misc/poetry
Leonard Cohen,
Philip Larkin,
Fernando Pessoa,
Pablo Neruda,
Mark Doty,
Alex Gallo-Brown,
Robert Hass,
Matthew Zapruder,
Wendy Trevino
poems i like
JAN 15, 2007 SICILY CAFÉ
And now that I kneel
At the edge of my years
Let me fall through the mirror of love
And the things that I know
Let them drift like the snow
Let me dwell in the light that’s above
In the radiant light
Where there’s day and there’s night
And truth is the widest embrace
That includes what is lost
Includes what is found
What you write and what you erase
And when will my heart break open
When will my love be born
In this scheme of unspeakable suffering
Where even the blueprint is torn
I used to keep a full picture of her
Hidden on my laptop
Then I thought:
I can’t do this again
And I dragged it (reluctantly)
To the little trash basket
Which I did not empty for quite a while
from 'elevator mirrors'
little vignette in pano?
And the man fell silent, looking at the sunset.
But what good is a sunset to one who hates and loves?
PERHAPS THOSE WHO ARE GOOD AT SEEING ARE POOR AT FEELING
Perhaps those who are good at seeing are poor at feeling
And do not enchant because they don’t know how to act.
There are ways for doing all things,
And love also has its way.
Those whose way of seeing a field is by seeing the grass
Cannot have the blindness that makes a man stir feelings.
I loved, and was not loved, which I only saw in the end,
For one is not loved as one is born but as may happen.
She still has beautiful lips and hair, like before.
And I am still alone in the field, like before.
I think this and my head lifts up
As if it had been bent down,
And the divine sun dries the small tears I can’t help but have.
How vast the field is and how tiny love!
I look, and I forget, as the world buries and trees lose their leaves.
Because I am feeling, I cannot speak.
I listen to my voice as if it belonged to another.
And my voice speaks of her as if this other were speaking.
Her hair is yellow-blond like wheat in bright sunlight,
And when she speaks, her mouth utters things not told by words.
She smiles, and her teeth gleam like the river’s stones.
18 NOVEMBER 1929
I multiplied myself to feel myself,
To feel myself I had to feel everything,
I overflowed, I did nothing but spill out,
I undressed, I yielded,
And in each corner of my soul there’s an altar to a different god.
from time's passage <3
Put time to good use!
But what’s time that I should put it to use?
Put time to good use!
Not a day without a few lines . . .
Honest and first-rate work
Like that of a Virgil or Milton . . .
But to be honest or first-rate is so hard!
To be Milton or Virgil is so unlikely!
from a note in the margin
I got off the train
And said goodbye to the man I’d met.
We’d been together for eighteen hours
And had a pleasant conversation,
Fellowship in the journey,
And I was sorry to get off, sorry to leave
This chance friend whose name I never learned.
I felt my eyes water with tears . . .
Every farewell is a death.
Yes, every farewell is a death.
In the train that we call life
We are all chance events in one another’s lives,
And we all feel sorry when it’s time to get off.
opening stanza of I got off the train
BY THE MOONLIGHT, IN THE DISTANCE
By the moonlight, in the distance,
A sailboat on the river
Sails peacefully by.
What does it reveal?
I don’t know, but my being
Feels suddenly strange,
And I dream without seeing
The dreams that I have.
What anguish engulfs me?
What love can’t I explain?
It’s the sailboat that passes
In the night that remains.
love the last stanza
12/18/63
The taste of death is sometimes in my mouth, these solitary evenings.
Each day I live means one day less to live.
That’s evident!
Before I die, I’d spend some time with her,
Just living.
Mornings are frantic, like all mornings,
The too fresh mind incapable
Of the maniacal decisions that produce art.
Exhausted by afternoon, I have completed my chores,
And am faced with myself and my hot-self again.
Then I work. I work like a worm in the earth,
I work like a termite fashioning a tunnel, a bridge.
I work for a future I can no longer see.
That’s my life.
Will I in five years, two years, one,
Gnash my teeth again (teeth long ago gnashed to bits)
And curse what I hesitate to call my fate, my pattern?
Or should I call it my stupidity?
Who but an imbecile would have chosen such a hard way?
Or shall I in five years or one,
Grow like an oak dressed in evergreen.
Happiness having swollen in me, become me,
Because of the devotion which she swears?
This I argue with myself on paper.
That is what I feel like sometimes,
Paper.
De Iuventute
When I was a young man
chasing girls I was so
hot to get into them I
never had time to learn
to savor the pleasures
of it. Fuss and rush
was all it was. And on
to the next.
Now that I'm old and
girls will have none
of me I must try to
imagine what it would
have been like with
each of them if I
had taken some pains
to learn to please them.