misc/poetry
Leonard Cohen,
Philip Larkin,
Fernando Pessoa,
Pablo Neruda,
Mark Doty,
Alex Gallo-Brown,
Robert Hass,
Matthew Zapruder,
Wendy Trevino
poems i like
I think this is one reason why Ashbery is often thought of as difficult or elusive. It can seem to readers either like there is nothing there, or that they are missing something. “The poem is sad, because it wants to be yours, and cannot,” he writes in another poem, “Paradoxes and Oxymorons,” which begins:
This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birth is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remember how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled
bread,
the thing her father said to her that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as
numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
I am trying to pry open your casket
with this burning snowflake.
I’ll give up my sleep for you.
This freezing sleet keeps coming down
and I can barely see.
If this trick works we can rub our hands
together, maybe
start a little fire
with our identification papers.
I don’t know but I keep working, working
half hating you,
half eaten by the moon.
by James Tate
Did I think it would abide as it was forever
all that time ago the turned earth in the old garden
where I stood in spring remembering spring in another place
that had ceased to exist and the dug roots kept giving up
their black tokens their coins and bone buttons and shoe nails
made by hands and bits of plates as the thin clouds
of that season slipped past gray branches on which the early
white petals were catching their light and I thought I
knew
something of age then my own age which had conveyed me
to there and the ages of the trees and the walls and houses
from before my coming and the age of the new seeds as I
set each one in the ground to begin to remember
what to become and the order in which to return
and even the other age into which I was passing
all the time while I was thinking of something different
by WS Merwin
There were flies in every room that summer. Windows open, rolled
pages of newsprint at the ready in our grips.
excerpt from a longer poem
The house passes a bailout for time. Every day
is shortened by two hours. It’s ratified
in the senate; the president, may he die, applauds.
They underpay workers to go around adjusting clocks
so the minute hands can keep up the pace. Watches
go on strike, then grandfather clocks, then phones. We go
back to sundials, and when it rains we hold each other’s
contacts up to our floor lamps (we have so many
floor lamps now) and wherever the spotlight falls
we wait until it turns green. No one assassinates
the president yet. Why depends on where
you’re reading this. There’s a law against spit now.
A city ordinance for limelight. All the op-ed pages
are in agreement about the uselessness of forms,
and in Alabama, we’re told a man had himself declared
legally miraculous. I disagree with the premise.
The alarm clocks have a picket line: they march
in figure eights around city hall, waking everyone up.
Young radicals get tattoos of the hours.
Nothing is done so much lately. There’s talk
of the rich being able to buy themselves another week.
The days are laid off. The seasons tighten their belts.
damn
On Day 1, the photographer walks into camp
and immediately starts shooting. She shoots us
at breakfast eating our C-rations, in our hammocks
reading Stars and Stripes. She shoots us in her sleep.
ooo
You came one day and
as usual in such matters
significance filled everything—
your eyes, the things you
knew, the way you turned,
leaned, stood, or sat,
this way or that: when
you left, the area around here rose
a tilted tide, and everything that
offers desolation drained away.
I forgot to tell you my husband
died. He was in Spain and something
strange happened with alcohol or water. He loved them
both so much. Which reminds me, do you want
to be cremated or buried? The difference,
if you do not know, is the ghost
or the body; heaven or sex.
Also I am planning a trip. No place special
just somewhere God has been.
Do you have any ideas? From there I will bring back
vials of ambergris. Did I mention I am carrying
his baby. I am in the tenth month and still
he does not show. The house hates me
and breaks everything I touch.
I myself prefer to be left
face up in a ditch and for someone to go
to jail because of what he’s done to me.
That way I can watch the stars
as they move toward the end of the sky
and he can plan his last
meal or some other consolation.
The awake, all straight-backed
and well-groomed, wait at a table
made of sharp sunlight. I’m late
as usual, but this is the morning
I give in, sign over everything:
pillow-gluttony, sheet-sickness,
the blanket’s wrapper like skin
on my skin, clock meaningless.
This solo has gone on far too long,
this cat’s life, drunk, disappearing,
the bed itself my ravenous lover;
goodbye, we will be acquaintances.
I must be alert to my own dying,
push away dreams’ hot reason.
I must walk on gravel and not hide
in cakey layers. The soft cloth
around me will bristle, hairshirt
an alarm: You’ll miss everything.
Get up, the day is waiting,
that crooked clown.