Phantom Verse and Free

Gary Snyder

2012-02-01T13:25:00.001-08:00

Civilization
Those are the people who do complicated things.

they'll grab us by the thousands
and put us to work.

World's going to hell, with all these
villages and trails.
Wild duck flocks aren't
what they used to be.
Aurochs grow rare.

Fetch me my feathers and amber

*

A small cricket
on the typescript page of
"Kyoto born in spring song"
grooms himself
in time with The Well-Tempered Clavier.
I quit typing and watch him through a glass.
How well articulated! How neat!

Nobody understands the ANIMAL KINGDOM.

*

When creeks are full
The poems flow
When creeks are down
We heap stones.

Gary Snyder

Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849)

2012-01-31T03:15:00.000-08:00

The Sleeper
.
At midnight, in the month of June,
I stand beneath the mystic moon.
An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,
Exhales from out her golden rim,
And, softly dripping, drop by drop,
Upon the quiet mountain top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley.
The rosemary nods upon the grave;
The lily lolls upon the wave;
Wrapping the fog about its breast,
The ruin molders into rest;
Looking like Lethe, see! the lake
A conscious slumber seems to take,
And would not, for the world, awake.
All Beauty sleeps!- and lo! where lies
Irene, with her Destinies!

O, lady bright! can it be right-
This window open to the night?
The wanton airs, from the tree-top,
Laughingly through the lattice drop-
The bodiless airs, a wizard rout,
Flit through thy chamber in and out,
And wave the curtain canopy
So fitfully- so fearfully-
Above the closed and fringed lid
'Neath which thy slumb'ring soul lies hid,
That, o'er the floor and down the wall,
Like ghosts the shadows rise and fall!
Oh, lady dear, hast thou no fear?
Why and what art thou dreaming here?
Sure thou art come O'er far-off seas,
A wonder to these garden trees!
Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress,
Strange, above all, thy length of tress,
And this all solemn silentness!

The lady sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
Which is enduring, so be deep!
Heaven have her in its sacred keep!
This chamber changed for one more holy,
This bed for one more melancholy,
I pray to God that she may lie
For ever with unopened eye,
While the pale sheeted ghosts go by!

My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep
As it is lasting, so be deep!
Soft may the worms about her creep!
Far in the forest, dim and old,
For her may some tall vault unfold-
Some vault that oft has flung its black
And winged panels fluttering back,
Triumphant, o'er the crested palls,
Of her grand family funerals-
Some sepulchre, remote, alone,
Against whose portal she hath thrown,
In childhood, many an idle stone-
Some tomb from out whose sounding door
She ne'er shall force an echo more,
Thrilling to think, poor child of sin!
It was the dead who groaned within.

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

2012-01-30T10:54:00.000-08:00

Are You Drinking?
.
washed-up, on shore, the old yellow notebook
out again
I write from the bed
as I did last
year.
will see the doctor,
Monday.
"yes, doctor, weak legs, vertigo, head-
aches and my back
hurts."
"are you drinking?" he will ask.
"are you getting your
exercise, your
vitamins?"
I think that I am just ill
with life, the same stale yet
fluctuating
factors.
even at the track
I watch the horses run by
and it seems
meaningless.
I leave early after buying tickets on the
remaining races.
"taking off?" asks the motel
clerk.
"yes, it's boring,"
I tell him.
"If you think it's boring
out there," he tells me, "you oughta be
back here."
so here I am
propped up against my pillows
again
just an old guy
just an old writer
with a yellow
notebook.
something is
walking across the
floor
toward
me.
oh, it's just
my cat
this
time.

Charles Bukowski

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

2012-01-29T01:27:00.000-08:00

Bowery Blues
.
The story of man
Makes me sick
Inside, outside,
I don't know why
Something so conditional
And all talk
Should hurt me so.

I am hurt
I am scared
I want to live
I want to die
I don't know
Where to turn
In the Void
And when
To cut
Out

For no Church told me
No Guru holds me
No advice
Just stone
Of New York
And on the cafeteria
We hear
The saxophone
O dead Ruby
Died of Shot
In Thirty Two,
Sounding like old times
And de bombed
Empty decapitated
Murder by the clock.

And I see Shadows
Dancing into Doom
In love, holding
TIght the lovely asses
Of the little girls
In love with sex
Showing themselves
In white undergarments
At elevated windows
Hoping for the Worst.

I can't take it
Anymore
If I can't hold
My little behind
To me in my room

Then it's goodbye
Sangsara
For me
Besides
Girls aren't as good
As they look
And Samadhi
Is better
Than you think
When it starts in
Hitting your head
In with Buzz
Of glittergold
Heaven's Angels
Wailing

Saying

We've been waiting for you
Since Morning, Jack
Why were you so long
Dallying in the sooty room?
This transcendental Brilliance
Is the better part
(of Nothingness
I sing)

Okay.
Quit.
Mad.
Stop.

Denise Low

2012-01-26T06:46:00.000-08:00

Two Gates
By Denise Low
.
I look through glass and see a young woman
of twenty, washing dishes, and the window
turns into a painting. She is myself thirty years ago.
She holds the same blue bowls and brass teapot
I still own. I see her outline against lamplight;
she knows only her side of the pane. The porch
where I stand is empty. Sunlight fades. I hear
water run in the sink as she lowers her head,
blind to the future. She does not imagine I exist.

I step forward for a better look and she dissolves
into lumber and paint. A gate I passed through
to the next life loses shape. Once more I stand
squared into the present, among maple trees
and scissor-tailed birds, in a garden, almost
a mother to that faint, distant woman.

St. John of the Cross (1542-1591)

2012-01-25T13:06:00.000-08:00

MY SOUL IS A CANDLE

My soul is a candle that burned away the veil;
only the glorious duties of light I now have.

The sufferings I knew initiated me into God.

I am a holy confessor for men.

When I see their tears running across their cheeks
and falling into

His hands,

what can I say to their great sorrow
that I too have
known.

The soul is a candle that will burn away the darkness,
only the glorious duties of love we will have.

The sufferings I knew initiated me into God.

Only His glorious cares
I now have.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1881)

2012-01-24T07:48:00.001-08:00

IV

Thou hast thy calling to some palace-floor,
Most gracious singer of high poems! where
The dancers will break footing, from the care
Of watching up thy pregnant lips for more.
And dost thou lift this house's latch too poor
For hand of thine? and canst thou think and bear
To let thy music drop here unaware
In folds of golden fulness at my door?
Look up and see the casement broken in,
The bats and owlets builders in the roof!
My cricket chirps against thy mandolin.
Hush, call no echo up in further proof
Of desolation! there's a voice within
That weeps . . . as thou must sing . . . alone, aloof.

Miklos Radnoti (1900-1944)

2012-01-23T07:28:00.001-08:00

War Diary

1. Monday Evening

You see, now fear often fingers your heart,
and at times the world seems only distant news;
the old trees guard your childhood for you
as an ever more ancient memory.

Between suspicious mornings and foreboding nights
you have lived half your life among wars,
and now once more, order is glinting toward you
on the raised points of bayonets.

In dreams sometimes the landscape still rises before you,
the home of your poetry, where the scent of freedom
wafts over the meadows, and in the morning when you wake,
you carry the scent with you.

Rarely, when you are working, you half-sit, frightened
at your desk. And it's as if you were living in soft mud;
your hand, adorned with a pen, moves heavily
and ever more gravely.

The world is turning into another war—a hungry cloud
gobbles the sky's mild blue, and as it darkens,
your young wife puts her arms around you,
and weeps.

Patti Smith

2012-01-22T11:02:00.001-08:00

THE FAMOUS EASTER ACT
stigmata susie
has the biggest feet in kansas city
call her sweet susie gunboats
feet as wide as ole lake erie

she's a landmark of america
call her purple spacious shoe susie
dances down the yosemite block dance
violet tap shoes from yosemite bay

that more than twice worn so tight
her feet bled for forty days
her feet bled for forty nights
ruined susies perfect arch

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

2012-01-21T05:30:00.000-08:00

Dark Wood, Dark Water
.
This wood burns a dark
Incense. Pale moss drips
In elbow-scarves, beards

From the archaic
Bones of the great trees.
Blue mists move over

A lake thick with fish.
Snails scroll the border
Of the glazed water

With coils of ram's-horn.
Out in the open
Down there the late year

Hammers her rare and
Various metals.
Old pewter roots twist

Up from the jet-backed
Mirror of water
And while the air's clear

Hourglass sifts a
Drift of goldpieces
Bright waterlights are

Sliding their quoits one
After the other
Down boles of the fir.

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

2012-01-20T05:16:00.001-08:00

‘March days return with their covert light’
.
March days return with their covert light,
and huge fish swim through the sky,
vague earthly vapours progress in secret,
things slip to silence one by one.
Through fortuity, at this crisis of errant skies,
you reunite the lives of the sea to that of fire,
grey lurchings of the ship of winter
to the form that love carved in the guitar.
O love, O rose soaked by mermaids and spume,
dancing flame that climbs the invisible stairway,
to waken the blood in insomnia’s labyrinth,
so that the waves can complete themselves in the sky,
the sea forget its cargoes and rages,
and the world fall into darkness’s nets.

Pablo Neruda

Charles Bukowski - (1930-1994)

2012-01-19T12:56:00.001-08:00

What A Writer
.
what i liked about e.e. cummings
was that he cut away from
the holiness of the
word
and with charm
and gamble
gave us lines
that sliced through the
dung.

how it was needed!
how we were withering
away
in the old
tired
manner.

of course, then came all
the e.e. cummings
copyists.
they copied him then
as the others had
copied Keats, Shelly,
Swinburne, Byron, et
al.

but there was only
one
e.e. cummings.
of course.

one sun.

one moon.

Charles Bukowski

Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996)

2012-01-18T02:38:00.001-08:00

As you pour yourself a scotch,
crush a roach, or scratch your crotch,
as your hand adjusts your tie,
people die.
In the towns with funny names,
hit by bullets, caught in flames,
by and large not knowing why,
people die.
In small places you don't know
of, yet big for having no
chance to scream or say good-bye,
people die.
People die as you elect
brand-new dudes who preach neglect,
self-restraint, etc. –whereby
people die.
Too far off to practice love
for thy neighbor/brother Slav,
where your cherubs dread to fly,
people die.
While the statues disagree,
Cain's version, history
for its fuel tends to buy
those who die.
As you watch the athletes score,
check your latest statement, or
sing your child a lullaby,
people die.
Time, whose sharp bloodthirsty quill
parts the killed from those who kill,
will pronounce the latter band
as your brand.

Joseph Brodsky

Wislawa Szymborska

2012-01-17T10:49:00.000-08:00

A Few Words On The Soul
.
We have a soul at times.
No one's got it non-stop,
for keeps.

Day after day,
year after year
may pass without it.

Sometimes
it will settle for awhile
only in childhood's fears and raptures.
Sometimes only in astonishment
that we are old.

It rarely lends a hand
in uphill tasks,
like moving furniture,
or lifting luggage,
or going miles in shoes that pinch.

It usually steps out
whenever meat needs chopping
or forms have to be filled.

For every thousand conversations
it participates in one,
if even that,
since it prefers silence.

Just when our body goes from ache to pain,
it slips off-duty.

It's picky:
it doesn't like seeing us in crowds,
our hustling for a dubious advantage
and creaky machinations make it sick.

Joy and sorrow
aren't two different feelings for it.
It attends us
only when the two are joined.

We can count on it
when we're sure of nothing
and curious about everything.

Among the material objects
it favors clocks with pendulums
and mirrors, which keep on working
even when no one is looking.

It won't say where it comes from
or when it's taking off again,
though it's clearly expecting such questions.

We need it
but apparently
it needs us
for some reason too.

Walter Savage Landor

2012-01-16T04:45:00.000-08:00

Last Fruit Off an Old Tree,
by Walter Savage Landor
.
Death stands above me, whispering low
I know not what into my ear:
Of his strange language all I know
Is, there is not a word of fear.

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)

2012-01-15T10:38:00.001-08:00

A FRIEND'S ILLNESS

SICKNESS brought me this
Thought, in that scale of his:
Why should I be dismayed
Though flame had burned the whole
World, as it were a coal,
Now I have seen it weighed
Against a soul?

José Asunción Silva (1865-1896)

2012-01-14T08:39:00.001-08:00

ARS POETICA

The poem is a sacred vessel. Place in it nothing
But the purest thoughts
In whose depths seethe fermenting images
Like golden bubbles in a fine old wine.

Empty into it the flowers that in their eternal cycle
Wrest the world from winter,
Distilling memories of time we cannot recapture
And tuberose dripping drops of dew,

So that our wretched lives may be made as sweet
As an unknown essence
Simmering in the fires of a tender heart:
Of such unequalled balm one drop is enough!

Miguel Hernandez (1910-1942)

2012-01-13T15:02:00.000-08:00

‘It Would Have Been Less Painful’
(IX: From ‘El Rayo Que No Cesa’)

It would have been less painful if it had been
nard your complexion to my gaze, nard,
thistle your skin to my touch, thistle,
bitter-apple your voice to my ears, bitter.

Bitter-apple is your voice to my ears, bitter,
and I burn, in and around your voice, I burn,
and I’m slow to burn, what I’m slow to offer,
juniper oil, my voice for yours, juniper.

Briar is your hand, if I hold it, briar,
wave your body, if I reach for it, wave,
close to me once, yet a thousand times not close.

Heron is my pain, a slender sad heron,
alone like a breath and a cry, alone,
stubborn in its error and disgrace, stubborn.

Gary Snyder

2012-01-12T11:29:00.001-08:00

After Work
The shack and a few trees
float in the blowing fog

I pull out your blouse,
warm my cold hands
on your breasts.
you laugh and shudder
peeling garlic by the
hot iron stove.
bring in the axe, the rake,
the wood

we'll lean on the wall
against each other
stew simmering on the fire
as it grows dark
drinking wine.

Gary Snyder

Tomas Transtromer

2012-01-11T08:25:00.001-08:00

After a Death
by Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Robert Bly

Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.
It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.
It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun
through brush where a few leaves hang on.
They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.
Names swallowed by the cold.

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat
but often the shadow seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.

Juan Ramon Jimenez (1881-1958)

2012-01-10T07:30:00.000-08:00

“I Am Not I”
By Juan Ramón Jiménez 1881–1958
Translated By Robert Bly

I am not I.
I am this one
walking beside me whom I do not see,
whom at times I manage to visit,
and whom at other times I forget;
who remains calm and silent while I talk,
and forgives, gently, when I hate,
who walks where I am not,
who will remain standing when I die.

Anonymous

2012-01-09T01:54:00.001-08:00

to learn how to die
watch cherry blossoms, observe
chrysanthemums

Mo Fei

2012-01-08T15:02:00.001-08:00

WORDS AND OBJECTS

Prelude

In that place either silent or blind
You're writing the only poem.
In the backyard of time
you've written the lines to replace words and objects.

Before the destruction you started
the poem
which no one can kidnap,
which has no beginning.
It's approaching the winter.
The pen tip gleams.
The last stroke in the dark
brings the world to a sudden halt.

Those whose ears were stolen
will never forgive.
The disaster caused by the snow storm
awoke all the intoxicated.

A gardener who keeps death and roses
is trying to learn cool wisdom
with the short days of his life.
Doors and windows are tightly closed.
How you wish you could keep your relatives here
and let trees enjoy the silent twilight.

You're doomed
to write this only poem.
The breath of the blooming words is short--
you linger on.

translated by Wang Ping and Leonard Schwartz

Steely Dan - Deacon Blues

2012-01-07T12:39:00.000-08:00

Deacon Blues

This is the day
Of the expanding man
That shape is my shade
There where I used to stand
It seems like only yesterday
I gazed through the glass
At ramblers
Wild gamblers
That's all in the past

You call me a fool
You say it's a crazy scheme
This one's for real
I already bought the dream
So useless to ask me why
Throw a kiss and say goodbye
I'll make it this time
I'm ready to cross that fine line

CHORUS:
I'll learn to work the saxophone
I'll play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whisky all night long
And die behind the wheel
They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues

My back to the wall
A victim of laughing chance
This is for me
The essence of true romance
Sharing the things we know and love
With those of my kind
Libations
Sensations
That stagger the mind

I crawl like a viper
Through these suburban streets
Make love to these women
Languid and bittersweet
I'll rise when the sun goes down
Cover every game in town
A world of my own
I'll make it my home sweet home

CHORUS

This is the night
Of the expanding the man
I take one last drag
As I approach the stand
I cried when I wrote this song
Sue me if I play too long
This brother is free
I'll be what I want to be

CHORUS

Wislawa Szymborska

2012-01-06T10:37:00.000-08:00

MARIA DEL CARMEN PAIVA

2012-01-05T14:10:00.001-08:00

LATER
.
After all have past;
from the initial rupture,
from the all-too-sad alterations
and from the visible abnegation
that reconciled me to the opposite of forgetfulness;
after that battle in which my belly burned
until they remained sculpted
in the image of my exhaustion
in the exuberant sky
of those days;
and later

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

2012-01-04T10:46:00.000-08:00

Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)

2012-01-03T11:02:00.000-08:00

Night Journey
.
Now as the train bears west,
Its rhythm rocks the earth,
And from my Pullman berth
I stare into the night
While others take their rest.
Bridges of iron lace,
A suddenness of trees,
A lap of mountain mist
All cross my line of sight,
Then a bleak wasted place,
And a lake below my knees.
Full on my neck I feel
The straining at a curve;
My muscles move with steel,
I wake in every nerve.
I watch a beacon swing
From dark to blazing bright;
We thunder through ravines
And gullies washed with light.
Beyond the mountain pass
Mist deepens on the pane;
We rush into a rain
That rattles double glass.
Wheels shake the roadbed stone,
The pistons jerk and shove,
I stay up half the night
To see the land I love.

Elisabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

2012-01-02T11:01:00.001-08:00

Dora de Boneo (1918-2001)

2012-01-01T09:25:00.001-08:00

Dora de Boneo (1918 - 2001 ) Argentina
I Will Tell You Later
To my husband Martín Alberto Boneo 1975

I will tell you later
why the time hurts me so much
and why there is no turning back
to pay for my life.

And I do not know
Why the days pile up
And wait in a row.

Why do I want
To get out of me?
Tell me, my compañero

I call you
And I call you!
Without any response.
And everyone wants to convince me
that I have gone crazy.
As you are dead
and your name remains
for everyone in memory.
Yes, only in memory.

But I have memory.
I am not crazy.
And I know what I have
And what have I lost.
Yes, I meet you in my loneliness.
But you do not understand
That I know it so well,
You are not with meand are always with me.

Because when we lived
It was like living
Carrying our love
To the pain of burning fires!

That happened to blend our blood
when suddenly it was cold
and hardened in order
to set the bones in sites.
And to forget that I cried
even though you did not know it.

Later I will tell you
how are our children
and why I grumble all day long,
serving you a cup of coffee
reaching to your chair
and not understanding
why it is empty.

One morning I was sad
and I did not know why.

And I was happy
to the point of being pretty.
And up to my waist exceeded
the hands, the flowers
the perfume, the warmth
the agility and the engagements…

Still the darkness lasted
longer than the laughter,
and it cost me fulfilling my hopes….

Yes, I can still contemplate the sun
through your tears to mine.
You see, we shared the pain.

I urge you to listen to me,
though at a distant,
I wish you to know
who I am.

I do not regret that God suspects
I stole the key to what I have lost.

That I guarded this love!

And that a distracted angel,
By your death,
Unaccountably gave it to me.

The key to your alive image.
As he knew
The time was deceived.

And I dream like yesterday
What I am today.
That’s why it’s hard
For you to respond to me.
Of that I myself am not sure.

My voice will reach you, my friend.
You will listen me very closely.
I am going towards…
You and I will be together.

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)

2011-12-31T11:25:00.000-08:00

"Along the Hard Crust..."
1917
.
Along the hard crust of deep snows,
To the secret, white house of yours,
So gentle and quiet – we both
Are walking, in silence half-lost.
And sweeter than all songs, sung ever,
Are this dream, becoming the truth,
Entwined twigs’ a-nodding with favor,
The light ring of your silver spurs...

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

2011-12-30T12:45:00.001-08:00

Shadows, by D. H. Lawrence
And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.

And if, as weeks go round, in the dark of the moon
my spirit darkens and goes out, and soft, strange gloom
pervades my movements and my thoughts and words
then I shall know that I am walking still
with God, we are close together now the moon's in shadow.

And if, as autumn deepens and darkens
I feel the pain of falling leaves, and stems that break in storms
and trouble and dissolution and distress
and then the softness of deep shadows folding, folding
around my soul and spirit, around my lips
so sweet, like a swoon, or more like the drowse of a low, sad song
singing darker than the nightingale, on, on to the solstice
and the silence of short days, the silence of the year, the shadow,
then I shall know that my life is moving still
with the dark earth, and drenched
with the deep oblivion of earth's lapse and renewal.

And if, in the changing phases of man's life
I fall in sickness and in misery
my wrists seem broken and my heart seems dead
and strength is gone, and my life
is only the leavings of a life:

and still, among it all, snatches of lovely oblivion, and snatches
of renewal
odd, wintry flowers upon the withered stem, yet new, strange
flowers
such as my life has not brought forth before, new blossoms of me—

then I must know that still
I am in the hands of the unknown God,
he is breaking me down to his own oblivion
to send me forth on a new morning, a new man.

Jane Kenyon (1947-1995)

2011-12-29T14:34:00.000-08:00

Portrait Of A Figure Near Water
.
Rebuked, she turned and ran
uphill to the barn. Anger, the inner
arsonist, held a match to her brain.
She observed her life: against her will
it survived the unwavering flame.

The barn was empty of animals.
Only a swallow tilted
near the beams, and bats
hung from the rafters
the roof sagged between.

Her breath became steady
where, years past, the farmer cooled
the big tin amphoræ of milk.
The stone trough was still
filled with water: she watched it
and received its calm.

So it is when we retreat in anger:
we think we burn alone
and there is no balm.
Then water enters, though it makes
no sound.

Jane Kenyon

Jose Manuel Arango (1937-2002)

2011-12-28T11:59:00.001-08:00

I

men rush out on the streets
to celebrate the coming of night

the sound of a flute goes thinly into the ear
and the plazas are again places of festivity

where girls with bare backs that meet
the eyes of adolescent tellers

repeat the movements of an ancient
sacred dance

and in the clamor
of the fruit vendors
forgotten gods speak

II

the repeated shipwreck of the parks
at nightfall

the hour in which closed
by the graze of a somber
wing
the heart descends to cold abodes

Giulia Niccotai

2011-12-27T11:01:00.000-08:00

Positive & Negative

Anything may happen
have a meaning or not have one.

It does not propose truth
it keeps the meaning open
the sense of things comes by speaking.

The measure of a page
a communication of forms
the hypothesis of a reality in motion:
a vertigo of infinite
diverse inversion.

And that which is opposed
may be always overturned
to its opposite.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

2011-12-26T18:08:00.001-08:00

Black Rook in Rainy Weather
On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident

To set the sight on fire
In my eye, not seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
Without ceremony, or portent.

Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Leap incandescent

Out of the kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then ---
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent

By bestowing largesse, honor,
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical,
Yet politic; ignorant

Of whatever angel may choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel.
For that rare, random descent.

Carilda Oliver Labra ( Cuba )

2011-12-25T19:58:00.000-08:00

go crazy, my love, I go crazy
When slowly I go into your mouth;
And almost without wanting, almost for nothing,
I touch you with the tip of my breast.

I touch you with the tip of my breast
And with my abandoned solitude;
And perhaps without being enamored
I go crazy, my love, I go crazy.

And my luck of the prized fruit
Burns in your lubricated and turbid hand
Like a bad promise of venom;

Though I want to kiss you knelt
When slowly I go into your mouth,
I go crazy, my love, I go crazy.

Bodhidharma (5th cent)

2011-12-24T07:38:00.001-08:00

When mortals are alive, they worry about death.
When they're full, they worry about hunger.
Theirs is the Great Uncertainty.

But sages don't consider the past.
And they don't worry about the future.
Nor do they cling to the present.
And from moment to moment they follow the Way.

Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

2011-12-23T19:09:00.001-08:00

Aubade: Lake Erie
by Thomas Merton

When sun, light handed, sows this Indian water
With a crop of cockles,
The vines arrange their tender shadows
In the sweet leafage of an artificial France.

Awake, in the frames of windows, innocent children,
Loving the blue, sprayed leaves of childish life,
Applaud the bearded corn, the bleeding grape,
And cry:
"Here is the hay-colored sun, our marvelous cousin,
Walking in the barley,
Turning the harrowed earth to growing bread,
And splicing the sweet, wounded vine.
Lift up your hitch-hiking heads
And no more fear the fever,
You fugitives, and sleepers in the fields,
Here is the hay-colored sun!"

And when their shining voices, clean as summer,
Play, like churchbells over the field,
A hundred dusty Luthers rise from the dead, unheeding,
Search the horizon for the gap-toothed grin of factories,
And grope, in the green wheat,
Toward the wood winds of the western freight.

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

2011-12-21T04:41:00.000-08:00

Consummation Of Grief

I even hear the mountains
the way they laugh
up and down their blue sides
and down in the water
the fish cry
and the water
is their tears.
I listen to the water
on nights I drink away
and the sadness becomes so great
I hear it in my clock
it becomes knobs upon my dresser
it becomes paper on the floor
it becomes a shoehorn
a laundry ticket
it becomes
cigarette smoke
climbing a chapel of dark vines. . .
it matters little
very little love is not so bad
or very little life
what counts
is waiting on walls
I was born for this
I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.

Maria Monvel

2011-12-20T08:26:00.001-08:00

Verses of Love I

Everything about you is sweet.
To live like I live
Hanging in your love,
Like a captive world.

The world runs to my feet,
But I do not feel it.
Only your love rouses
Me like a soft wind.

You from a distance hold
Your trembling threads.
I from a distance send you
Sobs and smiles.

Nicanor Parra

2011-12-19T13:14:00.001-08:00

The Last Toast
Whether we like it or not,
We have only three choices:
Yesterday, today and tomorrow.

And not even three
Because as the philosopher says
Yesterday is yesterday
It belongs to us only in memory:
From the rose already plucked
No more petals can be drawn.

The cards to play
Are only two:
The present and the future.

And there aren't even two
Because it's a known fact
The present doesn't exist
Except as it edges past
And is consumed...,
like youth.

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)

2011-12-18T10:14:00.001-08:00

HE GIVES HIS BELOVED CERTAIN RHYMES

FASTEN your hair with a golden pin,
And bind up every wandering tress;
I bade my heart build these poor rhymes:
It worked at them, day out, day in,
Building a sorrowful loveliness
Out of the battles of old times.

You need but lift a pearl-pale hand,
And bind up your long hair and sigh;
And all men's hearts must burn and beat;
And candle-like foam on the dim sand,
And stars climbing the dew-dropping sky,
Live but to light your passing feet.

Public Space - Ken Babstock

2011-12-17T14:48:00.001-08:00

public space

Wandering wordless through the heat of High
Park. High summer. Counting the chipmunks
who pause and demand the scrub stand by
till their flitty, piggybacked equal signs can think
through this math of dogwood, oak-whip, mulch.
Children glue mouths to ice cream and chips, punch
and kick at the geese, while rug-thick islands
of milt-like scum sail the duckpond’s copper stillness –
Over-fat, hammerhead carp with predator brains...
We can wreck a day on the shoals of ourselves.
Cramped, you broke last night and wept at the war,
at the ionized, cobalt glow that fish-tanked the air.
We’re here to be emptied under the emptying sky,
eyes cast outward, trolling for the extraordinary.

Po Chu-i (772-846)

2011-12-16T18:54:00.000-08:00

Early Autumn, by Po Chü-i. Two gray hairs appear in the lit mirror,a single leaf tumbling into the courtyard.Old age slips away, nothing to do with me,and when grief comes, who does it find?Idle months and years emptying away,loved ones from long ago lost to sight,I'll play with my girl here, my little girl:we keep coaxing smiles from each other.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

2011-12-15T08:44:00.000-08:00

Kubla Khan
.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.

But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Steely Dan - Reelin in the Years

2011-12-14T15:36:00.000-08:00

Reelin' In The Years

Your everlasting summer
You can see it fading fast
So you grab a piece of something
That you think is gonna last
You wouldn't know a diamond
If you held it in your hand
The things you think are precious
I can't understand

CHORUS:
Are you reelin' in the years
Stowin' away the time
Are you gatherin' up the tears
Have you had enough of mine

You been tellin' me you're a genius
Since you were seventeen
In all the time I've known you
I still don't know what you mean
The weekend at the college
Didn't turn out like you planned
The things that pass for knowledge
I can't understand

CHORUS

I spend a lot of money
And I spent a lot of time
The trip we made in Hollywood
Is etched upon my mind
After all the things we've done and seen
You find another man
The things you think are useless
I can't understand

CHORUS

Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

2011-12-13T10:22:00.000-08:00

A Psalm
.
When psalms surprise me with their music
And antiphons turn to rum
The Spirit sings: the bottom drops out of my soul.

And from the center of my cellar, Love, louder than thunder
Opens a heaven of naked air.

New eyes awaken.
I send Love's name into the world with wings
And songs grow up around me like a jungle.
Choirs of all creatures sing the tunes
Your Spirit played in Eden.
Zebras and antelopes and birds of paradise
Shine on the face of the abyss
And I am drunk with the great wilderness
Of the sixth day in Genesis.

But sound is never half so fair
As when that music turns to air
And the universe dies of excellence.

Sun, moon and stars
Fall from their heavenly towers.
Joys walk no longer down the blue world's shore.

Though fires loiter, lights still fly on the air of the gulf,
All fear another wind, another thunder:
Then one more voice
Snuffs all their flares in one gust.

And I go forth with no more wine and no more stars
And no more buds and no more Eden
And no more animals and no more sea:

While God sings by himself in acres of night
And walls fall down, that guarded Paradise.

John Keats

2011-12-12T12:01:00.000-08:00

A Dream, After Reading Dante's Episode Of Paolo And Francesca
.
As Hermes once took to his feathers light,
When lulled Argus, baffled, swooned and slept,
So on a Delphic reed, my idle spright
So played, so charmed, so conquered, so bereft
The dragon-world of all its hundred eyes;
And seeing it asleep, so fled away,
Not to pure Ida with its snow-cold skies,
Nor unto Tempe, where Jove grieved a day;
But to that second circle of sad Hell,
Where in the gust, the whirlwind, and the flaw
Of rain and hail-stones, lovers need not tell
Their sorrows. Pale were the sweet lips I saw,
Pale were the lips I kissed, and fair the form
I floated with, about that melancholy storm.

John Keats

Claude McKay (1889-1948)

2011-12-11T10:30:00.000-08:00

The Harlem Dancer

Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes
And watcher her perfect, half-clothed body say;
Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes
Blown by black players upon a picnic day.
She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,
The light gauze hanging loose about her form;
To me she seemed a proudly-swing palm
Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.
Upon her swarthy neck black shiny curls
luxuriant fell; and tossing coins in praise,
The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,
Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze;
But looking at her falsely-smiling face,
I knew her self was not in that strange place.

(from Harlem Shadows, 1922)

Zou Jingzhi

2011-12-10T12:33:00.000-08:00

WELL OF THE IMPERIAL CONCUBINE ZHEN

From "Yellow Tiles and Red Walls

The gate of hell, so gloomy so cold so deep and so far away,
opening and closing at the bottom of the dry well
Girls dare not bend to look in
afraid of a hand pusing from behind

Concubine Zhen died thin.
Her husband was an emperor, her mother-in-law the emperor dowager
Widowed for many years,
the dowager feared the laughter between man and woman,
feared that Zhen's graceful steps and her perfume
hooked the emperor's eye.

She ordered Zhen to die
and the emperor to love another.

Crying she said she didn't want to die or pollute the well.
If she died the other person would also perish . . .
Before she finished she was pushed
into a long distant night

She's been floating ever since

in the news
a girl who rebels against an exchange marriage
jumps into a well

translated by Wang Ping and Murar Nemet-Nejar

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

2011-12-09T16:11:00.000-08:00

The Japanese Wife
By Charles Bukowski
.
O lord, he said, Japanese women,
real women, they have not forgotten,
bowing and smiling
closing the wounds men have made;
but American women will kill you like they
tear a lampshade,
American women care less than a dime,
they’ve gotten derailed,
they’re too nervous to make good:
always scowling, belly-aching,
disillusioned, overwrought;
but oh lord, say, the Japanese women:
there was this one,
I came home and the door was locked
and when I broke in she broke out the bread knife
and chased me under the bed
and her sister came
and they kept me under that bed for two days,
and when I came out, at last,
she didn’t mention attorneys,
just said, you will never wrong me again,
and I didn’t; but she died on me,
and dying, said, you can wrong me now,
and I did,
but you know, I felt worse then
than when she was living;
there was no voice, no knife,
nothing but little Japanese prints on the wall,
all those tiny people sitting by red rivers
with flying green birds,
and I took them down and put them face down
in a drawer with my shirts,
and it was the first time I realized
that she was dead, even though I buried her;
and some day I’ll take them all out again,
all the tan-faced little people
sitting happily by their bridges and huts
and mountains—
but not right now,
not just yet.

Vicente Aleixandre

2011-12-08T12:19:00.000-08:00

Lover
.
What I do not want
is to give you the words of day dreams.
Not to spread the image with my lips
on your face, nor with my kiss.
I take the tip of your finger
with pink nail, for my gesture,
and, in this manner of airs,
I give it back to you.
From the grace and the lightsomeness of your pillow.
And the heat of your exotic eyes.
And the light of your secret
breasts.
Like the moon in the spring
a window
gives us yellow light, and a heart
beat
seems to flow back from you to me.
It’s not that. Nor will it be. Your true sense
has already given me the peace,
the beautiful secret,
the charming dimple,
the lovely corner of your mouth
and the weary
morning.

Luis Cernuda (1902-1963)

2011-12-06T14:34:00.000-08:00

Remorse in Black Tie

A gray man walks the foggy street.
No one suspects. An empty body,
Empty as plains or sea or wind:
Harsh deserts under unrelenting sky.

It is the past, and now his wings
In shadow meet a pallid force;
thus hesitant remorse, at night,
Brings near its heedless shadow secretly.

Don't take that hand! The prideful ivy
Will rise about the boles of winter.
In calm, the gray lman goes unseen.
Do you not hear the dead? But earth is deaf.

Nicanor Parra

2011-12-05T16:25:00.000-08:00

Young Poets
.
Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.

In poetry everything is permitted.

With only this condition of course,
You have to improve the blank page.

Nicanor Parra

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

2011-12-04T10:41:00.001-08:00

III

Unlike are we, unlike, O princely Heart!
Unlike our uses and our destinies.
Our ministering two angels look surprise
On one another, as they strike athwart
Their wings in passing. Thou, bethink thee, art
A guest for queens to social pageantries,
With gages from a hundred brighter eyes
Than tears even can make mine, to play thy part
Of chief musician. What hast thou to do
With looking from the lattice-lights at me,
A poor, tired, wandering singer, singing through
The dark, and leaning up a cypress tree?
The chrism is on thine head,--on mine, the dew, -
And Death must dig the level where these agree.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

2011-12-03T11:21:00.001-08:00

AN IRISH AIRMAN FORESEES HIS DEATH

I KNOW that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My county is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

Robert Bly

2011-12-02T10:24:00.001-08:00

The Sympathies of the Long Married
by Robert Bly

Oh well, let's go on eating the grains of eternity.
What do we care about improvements in travel?
Angels sometimes cross the river on old turtles.

Shall we worry about who gets left behind?
That one bird flying through the clouds is enough.
Your sweet face at the door of the house is enough.

The two farm horses stubbornly pull the wagon.
The mad crows carry away the tablecloth.
Most of the time, we live through the night.

Let's not drive the wild angels from our door.
Maybe the mad fields of grain will move.
Maybe the troubled rocks will learn to walk.

It's all right if we're troubled by the night.
It's all right if we can't recall our own name.
It's all right if this rough music keeps on playing.

I've given up worrying about men living alone.
I do worry about the couple who live next door.
Some words heard through the screen door are enough.

Silent Lotus

2011-12-01T13:52:00.000-08:00

Melting Mountain Snow

As

You

Let go

Of control

And are no longer

Frozen in time

The joy of your being

Will return like the serenity of nature

Melting mountain snow

To be once again

In the spring

Of the

Eternal

Flow

For

Forever

Frets not

To and fro

As it is only love which it knows

And in your silence

It is there

Where you

Will
Go

Pedro Salinis (1891-1951)

2011-11-29T11:10:00.000-08:00

Wake up. Day calls you

Wake up. Day calls you
to your life: your duty.
And to live, nothing more.
Root it out of the glum
night and the darkness
that covered your body
for which light waited
on tiptoe in the dawn.
Stand up, affirm the straight
simple will to be
a pure slender virgin.
Test your bodys metal.
cold, heat? Your blood
will tell against the snow,
or behind the window.
The colour
in your cheeks will tell.
And look at people. Rest
doing no more than adding
your perfection to another
day. Your task
is to carry your life high,
and play with it, hurl it
like a voice to the clouds
so it may retrieve the light
already gone from us.
That is your fate: to live
Do nothing.
Your work is you, nothing more.

Pedro Salinas
1891-1951

Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481)

2011-11-28T10:26:00.001-08:00

Why do people
Lavish decorations
On this set of bones
Destined to disappear
Without a trace?

No one really knows
The nature of birth
Nor the true dwelling place.
We return to the source
And turn to dust.

Gu Cheng (1956-1993)

2011-11-26T08:05:00.000-08:00

811. Poem, by Gu Cheng
Gray sky
gray road
gray buildings
in the gray rain

Through this wide grayness
walk two children
one bright red
one pale green

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

2011-11-25T13:57:00.000-08:00

A DREAM OF DEATH

I DREAMED that one had died in a strange place
Near no accustomed hand,
And they had nailed the boards above her face,
The peasants of that land,
Wondering to lay her in that solitude,
And raised above her mound
A cross they had made out of two bits of wood,
And planted cypress round;
And left her to the indifferent stars above
Until I carved these words:
i{She was more beautiful than thy first love,}
i{But now lies under boards.}

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

2011-11-24T12:49:00.000-08:00

Black Pine Tree in an Orange Light
Tell me what you see in it :
The pine tree like a Rorschach-blot
black against the orange light :

Plant an orange pumpkin patch
which at twelve will quaintly hatch
nine black mice with ebon coach,

or walk into the orange and make
a devil's cataract of black
obscure god's eye with corkscrew fleck;

put orange mistress half in sun,
half in shade, until her skin
tattoos black leaves on tangerine.

Read black magic or holy book
or lyric of love in the orange and black
till dark is conquered by orange cock,

but more pragmatic than all this,
say how crafty the painter was
to make orange and black ambiguous.

Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)

2011-11-23T11:02:00.001-08:00

Encounter
.
We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago.Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

Czeslaw Milosz

Jorge Luis Borges

2011-11-22T10:17:00.000-08:00

A Rose and Milton

From the generations of roses
That are lost in the depths of time
I want one saved from oblivion,
One spotless rose, of all things
That ever were. Fate permits me
The gift of choosing for once
That silent flower, the last rose
That Milton held before him,
Unseen. O vermilion, or yellow
Or white rose of a ruined garden,
Your past still magically remains
Forever shines in these verses,
Gold, blood, ivory or shadow
As if in his hands, invisible rose.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

2011-11-20T18:07:00.001-08:00

A Lament
O World! O Life! O Time!
On whose last steps I climb,
Trembling at that where I had stood before;
When will return the glory of your prime?
No more -Oh, never more!

Out of the day and night
A joy has taken flight:
Fresh spring, and summer, and winter hoar
Move my faint heart with grief, but with delight
No more -Oh, never more!

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Aurelio Arturo (1909-1974)

2011-11-19T12:22:00.000-08:00

Lullaby

The night is very busy
rocking one by one,
so many leaves.
And the leaves don’t fall asleep,
not all of them.

If aided by the stars,
how it trembles and jingles the infinite,
eternal canopy of heaven.

But who will cradle so many,
so many leaves,
if the day is already ascending
by the river?

(Where do this country
of the leaves
and this rustle of the
deep night sing?)

By the side of the river
come the days
of golden down,
come the nights
of fine lips.

(Where is the beautiful country
of the rivers that opens roads
for the clear wind
and the singing?)

The night is very busy
rocking one by one,
so many leaves.
And the leaves don’t fall asleep
not all of them.

If the stars could help . . .
But there are some more hidden,
but there are some leaves, some
that will never enter the night,
never.

(Where do this country
of leaves
and this rustle of
the deep night sing?)

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

2011-11-18T12:07:00.001-08:00

II

But only three in all God's universe
Have heard this word thou hast said,--Himself, beside
Thee speaking, and me listening! and replied
One of us . . . that was God, . . . and laid the curse
So darkly on my eyelids, as to amerce
My sight from seeing thee,--that if I had died,
The deathweights, placed there, would have signified
Less absolute exclusion. "Nay"is worse
From God than from all others, O my friend!
Men could not part us with their worldly jars,
Nor the seas change us, nor the tempests bend;
Our hands would touch for all the mountain-bars:
And, heaven being rolled between us at the end,
We should but vow the faster for the stars.

Lewis Carroll (1832-1898)

2011-11-17T13:00:00.000-08:00

HOW DOTH THE LITTLE CROCODILE

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!"

Tomas Transtromer

2011-11-16T11:22:00.001-08:00

Outskirts
by Tomas Tranströmer
translated by Robert Bly

Men in overalls the same color as earth rise from a ditch.
It's a transitional place, in stalemate, neither country nor city.
Construction cranes on the horizon want to take the big leap,
but the clocks are against it.
Concrete piping scattered around laps at the light with cold tongues.
Auto-body shops occupy old barns.
Stones throw shadows as sharp as objects on the moon surface.
And these sites keep on getting bigger
like the land bought with Judas' silver: "a potter's field for
burying strangers."

Lew Welch (1926-1971)

2011-11-15T06:36:00.001-08:00

The image, as in a Hexagram:

The hermit locks his door against the blizzard.
He keeps the cabin warm.

All winter long he sorts out all he has.
What was well started shall be finished.
What was not, should be thrown away.

In spring he emerges with one garment
and a single book.

The cabin is very clean.

Except for that, you'd never guess
anyone lived there.

Lew Welch

Jimyu Langge

2011-11-14T08:44:00.001-08:00

I Love China

China’s history
A history of war
of ideas, of literature
The Chinese won’t rashly launch an attack
without cause
Everyone holding to the principle of the counter-strike
China has Daoism
Records of the Peach Blossom Garden
Buddhism took root once it came to China,
showing that the Chinese people
look for an enemy in real life
But the ideal is peace
I am against any large or small country
that imposes upon China
Only in art
do I not have a nationality
That is to say, only after more of China
can there be more of the fucking world

Jane Kenyon (1947-1995)

2011-11-13T07:47:00.001-08:00

Happiness
.
There's just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Jane Kenyon

Wislawa Symborska

2011-11-12T08:49:00.001-08:00

The Joy Of Writing
Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
For a drink of written water from a spring
whose surface will xerox her soft muzzle?
Why does she lift her head; does she hear something?
Perched on four slim legs borrowed from the truth,
she pricks up her ears beneath my fingertips.
Silence - this word also rustles across the page
and parts the boughs
that have sprouted from the word "woods."
Lying in wait, set to pounce on the blank page,
are letters up to no good,
clutches of clauses so subordinate
they'll never let her get away.

Each drop of ink contains a fair supply
of hunters, equipped with squinting eyes behind their sights,
prepared to swarm the sloping pen at any moment,
surround the doe, and slowly aim their guns.

They forget that what's here isn't life.
Other laws, black on white, obtain.
The twinkling of an eye will take as long as I say,
and will, if I wish, divide into tiny eternities,
full of bullets stopped in mid-flight.
Not a thing will ever happen unless I say so.
Without my blessing, not a leaf will fall,
not a blade of grass will bend beneath that little hoof's full stop.

Is there then a world
where I rule absolutely on fate?
A time I bind with chains of signs?
An existence become endless at my bidding?

The joy of writing.
The power of preserving.
Revenge of a mortal hand.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

2011-11-11T09:52:00.001-08:00

April 18
the slime of all my yesterdays
rots in the hollow of my skull

and if my stomach would contract
because of some explicable phenomenon
such as pregnancy or constipation

I would not remember you

or that because of sleep
infrequent as a moon of greencheese
that because of food
nourishing as violet leaves
that because of these

and in a few fatal yards of grass
in a few spaces of sky and treetops

a future was lost yesterday
as easily and irretrievably
as a tennis ball at twilight

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

2011-11-10T12:17:00.000-08:00

I thought once how Theocritus had sung
Of the sweet years, the dear and wished-for years,
Who each one in a gracious hand appears
To bear a gift for mortals, old or young:
And, as I mused it in his antique tongue,
I saw, in gradual vision through my tears,
The sweet, sad years, the melancholy years,
Those of my own life, who by turns had flung
A shadow across me. Straightway I was 'ware,
So weeping, how a mystic Shape did move
Behind me, and drew me backward by the hair:
And a voice said in mastery, while I strove,--
"Guess now who holds thee? "--"Death,"I said. But, there,
The silver answer rang,--"Not Death, but Love."

Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867)

2011-11-09T05:11:00.000-08:00

CONTEMPLATION

by: Charles Baudelaire

HOU, O my Grief, be wise and tranquil still,
The eve is thine which even now drops down,
To carry peace or care to human will,
And in a misty veil enfolds the town.

While the vile mortals of the multitude,
By pleasure, cruel tormentor, goaded on,
Gather remorseful blossoms in light mood--
Grief, place thy hand in mine, let us be gone

Far from them. Lo, see how the vanished years,
In robes outworn lean over heaven's rim;
And from the water, smiling through her tears,

Remorse arises, and the sun grows dim;
And in the east, her long shroud trailing light,
List, O my grief, the gentle steps of Night.

Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996)

2011-11-08T05:52:00.001-08:00

Dutch Mistress
A hotel in whose ledgers departures are more prominent than arrivals.
With wet Koh-i-noors the October rain
strokes what's left of the naked brain.
In this country laid flat for the sake of rivers,
beer smells of Germany and the seaguls are
in the air like a page's soiled corners.
Morning enters the premises with a coroner's
punctuality, puts its ear
to the ribs of a cold radiator, detects sub-zero:
the afterlife has to start somewhere.
Correspondingly, the angelic curls
grow more blond, the skin gains its distant, lordly
white, while the bedding already coils
desperately in the basement laundry.

Joseph Brodsky

2011-11-07T09:07:00.001-08:00

Anfisa Osinnik

Renoir

Renoir liked to enlarge women's eyes,
giving roundness to cheeks and lips.
Renoir liked to play with women's hair.
Excellent painter and magnificent hatter,
every hat in his pictures shouts:
I'm the spirit of nature!
When he mixed crimson, cobalt and cinnabar on his pallet,
the oil in the paint turned solar,
the sun took unceremonious walks on his canvases
without noticing the frame.
The day he died
was gray, gray, gray,
or maybe it wasn't,
or maybe he died at night.
But I think that his spirit,
looking at his own portrait
in the frame of the coffin, thought:
Here's my worst picture.
Then the spirit fled,
surely towards the sun,
surely to step on women's hats,
surely to portray angels
with enlarged eyes,
with round cheeks
and fleshy lips.
Of course the angels
wear hats now;
the angels like
natural beauty turned spiritual.

Alberto Velez

2011-11-06T08:24:00.000-08:00

PORTRAIT

She is alone.
She strokes her face with a cold hand, forcing a smile.
What weariness.
How heavy, the hour on her back.
It folds, takes shelter in her tremulous flesh.
It’s not loneliness she fears
But those necessary encounters
Hitting her with handshakes, laughter,
Jokes, opinions.
She would so much like to be alive. But she cannot.
Day after day work devours her.
Crushes her against her own bones.
If she could fly and close her eyes,
Turn into rain, or wind,
Into a child again.

But she is alone. And doesn’t dream.
Weariness flows down her cheeks
And overwhelms her,
Sinks her into a guttural sob
That strips her naked.

Anna Akhmatova (1889-1966)

2011-11-05T10:15:00.000-07:00

Reading Hamlet

To the right, wasteland by the cemetery,
beyond it the river’s dull blue.
You said: ‘Go, get thee, to a nunnery
or get a fool to marry you…’

Though that’s always how Princes speak,
still, I’ve remembered the words.
As an ermine mantle let them stream,
behind him, through endless years.

Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)

2011-10-31T11:02:00.001-07:00

A Song On The End Of The World
.
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

Czeslaw Milosz

Michael Crummey

2011-10-30T12:07:00.001-07:00

Rivers/Roads

Michael Crummey
From: Arguments With Gravity. Kingston, Ont.: Quarry Press, 1996.

I thought I was following a track of freedom
and for awhile it was
Adrienne Rich

Consider the earnestness of pavement
its dark elegant sheen after rain,
its insistence on leading you somewhere

A highway wants to own the landscape,
it sections prairie into neat squares
swallows mile after mile of countryside
to connect the dots of cities and towns,
to make sense of things

A river is less opinionated
less predictable
it never argues with gravity
its history is a series of delicate negotiations with
time and geography

Wet your feet all you want
Hericlitus says,
it's never the river you remember;
a road repeats itself incessantly
obsessed with its own small truth,
it wants you to believe in something particular

The destination you have in mind when you set out
is nowhere you have ever been;
where you arrive finally depends on
how you get there,
by river or by road

Wislawa Symborska

2011-10-28T18:58:00.000-07:00

The Three Oddest Words
When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.
When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.

When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no non-being can hold.

San Juan de la Cruz

2011-10-24T12:32:00.000-07:00

Spiritual Verses

Seeking love always
with hope that cannot falter
I flew ever higher
till I overtook my prey.

So I might seize the prey
in this divine venture
I flew ever higher
from sight was forced to stray,

yet love so far did fly
that though in my flight
I faltered in the height
I caught the prey on high.

II

As higher I ascended
so the hardest conquest
came about in darkness,
all my sight was dazzled:

yet since love was my prey
from blind dark a leaper
I flew on ever higher
till I overtook the prey.

III
In this highest game,
the further I ascended
the humbler, more subdued
more abased I became.

‘None attains it’, I did say.
I sank down lower, lower,
yet I rose higher, higher
and so I took the prey.

IV
My one flight in strange manner
surpassed a hundred thousand
for the hope of highest heaven
attains the end it hopes for:

there hope alone did fly
unfaltering in the height:
hope, seeking in its flight,
I caught the prey on high.

Miquel Hernadez (1910-1942)

2011-10-23T10:27:00.001-07:00

‘Because Of Your Feet, Where Your Beauty Ends’
(VIII: From ‘El Rayo Que No Cesa’)

Because of your feet, where your beauty ends
in ten fragments of whiteness, more a dance,

a dove ascends to your waist,

an unending balm falls to earth.

Along with your feet goes the wonder

of nacre, in a ridiculous narrowness,

and where your feet go whiteness goes,

a dog sowing anklets of jasmine.

At your feet, as much foam as shore,

sand and sea reach me, and ebb from me,

and I try to enter the sheepfold of your sole.

I enter and let myself pass to your soul itself,

with the loving voice of the grapes:

trample my heart, now it’s ripe.

Lisa Zaran

2011-10-22T12:09:00.003-07:00

Girl by Lisa Zaran
.
She said she collects pieces of sky,
cuts holes out of it with silver scissors,
bits of heaven she calls them.
Every day a bevy of birds flies rings
around her fingers, my chorus of wives,
she calls them. Every day she reads poetry
from dusty books she borrows from the library,
sitting in the park, she smiles at passing strangers,
yet can not seem to shake her own sad feelings.
She said that night reminds her of a cool hand
placed gently across her fevered brow, said
she likes to fall asleep beneath the stars,
that their streaks of light make her believe
that she too is going somewhere. Infinity,
she whispers as she closes her eyes,
descending into thin air, where no arms
outstretch to catch her.

Adrienne Rich

2011-10-21T00:30:00.001-07:00

Living In Sin by Adrienne Rich
She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
under the milkman's tramp; that morning light
so coldly would delineate the scraps
of last night's cheese and three sepulchral bottles;
that on the kitchen shelf amoong the saucers
a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own--
envoy from some village in the moldings...
Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,
sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,
rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;
while she, jeered by the minor demons,
pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found
a towel to dust the table-top,
and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.
By evening she was back in love again,
though not so wholly but throughout the night
she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
like a relentless milkman up the stairs.

Charles Bukowski (1920-1994)

2011-10-20T10:07:00.000-07:00

The Genius Of The Crowd by Charles Bukowski
.
there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect

like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock

their finest art

Daniela Gioseffi

2011-10-19T04:17:00.003-07:00

THE OLIVE BRANCH

falls from the wet mouth of the old dove
and sinks into a river of fire rushing toward the delta
where the oceans will catch flame and evaporate with lust
and the children's lungs will be sucked of oxygen,
but the president doesn't notice. His polished desk
blinds him with veneer.

And on the street the crowds rush to glimpse the television
screen alight with the fire of electricity
like the body politic
as it broadcasts the baseball scores.

It's the final playoff of the World Serious
and we are here, all of us with flesh eyeballs alight
with the wings of the dove as they flutter on beyond
the red and blue sunset
which continues to outdo itself year after year
since the mastodons crept from the sea of blood
baring mammalian breasts full of warm white milk
for all the many colored faces of earth,
children as they suck life from leaves of grass
withering now in the threat of fire or ice,
eternal winter which comes to each, one by one,
but need not be passed in one blast of heat to all the young
buds of being wafting perfumes as they burn
from bright autumn rust, beauty so enough
that it kills the caring heart with its own ceasing.

William Blake (1757-1827)

2011-10-18T01:12:00.000-07:00

Ah! Sunflower
.
Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the Sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travellers journey is done.

Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

2011-10-17T04:46:00.000-07:00

Aftermath
.
Compelled by calamity's magnet
They loiter and stare as if the house
Burnt-out were theirs, or as if they thought
Some scandal might any minute ooze
From a smoke-choked closet into light;
No deaths, no prodigious injuries
Glut these hunters after an old meat,
Blood-spoor of the austere tragedies.

Mother Medea in a green smock
Moves humbly as any housewife through
Her ruined apartments, taking stock
Of charred shoes, the sodden upholstery:
Cheated of the pyre and the rack,
The crowd sucks her last tear and turns away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

2011-10-16T02:12:00.001-07:00

A Fragment: To Music
Silver key of the fountain of tears,
Where the spirit drinks till the brain is wild;
Softest grave of a thousand fears,
Where their mother, Care, like a drowsy child,
Is laid asleep in flowers.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

2011-10-15T03:07:00.000-07:00

A Process in the Weather of the Heart
.
A process in the weather of the heart
Turns damp to dry; the golden shot
Storms in the freezing tomb.
A weather in the quarter of the veins
Turns night to day; blood in their suns
Lights up the living worm.

A process in the eye forwarns
The bones of blindness; and the womb
Drives in a death as life leaks out.

A darkness in the weather of the eye
Is half its light; the fathomed sea
Breaks on unangled land.
The seed that makes a forest of the loin
Forks half its fruit; and half drops down,
Slow in a sleeping wind.

A weather in the flesh and bone
Is damp and dry; the quick and dead
Move like two ghosts before the eye.

A process in the weather of the world
Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child
Sits in their double shade.
A process blows the moon into the sun,
Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;
And the heart gives up its dead.

Dylan Thomas

Kamran Mir Hazar

2011-10-14T07:51:00.000-07:00

VIRUS WRITING

1.
Writing viruses
And electronic labyrinths
With a blackout and no computer
In a rented house, at seven thousand a month;
Kabul, the Afghan capital!
What silly poem is this?

You ask yourself, is poetry the same lonely words that wander in electronic corridors,
Cut off from their existence,
Thrown away, with no choice but to become a poem?
You watch imagination wandering through paths, over the paths,
You throw the leash at yet another word,
Trying to subdue this wild one,
And if you fail,
You stop functioning,
Like a computer crashed.

2.
There was someone, someone who wrote viruses
Behind a diesel-powered laptop
Looking for URLs and
An anonymous mail would be sent
Connecting you to a site, infected;
“I am from Florida, the USA, and 23 years of age,
Looking for someone to follow the link, and make happy”;
To open the mail and to make someone happy?
First, stop the programs;
Passing through security, typing 97, 98, 99,
Approaching the death of romance between zero and one.

A virus-writer drank half a beer bottle at once;
Then, computer deaths;
First to the east of Paris, a house,
Australia, three minutes more,
A man is waiting out the last minutes of an office shift
Needs to get home;
A party is starting in half an hour;
The Philippines, minutes later,
A 19-year-old girl
In a chat room,
Showing off a used body;
In Egypt, more or less the same time,
And the next morning, Kabul.

3.
You, and you, also you,
Yes, you and also you,
You are all arrested!

4.
They tell me, stop writing!
You write and we’ll show you Guantanamo at home,
You write, we’ll kill you.
Kabul, summer of ’07
Hands in handcuffs, feet tied up;
This is Afghanistan, and this here where it is going,
Dead bodies over dead bodies.
The poem has no choice but to stop writing itself.
This is prison.

5.
They asked a Kabul sparrow
Just what is mankind up to?
The sparrow considered this and died!

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

2011-10-13T10:59:00.001-07:00

Bird
.
It was passed from one bird to another,
the whole gift of the day.
The day went from flute to flute,
went dressed in vegetation,
in flights which opened a tunnel
through the wind would pass
to where birds were breaking open
the dense blue air -
and there, night came in.

When I returned from so many journeys,
I stayed suspended and green
between sun and geography -
I saw how wings worked,
how perfumes are transmitted
by feathery telegraph,
and from above I saw the path,
the springs and the roof tiles,
the fishermen at their trades,
the trousers of the foam;
I saw it all from my green sky.
I had no more alphabet
than the swallows in their courses,
the tiny, shining water
of the small bird on fire
which dances out of the pollen.

Pablo Neruda

Krisztina Tóth

2011-10-12T11:19:00.000-07:00

On the nature of love
.
Harbor suspicions as you watch closed eyes.
The water glugs beneath the ice, extras
act out the dream, and through the mouth's entrance/
exit an aerial procession slides;

recurring words, years reckoned in street signs,
buses that go zigzagging eastwards-westwards
across the nights, and on disordered bedclothes
the blinding signals drawn by motorist's lights …

… You've not been here. You lie here now, but that is
soon to be just a recollection. Therefore
intensively interrogate the hand which

recently moved as yours: you cannot ever
be sure who owns the body lying latticed
by shadows from the drapes, the stranger.

Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)

2011-10-11T06:19:00.000-07:00

Woe!
It is true, our tribe is similar to the bees,
It gathers honey of wisdom, carries it, stores it in honeycombs.
I am able to roam for hours
Through the labyrinth of the main library, floor to floor.
But yesterday, looking for the words of masters and prophets,
I wandered into high regions
That are visited by practically no one.
I would open a book and could decipher nothing.
For letters faded and disappeared from the pages.
Woe! I exclaimed-so it comes to this?
Where are you, venerable ones, with your beards and wigs,
Your nights spent by a candle, griefs of your wives?
So a message saving the world is silenced forever?
At your home it was the day of making preserves.
And your dog, sleeping by the fire, would wake up,
Yawn, and look at you, as if knowing.

Czeslaw Milosz

Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

2011-10-10T12:18:00.000-07:00

‘Carnal Apple, Woman Filled, Burning Moon,’
.
Carnal apple, Woman filled, burning moon,
dark smell of seaweed, crush of mud and light,
what secret knowledge is clasped between your pillars?
What primal night does Man touch with his senses?
Ay, Love is a journey through waters and stars,
through suffocating air, sharp tempests of grain:
Love is a war of lightning,
and two bodies ruined by a single sweetness.
Kiss by kiss I cover your tiny infinity,
your margins, your rivers, your diminutive villages,
and a genital fire, transformed by delight,
slips through the narrow channels of blood
to precipitate a nocturnal carnation,
to be, and be nothing but light in the dark.