Margaret Atwood

Flying Inside Your Own Body


Your lungs fill & spread themselves,
wings of pink blood, and your bones
empty themselves and become hollow.
When you breathe in you’ll lift like a balloon
and your heart is light too & huge,
beating with pure joy, pure helium.
The sun’s white winds blow through you,
there’s nothing above you,
you see the earth now as an oval jewel,
radiant & seablue with love.
It’s only in dreams you can do this.
Waking, your heart is a shaken fist,
a fine dust clogs the air you breathe in;
the sun’s a hot copper weight pressing straight
down on the think pink rind of your skull.
It’s always the moment just before gunshot.
You try & try to rise but you cannot.

Margaret Atwood

W.B. Yeats (1865-1939)

CUCHULAIN COMFORTED

A MAN that had six mortal wounds, a man
Violent and famous, strode among the dead;
Eyes stared out of the branches and were gone.

Then certain Shrouds that muttered head to head
Came and were gone. He leant upon a tree
As though to meditate on wounds and blood.

A Shroud that seemed to have authority
Among those bird-like things came, and let fall
A bundle of linen. Shrouds by two and three

Came creeping up because the man was still.
And thereupon that linen-carrier said:
'Your life can grow much sweeter if you will

'Obey our ancient rule and make a shroud;
Mainly because of what we only know
The rattle of those arms makes us afraid.

'We thread the needles' eyes, and all we do
All must together do.' That done, the man
Took up the nearest and began to sew.

'Now must we sing and sing the best we can,
But first you must be told our character:
Convicted cowards all, by kindred slain

'Or driven from home and left to die in fear.'
They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words,
Though all was done in common as before;

They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Beauty's Halo


Thy beauty hangs around thee like
Splendour around the moon--
Thy voice, as silver bells that strike
Upon...

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

It is an honorable thought...

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A bird came down...
A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad,--
They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, splashless, as they swim.

~Emily Dickinson

Ivan Borislavov

Odyssey

To Kiril Kadiiski

We are the illegitimate children of freedom,
we are the fallen angels with broken wings.
We were the boatswains of the cursed frigate
damned to sail in the impenetrable fog.

Day and night we chased our vague mirage
until we caught the virus of woe and darkness.
And, like naives, we wanted our dream
to take us at last to the promised coast.

We swore, we mutinied in search of vengeance.
The captain confessed – it was he who broke the compass.
And the blood in our veins suddenly turned to rust.

Since then we have been drifting ghostly in the fog,
wrapped in the spiderwebs of the ocean.
And by custom we salute the captain.

Al Purdy (1918-2000)

Married Man's Song

Al Purdy
From: Beyond Remembering - The collected poems of Al Purdy. 2000.


When he makes love to the young girl
what does the middle-aged long-married
man say to himself and the girl?
— that lovers live and desk clerks perish?

When neons flash the girl into light and shadow
the room vanishes and all those others
guests who checked out long ago
are smiling
and only the darkness of her may be touched
only the whiteness looked at
she stands above him as a stone goddess
weeping tears and honey
she is half his age and far older
and how can a man tell his wife this?

Later they'll meet in all politeness
not quite strangers but never friends
and hands touched elsewhere may shake together
with brush of fingers and casual eyes
and the cleanser cleans to magic whiteness
and love survives in the worst cologne
(but not girls' bodies that turn black leather)
for all believe in the admen's lies

In rare cases among the legions of married men
such moments of shining have never happened
and whether to praise such men for their steadfast virtue
or condemn them as fools for living without magic
answer can hardly be given

There are rooms for rent in the outer planets
and neons blaze in Floral Sask
we live with death but it's life we die with
in the blossoming earth where springs the rose
In house and highway in town and country
what's given is paid for blood gifts are sold
that stars' white fingers unscrew the light bulbs
the bill is due and the desk clerk wakes
outside our door the steps are quiet
light comes and goes from a ghostly sun
where only the darkness may be remembered
and the rest is gone

B.Z. Niditch

WAITING FOR MINGUS


Waiting for Mingus
jostled near the bar
heedless to the lucid light
of not yet morning,
with the pitter patter
of spraying rosin
on my jazz violin
next to Charlie’s bass
harmonizing the winds
in a city dripping
with turning away
the poor back up singer
who faints from hunger
before my adolescent feet
and all I want
is to jam
or murder a blood orange
until the cops arrive
to arrest anyone
they could get
their heavy hands on,
so this kid beats it
slips out of the alley
and finally pisses
his chance
of a life time
that day Mingus played
and I lost my deep strings
spewed out
by a future urn
breathing faster
than the abandoned gods
of Holderlin and Novalis.

Anne Spencer (1882-1975)

Lines to a Nasturtium

A lover muses

Flame-flower, Day-torch, Mauna Loa,
I saw a daring bee, today, pause, and soar,
Into your flaming heart;
Then did I hear crisp crinkled laughter
As the furies after tore him apart?
A bird, next, small and humming,
Looked into your startled depths and fled....
Surely, some dread sight, and dafter
Than human eyes as mine can see,
Set the stricken air waves drumming
In his flight.

Day-torch, Flame-flower, cool-hot Beauty,
I cannot see, I cannot hear your fluty
Voice lure your loving swain,
But I know one other to whom you are in beauty
Born in vain;
Hair like the setting sun,
Her eyes a rising star,
Motions gracious as reeds by Babylon, bar
All your competing;
Hands like, how like, brown lilies sweet,
Cloth of gold were fair enough to touch her feet . . . .
Ah, how the senses flood at my repeating,
As once in her fire-lit heart I felt the furies
Beating, beating.

Margret Atwood

A Visit


Gone are the days
when you could walk on water.
When you could walk.

The days are gone.
Only one day remains,
the one you're in.

The memory is no friend.
It can only tell you
what you no longer have:

a left hand you can use,
two feet that walk.
All the brain's gadgets.

Hello, hello.
The one hand that still works
grips, won't let go.

That is not a train.
There is no cricket.
Let's not panic.

Let's talk about axes,
which kinds are good,
the many names of wood.

This is how to build
a house, a boat, a tent.
No use; the toolbox

refuses to reveal its verbs;
the rasp, the plane, the awl,
revert to sullen metal.

Do you recognize anything? I said.
Anything familiar?
Yes, you said. The bed.

Better to watch the stream
that flows across the floor
and is made of sunlight,

the forest made of shadows;
better to watch the fireplace
which is now a beach.

Margaret Atwood :

Keijo Shurin

"The road enters green mountains near evening's dark;
Beneath the white cherry trees, a Buddhist temple
Whose priest doesn't know what regret for spring's passing means-
Each stroke of his bell startles more blossoms into falling."
- Keijo Shurin

Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972)

Be Music, Night


Be music, night,
That her sleep may go
Where angels have their pale tall choirs

Be a hand, sea,
That her dreams may watch
Thy guidesman touching the green flesh of the world

Be a voice, sky,
That her beauties may be counted
And the stars will tilt their quiet faces
Into the mirror of her loveliness

Be a road, earth,
That her walking may take thee
Where the towns of heaven lift their breathing spires

O be a world and a throne, God,
That her living may find its weather
And the souls of ancient bells in a child's book
Shall lead her into Thy wondrous house

Kenneth Patchen

Friedrich Ruckert (1788-1866)

Paradise


In paradise there must flow
A river of eternal love!
And every tear of longing
Must be a pearl within it.

In paradise there must blow
A zephyr that stills pain!
And every sorrow, and yours too,
Must dissolve and disappear in it!

There stands the cool tree of peace
Planted in green spaces,
And under [that tree] it must be possible to dream
A quiet dream of peace and happiness.

Friedrich Rückert

Bruce Cockburn

3. RUTHIE'S TIRED THING

Here The dark on which I feed
You The red room where I cannot reach
your blood

In the ring,
in the cuckoo,
in the tick at the wall

slow
vision buzzes in time
with darkness patterns
and those of light
that seek

this electric beehive where I live.

Robert Pinsky

Doctor Frolic


Felicity the healer isn’t young
And you don’t look him up unless you need him.
Clown’s eyes, Pope’s nose, a mouth for dirty stories,
He made his bundle in the Great Depression

And now, a jovial immigrant success
In baggy pinstripes, he winks and wheezes gossip,
Village stories that could lift your hair
Or lance a boil; the small town dirt, the dope,

The fishy deals and incestuous combinations,
The husband and the wife of his wife’s brother,
The hospital contract, the certificate ...
A realist and hardy omnivore,

He strolls the jetties when the month is right
With a knife and lemons in his pocket, after
Live mussels from among the smelly rocks,
Preventative of impotence and goitre.

And as though the sight of tissue healing crooked
Pleased him, like the ocean’s vaginal taste,
He’ll stitch your thumb up so it shows for life.
And where he once was the only quack in town

We all have heard his half-lame joke, the one
About the operation that succeeded,
The tangy line that keeps that clever eye
So merry in the punchinello face.

Robert Pinsky :

Gerald Stern

Apocalypse


Of all sixty of us I am the only one who went
to the four corners though I don't say it
out of pride but more like a type of regret,
and I did it because there was no one I truly believed
in though once when I climbed the hill in Skye
and arrived at the rough tables I saw the only other
elder who was a vegetarian--in Scotland--
and visited Orwell and rode a small motorcycle
to get from place to place; and I immediately
stopped eating fish and meat and lived on soups;
and we wrote each other in the middle and late fifties
though one day I got a letter from his daughter
that he had died in an accident; he was
I'm sure of it, an angel who flew in midair
with one eternal gospel to proclaim
to those inhabiting the earth and every nation;
and now that I go through my papers every day
I search and search for his letters but to my shame
I have even forgotten his name, that messenger
who came to me with tablespoons of blue lentils.

Gerald Stern

Gwendolyn Macewen (1941-1987)

This land like a mirror turns you inward
And you become a forest in a furtive lake;
The dark pines of your mind reach downward,
You dream in the green of your time,
Your memory is a row of sinking pines.

Explorer, you tell yourself this is not what you came for
Although it is good here, and green;
You had meant to move with a kind of largeness,
You had planned a heavy grace, an anguished dream.

But the dark pines of your mind dip deeper
And you are sinking, sinking, sleeper
In an elementary world;
There is something down there and you want it told.

— "Dark Pines Under Water," The Shadow Maker (1972)

Ann Menebroker

Crow Meets Coyote


They both become cautious.
The desert is big enough for both
of them, but sometimes it’s lack
of space they need, a reason
to get closer. The sky is so damn
wide, there is no intimacy left.
But if the sun is as bright
as the sky is endless, they will
have their chance at sunset
when the night is as long
as shelter, as horny as the owl.

Milton Acorn (1923-1986)

The Island

Milton Acorn
From: The Island Means Minago. Toronto: NC Press, 1975. p.13.

Since I'm Island-born home's as precise
as if a mumbly old carpenter,
shoulder-straps crossed wrong,
laid it out, refigured
to the last three-eighths of shingle.

Nowhere that plowcut worms
heal themselves in red loam;
spruces squat, skirts in sand
or the stones of a river rattle its dark
tunnel under the elms,
is there a spot not measured by hands;
no direction I couldn't walk
to the wave-lined edge of home.

Quiet shores -- beaches that roar
but walk two thousand paces and the sea
becomes an odd shining
glimpse among the jeweled
zigzag low hills. Any wonder
your eyelashes are wings
to fly your look both in and out?
In the coves of the land all things are discussed.

In the ranged jaws of the Gulf,
a red tongue.
Indians say a musical God
took up his brush and painted it,
named it in His own language
"The Island".

Wislawwa Szymborska (1923-2012)

Lot's Wife


They say I looked back out of curiosity.
But I could have had other reasons.
I looked back mourning my silver bowl.
Carelessly, while tying my sandal strap.
So I wouldn't have to keep staring at the righteous nape
of my husband Lot's neck.
From the sudden conviction that if I dropped dead
he wouldn't so much as hesitate.
From the disobedience of the meek.
Checking for pursuers.
Struck by the silence, hoping God had changed his mind.
Our two daughters were already vanishing over the hilltop.
I felt age within me. Distance.
The futility of wandering. Torpor.
I looked back setting my bundle down.
I looked back not knowing where to set my foot.
Serpents appeared on my path,
spiders, field mice, baby vultures.
They were neither good nor evil now--every living thing
was simply creeping or hopping along in the mass panic.
I looked back in desolation.
In shame because we had stolen away.
Wanting to cry out, to go home.
Or only when a sudden gust of wind
unbound my hair and lifted up my robe.
It seemed to me that they were watching from the walls of Sodom
and bursting into thunderous laughter again and again.
I looked back in anger.
To savor their terrible fate.
I looked back for all the reasons given above.
I looked back involuntarily.
It was only a rock that turned underfoot, growling at me.
It was a sudden crack that stopped me in my tracks.
A hamster on its hind paws tottered on the edge.
It was then we both glanced back.
No, no. I ran on,
I crept, I flew upward
until darkness fell from the heavens
and with it scorching gravel and dead birds.
I couldn't breathe and spun around and around.
Anyone who saw me must have thought I was dancing.
It's not inconceivable that my eyes were open.
It's possible I fell facing the city.

Wislawa Szymborska

Doug Draime

Ginger Baker

she said that life
was a burning fuse
and she knew she’d
lose, and I couldn’t help her
anyway.
she said this over
the pounding drums
of Ginger Baker
after we
dropped a lot
of acid
maybe 6 tabs
of windowpane
watching the orange sun set over downtown
Los Angeles
from the roof
of my house in
Echo Park,
and the Dodgers were beating
the Giants
just over the hill in
Chavez Ravine, and I couldn’t hear what she said,
and i asked her
to repeat
it 4 times,
the 4th time
her tears came, and I
listened
closer.

Al Purdy (1918-2000)

The Dead Poet

Al Purdy
From: Beyond Remembering - The collected poems of Al Purdy. 2000.


I was altered in the placenta
by the dead brother before me
who built a place in the womb
knowing I was coming:
he wrote words on the walls of flesh
painting a woman inside a woman
whispering a faint lullaby
that sings in my blind heart still

The others were lumberjacks
backwoods wrestlers and farmers
their women were meek and mild
nothing of them survives
but an image inside an image
of a cookstove and the kettle boiling
— how else explain myself to myself
where does the song come from?

Now on my wanderings:
at the Alhambra's lyric dazzle
where the Moors built stone poems
a wan white face peering out
— and the shadow in Plato's cave
remembers the small dead one
— at Samarkand in pale blue light
the words came slowly from him
— I recall the music of blood
on the Street of the Silversmiths

Sleep softly spirit of earth
as the days and nights join hands
when everything becomes one thing
wait softly brother
but do not expect it to happen
that great whoop announcing resurrection
expect only a small whisper
of birds nesting and green things growing
and a brief saying of them
and know where the words came from

Jacqui Corcoran

A Room by Jacqui Corcoran



This is the room with a view

it is for you

A basket to tend your soul

A moon of dresses

There is another room. A shower cubicle.

But who are these strangers in there?

Leave. Take your stories with you.

Who is this tour guide visiting my home?

Why is he saying somebody died

here? I need proof.

This is the room with a view

it is for you

A patch of shut irises

A fence to lean their fists of shifting indigo.

Scott Moore

Clown angry


she was working in home depot
since the circus left her and town behind
she had those big floppy shoes on
like most clowns do
ya know, the kind you can get lost in
i seemed to be pickin up a vibe that she didn’t exactly like men
at this particular moment in time
i’m guessing another casualty of the ringmaster
whatever… we all know how those stories end
but home depot, clowns
that’s crazy time in the sub’s
and ya it’s true
i’ve always been a little tentative about clowns
they just seem so sinister deep down
like serial killer shit
but we talked anyway
she said she went to B.C.
and had pursued a law degree
but the circus, well that was her true calling
i’ll bet her parents were pissed about that one
anyway…
she was stuck in a rut as they say
she could have been another lawyer
but the circus, the other clowns
they were family
i thought to myself…
this girl needs some perspective… t.v. stat
if she would only
lose the nose, lose the makeup, most of all lose the shoes
at least she’d lose some weight
maybe then
she wouldn’t feel so bitter, so betrayed
so clown angry