Philip Whalen (1923-2002)

A Vision of the Bodhisattvas

 

By Philip Whalen 1923–2002       

They pass before me one by one riding on animals

"What are you waiting for," they want to know

Z—, young as he is (& mad into the bargain) tells me

"Some day you'll drop everything & become a rishi, you know."

I know

The forest is there, I've lived in it

    More certainly than this town? Irrelevant—

    What am I waiting for?

A change in customs that will take 1000 years to come about?

Who's to make the change but me?

    "Returning again and again," Amida says

Why's that dream so necessary? walking out of whatever house alone

Nothing but the clothes on my back, money or no

Down the road to the next place the highway leading to the   

mountains

From which I absolutely must come back

What business have I to do that?

I know the world and I love it too much and it

Is not the one I'd find outside this door.

Vasko Popa (1922-1991)

Give Me Back My Rags #11

I've wiped your face off my face
Ripped your shadow off my shadow

Leveled the hills in you
Turned your plains into hills

Set your seasons quarreling
Turned all the ends of the world from you

Wrapped the path of my life around you
My impenetrable my impossible path

Just try to meet me now


Trans. by Anne Pennington
 

Vasko Popa :

Antonin Artaud (1896-1948)

Dark Poet

Dark Poet, a maid's breast
Haunts you,
Embittered poet, life seethes
And life burns,
And the sky reabsorbs itself in rain,
Your pen scratches at the heart of life.

Forest, forest, alive with your eyes,
On multiple pinions;
With storm-bound hair,
The poets mount horses, dogs.

Eyes fume, tongues stir,
The heavens surge into our senses
Like blue mother's milk;
Women, harsh vinegar hearts,
I hang suspended from your mouths.
Umbilical Limbo 1926
Translated by Victor Corti

Charles Simic (b.1938)

Mirrors At 4 A.M

You must come to them sideways
In rooms webbed in shadow,
Sneak a view of their emptiness
Without them catching
A glimpse of you in return.

The secret is,
Even the empty bed is a burden to them,
A pretense.
They are more themselves keeping
The company of a blank wall,
The company of time and eternity

Which, begging your pardon,
Cast no image
As they admire themselves in the mirror,
While you stand to the side
Pulling a hanky out
To wipe your brow surreptitiously.

 

Charles Simic :

Ruth Stone (1915-2011)

1941

By Ruth Stone 1915–2011      

I wore a large brim hat

like the women in the ads.

How thin I was: such skin.

Yes. It was Indianapolis;

a taste of sin.

You had a natural Afro;

no money for a haircut.

We were in the seedy part;

the buildings all run-down;

the record shop, the jazz

impeccable. We moved like

the blind, relying on our touch.

At the corner coffee shop,

after an hour’s play, with our

serious game on paper,

the waitress asked us

to move on. It wasn’t much.

Oh mortal love, your bones

were beautiful. I traced them

with my fingers. Now the light

grows less. You were so angular.

The air darkens with steel

and smoke. The cracked world

about to disintegrate,

in the arms of my total happiness.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861)

Sonnet Xxv

A heavy heart, Beloved, have I borne
From year to year until I saw thy face,
And sorrow after sorrow took the place
Of all those natural joys as lightly worn
As the stringed pearls, each lifted in its turn
By a beating heart at dance-time. Hopes apace
Were changed to long despairs, till God's own grace
Could scarcely lift above the world forlorn
My heavy heart. Then thou didst bid me bring
And let it drop adown thy calmly great
Deep being ! Fast it sinketh, as a thing
Which its own nature doth precipitate,
While thine doth close above it, mediating
Betwixt the stars and the unaccomplished fate.

 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning :

Valerie Gillies (b.1948)

Head: Sabre Wound

Poem

The strokes of a sabre
on his wan head –
those blows repeated
in the heat
of battle
where sabres whirl
like flames.

An attack
by a tiger
or the wake
of a cutlass?
He is conscious 
but he can’t speak.

Better the clean cut
of the sabre than all
the musket-fire, grape-shot
or tearaway cannonball.

A field surgeon knows
such a head injury
gives ‘frequent opportunities
of seeing the upper
and the lateral parts
of the cerebrum
exposed
by sabre wounds.’

To manoeuvre a cavalry horse
ridden in balance
staying steady
always
leaving the sabre arm free
is a skill
parried by another:
to remove fragments of bone
from the skull
allowing the wounded
dragoon
to recover.

Valerie Gillies