--I would define, in brief, the Poetry of words as the Rhythmic creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste.

Edgar Allan Poe
from The Poetic Principle


--Genuine Poetry can communicate before it is understood.

T. S. Eliot

All significant truths are private truths. As they become public they cease to become truths; they become facts, or at best, part of the public character; or at worst, catchwords.
T. S. Eliot

Anxiety is the hand maiden of creativity.
T. S. Eliot

Any poet, if he is to survive beyond his 25th year, must alter; he must seek new literary influences; he will have different emotions to express.
T. S. Eliot

April is the cruellest month.
T. S. Eliot

Every experience is a paradox in that it means to be absolute, and yet is relative; in that it somehow always goes beyond itself and yet never escapes itself.
T. S. Eliot

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
T. S. Eliot

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.
T. S. Eliot

It is only in the world of objects that we have time and space and selves.
T. S. Eliot

It's not wise to violate rules until you know how to observe them.
T. S. Eliot


Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.
T. S. Eliot


Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
T. S. Eliot

Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves.
T. S. Eliot
TS Eliot



The bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious.
T. S. Eliot


The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.
T. S. Eliot

What Stars Brought in October

Tuscan stars in a dark season. October
sky as death veilings; a shimmer-water
cobalt-blue in a dark season. By almond

saplings, leaves as rinds, a bevy of
jeterusy flowers.

- in progress

In Brine, Beneath Delos

In Brine, Beneath Delos,

Poseydon praised each mackerel with
A silvery line across mid-body; across

Mid-body and under, draped, a prism
Sheen or spleen of mother-of-pearl

And thin skin. Across the counter, sprawled,
On ice in all its coldness, a mackerel

Limp, its ghost-eyes pierced into skull
Like pearls, its head a part of its body

Under Mackerel Sky, a bevy of dead mackerel
Shells placed as decorum on Day's blue walls.

:

In Delos, a fisherman, in a Pleyt, spotted
A Horse entering the sea and, by it,

Getting swallowed. In Brine, the Horse
Transforms and turns into Poseydon.

In Brine, in rows, steams of uncoloured
Fish, till he arcs in a downhill motion

His spear and turns - clad in damask-
Each fish into a cross between Salmon

And Pirayah, names them Brinelos.

Crevalle Jacks from Nova Scota to Uruguay

From Nova Scota to Uruguay
and Portugal to Angola,

The Crevalle Jacks swim all day
In steams, bodies of draped

Luminosity as silver-green
As mackerel essence, eyes

Like pearls pierced into
The heads - each head a part
Of their broad bodies. In

Delphi, Apollo praised
Each Jack by silvery line

Across mid-body; now across
Mid-waist an prism sheen.

Moth-flocked, I row out in a canoe;
drag a part of the lake with

my paddle. God coats ten bees
in broad daylight. Their bodies

are ten pearls, wings a hymn draped
around them like seaweed. Beaver tail

slap water. Water rise and stick to fur.
I would stare through wood if wood

was air and penetrable.

Stages for: a Butterfly

.4
In a Mimesis of moths, these swallowtails
fly lambent over water - all wings all head

and body. Thorax contraction, then sudden
wing-fluttering. There are two swallowtails

whose wings are dim and frail with age.
Tongues coil and uncoil licking the rests

of a halcyon nest.


.3
A pupa whorls inside the cocoon hanging
like pears: tip and end of body twist like

Nautilus shells. Think fingerprints here,
think sea snake without its scales'

oily gleam of luminosity. Think cat on lap
or snail inside its shell. . .

Larva uncoils as cocoon dilates.


.2
Putti-innocenct, a larva lies stock-still
beneath the leaves, a crawler whose trail behind

is only slime and blank.


.1
The egg is less cream than milk-chroma
when it cracks open. Alcyone swathes

enamel shells.

Rainbow Abalone

Abalone shell: Imagine opaline fields of soap
bubbles, minus spheres. Imagine wet, rainbowy

abalone, whose surface looks like oil on hot
asphalt - that same bubbly, water-coloured

smear & smudge on layered flakes as frail
as thistle stems.

Rainbow Abalone

Abalone shell: Imagine opaline fields of soap
bubbles, minus spheres. Imagine wet rainbow

abalone, whose surface looks like oil on hot
asphalt - that same bubbly, water-coloured

smear & smudge on layered flakes as frail
as thistle stems. Imagine Grand Canyon -

rugged, red rocks on rough landscape.


Watery, rainbowy abalone, whose glossy surface
looks like oil on hot asphalt - it's that same

bubbly, water-colour smear & smudge on layered
flakes, brittle as pompom stems - tender as flesh.

Drowning Pigs

Spilled liquid. Pink, translucent
pigs - pale-coloured, lines of oily

ink. They are drowning: boat on water.
Pigs in water: a pink balloon in blue,

that speck descending down in emptiness.
Their flesh turns whiter; turns dim,

close to blue. It is sinking. Slow,
desperate inhaling. A limp twist of

legs. Then - silent: and never a new
sign of life.

Arcadia

Why not begin with the man and the snow
confetting the lawn, and how light glows;

why not begin with footfalls or the bumble
bee with wing too thin for its hairy body

not heavy, but slick with honeysuckle splutter;
why not begin with the sun that swells,

unswells, in a rainbow’s wet transparency;
or the fog we see as thinner,

more transparent – unraveling till
it appears dappled in blue in good light;

why not begin with the boughs that droop
fraught with fruit; or the seven magnolias

in the yard, breathing out. Why not end
with what coats the shallow body

beside the magnolias; or the beaver - that
slammer - slapping furry tail on water.

On a Holiday that Keeps Giving Fragments

(New fragments - as in, even, part of sentences - of poetry. Written away, in the spur of the moment; in a mind fully fresh, open to wonderments, although the scenes' beauty may still not be captured perfectly - in that the mind was fresh, open to take it in, understanding, but not in a state to write.)

If wood was air: if wood was penetrable: he / I would stare
through it.

[If wood was air: I would stare through it; if wood was penetrable: reach
for it / cut it with my body as with air, as I moved into it.]

to go out / row out in broad daylight

we coat the bees in broad
daylight (in honey, sugar -all melted
and pearl-like, sticky substance)

we coat the bees in broad daylight (in
honey, sugar - pearl-like), the sugar
melted - sticky drapery over / stickily draped
over bees.

full of thick fish
boots

Scraggy tail, turns limp - turns brown
with its water-cargoed / watery fur

Scraggy tail, turns limp - copper-brown
to black

with water-cargoed / watery fur

Scraggy tail, falls limp; falls
down, how the water sticks

like glue to the fur.


[What the Hambus
to Marvolo would look like:
as death, in the shape of his own dead body.]

The wall's bricks glow (gold),
and the water with it: how it
take / steal the wall's shape.

Do the doorbells echo to slow the silent hour?

Arcadia

(Undeveloped lines, part of lines, ideas, part of ideas, etc., while on holiday. Nothing connected to something else.)

Arcadia

The fog as we see it: less thick;
more transparent, unraveling

until, at last, it becomes blue-
dappled in good light. Though

the sun swells, unswells, it laces
what it touches: a rainbow's

transpancery in gold.


Why not begin with the man and the snow, it falls confetting the lawn, and how the light glows (on flakes in the sky: a lighthouse whose light is falling upon mothy-slanted, half-splintered fully-mastless ships)?

Why not begin with a man?

The man like any bird
with clipped wings, trapped
from better weather.

Sky: the sky, such / that
bringer / harbringer / echoer of wind.

The bee, as if sometime in swarming the magnolias
had too small wings for its cargo not heavy: slick,
with honeysuckle spit. / (not heavy turned-flesh:
slick with honeysuckle spit.)

A vase the colour of terra cotta slants--atop the pipe white and oddly fading; in places, paint flashed off like skin, coat its coaled ground.

A boat, in lake Arcadia, its vechicle
sound that of savannah drums.

If, at distance, the boughs hang
heavy with fruit, how can we discern it
from pear or apple tree?

Seven magnolias, breathing out. Unfolding
petals, orchid-red, bough-like.

-

What coats the shallow
body / bone ? - moths? bees on honey?

(honey on flesh)

If the body is a grave,
the grave is empty, is it also coated -
by what

(bouquets? confetti? bird shit?)

The sun behind the cloud: (glows)
luminous like glossed pearls.

The sun behind seven clouds: (glows)
luminous like glossed pearls.

Seven clouds like veils in front of
the sun: how it glows luminous like glossed-over pearls.

Seven clouds: seven veils for the sun
glowing luminous like glossed-over pearls.

A tree the mind
that is still; has stopped shaking.

To carry any specific number
of apples. To let another apple

fall: the sound of Icarus
falling, all wax all wing toward the ground.

A bee, as (if) for the blue
lake, as if buzzing into it, all

round all brown
and all yellow - see that splash?

How does the flesh taste? - if flesh is all
I can taste? What coats shallow body?
Moths, bees on honey (honey on flesh)?

How we see the fog: less fluid and more
transparent, unraveling until, at last,
it becomes blue-dappled blue-speckled

in good light: see these holes? - the sun
laces its edges gold.


-


arcadia and other ethereal planes

Why not begin with the man and
the snow that falls confetting
the lawn, and how the light glows? –
why not begin with footfalls; or
the bee as when still swarming

the magnolias had too small wings
for its cargo not heavy but slick
with honeysuckle spit; or the sun
that swells, unswells – in rainbow
transparency – lacing what it touches:

the fog we see as: less thick; more
transparent – unraveling until, at
last, it seems dappled in blue in good
light. If, at distance, the boughs
hang heavy with fruit, how can we

discern it from these pear or apple
trees? Seven magnolias, breathing
out. Unfolding petals, orchid-red,
bough-like. What coats the shallow
body? - moths? bees on honey?

(honey on flesh). If the body is
a grave, the grave is empty, is it
also coated - by what (bouquets?
confetti? bird shit?). Here, take
my hand. Snow falls onto graves;

a man under it, still as plants,
as if hoping to be snowed down
in good light blue-dappled, speckled.

Rosemallows versus Bees

The bees that, together,
in swarms, buzz and
plunge to boozw nectar

from the flowers that croon,
deaf-chorus, Alas, alas,
they steal our water,

and, deaf-chorused, cry
Alas, alas, you rob
us to the bees, yellow-

cargoed round balls
whose gossamer
wings are more still, less

flurry when
their beaks swill and swill
still. They do not heed

the rosemallows' plea,
whose necks are bending in
the wind but not by it.

The bees, full
of nectar, rub the horizon's
lip as they fly away from

the flowers: rosemallows
bending in the wind
but not by it. Then they pass

a hand, and not
a window. Two circle
the hand and stitch

it; how they wobble
in silk-scarf loops
to the ground, full

of rosemallow nectar.

Any Better?

They Shout

—all day, the men that fail to bring coyotes
out of storm. In the beginning, they poise
in narrow rows like garden flowers, heavy
with hesitance of failure of what happens;

then the thunder and the lightning, and
they spread. Do they find the lightning,
wrapped in yellow, intimidating? Waves
rise, up—to bees, to birds—as though

they are wet, blue answers of Babylon’s
tower, and not just waves; the harbour
rocks in the wind; and men sprawl beneath
tufts and bushes like antelopes for shelter,

a few dead, fallen. They hold and get held
by each other. I attempt to help but no
help is given. If today the light means
the end in its wash-grey— then I will die

here, as the rest, look up, and the light
will turn, the sky become sacredom. . .
What would the flesh taste, if flesh is all
I could taste? I mark the gull that passes

over—in fright—in feathers of course,
imagine, as with a leaf that seems to stop
half-flight, mid-flight, through the light,
the burned feathers of a gull, its roasted
flesh. I lie, in tufts. The sky turns blue to
sacredom.

They Shout

—all day, the men that fail to bring coyotes
out of storm. In the beginning, they poise
in narrow rows like garden flowers, heavy
with hesitance of failure of what happens;

then the thunder and the lightning, and
they spread. Do they find the lightning,
wrapped in yellow, intimidating? Waves
rise,up—to bees and to birds—like wet,

blue answers of Babylon’s tower and not
just waves; the harbour rocks in the wind;
and men sprawls beneath tufts and bushes
like antelopes for shelter, some dead,

some fallen, how they hold and get held
by each other. I attempt to help but no
help is given. If the light, in its wash-grey,
means Armageddon— I will die here, as

the rest; look up and know and, in knowing,
the light will turn, the sky become sacredom. . .
What would the flesh taste, if flesh is all
I could taste? I mark the gull that passes

over—in fright—in feathers of course,
imagine, as with a leaf that seems to stop
half-flight, mid-flight, through the light,
the burned feathers of a gull, its roasted
flesh. I lie, in tufts. The sky turns blue to
sacredom.

Explorations of an Idea

An antelope in
mid-leap:
the heart.


Like a squall whose voice rives
the sky that bound it, this
mouth from whom syllables are
stressed and consonants expressed.

Great Poems by Great Poets

For Grant Wood

by Margaret Mackinnon (Poetry)

A shy man seeks perfection in his art:
Across vast acres, color and shape of tidiness,
Iowa's unruly grass submits, blade by blade.
The blue of Mother's dishes tints the sky. Across vast acres, color and shape of tidiness,
sloping rows and rectangles piece a new land.
The blue of Mother's dishes tints the sky.
Like a black quilt tied with loops of green,

sloping rows and rectangles piece the new land.
The reassuring fields of corn unfold
like black quilts tied with loops of green.
Under the artist's alchemy,

the reassuring fields of corn unfold.
Sweet clouds hover like the hands of God.
Under the artist's alchemy,
even winter's leaden skies grow bright.

Sweet clouds hover like the hands of God
as the Thirties' skylines and bread lines disappear.
Even winter's leaden skies grow bright.
A yellow hill rises, like the belly of a woman ripe with child,

as the skylines and bread lines disappear.
Iowa's unruly grass submits, blade by blade,
a yellow hill rises—
and the shy man finds perfection in his art.

Becune Point

by Derek Walcott (Poetry)

Stunned heat of noon. In shade, tan, silken cows
hide in the thorned acacias. A butterfly staggers.

Stamping their hooves from thirst, small horses drowse
or whinny for water. On parched, ochre headlands, daggers

of agave bristle in primordial defense,
like a cornered monster backed up against the sea.

A mongoose charges dry grass and fades through a fence
faster than an afterthought. Dust rises easily.

Haze of the Harmattan, Sahara dust, memory's haze
from the dried well of Africa, the headland's desert

or riders in swirling burnooses, mixed with the greys
of hills veiled in Impressionist light. We inherit

two worlds of associations, or references, drought
that we heighten into Delacroix's North Africa,

veils, daggers, lances, herds the Harmattan brought
with a phantom inheritance, which the desperate seeker

of a well-spring staggers in the heat in search of—
heroic ancestors; the other that the dry season brings

is the gust of a European calendar, but it is the one love
that thirsts for confirmations in the circling rings

of the ground dove's cooing on stones, in the acacia's
thorns and the agave's daggers, that they are all ours,

the white horsemen of the Sahara, India's and Asia's
plumed mongoose and crested palmtree, Benin and Pontoise.

We are history's afterthought, as the mongoose races
ahead of its time; in drought we discover our shadows,

our origins that range from the most disparate places,
from the dugouts of Guinea to the Nile's canted dhows.


II

The incredible blue with its bird-inviting cloud,
in which there are crumbling towers, banners and domes,

and the sliding Carthage of sunsets, the marble shroud
drawn over associations that are Greece's and Rome's

and rarely of Africa. They continue at sixty-seven
to echo in the corridors of the head, perspectives

of a corridor in the Vatican that led, not to heaven,
but to more paintings of heaven, ideas in lifted sieves

drained by satiety because great art can exhaust us,
and even the steadiest faith can be clogged by excess,

the self-assured Christs, the Madonnas' inflexible postures
without the mess of motherhood. With this blue I bless

emptiness where these hills are barren of tributes
and the repetitions of power, our sky's naive

ceiling without domes and spires, an earth whose roots
like the thorned acacia's deepen my belief.

Sparrow Trapped in the Airport

by Averill Curdy (Poetry)

Never the bark and abalone mask
cracked by storms of a mastering god,
never the gods’ favored glamour, never
the pelagic messenger bearing orchards
in its beak, never allegory, not wisdom
or valor or cunning, much less hunger
demanding vigilance, industry, invention,
or the instinct to claim some small rise
above the plain and from there to assert
the song of another day ending;
lentil brown, uncounted, overlooked
in the clamorous public of the flock
so unlikely to be noticed here by arrivals,
faces shining with oils of their many miles,
where it hops and scratches below
the baggage carousel and lights too high,
too bright for any real illumination,
looking more like a fumbled punch line
than a stowaway whose revelation
recalls how lightly we once traveled.

Gym Dance with the Doors Wide Open

J. Allyn Rosser (Poetry)

When the fog slunk in with that salivary,

close, coyote panting, its hue a very

huelessness, like breath huffed on a glass,

like the void stretched and still stretching past

where we’d thought it could, we felt less wary.

We felt our shoulders loosen, surrendering

to phantom hands and softly vanished feet.

The sensation was a first and last: sweet

to feel the vigilance at last suspending,

the chronic stress of constantly pretending

to know—have known!—what all the others knew.

Loopy, sly, we leered at one another

(what we just assumed was one another)

and did the things we weren’t supposed to do,

grinning as if seated in the back pew

of a church that worshipped fuss and bother,

a dour church where facial expression

of any kind had been prohibited,

and where the chinking, hefty plate we shifted

hand to hand held such a vast collection

of their coin, we pocketed a fraction

for when the fog would lift, if it lifted.

But stealing from them puts you in their power.

Since then we have been paying for that hour.

Lullaby

by Amanda Jernigan

My little lack-of-light, my swaddled soul,
December baby. Hush, for it is dark,
and will grow darker still. We must embark
directly. Bring an orange as the toll
for Charon: he will be our gondolier.
Upon the shore, the season pans for light,
and solstice fish, their eyes gone milky white,
come bearing riches for the dying year:
solstitial kingdom. It is yours, the mime
of branches and the drift of snow. With shaking
hands, Persephone, the winter’s wife,
will tender you a gift. Born in a time
of darkness, you will learn the trick of making.
You shall make your consolation all your life.


Vanquished, Tr. by Rita Dove and Fred Viebahn

by Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Poetry)

For Nelly Sachs

It wasn't the earth that swallowed them. Was it the air?
Numerous as the sand, they did not become
sand, but came to naught instead. They've been forgotten
in droves. Often, and hand in hand,

like minutes. More than us,
but without memorials. Not registered,
not cipherable from dust, but vanished—
their names, spoons, and footsoles.

They don't make us sorry. Nobody
can remember them: Were they born,
did they flee, have they died? They were
not missed. The world is airtight
yet held together
by what it does not house,
by the vanished. They are everywhere.

Without the absent ones, there would be nothing.
Without the fugitives, nothing is firm.
Without the forgotten, nothing for certain.

The vanished are just.
That's how we'll fade, too.

Salvation

by James Kimbrell (Poetry)

It's not that I harbor a weeping willow
Shadow's worth of longing for those cloaked
Turns and straight-aways, or that swampy
South Mississippi was ever half as tragic
As I dreamed it could be, but that I still cruise
From time to time in the dope-ripe
Ford Fairlane of the mind where nothing
Has changed, where we remain hopelessly
Stoned devotees of the TOWN OF LEAKESVILLE
Emblazoned upon the graffitied water tower's
Testimonies to love. We believed speed
Would save us, would take us fast
And far away from the junkyard wrecks
Stacked in their mile-long convoy to nowhere.
And though losing the way should
Have seemed the worst of divine betrayals,
We took it as a minor fall from grace,
Tail-spun over the embankment rail, rocking
That flung steel body down as if to play
A bar-chord on the barbed-wire fence.
I'll never know what angelic overseer
Was bored and on duty that night, but we
Rose up and climbed out of the warped last
Breath of that car, no one with so much
As a scratch on his head, not a drop
Of beer spilt, and the radiator hissing
Like a teapot in hell when someone yelled
She's gonna blow! and each of us standing
There, starving for something more,
Something other than the back wheel
Spinning that sudden dark, cricketed quiet.

To Judgement: An Assay

by Jane Hirshfield (Poetry)

You change a life
as eating an artichoke changes the taste
of whatever is eaten after.
Yet you are not an artichoke, not a piano or cat—
not objectively present at all—
and what of you a cat possesses is essential but narrow:
to know if the distance between two things can be leapt.
The piano, that good servant,
has none of you in her at all, she lends herself
to what asks; this has been my ambition as well.
Yet a person who has you is like an iron spigot
whose water comes from far-off mountain springs.
Inexhaustible, your confident pronouncements flow,
coldly delicious.
For if judgment hurts the teeth, it doesn't mind,
not judgment. Teeth pass. Pain passes.
Judgment decrees what remains—
the serene judgments of evolution or the judgment
of a boy-king entering Persia: "Burn it," he says,
and it burns. And if a small tear swells the corner
of one eye, it is only the smoke, it is no more to him than a beetle
fleeing the flames of the village with her six-legged children.
The biologist Haldane—in one of his tenderer moments—
judged beetles especially loved by God,
"because He had made so many." For judgment can be tender:
I have seen you carry a fate to its end as softly as a retriever
carries the quail. Yet however much
I admire you at such moments, I cannot love you:
you are too much in me, weighing without pity yourown worth.
When I have erased you from me entirely,
disrobed of your measuring adjectives,
stripped from my shoulders and hips each of your nouns,
when the world is horsefly, coal barge, and dawn the color of winter butter—
not beautiful, not cold, only the color of butter—
then perhaps I will love you. Helpless to not.
As a newborn wolf is helpless: no choice but hunt the wolf milk,
find it sweet.

Song of the Sea to the Shore

by Robert Fanning (Poetry)

Unraveling velvet, wave after wave, driven
by wind, unwinding by storm, by gravity thrown—
however, heaving to reach you, to find you, I've striven
undulant, erosive, blown—

or lying flat as glass for your falling clear
down: I can't swallow you. So why
have I felt I've reached you—as two reflected stars,
surfaced, lie near—as if the sky's

close element is one in me, where starfish
cleave to stones—if you're so far?
I've touched you, I know, but my rush
subsides; our meetings only leave desire's

fleeting trace. Every place I touch you
changes shape. Shore, lie down—
undo. I'll fill your thirsty bones with blue.
I'll flood your every cave and we'll be one.

Nomadology

by Alissa Leigh (Poetry)

In the beginning, a word, move;
then a plan and then the reasons,
which I do not remember exactly.
I remember clearly only the clothes
we were given for the journey
and the last, silent meal we ate.
We left the place as lightly as we
had come, so many years before.

From a sunlit state of innocence
where white sheets were hung
to dry like clouds over paradise;
from eucalyptus-scented earth,
a red house with a yard swung
between dreaming hills, pillaged
by raccoons, framed with lilies
like trumpets of the archangels,

we moved: into history, a river
slowed by many bends, a village
of peacocks with a hundred eyes;
a low house among fields, with
an iron stove, a winter shrine;
a fireplace blackened by time,
the fragile bones of a sparrow
frozen in the shape of its flight.

When father played his trombone
in the attic, schoolchildren tittered
in the street. In the late afternoon,
the cows assembled at the gate,
witless, waiting for a farmer's son.
Home, the children conjugated
verbs, found variables and drew
diagrams of the human heart.

Evenings, the round kitchen table,
lit by a low Dutch lamp, summoned
poets, players, horsethieves, to glasses
of jenever. An incense of gossip rose
slowly, blackening the walls. Outside,
horses pawed the darkness, breathing
delicate feathers of ice. We courted
the favors of spiders, mice and moles.

Our words grew small and porous as
fossiled bones, our gestures groaned
with the cold. The will-less world of
water, wood and stone taught us when
to yield. When it came time to move
along again, we were four strangers
waving at each other, in slow motion,
across a deafening expanse of ocean.

Glory

by Robert Pinsky (Poetry)

I acknowledge my status as a stranger:
Pindar, poet of the victories, fitted names
And legends into verses for the chorus to sing:
Names recalled now only in the poems of Pindar:

O nearly unpronounceable immortals,
In the dash, Oionos was champion:
Oionos, Likmynios's son, who came from Midea.
In wrestling, Echemos won—the name
Of his home city, Tegea, proclaimed to the crowds.
Doryklos of Tiryns won the prize in boxing,
And the record for a four-horse team was set
By Samos from Mantinea, Halirothios's son.

And Pindar, poet of the Olympian and Isthmian
And Pythian games, wrote also of the boundless
And forgetful savannas of time. What is someone?
The chorus sing in a victory ode—What is a nobody?

Creatures of a day, they chant in answer, Creatures
Of a day. So where is the godgiven glory Pindar says
Settles on mortals?—Bright as gold among the substances,
Say the chorus, paramount as water among the elements.

Not in the victory itself, petty or great,
Of rich young Greeks contending in games.
Not in the poetry itself, with its forgotten dances
And Pindar spinning among tiresome or stirring
Myths and genealogies, the chanted names
Of cities and invoked gods and dignitaries—

Striving, O nearly unpronounceable athletes,
To animate the air with dancing feet raising
A golden pollen of dust: a pervasive blur
Of seedlets in the sunlight, whirling—beyond mere
Victory or applause or performance,
As victory is beyond defeat.

The one who threw the javelin furthest
Sang the chorus, chanting Pindar's incantation
Against envy and oblivion, was Phrastor.
And when Nikeus grunting whirled the stone
Into the air and it flew past the marks
Of all the competitors, Nikeus's countrymen
Shouted his name after it, Nikeus,
Nikeus, and the syllables so say the lines Pindar
Composed for the sweating chorus to chant—radiated
For a spell like the silvery mirror of the moon.

Dio ed Io

by Charles Wright (Poetry)

There is a heaviness between us,
Nameless, raised from the void, that counts out the sprung hours.
What ash has it come to purify?
What disappearance, like water, does it lift up to the clouds?

God of my fathers, but not of mine,
You are a part, it is said, an afterthought, a scattered one.
There is a disappearance between us as heavy as dirt.
What figure of earth and clay would it have me become?

Sunday again, January thaw back big time.
The knock-kneed, overweight boys and girls
Sit on the sun-warmed concrete sidewalk outside the pharmacy
Smoking their dun-filtered cigarettes.

Nothing is bothering them—and their nicotine dreams—
This afternoon. Everything's weightless,
As insubstantial as smoke.
Nothing is disappearing in their world. Arrival is all.

There is a picture of Yves Klein leaping out of a window
Above a cobblestone Paris street.
A man on a bicycle peddles away toward the distance.
One of them's you, the other is me.

Cut out of the doctored photograph, however, the mesh net
Right under the swan-diving body.
Cut out of another print, the black-capped, ever-distancing cyclist, as well as the mesh net.
Hmm . . . And there you have it, two-fingered sleight-of-hand man.

One loses one's center in the air, trying to stay afloat,
Doesn't one? Snowfalling metaphors.
Unbidden tears, the off-size of small apples. Unshed.
And unshedable.

Such heaviness. The world has come and lies between us.
Such distance. Ungraspable.
Ash and its disappearance—
Unbearable absence of being,
Tonto, then taken back.

Habitation

by Jennifer O'Grady (Poetry)

The long road south, the pavement flat
and black as a dash without end, no signs,

no houses, the heat like an unseen fog
and the sun a swollen crimson clot

above fields where frazzle-haired palm trees rose
sporadic and unwieldy, the miles

of pasture where cattle of every conceivable
color, rust and tobacco and ashen, fed

and nursed their stumbling young,
heavy heads bent to the ground.

And insects that crashed against windshield
so tiny, no body was left behind.

Then a wooden shack where we stopped to pee
and the shock of iron-red flecks against

bowl, the water placid, unmoved.
There was hardly any pain.

What could we do but continue on
as scattered street-lamps gradually revealed

a landscape inhabited once again: the still
shuttered windows of bungalows pink

as scrubbed flesh, the small dark yards of abandoned
Bigwheels and plots of petunias or cukes,

the closed, expectant mailboxes
and the living already dead inside me.

The Third Hour of the Night

by Frank Bidart (Poetry)

When the eye

When the edgeless screen receiving
light from the edgeless universe

When the eye first

When the edgeless screen facing
outward as if hypnotized by the edgeless universe

When the eye first saw that it

Hungry for more light
resistlessly began to fold back upon itself TWIST

As if a dog sniffing

Ignorant of origins
familiar with hunger

As if a dog sniffing a dead dog

Before nervous like itself but now
weird inert cold nerveless

Twisting in panic had abruptly sniffed itself

When the eye
first saw that it must die When the eye first

Brooding on our origins you
ask When and I say

Then


�


wound-dresser let us call the creature

driven again and again to dress with fresh
bandages and a pail of disinfectant
suppurations that cannot
heal for the wound that confers existence is mortal

wound-dresser

what wound is dressed the wound of being


�


Understand that it can drink till it is
sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied.

It alone knows you. It does not wish you well.

Understand that when your mother, in her only
pregnancy, gave birth to twins

painfully stitched into the flesh, the bone of one child

was the impossible-to-remove cloak that confers
invisibility. The cloak that maimed it gave it power.

Painfully stitched into the flesh, the bone of the other child

was the impossible-to-remove cloak that confers
visibility. The cloak that maimed it gave it power.

Envying the other, of course each twin

tried to punish and become the other.
Understand that when the beast within you

succeeds again in paralyzing into unending

incompletion whatever you again had the temerity to
try to make

its triumph is made sweeter by confirmation of its

rectitude. It knows that it alone
knows you. It alone remembers your mother's

mother's grasping immigrant bewildered

stroke-filled slide-to-the-grave
you wiped from your adolescent American feet.

Your hick purer-than-thou overreaching veiling

mediocrity. Understand that you can delude others but
not what you more and more

now call the beast within you. Understand

the cloak that maimed each gave each power.
Understand that there is a beast within you

that can drink till it is

sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied. Understand
that it will use the conventions of the visible world

to turn your tongue to stone. It alone

knows you. It does
not wish you well. These are instructions for the wrangler.

The Dead

by Don Paterson (Poetry)

Our business is with fruit and leaf and bloom;
though they speak with more than just the season's tongue—
the colours that they blaze from the dark loam
all have something of the jealous tang

of the dead about them. What do we know of their part
in this, those secret brothers of the harrow,
invigorators of the soil—oiling the dirt
so liberally with their essence, their black marrow?

But here's the question. Are the flower and fruit
held out to us in love, or merely thrust
up at us, their masters, like a fist?

Or are they the lords, asleep amongst the roots,
granting to us in their great largesse
this hybrid thing—part brute force, part mute kiss?

Country Love Song

by Melanie Almeder (Poetry)

I try to think of the cup of a hand,
of legs in a tangle, and not the thistle

though even it, purpled, spiking away,
wants to be admired, wants to say, whistle

a little for me. O every little thing wants
to be loved, wants to be marked by the cry

that brings desire to it, even blue-eyed fly
to the bloated hiss of death. To love is to be remiss:

the horse alone in the wide flat field nods
its head as if the bridle and bit were missed

or mocked; the cow slung with the unmilked weight
of her tremendous teats shoots a look back over her shoulder

at O lonesome me. I want to say to her need
as if crooning could be enough,

sweet, sweet mama . . . truth be told,
the thousand lisping bees to the milkweeds' honey

terrifies me. When the stink of slurry season
is over and the greened fields are slathered, fecund,

overtall foxgloves tip with the weight of their fruit.
Then I dream a little dream of you

and me, curled like two grubs on the top of a leaf
wind-driven and scudding along the lake's surface.

All night we glide to its blue harbor
and back again. The fattened slack of us

singing O darlin' darlin' darlin'.

lantern festival
by Victoria Chang (KR)

Some open like accordions, honoring the arrival of a newborn,
others hang still like moons,

red ones line up in a row on a metal thread over scents
of sticky rice balls smoking in soup,

round ones glow in the wind, sockets firing up
one after another.

No! I am wrong, the round ones lash in the wind:

they are human heads, gutted and plucked from bodies that were
snipping stalks of choy sum, or

excavating daikon, or stabbing fish in the river, or trimming
pork loins for evening porridge.

And they hang in a row for decoration, foreheads bumping
into each other,

glowing like a galaxy of holiday lights, honoring
the arrival of the new,

that always, always turns into the next target
the minute it is named.

WROUGHT FROM THE GENERATION OF EARTH
by Susan Stewart (KR)

One boot planted, firm as a trunk, the other shoved down on the shovel,
shoving with a human weight that barely dents the crust
over the outcrop of flinty veins that plumb through clay and chalk.
Struck down bluntly over and over, the shovel bounces back,
ringing the facts. Even the dead must wait above ground
for a hard winter to thaw. Nothing to do but wait, hoping for
the ground to give, hoping the corpse will not wander.
Freezing up, the bulb cracks, aborting its bloom, and the smaller
half falls away—all things bearing their own teleology,
all things turning out or not—the husk shrivels back across
the pod and the young mice lie stiff in their nest. Coming to be
collapses, radiant as a berry trapped in ice.

Under the dazzle of the white light on the whiteness, only
the forms remain, a solid geometry slumping at its edges;
you can't tell the difference between a rock and a hard place, or a sled
and a wheelbarrow sunk into the compost. The tar caddies
steam on every block, buckets of hell-sludge go up single file, plugging
the gaping roofs, or passed down to craters where traffic
ruts and wheels are wrenched away. A tomb is pried up, then resealed.
Skull-duggery, boneyards, dustbins. The endless digging and patching
of the world. A new wound is cut, then healed.
The dew evaporates from the softening snow; you can see your breath
and know you are breathing and that is enough to make you want to speak
in the season of longest nights.

The frail root stirs, a shiver runs down the hinges of the night crawler,
a slight quiver
ruffles across the hunched neck of the wren. One day a breeze arrives,
and her winter
wings shake free with each short hop to the seed after next. It doesn't
take a crowbar
when the door is open. The mud turns to muck, the blood begins to thin,
the rusted joints
are oiled and move again. The ice breaks and jams the river, sounding
like distant guns,
while the pitchfork goes in and out with ease. What will come back
comes back and what
doesn't come back stays, too, somehow nascent or caught within the
bramble,
slowly losing its name and form.

The broom sweeps up and wears away, sweeping itself into a stump.
Pebble tags weed
and weed tags clod—fatigue of the soiled world, fatigue-dragging shoe,
dragging shoulder and fist, the effort toward consequence, clenched and
released in
rhythm. Crops fail or flourish, toys of the weather, and the weather does
not think of us in turn.
Spirit who needs a lookout, spirit not in our image, he drops to the horizon,
gathering speed. The absolute form of offering repeated, the absolute
form of earthly
repetition, churning and churning along the furrow.

There by the side of the churning sea, the plowman's bent doubled in
the field, sees
a dark fleck—no, white wings—moving toward the sun, but does not see
his fall, or even
dream a man could free himself from ground and somehow fly.

Work is wrenched from the thick, from the dense, from the places where
resistance
is clotted with stones. The rake gets tangled with sticks and vines,
the scythe chips off and leaves a ragged swath.
Mud muddies the spring and can only be settled by gravity. The sun
takes aim at the nape
of the neck, the crown, or right between the eyes.
Spoiled saints listen for miracles while cooks sift pebbles from the grain.

What is primitive in memory stays buried in memory. Things made
of earth
sink deeper into earth and begin to be earth again: a vase blown from
sand and fire;
the clay lamp shaped by a hand long dead and water long ago drawn
back into its bed; a spoon thinned into a silver lattice soon to be flecks
of silver again.
Deep in the mine, fire flames from the methane
or shines for no reason from the diamond's splinter.

Dust rolls cells and crumbs and lint and binds them loose with hair.
Amber hardens around the spider, the bones melt into the peat.
The soil lies opened to the gaze of the heavens like a memory exposed
to light.
Vase, clay lamp, and silver spoon, working loose, come glinting as shards
to the surface.

Went down to the shore where the beach was hard,
went right to the edge of the inhabited world,
built a ditch and a castle, a minaret, a drawbridge,
shaping heads and limbs from the sugary sand.
Then fast-flung, crashed, a single wave
erasing, though every grain of sand remains.

This was the only world, the world where we awakened, where the sky
gods hold
one handle of the plow and the gods of the dead hold the other.
The brown gods rose from the mud and the ponds, and crept along
the paths
and had no names. And then the gods concealed in gypsum fought
against the fathers,
rising up in fury, inconsolable. When the wars of heaven ended, sky
held dominion,
dominion over all below.

Deep where the bloodless ghosts assemble, at the still base of the
revolving world,
the girl sorted seeds in the lap of her apron, letting each one count as a
month, letting
three count as a season, saying six will count as the darkness and six will
count as the light.
She sang to herself, sang the whole day through, knotting rings and
necklaces from
coarsest blades of grass. She sang a walking song and dreamed, her
corduroy blanket
abandoned to fray and lint for the birds to weave.

Look for her, lie along the meadow; you can hear the hum
of the stalks and leaves, the full buzz so unlike
a shell's hollow roar. Lie along the field and feel the mineral cold,
bone-chilling
deep below the warmth of the loam. Lie in the dead leaves and do not
make a sound
and love will cut furrows in the soil of grief.

This was the only world: great scar, worn away by reverence and harm.
Permanence out of which all things that perish rise; permanence in which
each enduring thing will perish. Not the earth surrendered or asunder.
Not the earth itself, but tenderness.

The Bird in Front of the Ox

Shaker of air, possesser of red
feathers, the bird whose wings the bird
catcher straps in front of the ox,
that hater of geranium.

And so it has come

that I have turned 16.

I got a moped license in birthday gift, which is quite the expensive thing. For friend's money I'll buy poetry books and books on poetry craft (as well as new football outfit and a pair of grass shoes).

Help

I give up writing poetry. How can Osprey be perceived as better than Heavy-Legged Soldiers? In what ways does the images become better, the syntax better, more challenging? The second example, in every sense, seems a better read to me: rhythm-wise, syntax-wise, in thoughts of wordings. Even the story, although perhaps a bit muddied, is better.

Can someone help a helpless, stranded poet?

Here are the links to each poem:

(Osprey)
http://www.alsopreview.com/gazebo/messages/4/13379.html?1181691628

(Heavy-Legged Soldiers)
http://www.alsopreview.com/gazebo/messages/4/13325.html?1181418488

Heavy-Legged Soldiers

I.

All day, the men fails to bring coyotes
out of storm. By sand-banks, in dream—

or not in dream but in a wet, dream

slow reality: soldiers poise, in narrow rows,

heavy-legged as though with hesitance of failure
of what happens—or is about to. Overhead, thunder

and lightning. Do the soldiers find the lightning,
wrapped in yellow, intimidating? By the shore,

waves rise, up—to bees, to birds—as though they are wet,
blue answers of Babylon's tower and not just blue

waves, the harbor rocking like the one abandoned

soldier to whom, suddenly—come clarity, and black.

II.

There are men in the tufts: some dead, some
only like the antelope for shelter, others,

fallen, how they hold and get hold by each
other. I attempt to help but no help is given—

the wind, the bombs, this morning, the light
as though they also were enemies and not just

the soldiers. That the light, in its wash-grey,
means Armageddon, I believe: I will die here,

as the rest, I will look up and know and, in knowing,
the light will turn, the sky become sacredom.

III.

What would the flesh taste, if flesh is all
I could taste? I mark the gull that passes

over—in fright—in feathers of course,
imagine, as with a leaF that seems to stop

half-flight, mid-flight, through the light,
the burned feathers of a gull, its roasted flesh.

IV.

I lie, in tufts. The sky turns blue
to sacredom.

Foreheads in Thick, Plum Letters

..............I name them as though they are stars—
.......Zeus, Pegasus, Orion—I am in love
.lipsticked onto their forehead

..............in thick, plum letters. Their names
.......are carved into wood: aspen
.and birch, bark peeled off

..............to give space to Bill and Molly
.......Forever and this wind, all around,
.in our shirt, filling, emptying

..............the space, this heart brown
......but not red. This silver arrow.
.By the trees, this morning,

...............no raccoons, no peafowl wing
......to flail as against a ghost
.force, no ants, only

............t..the two teenagers in love,
......sharing lips, leaning nude
.and just-showered

...............against the other,
.......against the trees . . .

A Gathering of old Phrases

It was not like any dream: here no fence or barb-wire
allows for the jumping of the sheep I never counted:

one, two, three sheep, the usual story. Here the cattails
bend, unbend, at this lean hour. It means nothing but

the wind shuffles them, in the heat it is strong. In the
dream, there is a lake I call Lake Como of seaweed

and Lake Where Horses Enters The Sea. One after another,
as though sheep in another dream, in lines they come.

I can count them, easily: one, two, three horses, not
the usual story. If dreams are messages, do I need to clean

—what—my body? my hands? I have not murdered, nor betrayed,
nor loosened, from the dying crows, the dying lambs, their limbs.

The Greek Play / Tragedy

I

What are they called? what do we call them:

Orion. Pegasus. Sagittarius.

What else?

Scutum and Perseus. Procyon.

And the constelation of a charioteer?

Aurigia, Aurigia. O look how she whips
the invisible horse toward battle.

II

What is battle without stars?

What is Achilles without his shield?
his spear? that which he needs?

A man like any man: vulnerable,
fallible, how in time he will die
by my bow.

III

How?

Less like a leave
than like a bird. Not as much a bird as the Spartan
warrior by the banks of our walls. Nor a lamb,
when it lays down. Nor ruin nor rain nor meteor,
nor bird nests under storm.

IV

What is war without blood? What is war if lives
have not been spilled upon, first, our friends,
later: our foes?

Not a cruel one, but a diplomatic one.

V

A diplomatic one.

Shell Dream

In my dream, all I remember were
the shells. I remember the shells,
as if that's what was important, and not
what happened. I held them in my hands,
at first, I brought them home, where they splayed into colours
when I painted them.

It was not like any dream: here no fence or barb-wire
allows for the jumping of the sheep I never counted:
one, two, three sheep, the usual story. Here no witch
with acnes and a crooked nose come by the broom
at this hour, to sweep and to carry somewhere else
my body. It was not like that. There was probably
a sycamore tree beneath which

I placed the shells. Here the fruits reeked age and the shells
..................................carried the same colours
like imitators, as when I plucked them up: then, they sounded
..................................like the sea: looked like the beach.
Leaves hold and get held by each other, the sound a chickadee
..................................when I take a step away from
the sycamore as if, reluctantly, with the reluctance
..................................of a father leaving his children.

Rambling / Meditation

(Which version?)

Meditation

So we see more partings
than returns. So we are old. So the wrinkles do not make
a workman but a crippling,
a reed; a weed on the lawn. The cattails bend, unbend,
at this lean hour. It means nothing
save the wind swings the world—is strong today. I shuffle
by marsh-mires: here no reed
stand strong to take hold of and lift me, dirty but just-
dry, against the wind, that which beats me. Clouds cross
like ships, fire ammo the sound
of thunder and shape of lightning. My clothes swell
in the wind and in the rain
that shape it into breathings, shapes without shape.
I haven't told of a dream
in which a Greek boy hunched beneath the shelter of trees
(from thunder, from lighting),
but he dripped and shivered like me. The leaves like grapes
pulled up by the stem, in the wind,
by daybreak, as from somewhere a force had come,
the leaves rustled and bowed
like that, as the cattails bend, unbend, at this lean hour.



Meditation


So we see more partings
than returns. So we are old. So the wrinkles do not make
a workman but a crippling,
a reed; a weed on the lawn. So the cattails bend, unbend,
at this lean hour: it means nothing
but the wind is strong today. I shuffle by marsh-
mires: here no reed stand strong
to take hold of and lift me, dirty but just-dry, against
the wind. Clouds cross
like ships, fire ammo the sound of thunder and shape
of lightning, my clothes
whose swelling in the wind and in the rain
is a shapelessness beaten,
hammered into shape. So I haven't told of the dream
where the greek boy hunched
beneath the shelter of trees (from thunder; from lighting),
and all the time the leaves rustled
and bowed; and all the time the cattails bend,
unbend, at this lean hour.

The Greek Boy

The Greek Boy

( PG / V (View Discretion Advised))


I. Thunder, and lighting. By dawn, it passes.
Here is the boy by the trees. He's hunching.
He is not a boy, shaking, and not any Greek boy
on his way to the palestina ground, but
the assembler, the the blacksmith's son.
He's is not dry, he is soaked, logs across
his lap, he is shaking, a hogger or not.
It had rained and had thundered.
What if he turned home, and did not shake,
and was not wet, and did not carry his logs?
What if that which he learned to do with his hands,
he misuses: here, the metal, strike it, strike it
twice, harder, hear that twang. What if those
hands are in his pants--what have he done
with them, the once promising and clean hands
of a blacksmith son?

Fruits by Lawn

Fruits by Lawn


When he says Hell, and Fuck you, he does not mean
to fuck them, the man and the mare the man
holds by the martingale. He does not mean it is hell. How he avoids, wishes
himself elsewhere, like a thought when, in dream,
one recalls that memory we try--and have tried, continue--supressing.
What is the moon to the stars? What is the moon to the stars
if both hold the world?
Yes, that means they are hands. No. Fingers, maybe. It means there is a
God out there. No. God in plurals: Gods. It means earth is fruit. It means universe
is lawn. It means God is tree. By now, the wind has taken up. I know that
by the way the leaves dangle. There is a lawn,
and there is a tree. There are fruits.
They fall. Apples, oranges, plums,
all reddening / greening / lilac-ing the lawn.
Strewn, all over, past a ripeness, meaning there is no freshness:
only how they lay sprawled, dead, like stars on sky.
Visible, long after.

In Response to Previous Poem

Not the martingale, not the chicken
we bought for the Greek dinner, nor
the sound of any human voice or
feet's sashay by the table, much less
our faces, never only the window porch,
in no apparent way the wind whistling
by the house's corner, so they have
seemed, the crows on our window porch
like any swan where the water is.
It's not as much that nothing is ever
good enough, as I see it, it's more a wish
to move away from what they have:
the boughs / the barn roofs / the sky
where endlessness is. Does that mean
the crows by themselves want to be
tethered? Let's take the roosting crows inside.

The Crows

It was not as much the martingale as it was
the chicken we bought for the Greek diner.
All day the crows came from the trees that bent
toward their lost crowns to see and to peak
as they do. The crows rustled their feathers
(for warmth, for—territory?), seemed to have
come to a kind of resting on the window
porch. I recall the afternoons spent in the barn
in which there were no cows and no sheep,
much less a lamb to slaughter, only hays and
honeycombs stacked in boxes in rows, and outside
any day the five crows that soared and came
to rest upon the barn's grey shingle, their feathers
rustling in that way that means The wind shakes
them, the wind is strong today. The crows
like any man to whom nothing is good enough:
not that, not that, not you.

The Crows that Came to Roost

The crows come to smoke at dawn,
not like any swan but like the swan
by the pond whose wings unfold as to flap

away from the burial of heaps where
the timbers are stained, burried
beneath ashes. The ashes are not really black:

they are blackened like the crows
I imagine at the creation of time were made
soothed by the Greek Gods who also

cupped their liquid to the earth
(as we know as rivers now, as seas)
and moulded the earth to trees /

to mountains as they do with sand
by the beach, the small children.
Was this ever a town to which

the ploughers plowed the fields,
raked the rows by tomato
shrubs, and the woman did their

daily bidding, they who were the
cookers, the spinners of garn
(of wool) for cloths, and the men

the blacksmiths that hammered
to strength the weapons (as in
the stories we know all too well:

swords, shields, a few men, a battle),
the children like tended lambs . . .
Today, in flocks, herons pass as they

would over anything. The village
is ash and smoke, a beaten warrior in a war
that does not end, does not seem to.

Recall, the boars must have left
this place a long time ago; the ravens,
the crows, as to any dying place,

have come to roost. Here is the
abandoned fiddle, here the spinner
from once the women spun wool,

here is the silence of the rooster without voice:

Interesting Ending

I just found an interesting line by Cheryl Snell (all copyrights to her):

The moon
wanes, paler than it should have been.

Thinking a little bit about making this end stronger, I came up with a variant, posting up here mostly for my own sake of remember how this could be a possible twist-ending later on if the end seems to be too deliberate:

The moon / wanes, not the pale as it should have been; / paler.

The Horse Enters the Sea, and the Sea Holds it

If my body is your body, I must be inside you.
Enter me. Enter me when you're ready, you say,
the way you enter the sea, I imagine you saying,

if your voice equals your expression / your furrows /
your can-you-read-me's: Enter me, enter me you groan like Leda
in the Greek mythology, like the hunger we keep returning to, even if,

all this time, I have entered you the way the horse enters
the sea: in straight line. If I lay my body upon
yours, if you allow me, if we fill each other

like bees-in-honeycomb, we become a kind of sashay:
a sashay like that of the sea and the horse: here,
the horse that enters, and the sea that keeps it,

moans Enter me and I'll assist. The cattails bend,
unbend, at this lean hour, meaning nothing but the wind is
strong; the sun a yolk glow that follows the horse's cleansing.

The Greek Gods

Look: the trees are not themselves
today: the boughs / the needles /
the cons do not bend to slap me.
Cattails, in lake Como of seaweed:
of rainbowed fish and blue colour
that is not really blue. I know that.
The lake looks like that—that blue
thistle—because of the wavelength
of the reflecting light. It is not
because of the sky or the Greek
Gods who, in ancient times, drank
from chalices and—fed—cupped,
loosened to the earth the white
wine we know, have known,
all this time, as rain and more rain,
that water we drink from taps
the way bees drink nectar.
We have known and—have imagined.
How wrong we were.

Sacredom: Death

It was not that I didn't call, aloud,
your name, I did: Jesus, Jesus,
heal this flesh and fix these bones
I groaned: yolk-like, I dragged the 'e's
of 'Jesus' the way the yolk is glued
to the eggshell, has stained my fingers
meringue. My limbs have become torn,
have shifted as if into the yolk, that
position it has before it leaves the eggshell,
askew. A-canter. That way. I laid
down, have been laying down
for a long while, in a pool, less
the abandoned Greek figure than
the barbarian splayed, forgotten
in marsh- mires filled with cattails.
I grasped for my necklace: a
sacred sign my hands clenched
around. And then I knew, and turned
as if a survivor to the sky: a blue
sacredom: On earth no blood was
ever spilled

When We Let Go

So that each is a feather of
a peacock wing: the bodies laying sprawled
on the Palestina ground. The limbs.
The bone and flesh, neither fresh
nor dried. Here is the sun that splays
them. Here, each like a bridge,
are my arms, hands palm-turned as if
to baptize or to preach: We love you,
the way God loves you. No word is
needed. Out of defeat and acceptance,
both, I do nothing to save you, not
as a rebel but as a guard that start doing
the right thing. I hold you, and now
I release, let you warm the earth with
your body before you turn cold
and enter the sky the way, once, naked,
you entered /the sea. The cattails
bending, unbending. What was becomes
what is. Nothing really changes, in time.

A Lover

Let's make this much
clear: I have loved you
the way you haven't loved me,
have watered the flowers
the requested number of times,
not with a reluctance but a lover's
willingness, I have plowed these fields,
have watched you laze in the heat-
crippled fields with martini
and grapes, each grape made fresh
and ripe by my hand . . .
have found myself merely this long
accepting. What was there ever in it
for me? If I'd be a bee, you'd be
the flower. No. If I'd be a horse,
you'd be the horseman whipping me
to run faster.

The Body: The Soul

—have walked these grounds, have plowed,
have raked the fields with hands as if tokens
of holding, not loosing as, through my palm,
the earth retreats, slips clean, like sand,
from what tethers. The slipping away
through my fingers is not intentional,
like the slipping away of the soul isn't.
The tethered soul was never tethered
by the body: was caught only. This is
understandable. This is not: the soul
as the body, the soul as what tethers it


/ version 2:

The Body: The Soul

—have walked these grounds, have plowed,
have raked the fields with hands as if tokens
of holding, not loosing as, through my palm,
the earth retreats, slips clean, like sand,
from what tethers. The slipping away
through my fingers is not intentional,
like the slipping away of the soul isn't.
The tethered soul was never tethered:
was caught only by the bodies that,
eventually, laid, not rested, which implies
peace and more peace, beneath earth.
Like sand, the soul slips away from
what this long has caught it. This is
understandable. This is not: the soul
as the body, the soul as what tethers it.

What is Meant by Failure

What is desire? What is failure?
I have long thought of the latter
as what is in our hands and palms:
here are the wrinkles that, like leaves,
do not stop coming, do not seem to,
but seem to be, must be meaning, almost,
failure and more failure. Listen:
here is the song that is not really a song;
here are the trees that, all this time,
have seemed but have not / been dying.
What seems like failure is not failure.
I know that. It's the subtler signs,
not the swan that raped the woman
but the stillness, the palms becoming wrinkled,
the slow, weak blow of a trumpeter
not a trumpeter. So says the heart,
a truth to which the swans come, desire
come, plucking each feathered wing off
the swan's reddening cargo.

Alba: Desire

Alba: Desire

I love you, have loved you, the way a horse
loves, all this time. Remember the lake

and the lovers who crossed it with a small boat
and two oars, though the water churned like big biceps?

They should have drown, naturally, but did not: could not,
as we cannot: we will love and meet as if for the first time

each time, each of us like coins buffed to a sheen
by each other's touches: Do you feel that rinsing

of flesh? Like apes we clean each other
with our hands. Your hands enter and clean me,

not like the bees that enter the honeycomb,
but like the horse that enters the sea.

You will be missed.

The Soul Like Pigeon

I'm blue, the way the sky's blue.
No, not in color. Not that blue,

not like that: I'm blue, the way
my soul's blue. It breaks.

Love paints me, my soul, into a
blue to which you enter, the way

the pigeons enter, rabbit-like,
the boughs. If the boughs are a kind

of resting, or a safety to which
it will return to, mustn't it also be

my body? What my soul is, it is
inside my body. That much is certain.

The shorter version goes
like this: the body the bough,

the soul the pigeon that
can't stop returning.

The Dead

The dead / wander where they please,
especially into the heart where there is no defense
goes a line from a poet I know. What does she mean
by defense? By the dead in relation to
the heart? There is heart and there is
body, is memory, is that it? Who we have
loved, we will still love, will keep coming back
like rain: more a question about when than if.
If I have told of my heart as a lighthouse,
are the dead the wrecked sailors who enter,
bewiggled, in storm, for shelter, with coats
that carry the sea? Not like a curse but like
a burden? If the dead are the sailors, can
the boat be with what they wander, the heart
the lighthouse? meaning life is random, but also
unrandom: both. My heart: a lighthouse:
a tower of light to which the dead enter
like rain.

Cento: So You Were Spared

So you were spared.
You knew no field, but drifted
toward one. As pigeons to home, they
sough and came to a kind of resting
upon your deep/your fair/your not-
to-be-understood-in-this-our-life-
time breast. They bent over in grief,
mourning their lost brilliant crowns that
they can only watch, not reach as,
beneath them, leaves scattered down:
singly, in fistfuls. Leaves. Light.
The trees filling, emptying. The bodies
that, wrapped and wrapped, lay
sprawled above the steam as it left
the vents of my city. Here's a coyote.
Alas, alas, all is undone, you cry, when he
takes it by the neck, where the head should
be, repositioning the body so the markings
at the wings face up. Like memory, the cry
changes nothing really, any more than trust
changes: Trust me, the way one animal trusts
another.


Notes:

From From the Devotions, and Riding Westward


Alba: After: Line 1
The Blue Castrato: Line 2-7
Alba: Failure: Line 7-10
The Cure: Line 10-11
Truce: Line 11-12
Alba: Failure: Line 12-15
Riding Westward: Line 15
Hunters: Line 16
The Way Back: Line 16-19
Radiance versus Ordinary Light: Line 20
Torn Sash: Line 19
My line: Line 20
Closer Your Eyes: Line 21-22

If a Lighthouse

No, not like a volcano. Not like waves.
Like a light bulb whose light is
constant; like a throbbing, or
a workhorse. Da-dum-da-dum.
That's how it goes, my heart.
If a lighthouse, then not
the tower but the light that shifts,
not spreading as, in moving,
it splays the sea, like a gift.
Like hands, it give guidance to
any ship. If, say, my body is such,
then my heart is its guidance:
an anchor to which, all this time,
I have kept returning.

Alba: Two Lovers before Dawn

I love you, have loved you, the way a lark
loves, all this time: not like the folding

of wings but like truth and more truth;
not like dishonesty but like loyalty,

like a gift, open, granted here. Remember the lake I
told of, and the lovers who crossed it with a small boat

and two oars, and the water churning like big
biceps? They would drown, naturally,

but did not: could not, as we cannot:
we will love and meet as if for

the first time each time, each of us like coins
cleaned shiny by each other's touches:

Do you feel that rinsing of flesh? Like cats,
we clean each other. Like apes. Like you, touch me

here and here. Do it again, all over. Enter me: clean
me. As our sex, you will be missed.

Confessions of a Sinner

As with Pigeons, they Ignore us

What shall we do with the bodies,
all bleach all mud all smeared
in blood? Do we burn, lit aegis-like
their skin, so that black come,
ash come, and effluvium? Isn't
the fire too perceptible, a mark to
say: here, bind hard our hands?
If we wash only and throw their bodies
into water, would traces be traceable?
Traces always carves the same: the same hunt,
the same end: no trial and no listening to what
we say. As with pigeons, there's only ignorance.
Yes: our hands have killed and
killed. But here, in my palm, can you see
what I see: can you see that blood?
What we have done, we have suffered.



A Sinner

If you'd count syllables any day,
any day I'd count, name tiredly
the stars: Pegasus. Orion. Procyon
and Procyon: which have burned out and
have not? At Lake Como, I comb the grass
flat, as if in the starwatching Earth's hands
press me, my body, farther from that
cosmos I reach for, E.T-like, as for doves.
If I have grabbed a dove, felt that crushing
of limbs, have I sinned? If I made red the
palestrea ground, can I be forgiven? Yes, I have
killed, but any day these bleached hands
are like their faces. Can you take, rinse clean
my hands?



Your Servant

Here's a jello, and some pudding. Eat some.
Here's a light, making of my platter a mirror
of gold columns: signals, maybe, from
God. Does it mean he doesn't want us?
As swans, we keep coming back to what
we love with hunger and more hunger.
More to do with the human condition,
than with sin. It's only natural, like breathing
air is, or to fish: that sea, that salt
seaweed,etc. We regard it as privilege
to do what you do, have done, did, on earth.
If to savor for savoring is sin, give us a
sign, not like a threat but like a gift: is it
this light or this wind? I'm your servant:
What you want me to do, I'll do. You
can tell me anything.

The Stillness of a World Lacking Time

A stillness of a world this long forgotten: lines like
scissors, shapes that cut clear, what,
everything? Yes. A dune. A sky,
meeting. An oryx
gazelle, with horns that rip
nothingness like spears.

Faith: like Brainwashing: God Poem

Here's a jello, and some pudding. Eat some. Here's a
light, making as of my platter
a mirror of gold columns: signals, maybe, from
God. Does it mean he doesn't want us?
As swans, we keep coming back
to what we love with greater hunger.
More to do with the human condition, than
with sin. It's only natural, like breathe
air is, or to fish: that sea, that salt
seaweed,etc. We regard it a privilege to
do what you do, have done, did on earth.
If to savor for savoring is sin, tell,
give here to us a sign: is the light or wind
that? I'm your servant: What you want me to
do, I'll do. You can tell me anything.

Growing up: Less Imagination, More

Like a bird, any bird: a pigeon maybe.
Or like a volcano, as cold as coins; as
warm as lava. Yes, that is my heart.
It changes, changes the way a swan
does, at first--a swan, then a girl. It's
fairytale, but who said my heart
isn't? Who, aegis-like, as if a cargo
around their mind, think of the heart as
else? A steadiness, a throbbing
(Here, feel it)?
There's only this much truth,
this much imagination. Take what's left
of the latter, given chance, when chance
give it, gave: with hands in air as though
saying, Here, take some.

The Arm

The biceps
curl like the man rowing
his boat, the triceps extension
extends like light. I drag, lift
half-willingly my body onto the mountain
shelf, with bi- and triceps working.
I rest, I strap myself to the granite.
Look up. A blue sky.Look
down. A river, extending like a tricep.
A hill a curl like a bicep.

Alternate ending of Sonnenizio

Sonnenizio

Now he's singing, cadence on a rough sea:
no quiver in the sky, only a rip, as when a violin plays

and it slices the air around your ears now
and now; how delicate his fingers touch

this instrument, these strings that twangs
when he plucks them, one-by-one-by-one.

Now he's stopping, stillness in a rough wind:
it must be hard to imagine

a stillness having fallen in this weather,
like that of a peach's soft flesh, but imagine: this

was what he felt. I cannot, beside him in a lime light,
with legs like a leave, a quivering almost like two Babel's towers,

see another reason he'd stop: to him a peach stillness
to be tasted this long, and this long: momentarily teeth-in-peach.

Sonnenizio on a Line by Carl Phillips

Sonnenizio

Now he's singing, cadence on a rough sea:
no quiver in the sky, only a rip, as when a violin plays

and it slices the air around your ears now
and now; how delicate his fingers touch

this instrument, these strings that twangs
when he plucks them, one-by-one-by-one.

Now he's stopping, stillness in a rough wind:
it must be hard to imagine

a stillness having fallen in this weather,
like that of a peach's soft flesh, but imagine: this

was what he felt. I cannot, beside him in a lime
light, with legs like a leave / like two Babel's towers,

see another reason he'd stop: to him a peach stillness
to be tasted this long, and this long: momentarily teeth-in-peach.


¤

A Bulb, a Coin, a Column

Today, this is me: a bulb, a rusty
coin; a column, this close to breaking.

Mosquitoes and Wings

I think of mosquitoes when I see wings,

I think of mosquitoes as of wings: like
any wing: like a wing going unnoticed

a pigeon's wing ripping hard the sky's
in the act before ripping the sky

flesh, the mosquito sucks blood apart, in that manner,
the mosquito sucks blood

:you know, in that manner when it bows
as wings suck the sky, its blue brow.

over a certain part of your body,
This is the difference, only:

a needle-like beak eating hungrily your
the mosquito does it with bodies,

blood, there and there, now progressing
with those who plows innocently

over here. The only difference, I guess,
their orchard, those striding

are what they cause: malaria and
through a thick jungle

shapelessness. And how they look.

Like Two Figures Who've Forgotten Where They Are

I have flashes now: a lime light, and a tree
beneath it; a ground upon which lies a dry leaf
like a sailboat, upside-down, or like a leaf
or flower folded into a ship upon a pond. You know
these vessels we make as a child, blowing
at its anchor as if from behind
a waft comes, coming slowly, and everywhere
beside the sound of insects' gossamer wings
brush the air. Yes, the leave like that, but
it's also a leave of the same dry texture
as, say, terracotta clay,that same untraceable
pattern our fingers, each of our two fingers,
touch now and now,like two figures who've forgot
where they are.

The Bow, the String, the Archer

Imagine a bow, the force in the arrow
if the archer let go of what he holds
to his chin: that string which he draws
back with two fingers as if a horseman
or a charioteer controlling his horse,
or the relationship between the poet
and the syntax. To be a good archer
is all about the way you pluck it, the string
you hold, and how you release it: the twang
must drrr as you shiver: a long shaking,
all but strong. Also the eye is important:
For aim, of course: remember to squint.
There's a string, and there's an archer.
Together, you are the restrainer and
the releaser.


/

Imagine a bow, the force in the arrow
if the bowman let go of what he holds
to his chin: that string which he draws
back with two fingers as if a horseman
or a charioteer controlling his horse,
or that relationship between the poet
and the syntax. How far the arrow
goes comes from how he plucks it,
the string he holds, and how he releases it:
the twang must drrr the way you shiver:
a long shaking, all but strong. If the arrow
is the force, the bow is the holder,
the archer the restrainer, the string
the releaser, when released.