Poems

A little poem from Jeffrey Ross titled I Miss Her Sometimes

I ran into my old girlfriend yesterday.
And I backed up and ran into her again.
I miss her sometimes.

 

Ha! If Ambrose Bierce were alive today, that's the kind of stuff he'd be writing....

 

Youth (W.S. Merwin)

Through all of youth I was looking for you
without knowing what I was looking for

or what to call you I think I did not
even know I was looking how would I

have known you when I saw you as I did
time after time when you appeared to me

as you did naked offering yourself
entirely at that moment and you let

me breathe you touch you taste you knowing
no more than I did and only when I

began to think of losing you did I
recognize you when you were already

part memory part distance remaining
mine in the ways that I learn to miss you

from what we cannot hold the stars are made

 

Between us
twenty years of age
between your lips and my lips
when they meet and stay
the years collapse
the glass of a whole life shatters.
The day I met you I tore up
all my maps
an my prophecies
like an Arab stallion I smelled the rain
of you
before it wet me
heard the pulse of your voice
before you spoke
undid your hair with my hands
before you had braided it
There is nothing I can do
nothing you can do
what can the wound do
with the knife on the way to it?
Your eyes are like a night of rain
in which ships are sinking
and all I wrote is forgotten
In mirrors there is no memory.
God how is it that we surrender
to love giving it the keys to our city
carrying candles to it and incense
falling down at its feet asking
to be forgiven
Why do we look for it and endure
all that it does to us
all that it does to us?
Woman in whose voice
silver and wine mingle
in the rains
From the mirrors of your knees
the day begins its journey
life puts out to sea
I knew when I said
I love you
that I was inventing a new alphabet
for a city where no one could read
that I was saying my poems
in an empty theater
and pouring my wine
for those who could not
taste it.
When God gave you to me
I felt that He had loaded
everything my way
and unsaid all His sacred books.
Who are you
woman entering my life like a dagger
mild as the eyes of a rabbit
soft as the skin of a plum
pure as strings of jasmine
innocent as children's bibs
and devouring like words?
Your love threw me down
in a land of wonder
it ambushed me like the scent
of a woman stepping into an elevator
it surprised me
in a coffee bar
sitting over a poem
I forgot the poem
It surprised me
reading the lines in my palm
I forgot my palm
It dropped on me like a blind deaf
wildfowl
its feathers became tangled with mine
its cries were twisted with mine
It surprised me
as I sat on my suitcase
waiting for the train of days
I forgot the days
I traveled with you
to the land of wonder
Your image is engraved
on the face of my watch
It is engraved on each of the hands
It is etched on the weeks
months years
My time is no longer mine
it is you

Nizar Qabbani

 

--- merged: Apr 11, 2013 at 6:33 PM ---
Great thread. I will have to go through it at length at some point. In the meantime, here is something I have always liked. I would have posted some Eliot but that would require a post three pages long.

Recitation - W. H. Auden

If the muscle can feel repugnance, there is still a false move to be made;
If the mind can imagine tomorrow, there is still a defeat to remember;
As long as the self can say "I," it is impossible not to rebel;
As long as there is an accidental virtue, there is a necessary vice:
And the garden cannot exist, the miracle cannot occur.
For the garden is the only place there is, but you will not find it
Until you have looked for it everywhere and found nowhere that is not a desert;
The miracle is the only thing that happens, but to you it will not be apparent,
Until all events have been studied and nothing happens that you cannot explain;
And life is the destiny you are bound to refuse until you have consented to die.
Therefore, see without looking, hear without listening, breathe without asking:
The Inevitable is what will seem to happen to you purely by chance;
The Real is what will strike you as really absurd;
Unless you are certain you are dreaming, it is certainly a dream of your own;
Unless you exclaim -- "There must be some mistake" -- you must be mistaken.

 

This is one of the first poems I wrote for Mrs. Levite....


The Northwest Passage

In storms of the mundane I’m lost, I try but cannot find you now.
In frost-locked squalls of daily grind, you’re muddled and can’t feel my hand,
or see the way to go with me,
and so around us it comes down: a maelstrom of minutiae
our creditors and balances within and sometimes due without
a wrack of places, dates, and now-we-musts, of expectations and of others’ doubts
a farrago of all the fears of the not quite so young or new,
the brilliant and the underused, who worry what they’ve brought they’ll lose.
We’re snowblind in the blizzard, then,
forget to breathe and now we’re panicking,
forget to stop before we go, and now we’re shocked our steps are faltering
forget to listen for the quiet and now sick our paths are vanishing;
and how the noise just snowballs,
‘til we’re running blind and deaf to all
the lines we cross, the signs we left, the signals back and forth we missed.

It’s in silences I find you best, the warm and curving stillnesses.
In calm of moments taken well you see me and know where I’m bound,
and it’s together we have always found, with surety of doubled breath,
a symphony of sacred time, the spark of synchronicity,
to see our path, to know our way, to find the hope for years and days
yet unarrived, a pair of lives no more or less
unbounden or unburdened with the troubles and the weights
that all fight off, or all take on, or all fall to, or all flee from;
but in those sun-becalming undulations of our moments of serenity,
I see you and you hear me, and in glad appreciation of the patience
and the perseverance of the pridefulness, refusing pain’s privations;
the unhurried sense of harmony that let us come together first
becomes our compass, and our spyglass, and our footing and our nerve.

Fair-weather friends are free to suffer fickle fate or flee,
but all is fair in love, we know, and for us there in unity’s no strength unless
it be a map, a chart, a jointly written rutter that shall route us from
the bitterest of winter’s parts and bring us to ourselves again:
for in our twoness when we’re one, our fear’s undone, and we
can learn to trust our way again and come through struggle’s cyclone swirl
to tranquil light upon the eye, the stillness of uniqueness that’s
a glance of what’s in you and I.

 

Love this one, though it is probably not his best.

Anthem - Leonard Cohen

The birds they sang
At the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
Has passed away
Or what is yet to be.
Ah the wars they will
Be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
Bought and sold
And bought again
The dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

We asked for signs
The signs were sent
The birth betrayed
The marriage spent
Yeah the widowhood
Of every government
Signs for all to see.

I can't run no more
With that lawless crowd
While the killers in high places
Say their prayers out loud.
But they've summoned, they've summoned up
A thundercloud
And they're going to hear from me.

Ring the bells that still can ring

You can add up the parts
But you won't have the sum
You can strike up the march,
There is no drum
Every heart, every heart
To love will come
But like a refugee.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.
That's how the light gets in.

 

The mind of the awakened is clear and bright
as it thinks all day and it thinks all night
Letting the old thoughts go for the new ones to come
The asleep cannot go where the awakened have gone

 

Did you write that? I really like it; especially the last line.

 

Yes, I wrote that.

 

Have had some words rolling around in head for the past few months.

yesterday's makeup smeared dark across her face
a bleak morning reminder of last night's fall from grace

Nowhere near anything yet, but I still kind of like it.

 

I'm in a mood for sharing, um, things today.

Sex Conquest
September 28, 2000

Love motion begins
in the growling of stomachs
pressed together
in twisted cotton sheets,
a little more flesh
than necessary
exposed,
bordering the unfolded map
of a quilted blue ocean
blanket—palming ships
to name this new continent,
once they push
up against sensitive,
unclaimed shores

 

I'm inclined to poetrybomb the shit out of this thread. I'll try to restrain myself.
(I already put this one into a blog post anyway. Whatever.)

Big Dipper
August 28, 2006

The house fly’s death dance
spun fractal patterns on the chapel floor
in odd time signatures;
the minister delivered
a eulogy lacking cadence, impotent
like a measured elk in dance.

Lovers first, then
chemists, believing they would
meet again at the molecular level—
she memorized insanity
in color. He, a man,

awakens,

collapses before beachfront homes
in flames, far
from her fog-swallowed cornfields,
from clouds of starlings,
grieving. Along the water sweaty youth
propels like a misfired
cannonball, its dialect lost

already

to the surf—far from the crickets
that kept time for her
at night,
at home. She had always denied
the end of the world
in her bridal bouquet.

Tomorrow he will climb
out of fresh blisters in his palms
and, dancing, die.

 

The Breast

This is the key to it.
This is the key to everything.
Preciously.

I am worse than the gamekeeper's children
picking for dust and bread.
Here I am drumming up perfume.

Let me go down on your carpet,
your straw mattress - whatever's at hand
because the child in me is dying, dying.

It is not that I am cattle to be eaten.
It is not that I am some sort of street.
But your hands found me like an architect.

Jugful of milk! It was yours years ago
when I lived in the valley of my bones,
bones dumb in the swamp. Little playthings.

A xylophone maybe with skin
stretched over it awkwardly.
Only later did it become something real.

Later I measured my size against movie stars.
I didn't measure up. Something between
my shoulders was there. But never enough.

Sure, there was a meadow,
but no young men singing the truth.
Nothing to tell truth by.

Ignorant of men I lay next to my sisters
and rising out of the ashes I cried
my sex will be transfixed!

Now I am your mother, your daughter, your brand new thing - a snail, a nest.
I am alive when your fingers are.

I wear silk - the cover to uncover -
because silk is what I want you to think of.
But I dislike the cloth. It is too stern.

So tell me anything but track me like a climber
for here is the eye, here is the jewel,
here is the excitement the nipple learns.

I am unbalanced - but I am not mad with snow.
I am mad the way young girls are mad,
with an offering, an offering…

I burn the way money burns.

- Anne Sexton

 

Tristia

There is, I know, a science of separation
In night’s disheveled elegies, stifled laments,
The clockwork oxen jaws, the tense anticipation
As the city’s vigil nears its sun and end.
I honor the natural ritual of the rooster’s cry,
The moment when, red-eyed from weeping, sleepless
Once again, someone hoists the journey’s burden,
And to weep and to sing become the same quicksilver verb.

But who can prophesy in the word good-bye
The abyss of loss into which we fall;
Or what, when the dawn fires burn in the Acropolis,
The rooster’s rusty clamor means for us;
Or why, when some new life floods the cut sky,
And the barn-warm oxen slowly eat each instant,
The rooster, harbinger of the one true life,
Beats his blazing wings on the city wall?

I love the calm and custom of quick fingers weaving,
The shuttle’s buzz and hum, the spindle’s bees.
And look — arriving or leaving, spun from down,
Some barefoot Delia barely touching the ground …
What rot has reached the very root of us
That we should have no language for our praise?
What is, was; what was, will be again; and our whole lives’
Sweetness lies in these meetings that we recognize.

Soothsayer, truth-sayer, morning’s mortal girl,
Lose your gaze again in the melting wax
That whitens and tightens like the stretched pelt of a
squirrel
And find the fates that will in time find us.
In clashes of bronze, flashes of consciousness,
Men live, called and pulled by a world of shades.
But women — all fluent spirit; piercing, pliable eye –
Wax toward one existence, and divining they die.

Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam, 1918

 

Quattrocento

The snake enters your dreams through paintings:
this one, of a formal garden
in which there are always three:

the thin man with the green-white skin
that marks him vegetarian
and the woman with a swayback and hard breasts
that look stuck on

and the snake, vertical and with a head
that's face-colored and haired like a woman's.

Everyone looks unhappy,
even the zoo animals, stippled with sun,
even the angel who's like a slab
of flaming laundry, hovering
up there with his sword of fire,
unable as yet to strike.

There's no love here.
Maybe it's the boredom.

And that's no apple but a heart
torn out of someone
in this myth gone suddenly Aztec.

This is the possibility of death
the snake is offering:
death upon death squeezed together,
a blood snowball.

To devour it is to fall out
of the still unending noon
to a hard ground with a straight horizon
and you are no longer the
idea of a body but a body,
you slide down into your body as into hot mud.

You feel the membranes of disease
close over your head, and history
occurs to you and space enfolds
you in its armies, in its nights, and you
must learn to see in darkness.

Here you can praise the light,
having so little of it:
it's the death you carry in you
red and captured, that makes the world
shine for you
as it never did before.

This is how you learn prayer.

Love is choosing, the snake said.
The kingdom of God is within you
because you ate it.

- Margaret Atwood

(hero.)

 

this poem gave me a buzz.