October 2009
10 posts
The Waking, by Theodore Roethke
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I feel my fate in what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know? I hear my being dance from ear to ear. I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you? God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there, And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree;...
The Hair by Zbigniew Herbert
The hair grows out by night on the wall this is not the curl behind the ear of memory neither do they belong to the nimble bosom of night divided from the skin they lead a life dry and separate they have uneasy movements given only a touch they tense themselves painfully not white not black rather their colour is rustle gnashing of teeth sudden scream tearing with fingers are not sufficient to...
54 by Osip Mandelstam trans. W.S. Merwin
Poison in the bread, the air drunk dry. Hard to doctor the wounds. Joseph sold into Egypt grieved no more bitterly for home.
Bedouins under the stars close their eyes, sitting their horses, and improvise songs out of the troubles of the day.
No lack of subject: one lost a quiver in the sand, one bartered away a stallion… the mist of events drift away.
And if the song is sung truly, from...
Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout by Gary...
Down valley a smoke haze Three days heat, after five days rain Pitch glows on the fir-cones Across rocks and meadows Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read A few friends, but they are in cities. Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup Looking down for miles Through high still air. Posted by mitch
Poem (Lana Turner has collapsed!)
Lana Turner has collapsed! I was trotting along and suddenly it started raining and snowing and you said it was hailing but hailing hits you on the head hard so it was really snowing and raining and I was in such a hurry to meet you but the traffic was acting exactly like the sky and suddenly I see a headline LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED! there is no snow in Hollywood there is no rain in California I...
High Sierra by Afaa Michael Weaver
I take my Schwinn High Sierra bicycle down the gravel road through the woods. I am afraid of the physics of speed and hills, afraid that the whir might become a hush where the trees, brush, and flowers whisper a song that wishes away virtual harm. You warned me of this danger when I abandoned you in the steel skeleton of the warehouse. I left my home and my wife, emblems of failure.
The brakes...
When They Come Alive by C.P. Cavafy trans. Edmund...
Try to keep them, poet those erotic visions of yours, however few of them there are that can be stilled. Put them, half-hidden, in your lines. Try to hold them, poet, when they come alive in your mind at night or in the brightness of noon.
Posted by mitch
A Hemisphere in Your Hair by Baudelaire trans....
Long, long let me breathe the fragrance of your hair. Let me plunge my face into it like a thirsty man into the water of a spring, and let me wave it like a scented handkerchief to stir memories in the air.
If you only knew all that I see! all that I feel! all that I hear in your hair! My soul voyages on its perfume as other men’s souls on music.
Your hair holds a whole dream of masts and...
Temptation by Czeslaw Milosz
Under a starry sky I was taking a walk, On a ridge overlooking neon cities, With my companion, the spirit of desolation, Who was running around and sermonizing, Saying that I was not necessary, for if not I, then someone else Would be walking here, trying to understand his age. Had I died long ago nothing would have changed. The same stars, cities and countries Would have been seen with other...
Water by Robert Lowell
It was a Maine lobster town- each morning boatloads of hands pushed off for granite quarries on the islands,
and left dozens of bleak white frame houses stuck like oyster shells on a hill of rock,
and below us, the sea lapped the raw little match-stick mazes of a weir, where the fish for bait were trapped.
Remember? We sat on a slab of rock. From this distance in time, it seems the color of...
