November 2009
24 posts
Gilgamesh trans. D. Ferry
From Tablex IX
“The gate to the entrance into the mountain is open. May Gilgamesh in safety make the journey.”
After the Scorpion Dragon Being spoke, Gilgamesh went to the entrance into the mountain
and entered the darkness alone, without a companion. By the time he reached the end of the first league
the darkness was total, noting behind or before. He made his way, companionless...
Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu trans. S. Mitchell & S....
8.
Shang shan jo shui. Best to be like water, Which benefits the ten thousand things And does not contend. It pools where humans disdain to dwell, Close to the Tao.
Live in a good place. Keep your mind deep. Treat others well. Stand by your word. Make fair rules. Do the right thing. Work when it’s time.
Only do not contend, And you will not go wrong.
MM
Desert Places by Robert Frost
Snow falling and night falling fast oh fast In a field I looked into going past, And the ground almost covered smooth in snow, But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
The woods around it have it - it is theirs. All animals are smothered in their lairs. I am too absent-spirited to count; The loneliness includes me unawares.
And lonely as it is that loneliness Will be more lonely ere it will be...
Publication Date by Franz Wright
One of the few pleasures of writing is the thought of one’s book in the hands of a kind-hearted intelligent person somewhere. I can’t remember what the others are right now. I just noticed that it is my own private National I Hate Myself and Want to Die Day (which means the next day I will love my life and want to live forever). The forecast calls for a cold night in Boston all morning...
From Clearances by Seamus Heaney
III
In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984 When all the others were away at Mass I was all hers as we peeled potatoes. They broke the silence, let fall one by one Like solder weeping off the soldering iron: Cold comforts set between us, things to share Gleaming in a bucket of clean water. And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes From each other’s work would bring us to our senses. So...
Father Outside by Nick Flynn
A black river flows down the center of each page & on either side the banks are wrapped in snow. My father is ink falling in tiny blossoms, a bottle wrapped in a paperbag. I want to believe that if I get the story right we will rise, newly formed, that I will stand over him again as he sleeps outside under the church halogen only this time I will know what to say. It is night & it’s...
Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3,...
Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth like a garment wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour...
The Four Evangelists by Yusef Komunyakaa
The lion, Mark- The ox, Luke- The eagle, John- Ezekiel dreamt the wheel
Turning like a constellation, A cycle of magpies, winter To springtime. Paul shepherds them Like a bawdy son of Horus.
If you can’t trust dreams, the journey Ends at birth. Gods invent themselves So men & women see a few feet Into the unknown. Sympathetic
Magic. Our desire To prolong an orgasm, to be Taken back to...
Sediments of Santa Monica by Brenda Hillman
A left margin watches the sea floor approach It takes 30 million years It is the first lover More saints for Augustine's mother A girl in red shorts shakes Kafka's The Trial free of some sand A left margin watches the watcher from Dover After the twentieth century these cliffs Looked like ribbons on braids or dreads A dream had come right over With a sort of severe leakage Ah love let us...
On Washerwoman Bridge by Joseph Brodsky
On Washerwoman Bridge, where you and I stood like the two hands of a midnight clock embracing, soon to part, not for a day but for all days - this morning on our bridge a narcissistic fisherman, forgetting his cork float, stares goggle-eyed at his unsteady river image. The ripples age him and then make him young; a web of wrinkles flows across his brow and melts into the features of his youth. He...
Each Defeat by Eileen Myles
Please! Keep reading me Blake because you’re going to make me the greatest poet of all time
Keep smoothing the stones in the driveway let me fry an egg on your ass & I’ll pick up the mail.
I feel your absence in the morning & imagine your instant mouth let me move in with you— Travelling wrapping your limbs on my back I grow man woman Child I see wild wild wild
Keep letting the day be...
Psalm 9 by Mahmoud Darwish
O rose beyond the reach of time and of the senses O kiss enveloped in the scarves of all the winds surprise me with one dream that my madness will recoil from you Recoiling from you In order to approach you I discovered time Approaching you in order to recoil from you I discovered my senses Between approach and recoil there is a stone the size of a dream It does not approach It does...
Still Life by Thom Gunn
I shall not soon forget The greyish-yellow skin To which the face had set: Lids tight: nothing of his, No tremor from within, Played on the surfaces.
He still found breath, and yet It was an obscure knack. I shall not soon forget The angle of his head, Arrested and reared back On the crisp field of bed, Back from what he could neither Accept, as one opposed, Nor, as a life-long breather,...
From "Little Gidding" by T.S. Eliot
V
What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. And every phrase And sentence that is right (where every word is at home, Taking its place to support the others, The word neither diffident nor ostentatious, An easy commerce of the old and the new, The common word exact without vulgarity, The formal word precise but not...
"Time fills the canyon..." by William Stafford
Time fills the canyon, stillness of a dim bowl. The pine trees grow and stand in it, more still than stillness, done moving, dreamed in amber time, called silent, told quiet, cried wilderness by some dead god.
Off, down, free of earth, flown from arms of trees that hold from the cliff rim, tomorrow lies.
One gray bird goes far below across time- a simple bird in sunlight, loose, alive in air...
The Leaving by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
My father said I could not do it, but all night I picked the peaches. The orchard was still, the canals ran steadily. I was a girl then, my chest its own walled garden. How many ladders to gather an orchard? I had only one and a long patience with lit hands and the looking of the stars which moved right through me the way the water moved through the canals with a voice that seemed to speak of this...
Passing Through by Stanley Kunitz
—on my seventy-ninth birthday
Nobody in the widow’s household ever celebrated anniversaries. In the secrecy of my room I would not admit I cared that my friends were given parties. Before I left town for school my birthday went up in smoke in a fire at City Hall that gutted the Department of Vital Statistics. If it weren’t for a census report of a five-year-old White Male sharing my...
A Little Tooth by Thomas Lux
Your baby grows a tooth, then two, and four, and five, then she wants some meat directly from the bone. It’s all over: she’ll learn some words, she’ll fall in love with cretins, dolts, a sweet talker on his way to jail. And you, your wife, get old, flyblown, and rue nothing. You did, you loved, your feet are sore. It’s dusk. Your daughter’s tall.
AM
Multas per gentes by Catullus trans. David Ferry
O my poor brother, I have journeyed here, Through many foreign lands and many seas, To come to this unhappy ceremony, Seeking to speak to ashes, that cannot speak, Since Fortune has take you yourself away- Alas, my brother, cruelly taken you.
According to the custom of our fathers I bring these offerings for the wretched dead. Accept, my brother, what I have brought you, weeping. Ave, forever...
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird By Wallace...
I
Among twenty snowy mountains, The only moving thing Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman Are one. A man and a woman and a blackbird Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer, The beauty of inflections Or the beauty...
Heart by Andrea Cohen
My glass house thrown at stones.
AM
Orchard By H.D.
I saw the first pear as it fell— the honey-seeking, golden-banded, the yellow swarm was not more fleet than I, (spare us from loveliness) and I fell prostrate crying: you have flayed us with your blossoms, spare us the beauty of fruit trees.
The honey-seeking paused not, the air thundered their song, and I alone was prostrate.
O rough-hewn god of the orchard, I bring you an offering—...
The Room of My Life by Anne Sexton
Here, in the room of my life the objects keep changing. Ashtrays to cry into, the suffering brother of the wood walls, the forty-eight keys of the typewriter each an eyeball that is never shut, the books, each a contestant in a beauty contest, the black chair, a dog coffin made of Naugahyde, the sockets on the wall waiting like a cave of bees, the gold rug a conversation of heels and...
