multiple poets
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greatpoetryMods: if you'd rather me post each of these separately for tagging & whatnot, let me know and I will. My apologies for anything repeated in the archives.
Here are my ten favorite poems of all time, in no particular order. (A friend challenged me to post them.)
* Self-Portrait - Revan Schendler
The I examines itself
as it thinks it is seen,
resting its fingers
on its temples,
stares into its own eyes,
declares: What lies,
you broken, divine
pain-bound, ethereal,
excrement, perfection...
The mystery, the self deception:
look at me for a moment,
turn your face from these reflections
of self-love and self-loathing:
I, too, have a mirror.
* Clenched Soul - Pablo Neruda --translated from the original Spanish
We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.
I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.
Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.
I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.
Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?
The book fell that always closed at twilight
and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.
Always, always you recede through the evenings
toward the twilight erasing statues.
* i like my body when it is with your - e. e. cummings
i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,
and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you so quite new
* Antilamentation - Dorianne Laux
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering
any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.
* the song of mehitabel - Don Marquis
this is the song of mehitabel
of mehitabel the alley cat
as i wrote you before boss
mehitabel is a believer
in the pythagorean
theory of the transmigration
of the soul and she claims
that formerly her spirit
was incarnated in the body
of cleopatra
that was a long time ago
and one must not be
surprised if mehitabel
has forgotten some of her
more regal manners
i have had my ups and downs
but wotthehell wotthehell
yesterday sceptres and crowns
fried oysters and velvet gowns
and today i herd with bums
but wotthehell wotthehell
i wake the world from sleep
as i caper and sing and leap
when i sing my wild free tune
wotthehell wotthehell
under the blear eyed moon
i am pelted with cast off shoon
but wotthehell wotthehell
do you think that i would change
my present freedom to range
for a castle or moated grange
wotthehell wotthehell
cage me and i d go frantic
my life is so romantic
capricious and corybantic
and i m toujours gai toujours gai
i know that i am bound
for a journey down the sound
in the midst of a refuse mound
but wotthehell wotthehell
oh i should worry and fret
death and i will coquette
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai
i once was an innocent kit
wotthehell wotthehell
with a ribbon my neck to fit
and bells tied onto it
o wotthehell wotthehell
but a maltese cat came by
with a come hither look in his eye
and a song that soared to the sky
and wotthehell wotthehell
and i followed adown the street
the pad of his rhythmical feet
o permit me again to repeat
wotthehell wotthehell
my youth i shall never forget
but there s nothing i really regret
wotthehell wotthehell
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai
the things that i had not ought to
i do because i ve gotto
wotthehell wotthehell
and i end with my favorite motto
toujours gai toujours gai
boss sometimes i think
that our friend mehitabel
is a trifle too gay
* I'm In Love - Charles Bukowski
she's young, she said,
but look at me,
I have pretty ankles,
and look at my wrists, I have pretty
wrists
o my god,
I thought it was all working,
and now it's her again,
every time she phones you go crazy,
you told me it was over
you told me it was finished,
listen, I've lived long enough to become a
good woman,
why do you need a bad woman?
you need to be tortured, don't you?
you think life is rotten if somebody treats you
rotten it all fits,
doesn't it?
tell me, is that it? do you want to be treated like a
piece of shit?
and my son, my son was going to meet you.
I told my son
and I dropped all my lovers.
I stood up in a cafe and screamed
I'M IN LOVE,
and now you've made a fool of me. . .
I'm sorry, I said, I'm really sorry.
hold me, she said, will you please hold me?
I've never been in one of these things before, I said,
these triangles. . .
she got up and lit a cigarette, she was trembling all
over.she paced up and down,wild and crazy.she had
a small body.her arms were thin,very thin and when
she screamed and started beating me I held her
wrists and then I got it through the eyes:hatred,
centuries deep and true.I was wrong and graceless and
sick.all the things I had learned had been wasted.
there was no creature living as foul as I
and all my poems were
false.
* The Bistro Styx - Rita Dove
She was thinner, with a mannered gauntness
as she paused just inside the double
glass doors to survey the room, silvery cape
billowing dramatically behind her. What's this,
I thought, lifting a hand until
she nodded and started across the parquet;
that's when I saw she was dressed all in gray,
from a kittenish cashmere skirt and cowl
down to the graphite signature of her shoes.
"Sorry I'm late," she panted, though
she wasn't, sliding into the chair, her cape
tossed off in a shudder of brushed steel.
We kissed. Then I leaned back to peruse
my blighted child, this wary aristocratic mole.
"How's business?" I asked, and hazarded
a motherly smile to keep from crying out:
Are you content to conduct your life
as a cliché and, what's worse,
an anachronism, the brooding artist's demimonde?
Near the rue Princesse they had opened
a gallery cum souvenir shop which featured
fuzzy off-color Monets next to his acrylics, no doubt,
plus beared African drums and the occasional miniature
gargoyle from Notre Dame the Great Artist had
carved at breakfast with a pocket knife.
"Tourists love us. The Parisians, of course"--
she blushed--"are amused, though not without
a certain admiration . . ."
The Chateaubriand
arrived on a bone-white plate, smug and absolute
in its fragrant crust, a black plug steaming
like the heart plucked from the chest of a worthy enemy;
one touch with her fork sent pink juices streaming.
"Admiration for what?" Wine, a bloody
Pinot Noir, brought color to her cheeks. "Why,
the aplomb with which we've managed
to support our Art"--meaning he'd convinced
her to pose nude for his appalling canvases,
faintly futuristic landscapes strewn
with carwrecks and bodies being chewed
by rabid cocker spaniels. "I'd like to come by
the studio," I ventured, "and see the new stuff."
"Yes, if you wish . . ." A delicate rebuff
before the warning: "He dresses all
in black now. Me, he drapes in blues and carmine--
and even though I think it's kinda cute,
in company I tend toward more muted shades."
She paused and had the grace
to drop her eyes. She did look ravishing,
spookily insubstantial, a lipstick ghost on tissue,
or as if one stood on a fifth-floor terrace
peering through a fringe of rain at Paris'
dreaming chimney pots, each sooty issue
wobbling skyward in an ecstatic oracular spiral.
"And he never thinks of food. I wish
I didn't have to plead with him to eat. . . ." Fruit
and cheese appeared, arrayed on leaf-green dishes.
I stuck with café crème. "This Camembert's
so ripe," she joked, "it's practically grown hair,"
mucking a golden glob complete with parsley sprig
onto a heel of bread. Nothing seemed to fill
her up: She swallowed, sliced into a pear,
speared each tear-shaped lavaliere
and popped the dripping mess into her pretty mouth.
Nowhere the bright tufted fields, weighted
vines and sun poured down out of the south.
"But are you happy?" Fearing, I whispered it
quickly. "What? You know, Mother"--
she bit into the starry rose of a fig--
"one really should try the fruit here."
I've lost her, I thought, and called for the bill.
* 3 parts from The Last Benjamin of Todela - Yehuda Amichai (I couldn't find the full text online, so I'll grab my book sometime and change this to the full version) --translated from the original Hebrew
1. Turn over now. Look, the crease down the back that
deepens through the buttocks. Who
can say where they begin and where
the thighs end: see the bold supports
of the loins, columns of legs
and Hellenistic curlicues of hair
above the genitals. The Gothic arch that rises
toward the heart and the reddish Byzantine flame
between her legs. A distinct
Crusader influence in the hard jaws,
protuberant chin. If she stoops she'll be perfect Arabesque.
She can touch the floor with both hands
without bending her knees. She touches the earth
I didn't kiss when I was brought to it, a child.
Visit the country again,
visit my tears and the east wind,
the true Western Wall, made of great stones
of wind. The sobbing of wind and the bits
of paper blown by the wind are the entreaties
I stuck between the stones. Visit the country.
On a fine day, if the visibility is good, one can see
the miracle of my child
holding me in his arms, four years old.
And I forty-four.
And here is the zoo of greater love,
acres of love. Hairy animals breathing
in the cages of porous underpants, brown
feathers and fur, red fish with green eyes,
solitary hearts behind the bars of ribs
jumping like monkeys, furry fish and snakes
like round fat thighs.
A blazing body a flame
covered with a damp rain coat. That is soothing.
2. Forty-two light-years and forty-
two night years. Drunkard and glutton
stuffing and feasting like the last Roman Caesars
in the secondhand history books, mad graffiti
and the writing on the wall in toilets,
heroic annals and conquest and decline,
vain life and vain death.
Revolt and rebellion and the suppression of rebellion
while banqueting. In a transparent nightdress
like a banner, you rose in revolt against me, hair
flying like a flag above, and bristling below.
Ram's horn blast, long blast. Crash of a broken bottle
and war cry. Suppression of revolt with the garter belt
of a woman. Suffocation with transparent stockings.
Stoning with the sharp heels of evening shoes.
Circus duels between a broken bottle neck
and a net of flimsy petticoats. Shoes
against treacherous gauze, tongue against fork,
half a fish against half a woman. Straps and buttons,
brassieres decorated with buds tangled with buds
and army equipment. Fanfare and suppression of fanfare.
Football shouts from the nearby pitch.
And I was lying on you heavy and quiet
like a weight, so that the wind and time couldn't
blow you away like bits of paper and hours.
3. This could have been a song of praise
to the sweet imaginary God of my childhood.
It was Friday, and black angels
filled the Valley of the Cross, their wings
black houses and abandoned quarries.
Sabbath candles rose and fell like ships
at the entrance to the harbor. Come Sabbath bride,
come bride,
wear the clothes of morning and of your glory
the night you thought I would not come to you
and I came. The room was tipsy with the smell
of black cherry preserve. Papers
scattered on the floor below,
bitter wings scythed above.
Love with parting, like a record--
music with applause at the end, love
with a cry, love with the stammered despair
of the proud departure into exile from each other.
Come bride, hold something of clay in your hand
at the hour of sunset, for flesh dissolves
and iron doesn't keep. Hold clay in your hand
for future archaeologists to find and remember.
They do not know that poppies after rain
are also an archaeological find, rich evidence.
* Will They Cry When You're Gone, You Bet - Amiri Baraka/ LeRoi Jones
[Note: the original text in the book ends in a comma, so I have preserved that in this transcription.]
You leave dead friends in
a desert. But they've deserted
you, and them-
selves, and are leaving
themselves,
in the foot paths
of madmen and saints
enough sense to get away
from the dryness and uselessness
of such relaxation, dying in the dry
light, sand packed in their mouths
eyes burning, white women serenade them
in mystic deviousness, which is another
way of saying they're seeing things, which
are not really there, except for them,
never to find an oasis, even bitter water
which we get used to, is better than
white drifting fairies, muses, singing
to us, in calm tones, about how it is better to die
etcetera, than to go off from them, how it is better to
lie in the cruel sun with your eyes turning to dunes
than leave them alone in that white heat,
* In Memory of M. B. - Anna Akhmatova --translated from the original Russian
Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,
not sticks of burning incense.
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end
your magnificent disdain.
You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes,
and suffocated inside stifling walls.
Alone you let the terrible stranger in,
and stayed with her alone.
Now you're gone, and nobody says a word
about your troubled and exalted life.
Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn
at your dumb funeral feast.
Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.
Here are my ten favorite poems of all time, in no particular order. (A friend challenged me to post them.)
* Self-Portrait - Revan Schendler
The I examines itself
as it thinks it is seen,
resting its fingers
on its temples,
stares into its own eyes,
declares: What lies,
you broken, divine
pain-bound, ethereal,
excrement, perfection...
The mystery, the self deception:
look at me for a moment,
turn your face from these reflections
of self-love and self-loathing:
I, too, have a mirror.
* Clenched Soul - Pablo Neruda --translated from the original Spanish
We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.
I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.
Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.
I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.
Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?
The book fell that always closed at twilight
and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.
Always, always you recede through the evenings
toward the twilight erasing statues.
* i like my body when it is with your - e. e. cummings
i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,
and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you so quite new
* Antilamentation - Dorianne Laux
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook.
Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication.
Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don't regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the livingroom couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You've walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You've traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs
window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied
of expectation. Relax. Don't bother remembering
any of it. Let's stop here, under the lit sign
on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.
* the song of mehitabel - Don Marquis
this is the song of mehitabel
of mehitabel the alley cat
as i wrote you before boss
mehitabel is a believer
in the pythagorean
theory of the transmigration
of the soul and she claims
that formerly her spirit
was incarnated in the body
of cleopatra
that was a long time ago
and one must not be
surprised if mehitabel
has forgotten some of her
more regal manners
i have had my ups and downs
but wotthehell wotthehell
yesterday sceptres and crowns
fried oysters and velvet gowns
and today i herd with bums
but wotthehell wotthehell
i wake the world from sleep
as i caper and sing and leap
when i sing my wild free tune
wotthehell wotthehell
under the blear eyed moon
i am pelted with cast off shoon
but wotthehell wotthehell
do you think that i would change
my present freedom to range
for a castle or moated grange
wotthehell wotthehell
cage me and i d go frantic
my life is so romantic
capricious and corybantic
and i m toujours gai toujours gai
i know that i am bound
for a journey down the sound
in the midst of a refuse mound
but wotthehell wotthehell
oh i should worry and fret
death and i will coquette
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai
i once was an innocent kit
wotthehell wotthehell
with a ribbon my neck to fit
and bells tied onto it
o wotthehell wotthehell
but a maltese cat came by
with a come hither look in his eye
and a song that soared to the sky
and wotthehell wotthehell
and i followed adown the street
the pad of his rhythmical feet
o permit me again to repeat
wotthehell wotthehell
my youth i shall never forget
but there s nothing i really regret
wotthehell wotthehell
there s a dance in the old dame yet
toujours gai toujours gai
the things that i had not ought to
i do because i ve gotto
wotthehell wotthehell
and i end with my favorite motto
toujours gai toujours gai
boss sometimes i think
that our friend mehitabel
is a trifle too gay
* I'm In Love - Charles Bukowski
she's young, she said,
but look at me,
I have pretty ankles,
and look at my wrists, I have pretty
wrists
o my god,
I thought it was all working,
and now it's her again,
every time she phones you go crazy,
you told me it was over
you told me it was finished,
listen, I've lived long enough to become a
good woman,
why do you need a bad woman?
you need to be tortured, don't you?
you think life is rotten if somebody treats you
rotten it all fits,
doesn't it?
tell me, is that it? do you want to be treated like a
piece of shit?
and my son, my son was going to meet you.
I told my son
and I dropped all my lovers.
I stood up in a cafe and screamed
I'M IN LOVE,
and now you've made a fool of me. . .
I'm sorry, I said, I'm really sorry.
hold me, she said, will you please hold me?
I've never been in one of these things before, I said,
these triangles. . .
she got up and lit a cigarette, she was trembling all
over.she paced up and down,wild and crazy.she had
a small body.her arms were thin,very thin and when
she screamed and started beating me I held her
wrists and then I got it through the eyes:hatred,
centuries deep and true.I was wrong and graceless and
sick.all the things I had learned had been wasted.
there was no creature living as foul as I
and all my poems were
false.
* The Bistro Styx - Rita Dove
She was thinner, with a mannered gauntness
as she paused just inside the double
glass doors to survey the room, silvery cape
billowing dramatically behind her. What's this,
I thought, lifting a hand until
she nodded and started across the parquet;
that's when I saw she was dressed all in gray,
from a kittenish cashmere skirt and cowl
down to the graphite signature of her shoes.
"Sorry I'm late," she panted, though
she wasn't, sliding into the chair, her cape
tossed off in a shudder of brushed steel.
We kissed. Then I leaned back to peruse
my blighted child, this wary aristocratic mole.
"How's business?" I asked, and hazarded
a motherly smile to keep from crying out:
Are you content to conduct your life
as a cliché and, what's worse,
an anachronism, the brooding artist's demimonde?
Near the rue Princesse they had opened
a gallery cum souvenir shop which featured
fuzzy off-color Monets next to his acrylics, no doubt,
plus beared African drums and the occasional miniature
gargoyle from Notre Dame the Great Artist had
carved at breakfast with a pocket knife.
"Tourists love us. The Parisians, of course"--
she blushed--"are amused, though not without
a certain admiration . . ."
The Chateaubriand
arrived on a bone-white plate, smug and absolute
in its fragrant crust, a black plug steaming
like the heart plucked from the chest of a worthy enemy;
one touch with her fork sent pink juices streaming.
"Admiration for what?" Wine, a bloody
Pinot Noir, brought color to her cheeks. "Why,
the aplomb with which we've managed
to support our Art"--meaning he'd convinced
her to pose nude for his appalling canvases,
faintly futuristic landscapes strewn
with carwrecks and bodies being chewed
by rabid cocker spaniels. "I'd like to come by
the studio," I ventured, "and see the new stuff."
"Yes, if you wish . . ." A delicate rebuff
before the warning: "He dresses all
in black now. Me, he drapes in blues and carmine--
and even though I think it's kinda cute,
in company I tend toward more muted shades."
She paused and had the grace
to drop her eyes. She did look ravishing,
spookily insubstantial, a lipstick ghost on tissue,
or as if one stood on a fifth-floor terrace
peering through a fringe of rain at Paris'
dreaming chimney pots, each sooty issue
wobbling skyward in an ecstatic oracular spiral.
"And he never thinks of food. I wish
I didn't have to plead with him to eat. . . ." Fruit
and cheese appeared, arrayed on leaf-green dishes.
I stuck with café crème. "This Camembert's
so ripe," she joked, "it's practically grown hair,"
mucking a golden glob complete with parsley sprig
onto a heel of bread. Nothing seemed to fill
her up: She swallowed, sliced into a pear,
speared each tear-shaped lavaliere
and popped the dripping mess into her pretty mouth.
Nowhere the bright tufted fields, weighted
vines and sun poured down out of the south.
"But are you happy?" Fearing, I whispered it
quickly. "What? You know, Mother"--
she bit into the starry rose of a fig--
"one really should try the fruit here."
I've lost her, I thought, and called for the bill.
* 3 parts from The Last Benjamin of Todela - Yehuda Amichai (I couldn't find the full text online, so I'll grab my book sometime and change this to the full version) --translated from the original Hebrew
1. Turn over now. Look, the crease down the back that
deepens through the buttocks. Who
can say where they begin and where
the thighs end: see the bold supports
of the loins, columns of legs
and Hellenistic curlicues of hair
above the genitals. The Gothic arch that rises
toward the heart and the reddish Byzantine flame
between her legs. A distinct
Crusader influence in the hard jaws,
protuberant chin. If she stoops she'll be perfect Arabesque.
She can touch the floor with both hands
without bending her knees. She touches the earth
I didn't kiss when I was brought to it, a child.
Visit the country again,
visit my tears and the east wind,
the true Western Wall, made of great stones
of wind. The sobbing of wind and the bits
of paper blown by the wind are the entreaties
I stuck between the stones. Visit the country.
On a fine day, if the visibility is good, one can see
the miracle of my child
holding me in his arms, four years old.
And I forty-four.
And here is the zoo of greater love,
acres of love. Hairy animals breathing
in the cages of porous underpants, brown
feathers and fur, red fish with green eyes,
solitary hearts behind the bars of ribs
jumping like monkeys, furry fish and snakes
like round fat thighs.
A blazing body a flame
covered with a damp rain coat. That is soothing.
2. Forty-two light-years and forty-
two night years. Drunkard and glutton
stuffing and feasting like the last Roman Caesars
in the secondhand history books, mad graffiti
and the writing on the wall in toilets,
heroic annals and conquest and decline,
vain life and vain death.
Revolt and rebellion and the suppression of rebellion
while banqueting. In a transparent nightdress
like a banner, you rose in revolt against me, hair
flying like a flag above, and bristling below.
Ram's horn blast, long blast. Crash of a broken bottle
and war cry. Suppression of revolt with the garter belt
of a woman. Suffocation with transparent stockings.
Stoning with the sharp heels of evening shoes.
Circus duels between a broken bottle neck
and a net of flimsy petticoats. Shoes
against treacherous gauze, tongue against fork,
half a fish against half a woman. Straps and buttons,
brassieres decorated with buds tangled with buds
and army equipment. Fanfare and suppression of fanfare.
Football shouts from the nearby pitch.
And I was lying on you heavy and quiet
like a weight, so that the wind and time couldn't
blow you away like bits of paper and hours.
3. This could have been a song of praise
to the sweet imaginary God of my childhood.
It was Friday, and black angels
filled the Valley of the Cross, their wings
black houses and abandoned quarries.
Sabbath candles rose and fell like ships
at the entrance to the harbor. Come Sabbath bride,
come bride,
wear the clothes of morning and of your glory
the night you thought I would not come to you
and I came. The room was tipsy with the smell
of black cherry preserve. Papers
scattered on the floor below,
bitter wings scythed above.
Love with parting, like a record--
music with applause at the end, love
with a cry, love with the stammered despair
of the proud departure into exile from each other.
Come bride, hold something of clay in your hand
at the hour of sunset, for flesh dissolves
and iron doesn't keep. Hold clay in your hand
for future archaeologists to find and remember.
They do not know that poppies after rain
are also an archaeological find, rich evidence.
* Will They Cry When You're Gone, You Bet - Amiri Baraka/ LeRoi Jones
[Note: the original text in the book ends in a comma, so I have preserved that in this transcription.]
You leave dead friends in
a desert. But they've deserted
you, and them-
selves, and are leaving
themselves,
in the foot paths
of madmen and saints
enough sense to get away
from the dryness and uselessness
of such relaxation, dying in the dry
light, sand packed in their mouths
eyes burning, white women serenade them
in mystic deviousness, which is another
way of saying they're seeing things, which
are not really there, except for them,
never to find an oasis, even bitter water
which we get used to, is better than
white drifting fairies, muses, singing
to us, in calm tones, about how it is better to die
etcetera, than to go off from them, how it is better to
lie in the cruel sun with your eyes turning to dunes
than leave them alone in that white heat,
* In Memory of M. B. - Anna Akhmatova --translated from the original Russian
Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,
not sticks of burning incense.
You lived aloof, maintaining to the end
your magnificent disdain.
You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes,
and suffocated inside stifling walls.
Alone you let the terrible stranger in,
and stayed with her alone.
Now you're gone, and nobody says a word
about your troubled and exalted life.
Only my voice, like a flute, will mourn
at your dumb funeral feast.
Oh, who would have dared believe that half-crazed I,
I, sick with grief for the buried past,
I, smoldering on a slow fire,
having lost everything and forgotten all,
would be fated to commemorate a man
so full of strength and will and bright inventions,
who only yesterday it seems, chatted with me,
hiding the tremor of his mortal pain.
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no subject
Date: 2006-09-28 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-28 04:15 pm (UTC)(a side story: i read "antilamentation" at a poetry reading once. a few weeks later, someone emailed me that it was their favorite poem, and could we meet for coffee? we ended up dating for a few months. i like the idea of poetry creating common ground.)
also, yay exploding dog. :)
no subject
Date: 2006-09-28 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-28 04:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-28 04:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-28 04:16 pm (UTC)You know I like it when you talk Neruda.
Date: 2006-09-28 06:00 pm (UTC)in that sadness of mine that you know.
One of my most favorite images of his poetry. I actually like this poem in the Spanish, even though my understanding of it is shoddy.
Re: You know I like it when you talk Neruda.
Date: 2006-09-28 07:52 pm (UTC)... which poem, you say? i can't remember right now. you'll just have to see it.
Moderator
Date: 2006-09-28 06:25 pm (UTC)Re: Moderator
Date: 2006-09-28 06:48 pm (UTC)I love the tag feature in this community and often search it for poems to give to my college intro to poetry class. It also makes it easier for members to find previously posted poems by the same author.
Re: Moderator
Date: 2006-09-28 07:49 pm (UTC)Re: Moderator
Date: 2006-09-29 05:36 am (UTC)Re:
Date: 2006-09-29 12:33 pm (UTC)