First post

[dferahgo.livejournal.com]

"My Lover Lives on the Other Coast"

I do what
my baby bids
me do;

across this side-effect of manifest destiny

I fly
to you.

- From "Slanky," poems by Mike Doughty

(no subject)

[mizraim.livejournal.com]

THE PURE FURY
By Theodore Roethke

Stupor of knowledge lacking inwardness--
What book, O learned man, will set me right?
Once I read nothing through a fearful night,
For every meaning had grown meaningless.
Morning, I saw the world with second sight,
As if all things had died, and rose again.
I touched the stones, and they had my own skin.

The pure admire the pure, and live alone;
I love a woman with an empty face.
Parmenides put Nothingness in place;
She tries to think, and it flies loose again.
How slow the changes of a golden mean:
Great Boehme rooted all in Yes and No;
At times my darling squeaks in pure Plato.

How terrible the need for solitude:
That appetite for life so ravenous
A man's a beast prowling in his own house,
A beast with fangs, and out for his own blood
Until he finds the thing he almost was
When the pure fury first raged in his head
And trees came closer with a denser shade.

Dream of a woman, and a dream of death:
The light air takes my being's breath away;
I look on white, and it turns into gray--
When will that creature give me back my breath?
I live near the abyss. I hope to stay
Until my eyes look at a brighter sun
As the thick shade of the long night comes on.

Above the Tree Line...

[demon151.livejournal.com]

Above the Tree Line


Only the tenacious
reach this summit cone — scoured
to stone by eons of wind
and rain — that I have climbed to
this day in my own time,
trying to surmount
something human.
I intended to carry
only what I could bear with ease,
yet I've hauled my tethered heart
one-half mile straight up
through densities of sun-
doused birches, fountains
of ferns that swept my knees —
clasped evergreens, then scrambled
over palm-rasping rocks
past stunted pine and scrub and
chalky, anonymous berry bushes up
to the gray, pocked surface
of this enormous glacial brain
in whose corrugations thistle
and lichen sprout. Strangely,
seeing birds circling
overhead, I don't yearn
for flight, or any fanciful freedom.
The world below is mine,
though ruthless. I lean
into the breeze sweeping
seventy-five miles from the sea,
anchored by an earthly sorrow,
rooted in grief,
the ground that will never give way.


Kathy Mangan