thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird -wallace stevens

[drowningbabies.livejournal.com]

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 wind
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 inflexions
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The Mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
for blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar limbs.

(no subject)

[gl-oriana.livejournal.com]

I travel your length, like a river
I travel your body, like a forest,
like a mountain path that ends at a cliff
I travel along the edge of your thoughts
and my shadow falls from your white forehead,
my shadow shatters, and I gather the pieces
and go with no body, groping my way

Octavio Paz
From Piedra de Sol (The Sun Stone), translated by Eliot Weinberger

i haven't posted in a loooong time

[summerstarlight.livejournal.com]

Morning Song
Sylvia Plath


Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

a request (and the obligatory poem)

[emyuhlie.livejournal.com]

hey, guys, i need a favor. a friend of mine needs a poem to quote for his girlfriend's christmas present...something about stars, or the uniqueness of stars or someone...you know, something all romantical like that.

and the poem, as promised.

( Dark angels were bringing handkerchiefs/ And melted snow as aids;/ Dark angels with great curving wings/ Of Albacete blades. )

Love and Dylan Thomas

[nattyleedread.livejournal.com]

Before I post a poem, I must say that this community brings me so much joy. I start the day reading the poetry posted here, and it weaves the rest of my day into a beautiful sort of expectation for the next, and I've never been disappointed... Thank you all :)

ONCE IT WAS THE COLOUR OF SAYING

Once it was the colour of saying
Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill
With a capsized field where a school sat still
And a black and white patch of girls grew playing;
The gentles seaslides of saying I must undo
That all the charmingly drowned arise to cockcrow and kill.
When I whistled with mitching boys through a reservoir park
Where at night we stoned the cold and cuckoo
Lovers in the dirt of their leafy beds,
The shade of their trees was a word of many shades
And a lamp of lightning for the poor in the dark;
Now my saying shall be my undoing,
And every stone I wind off like a reel.

it's life, carlos

[lunar-endeavor.livejournal.com]

Poem after Carlos Drummond de Andrade
Marvin Bell

"IT'S LIFE, CARLOS."

It's life that is hard: waking, sleeping, eating, loving, working and
     dying are easy.
It's life that suddenly fills both ears with the sound of that
     symphony that forces your pulse to race and swells your
     heart near to bursting.
It's life, not listening, that stretches your neck and opens your eyes
     and brings you into the worst weather of the winter to arrive
     once more at the house where love seemed to be in the air.

And it's life, just life, that makes you breathe deeply, in the air that
     is filled with wood smoke and the dust of the factory, because
     you hurried, and now your lungs heave and fall with the
     nervous excitement of a leaf in spring breezes, though it is
     winter and you are swallowing the dirt of the town.
It isn't death when you suffer, it isn't death when you miss each
     other and hurt for it, when you complain that isn't death,
     when you fight with those you love, when you misunder-
     stand, when one line in a letter or one remark in person ties
     one of you in knots, when the end seems near, when you
     think you will die, when you wish you were already
     dead---none of that is death.
It's life, after all, that brings you a pain in the foot and a pain in the
     hand, a sore throat, a broken heart, a cracked back, a torn
     gut, a hole in your abdomen, an irritated stomach, a swollen
     gland, a growth, a fever, a cough, a hiccup, a sneeze, a
     bursting blood vessel in the temple.
It's life, not nerve ends, that puts the heartache on a pedestal and
     worships it.
It's life, and you can't escape it. It's life, and you asked for it. It's
     life, and you won't be consumed by passion, you won't be
     destroyed by self-destruction, you won't avoid it by
     abstinence, you won't manage it by moderation, because it's
     life---life everywhere, life at all times---and so you won't be
     consumed by passion: you will be consumed by life.

It's life that will consume you in the end, but in the meantime ...
It's life that will eat you alive, but for now ...
It's life that calls you to the street where the wood smoke hangs,
     and the bare hint of a whisper of your name, but before you
     go ...

Too late: Life got its tentacles around you, its hooks into your
     heart, and suddenly you come awake as if for the first time,
     and you are standing in a part of the town where the air is
     sweet---your face flushed, your chest thumping, your
     stomach a planet, your heart a planet, your every organ a
     separate planet, all of it of a piece though the pieces turn
     separately, O silent indications of the inevitable, as among
     the natural restraints of winter and good sense, life blows you
     apart in her arms.