Mirror

[hellspoette.livejournal.com]

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike .
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

-Sylvia Plath

(no subject)

[bay-state-magi.livejournal.com]

North

By Seamus Heaney

I returned to a long strand,
the hammered curve of a bay,
and found only the secular
powers of the Atlantic thundering.

I faced the unmagical
invitations of Iceland,
the pathetic colonies
of Greenland, and suddenly

those fabulous raiders,
those lying in Orkney and Dublin
measured against
their long swords rusting,

those in the solid
belly of stone ships,
those hacked and glinting
in the gravel of thawed streams

were ocean-deafened voices
warning me, lifted again
in violence and epiphany.
The longship's swimming tongue

was buoyant with hindsight-
it said Thor's hammer swung
to geography and trade,
thick-witted couplings and revenge,

the hatreds and behind-backs
of the althing, lies, and women,
exhaustions nominated peace,
memory incubating the spilled blood.

It said, "Lie down
in the word-hoard, burrow
the coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.

Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.

Keep your eye clear
as the bleb of the icicle,
trust the feel of what nubbed treasure
your hands have known."

I am the only person who lists Belle Randall within my interests...

[jane-dark.livejournal.com]

...and that's sad. Here are two sonnets from her chapbook True Love.

Even Now This Word Aureole

Is hard to say, so let it be said, there's a certain
chagrin surrounding this tender patch of stipple
God couldn't help but leave when parting
putty knife from spackle. The slightest ripple
of a breeze, defensive as an anemone,
rubbery and utterly unyielding,
it raises like a hackle. This enemy
at other times as invitingly revealing
as a tassle on a drawer, warm and filled
with trust, softens to a glow, as if
to undergo a slow dissolution like shadow,
like mist, until distinctions willed are blurred,
the numb and burning swollen stings of nettles
in a shifting breeze become rose petals.
**

Face It

No she would wind up on her back, frog position
no he on top, butt pumping like a piston,
(not to mention he on he in costume
of a Nordic vixen), were these actions not
commissioned by powerful desires. Viewed
dispassionately, sex seems ridiculous,
a finger in the eye of God. Mom
and Dad did no such thing's a common
first reaction. To picture sex between
long married aunts and uncles makes us wrinkle
our noses in disdain--of paradise perhaps,
because, like Hamlet, it lacks correlative,
is a love song in a loping limerick shape,
a dancer in the costume of an ape.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

[allisonmeyer.livejournal.com]

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
James Wright

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

(no subject)

[silverflurry.livejournal.com]

On the Path

Three times lately on my walk in the hills behind the house
I have come across an elderly man in company with a lolloping dog:
A youngster, white and yellow like a polar bear, mild-eyed and foolish,
Coming back repeatedly from short cuts into the undergrowth for pretend discipline and conversation –
Mild ironies at his expense, he seems to understand, answered by urine on the creosote bush.

These are real hills, and the man looks frail. How much medication
Are the two of us taking? No chemical damper needed, it seems, on the dog’s
Anxiety about whatever it is lurking inside the chrysalis –
White and yellow like a burnt manuscript – of an owl’s efficient turd.

Easy to guess what the old man and I most envy
In the snuffling going on at the side of the path.
Not the creature’s inquisitiveness, precisely (the two of us still want to see the Taj Mahal),
Not its optimism, not its wild overestimate of the size of things,
Not even doom taking the form of a picked-over skeleton;
No, more the dog’s certainty that we and our kind have uses,
And, above all, his lack of concern with the childhood –
Charts of the planets, lost balls, broken windows, hot drinks in bed —
We agree, with a glance, passed us by.


T. J. Clark
The Threepenny Review
100th Issue
Winter 2005

(no subject)

[shoism.livejournal.com]

Allen Ginsberg - A Supermarket In California

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whit-
man, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees
with a headache self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images,
I went into the neon fruit supermarket, dreaming of
your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole fam-
ilies shopping at night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives
in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!--and you,
García Lorca, what were you doing down by the
watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old
grubber, poking among the meats in the refrigerator
and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed
the pork chops? What price bananas? Are you my
Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of
cans following you, and followed in my imagination
by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in
our solitary fancy tasting artichokes, possessing every
frozen delicacy, and never passing the cashier.
Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors
close in an hour. Which way does your beard point
tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the
supermarket and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets?
The trees add shade to shade, lights out in the houses,
we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming ofthe lost America of love
past blue automobiles in driveways, home to our silent
cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-
teacher, what America did you have when Charon quit
poling his ferry and you got out on a smoking bank
and stood watching the boat disappear on the black
waters of Lethe?

"The Look" by Sara Teasdale

[amieinstereo.livejournal.com]

The Look

Strephon kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.

Strephon's kiss was lost in jest,
Robin's lost in play
But the kiss in Colin's eyes
Haunts me night and day.