In the desert...

[goatunit.livejournal.com]

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter - bitter," he answered;
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."

-Stephen Crane

WD Snodgrass - April Inventory

[natelyswhore.livejournal.com]

April Inventory

The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven't learned
A blessed thing they pay you for.
The blossoms snow down in my hair;
The trees and I will soon be bare.

The trees have more than I to spare.
The sleek, expensive girls I teach,
Younger and pinker every year,
Bloom gradually out of reach.
The pear tree lets its petals drop
Like dandruff on a tabletop.

The girls have grown so young by now
I have to nudge myself to stare.
This year they smile and mind me how
My teeth are falling with my hair.
In thirty years I may not get
Younger, shrewder, or out of debt.

The tenth time, just a year ago,
I made myself a little list
Of all the things I'd ought to know,
Then told my parents, analyst,
And everyone who's trusted me
I'd be substantial, presently.

I haven't read one book about
A book or memorized one plot.
Or found a mind I did not doubt.
I learned one date. And then forgot.
And one by one the solid scholars
Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.

And smile above their starchy collars.
I taught my classes Whitehead's notions;
One lovely girl, a song of Mahler's.
Lacking a source-book or promotions,
I showed one child the colors of
A luna moth and how to love.

I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.

I have not learned there is a lie
Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger;
That my equivocating eye
Loves only by my body's hunger;
That I have forces true to feel,
Or that the lovely world is real.

While scholars speak authority
And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,
My eyes in spectacles shall see
These trees procure and spend their leaves.
There is a value underneath
The gold and silver in my teeth.

Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.

Names of Horses - Donald Hall

[ex-thylacine403.livejournal.com]

All winter your brute shoulders strained against collars, padding
and steerhide over the ash hames, to haul
sledges of cordwood for drying through spring and summer,
for the Glenwood stove next winter, and for the simmering range.

In April you pulled cartloads of manure to spread on the fields,
dark manure of Holsteins, and knobs of your own clustered with oats.
All summer you mowed the grass in the meadow and hayfield,
the mowing machine
clacketing beside, while the sun walked high in the morning;
and after noon's heat, you pulled a clawed rake through the same acres,
gathering stacks, and dragged the wagon from stack to stack,
and the built hayrack back, uphill to the chaffy barn,
three loads of hay a day from standing grass in the morning.

Sundays you trotted the two miles to church with the light load
of a leather quartertop buggy, and grazed in the sound of hymns.
Generation on generation, your neck rubbed the windowsill
of the stall, smoothing the wood as the sea smooths glass.


When you were old and lame, when your shoulders hurt bending to graze,
one October the man, who fed you and kept you, and harnessed you
every morning,
led you through corn stubble to sandy ground above Eagle Pond,
and dug a hole beside you where you stood shuddering in your skin,
and lay the shotgun's muzzle in the boneless hollow behind your ear,
and fired the slug into your brain, and felled you into your grave,
shoveling sand to cover you, setting goldenrod upright above you,
where by next summer a dent in the ground make your monument.

For a hundred and fifty years, in the pasture of dead horses,
roots of pine trees pushed through the pale curves of your ribs,
yellow blossoms flourished above you in autumn, and in winter
frost heaved your bones in the ground--old toilers, soil makers:

O Roger, Mackerel, Riley, Ned, Nellie, Chester, Lady Ghost.

(no subject)

[redheartleaf.livejournal.com]

To My Dear and Loving Husband

If ever two were one then surely we.
If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;
If ever wife were happy in a man,
Compare with me, ye women, if you can.
I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold
Or all the riches that the East doth hold.
My love is such that rivers cannot quench,
Nor aught but love from thee give recompense.
Thy love is such I can no way repay,
The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray.
Then while we live, in love let's so persevere
That when we live no more, we may live ever.

Bradstreet, Anne.

Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), considered the first (chronologically speaking) most notable female poet of the United States, settled in Massachusetts Bay in America at the age of 18, two years after marrying Simon Bradstreet in England. She wrote her poetry as a personal act, while rearing eight children.

Without her permission or knowledge, her brother-in-law took her poems to England, where they were published in 1650 as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America. An expanded American edition would appear eight years later under the title Several Poems Compiled With Great Variety of Wit and Learning.

Her later poems, written mostly for her family, show a deeper spiritual side as she further embraced Puritan ideals. Among these poems were subjects of childbirth and the death of a grandchild.

(no subject)

[redheartleaf.livejournal.com]

Silence

My father used to say,
"Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow's grave
nor the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self reliant like the cat --
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse's limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth --
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint."
Nor was he insincere in saying, "Make my house your inn."
Inns are not residences.

Moore, Marianne. 1924. Observations.

Marianne Moore (1887-1972) was an American poet known for the moral and intellectual insights her work achieved while maintaining an accurate and objective perspective. Her devotion to writing earned her acclaim and support by both colleagues and critics.

Moore's first book of poetry, Poems, was published in London in 1921, followed three years later by Observations. These early poems, including "Silence" above, contained many arresting images and thoughts that crystallized at the end of the poem into a conclusion that was powerful, yet familiar -- perhaps due to a feeling of nostalgia.

In 1925, she became acting editor of The Dial, a renowned American journal of literature and the arts. Her collected poems were published in 1951.

Saddest Poem- Pablo Neruda

[slurring-rhythm.livejournal.com]

Saddest Poem

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.

Write, for instance: "The night is full of stars,
and the stars, blue, shiver in the distance."

The night wind whirls in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like this, I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times under the infinite sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her.
How could I not have loved her large, still eyes?

I can write the saddest poem of all tonight.
To think I don't have her. To feel that I've lost her.

To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the poem falls to the soul as dew to grass.

What does it matter that my love couldn't keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.

That's all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.

As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.

The same night that whitens the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.

I no longer love her, true, but how much I loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.

Someone else's. She will be someone else's. As she once
belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her light body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, true, but perhaps I love her.
Love is so short and oblivion so long.

Because on nights like this I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.

Although this may be the last pain she causes me,
and this may be the last poem I write for her.

-Pablo Neruda

Allen Ginsberg - Metaphysics

[radio-void.livejournal.com]

From Allen Ginsberg's Collected Poems, 1947-1980, originally from Empty Mirror: Gates Of Wrath

METAPHYSICS

This is the one and only
Firmament; therefore
It is the absolute world.
There is no other world.
The circle is complete.
I am living in Eternity.
The ways of this world
Are the ways of Heaven.

Stephanie Bolster - Peacock

[natelyswhore.livejournal.com]

Peacock

The world in a tail, that’s what
we came for. The swirl of oil spilled in a lot
one June night outside the cinema.
Just past sunset, what the day was
flashes up, purpled with what
some wince at as regret.
The call erodes the throat
of the listener. What lack! The tail unfolds
its devastation: many eyes emblazoned
turquoise, emerald, witness
our disregard for each thing other
than their beauty. Our eyes dilate
to the backs of mirrors.

...

[agata.livejournal.com]

A Lady by Amy Lowell

You are beautiful and faded
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
Or like the sun-flooded silks
Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.
In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of out-lived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul
Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
Your half-tones delight me,
And I grow mad with gazing
At your blent colours.

My vigour is a new-minted penny,
Which I cast at your feet.
Gather it up from the dust,
That its sparkle may amuse you.