(no subject)

[http://users.livejournal.com/_honeyspider/]

Temptation
by Christine Strelan

The snake’s body swung in an arc from my roof
and glided across sunlit space to the tree.
As it moved,
the midday brightness glittered on its scales,
a burnished, golden chain drawn slowly across the
sky’s hard, dry blue.
It hung up there in the tree, among the leaves
and tangled creeper with its scarlet flowers,
each one a starburst of blood.

I was drawn to its sinuous, shining elegance,
Its daring in leaving the dark slit of its home
to flaunt its brazen sheen in the hard noon sun.
For its metallic eyes were made for peering
into leaf litter and dust, as it crawls on its belly
through that fertile place where fallen matter decays
and slips secretly into the pores of the soil.
Where the roots of trees spread their fingers wide
and murmur songs so slow and soft
the wilful water is enchanted,
and seeps gladly into their arms.

Where the smooth seed sacrifices its intact shell,
giving life to the coiled green lightseeker within
Where the black granules of earth cluster kindly
around the bodies of the dead,
pressing closer and closer,
until they have absorbed the flesh,
and their dark embrace is filled only by bones.

What secrets has the snake heard
sighing upwards from the sockets of skulls,
as it slithers past with its scales in the dust?
Could it teach me the mystery of renewal,
how to shed my skin,
and leave my old self behind forever?

My ancient mother in Eden
craved the serpent’s wisdom so badly
she was willing to die for it.
And if this snake whispered slyly to me now,
tempting me to pluck one of those flowers,
as red as apples,
would I too risk everything for knowledge?
Would I climb to the top of the tree,
just to hold those crimson petals
and look once into those golden eyes,
before the glittering brightness
overwhelmed me?

ONE WAY by w.s. merwin

[vorgefuhl.livejournal.com]

ONE WAY


Oh hell, there once again hunger
Gets up in the middle of a meal and without
A word departs. I go after: what
Would I be without her?

                                   It is
Night, I am
As old as pain and I have
No other story.
We do not keep to the telegraph lines.
“Is there a map for this?” I call
After. “Is there even
A name for this? I spend my
Life asking, is there even a name
For you?”

        And what a starved path,
Licking stones; often
I am sure one side has eaten the other.
And with what bitterness I remember
I had not yet had my fill
Of dissatisfaction. My mouth
Works like a heart. More and more
I get like shadows; I find out
How they hate.
                        And then she is gone.

No astonishment anywhere. The owls
Are digesting in silence.
I will not look up again to learn again
That despair has no star.
Don’t ask me why, I
Lift my feet in their dice-boxes.
I believe I continue
As she would have done, I believe.

                            Don’t ask me
Why: this time it is not I
Waking the birds. Somewhere
The light begins to come to itself.
As I walk, the horizon
Climbs down from its tree and moves toward me
With offerings. There
At the table which she has set with
The old plates, she is waiting, and to us
The day returns like a friend
Bringing others.

Richard Cory, by Edwin Arlington Robinson

[angabel.livejournal.com]

Richard Cory

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
And admirably schooled in every grace;
In fine we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

from Six Glasgow Poems, Tom Leonard

[angabel.livejournal.com]

from Six Glasgow Poems

(6) Good Style

helluva hard tay read theez init
stull
if yi canny unnirston thim jiss clear aff then
gawn
get tay fuck ootma road

ahmaz goodiz thi lota yiz so ah um
ah no whit ahm dayn
tellnyi
jiss try enny a yir fly patir wi me
stick thi bootnyi good style
so ah wull

---

And since I couldn't find this poem online, I'm going to cite it. Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry, edited by Keith Tuma (a wonderful, inspiring man)

Faxes to William by Hayden Carruth

[unwinding.livejournal.com]

Faxes to William
Hayden Carruth


ONE

Some poets write blurbs, William,
and some do not. And it is by
a law of nature that the former
envy the latter desperately
though they, the former can do
nothing to release themselves
from the trap, squirm and prevaricate
as they may. They have unmade
their beds and they must schlep in them.


TWO
( The news announces that research now shows )

The End, by Allen Ginsberg

[http://users.livejournal.com/_outercourse/]

I am I, old Father Fisheye that begat the ocean, the worm at my
own ear, the serpent turning around a tree,
I sit in the mind of the oak and hide in the rose, I know if any
wake up, none but my death,
come to me bodies, come to me prophecies, come all foreboding,
come spirits and visions,
I recieve all, I'll die of cancer, I enter the coffin forever, I close
my eye, I disappear,
I fall on myself in winder snow, I roll in a great wheel through
rain, I watch fuckers in convulsion,
car screech, furies groaning their basso music, memory fading
in the brain, men imitating dogs,
I delight in a woman's belly, youth stretching his breast and
thighs to sex, the cock sprung upward
gassing its seed on the lips of Yin, the beasts dance in Siam,
they sing opera in Moscow,
my boys yearn at dusk on stoops I enter New York, I play my
jazz on a Chicago Harpsichord,
Love that bore me I bear back to my Origin with no loss, I loat
over my vomiter
thrilled with my deathlessness, thrilled with this endlessness I
dice and bury,
come Poet shut up eat my word, and taste my mouth in your ear.

Dylan Thomas - REMEMBER THE PROCESSION OF THE OLD YOUNG MEN

[angry-salad-gal.livejournal.com]

Remember the procession of the old-young men
From dole queue to corner and back again,
From the pinched, packed streets to the peak of slag
In the bite of the winters with shovel and bag,
With a drooping fag and a turned up collar,
Stamping for the cold at the ill lit corner
Dragging through the squalor with their hearts like lead
Staring at the hunger and the shut pit-head
Nothing in their pockets, nothing home to eat.
Lagging from the slag heap to the pinched, packed street.
Remember the procession of the old-young men,
It shall never happen again.

Notes For The Legend Of Salad Woman - Ondaatje

[pas-possible.livejournal.com]

"Notes For The Legend Of Salad Woman"
Michael Ondaatje

Since my wife was born
she must have eaten
the equivalent of two-thirds
of the original garden of Eden.
Not the dripping lush fruit
or the meat in the ribs of animals
but the green salad gardens of that place.
The whole arena of green
would have been eradicated
as if the right filter had been removed
leaving only the skeleton of coarse brightness.

All green ends up eventually
churning in her left cheek.
Her mouth is a laundromat of spinning drowning herbs.
She is never in fields
but is sucking the pith out of grass.
I have noticed the very leaves from flower decorations
grow sparse in their week long performance in our house.
The garden is a dust bowl.

On our last day in Eden as we walked out
she nibbled the leaves at her breasts and crotch.
But there's none to touch
none to equal
the Chlorophyll Kiss

Intimates, by D.H.Lawrence

[http://users.livejournal.com/_outercourse/]

Don't you care for my love? she said bitterly.

   I handed her the mirror, and said:
Please address these questions to the proper person!
Please make all requests to head-quarters!
 In all matters of emotional importance
please approach the supreme authority direct! --
     So I handed her the mirror.
And she would have broken it over my head,
but she caught sight of her own reflection
and that held her spell bound for two seconds
	   while I fled.

The Sigh

[curlyhaze.livejournal.com]

A sigh went out skating, alone and at night.
He cut a fine figure, but oh! he was frantic.
The moon it was shining, the snow it was white,
and the sigh, the sigh felt romantic.

The sigh remembered a beautiful wench.
His thoughts became hot. Full Fahrenheit hot.
I dare not describe them, not even in French.
And so the sigh melted. He drowned on the spot.

Christian Morgenstern (Translated by Michael Hulse)

Skunk Hour

[curlyhaze.livejournal.com]

Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son's a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village;
she's in her dotage.

Thirsting for
the hierarchic privacy
of Queen Victoria's century
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.

The season's ill--
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he'd rather marry.

One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town....
My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love...." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat...
I myself am hell;
nobody's here--

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their solves up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.

Robert Lowell

(no subject)

[evolfaery.livejournal.com]

LAST ANSWERS

I WROTE a poem on the mist
And a woman asked me what I meant by it.
I had thought till then only of the beauty of the mist,
how pearl and gray of it mix and reel,
And change the drab shanties with lighted lamps at evening
into points of mystery quivering with color.

I answered:
The whole world was mist once long ago and some day
it will all go back to mist,
Our skulls and lungs are more water than bone and
tissue
And all poets love dust and mist because all the last
answers
Go running back to dust and mist.


Carl Sandburg