"Admonitions To A Special Person" by Anne Sexton

[nepenthean.livejournal.com]

"Admonitions To A Special Person" by Anne Sexton

Watch out for power,
for its avalanche can bury you,
snow, snow, snow, smothering your mountain.

Watch out for hate,
it can open its mouth and you'll fling yourself out
to eat off your leg, an instant leper.

Watch out for friends,
because when you betray them,
as you will,
they will bury their heads in the toilet
and flush themselves away.

Watch out for intellect,
because it knows so much it knows nothing
and leaves you hanging upside down,
mouthing knowledge as your heart
falls out of your mouth.

Watch out for games, the actor's part,
the speech planned, known, given,
for they will give you away
and you will stand like a naked little boy,
pissing on your own child-bed.

Watch out for love
(unless it is true,
and every part of you says yes including the toes),
it will wrap you up like a mummy,
and your scream won't be heard
and none of your running will end.

( cut )

(no subject)

[seamusd.livejournal.com]

J. Allyn Rosser

Goose's Jack: Over the Hill?

No one in the folk-lore sense climbs to the top of a hill
for water unless that water has a special significance --Lewis Spence

Something, then--a stain on her dress,
a bee in her bonnet, the last stick
of gum unshared--something has been
left out. Perhaps he wasn't all he's been
cracked up to be. On this point
the text is clearly ambiguous.
But you're not going to tell me
Jack simply "fell" down. Okay,
let's say she never actually pushed him.
The word fell is the ticket here.
Fell: fierce. Fell, closely echoing
fail. Jack failed to find water.
He failed fiercely, the way they do.
I'm not saying I don't sympathize.
But you can't overlook the fact
that fell slant-rhymes ever so wantonly
with Jill, suggesting that Jack has connected Jill and fail
inextricably in his man-mind,
that feckless projector of choppy
home movies where the heads
of the beloved are cut off,
their least fetching sides exposed.
So if Jack is the determinist hero
of Jill's self-actualized world-view,
it follows that Jack was not totally
at fault in his wish-fulfilling
falling. It is readily inferable
that what really went down
was Jack's confidence in his
water-finding abilities:
a slip of the old divining rod,
a "tumble" curtailed. Of course
we can only speculate.

(from Bright Moves. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990)

(no subject)

[wiredkitten.livejournal.com]

: Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
I will tell you all. I will conceal nothing.
When I was three, a little child read a story about a rabbit
who died, in the story, and I crawled under a chair :
a pink rabbit : it was my birthday, and a candle
burnt a sore spot on my finger, and I was told to be happy.

: Oh, grow to know me. I am not happy. I will be open:
Now I am thinking of white sails against a sky like music,
like glad horns blowing, and birds tilting, and an arm about me.
There was one I loved, who wanted to live, sailing.

: Speak to me. Take my hand. What are you now?
When I was nine, I was fruitily sentimental,
fluid : and my widowed aunt played Chopin,
and I bent my head to the painted woodwork, and wept.
I want now to be close to you. I would
link the minutes of my days close, somehow, to your days.

: I am not happy. I will be open.
I have liked lamps in evening corners, and quiet poems.
There has been fear in my life. Sometimes I speculate
on what a tragedy his life was, really.

: Take my hand. Fist my mind in your hand. What are you now?
When I was fourteen, I had dreams of suicide,
I stood at a steep window, at sunset, hoping toward death :
if the light had not melted clouds and plains to beauty,
if light had not transformed that day, I would have leapt.
I am unhappy. I am lonely. Speak to me.

: I will be open. I think he never loved me:
he loved the bright beaches, the little lips of foam
that ride small waves, he loved the veer of gulls:
he said with a gay mouth : I love you. Grow to know me.

: What are you now? If we could touch one another,
if these our separate entities could come to grips,
clenched like a Chinese puzzle . . . yesterday
I stood in a crowded street that was live with people,
and no one spoke a word, and the morning shone.
Everyone silent, moving . . . Take my hand. Speak to me.

Effort at Speech Between Two People - Muriel Rukeyser

"Volcano Tile, Davis Square," by Jane Zwart

[dominika-kretek.livejournal.com]

I was coming out of the subway, minding my own business, reading the Threepenny Review, when I suddenly realized that the subject of the poem I was reading was right in front of me...

Volcano Tile, Davis Square

John Spindler, I read your name each day;
its letters are serif ruts in a tile you made in grade school.

When I see your surname, Spindler, I cannot help imagining you
the unmentioned fourth; the one unable to unseat
Butcher, Baker, or Candlestick Maker. The tile you made in grade school
is grouted flush to brick, with perhaps a hundred others,
in the hallway of a train station; it is the last one before the escalator
I take to rise to the street.

Spindler, the volcano on your tile is exquisite.
Other kids applied their glaze like
coloring in the countries on a map—
there are a dozen flowered tiles nearer the trains,
where a vendor in a safety vest sells tokens.
Each bloom fans its uniform petals in unmixed glaze,
whether roses in a vase that crowds the ceramic square
or zinnias, growing from the flat horizon of the tile's bottom edge.
Near the Holland Street exit,
a slick of ice is nothing but mint-blue; even the skater's scarf
can be depended upon to keep segregate
the colors in its thin stripes.
Six monochromatic sunsets and shuttered houses later,
after a mountain whose ice-cap is as neatly drawn as a stuttered "w,"
John Spindler's volcano.

From its peak, the accidental gentleness you used as a boy
approximates the volcano's stream, its thrown molten stone.
At the apex of your tableau, Spindler,
Vesuvius melts the colored glazed streamers you painted at its peak;
pumpkin and crimson average. Lavender cedes to umber.

Violent and tender, the erupted mountain:
Spindler, each day I suspect every artisan on the train
of having forged it, your volcano.

—Jane Zwart

( So I took a picture of it... )

frank o'hara

[vorgefuhl.livejournal.com]

JOSEPH CORNELL


Into a sweeping meticulously-
detailed disaster the violet
light pours. It's not a sky,
it's a room. And in the open
field a glass of absinthe is
fluttering its song of India.
Prairie winds circle mosquitos.

You are always a little too
young to understand. He is
bored with his sense of the
past, the artist. Out of the
prescient rock in his heart
he has spread a land without
flowers of near distances.




DIGRESSION ON NUMBER 1, 1948


I am ill today but I am not
too ill. I am not ill at all.
It is a perfect day, warm
for winter, cold for fall.

A fine day for seeing. I see
ceramics, during lunch hour, by
Miro, and I see the sea by Leger,
and a rude awakening by Brauner,
a little table by Picasso, pink.

I am tired today but I am not
too tired. I am not tired at all.
There is the Pollock, white, harm
will not fall, his perfect hand

and the many short voyages. They'll
never fence the silver range.
Stars are out and there is sea
enough beneath the glistening earth
to bear me toward the future
which is not so dark. I see.