Lawrence Ferlinghetti

[patsydecline.livejournal.com]

4

In Paris in a loud dark winter

when the sun was something in Provence

when I came upon the poetry of Rene Char

I saw Vaucluse again

In a summer of sauterelles

its fountains full of perals

and its river thrown down

through all the burnt places

of that almond world

and the fields full of silence

though the crickets sang

with their legs

And in the poet's plangent dream I saw

no Lorelei upon the Rhone

nor angels debarked at Marseilles

but couples going nude into the sad water

in the profound laciviousness of spring

in an algebra of lyricism

which I am still deciphering.

Continuing today's trend of old man poems!

[mixedupfiles.livejournal.com]

Among the Narcissi
Sylvia Plath

Spry, wry, and gray as these March sticks,
Percy bows, in his blue peajacket, among the narcissi.
He is recuperating from something on the lung.

The narcissi, too, are bowing to some big thing :
It rattles their stars on the green hill where Percy
Nurses the hardship of his stitches, and walks and walks.

There is a dignity to this; there is a formality-
The flowers vivid as bandages, and the man mending.
They bow and stand : they suffer such attacks!

And the octogenarian loves the little flocks.
He is quite blue; the terrible wind tries his breathing.
The narcissi look up like children, quickly and whitely.

congrats to claudia emerson

[okapi-4evr.livejournal.com]

In Late Wife, a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for years. She then describes the unexpected joys of solitude during her recovery and emotional convalescence. Finally, in a sequence of sonnets, she speaks to her new husband, whose first wife died from lung cancer. The poems highlight how the speaker’s rebeginning in this relationship has come about in part because of two couples’ respective losses.

The most personal of Claudia Emerson’s poetry collections, Late Wife is both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past.

Artifact

For three years you lived in your house
just as it was before she died: your wedding
portrait on the mantel, her clothes hanging
in the closet, her hair still in the brush.
You have told me you gave it all away
then, sold the house, keeping only the confirmation
cross she wore, her name in cursive chased
on the gold underside, your ring in the same

box, those photographs you still avoid,
and the quilt you spread on your borrowed bed—
small things. Months after we met, you told me she had
made it, after we had slept already beneath its loft
and thinning, raveled pattern, as though beneath
her shadow, moving with us, that dark, that soft.

Probing, R S Thomas

[rymenhild.livejournal.com]

Probing
R S Thomas

No one would know you had lived,
but for my discovery
of the anonymous undulation
of your grave, like the early swelling
of the belly of a woman
who is with child. And if I entered
it now, I would find your bones
huddled together, but without
flesh, their ruined architecture
a reproach, the skull luminous
but not with thought.
...................Would it help us to learn
what you were called in your forgotten
language? Are not our jaws
frail for the sustaining of the consonants'
weight? Yet they were balanced
on tongues like ours, echoed
in the ears' passages, in intervals when
the volcano was silent. How
tenderly did the woman handle
them, as she leaned her haired body
to yours? Where are the instruments
of your music, the pipe of hazel, the
bull's horn, the interpreters
of your loneliness on this
ferocious planet?
....................We are domesticating
it slowly; but at times it rises
against us, so that we see again
the primeval shadows you built
your fire amongst. We are cleverer
than you; our nightmares
are intellectual. But we never awaken
from the compulsiveness of the mind's
stare into the lenses' furious interiors.

Old Women in Eliot Poems, David Wright

[moireach.livejournal.com]

Old Women in Eliot Poems
David Wright

1

With fine hair on their arms,
with Michelangelo on their lips,
who do not understand the play at all,

not at all—still sing such lovely trills,
for someone, and dance rhumbas
on the beach, and pinch sugar cookies

between pale fingers. Go on.
The moonlight and ragtime
will not last. Go on now.

The evening crumbles
like thin dough or sand,
which both taste the same.

2

Are not so old, too old
but still rather distant.
high up, perhaps in peach

trees that he does not dare
climb, because he stares
down instead at cigarette

butts and lamplight dropped
on streets or bridges, fuller
than he notices. The wild

and wicked rhyme seduces
even the coolest cats
with the deepest blues.

The wicked, deep, wild blues
of the music hall will win:
look up and sing, for Christ's

sake, look up and moan
in time until a hollow
chapel echoes the sweetest

dying syncopated prayers:
hurry up and live, darling,
hurry up, now, and live.

Old man theme x RS Thomas

[kementari2.livejournal.com]

The Dance
by R.S. Thomas

She is young. Have I the right
Even to name her? Child,
It is not love I offer
Your quick limbs, your eyes;
Only the barren homage
Of an old man whom time
Crucifies. Take my hand
A moment in the dance,
Ignoring its sly pressure,
The dry rut of age,
And lead me under the boughs
Of innocence. Let me smell
My youth again in your hair.

request and [Your Name Here], David Hernandez

[angabel.livejournal.com]

For my Advanced Poetry Workshop, we have to recite three poems by memory. I've recited "The Truth the Dead Know" by Anne Sexton and section II of Adrienne Rich's "Twenty-One Love Poems." Now, I'm looking for a poem by a male, something on a completely different spectrum. I want to stay away from the likes of "typical" poets: such as Frost, Whitman, Bukowski, cummings... Any suggestions as to poems (at least 16 lines long) or poets? Thanks.

( [Your Name Here] )