Claudia Rankine, "The Room is a Fountain in Experience"

[prettyvacunt.livejournal.com]

Though a previousness, cushioned by dark, aggregates the room
(for there is no disparity),

a room is brought into existence, the activity of—

Here Liv is letting herself feel as she feels, her will yielding to
streams, the lyric field of her everyday depths.

Her presence is. It’s come along, is lost, is loss, is wallside
reconciling: can I love now please?

Or in inclusion she bursts into a hood of tenderness: the body’s
anguish and flesh and all reflected in the absorbed atmosphere
soaking her being,

then the self feels deeper the depicted insistence engaged, its
essential nest, its scape—

And always and each contiguous thought, approaching the
distance, augments. Viewed against, the mind reshapes and here
is refuge without its tent.

All that’s resolved plots against her dividing self, binding her as
if any intervening space is recess for

her grave, an equivalence overlaying presence. Can I love now
please?

--Claudia Rankine

Quicksand, Jacques Prevert

[windbound.livejournal.com]

Quicksand

Deamons and marvels
Winds and tides
Far away already, the sea has ebbed
And you
Like seaweed slowly carressed by the wind
In the sands of the bed you stir, dreaming
Deamons and marvels
Winds and tides
Far away already, the sea has ebbed
But in your half-opened eyes
Two small waves have remained
Deamons and marvels
Winds and tides
Two small waves to drown me

( in French )

yehuda amichai poem

[wicked-sassy.livejournal.com]

Lj-cut after second stanza.

Yehuda Amichai: Ballad in the Streets of Buenos Aires


And a man waits in the street and meets a woman
precise and beautiful as the clock on the wall of her room
and sad and white as the wall that holds it

And she doesn’t show him her teeth
And she doesn’t show him her belly
( but she shows him her time, precise and beautiful )

On The Table - Andrew Motion

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

I would like to make it clear that I have bought
this tablecloth with its simple repeating pattern
of dark purple blooms not named by any botanist
because it reminds me of that printed dress you had
the summer we met - a dress you have always said
I never told you I liked. Well I did, you know. I did.
I liked it a lot, whether you were inside it or not.

How did it slip so quietly out of our life?
I hate - I really hate - to think of some other bum
swinging those heavy flower-heads left to right.
I hate even more to think of it mouldering on a tip
or torn to shreds - a piece here wiping a dipstick,
a piece there tied round a crack in a lead pipe.

It's all a long time ago now, darling, a long time,
but tonight just like our first night here I am
with my head light in my hands and my glass full,
staring at the big drowsy petals until they start to swim,
loving them but wishing to lift them aside, unbutton them,
tear them, even, if that's what it takes to get through
to the beautiful, moon-white, warm wanting skin of you.

Naya Valdellon's "Double Takes"

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

Double Takes
by Naya Valdellon

    About suffering, they were never wrong,
    The Old Masters: how well they understood
    Its human position; how it takes place
    While someone is eating or opening a window or just walking
    dully along.

    - W.H. Auden

( The poem. )

Adrienne Rich

[3butterflies.livejournal.com]

IX
from Twenty-One Love Poems

Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live
I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.
It's not my own face I see there, but other faces,
even your face at another age.
Whatever's lost there is needed by both of us—
a watch of old gold, a water-blurred fever chart,
a key . . . . Even the silt and pebbles of the bottom
deserve their glint of recognition. I fear this silence,
this inarticulate life. I'm waiting
for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water
for once, and show me what I can do
for you, who have often made the unnameable
nameable for others, even for me.

--Adrienne Rich

Fever, from each window - Stan Mir

[3g0.livejournal.com]

The wind is all arms
& cruel.  It does not do
what you do.  Midday
the streets are noiseless.

I have set a limit
to my talking.  Glove,
you have fooled me
into a hand.

Guam's Caution - Carolyn Guinzio

[3g0.livejournal.com]

This is what happens
from letting them go:
First, a clotting, 
ungodly, of the understory.
A severing of air and color.
What falls dead, shrub or bird,
will turn into the grey 
abundance.  Spiders
in chandelier lattices cross,
filling the gaps between trees.
There will be no stopping
what passes being stopped.
We are alone and need
every part of ourselves.
We are meant to see
into the water,
into the sky between leaves.
These were two of our many
blue things.  Spiders
fatten, listening
with their feet.

"Waves" by Katherine Mansfield.

[tricklingdust.livejournal.com]

(I'm new here, so here goes nothing! Hope you enjoy!)

I saw a tiny God
Sitting
Under a bright blue umbrella
That had white tassels
And forked ribs of gold.
Below him His little world
Lay open to the sun.
The shadow of His hat
Lay upon a city.
When he stretched forth His hand
A lake became a dark tremble.
When he kicked up His foot
It became night in the mountain passes.

But thou art small!
There are gods far greater than thou.
They rise and fall,
The tumbling gods of the sea.
Can thy heart heave such sighs,
Such hollow savage cries,
Such windy breath,
Such groaning death?
And can thy arm enfold
The old,
The cold,
The changeless dreadful places
Where the herds
Of horned sea-monsters
And the screaming birds
Gather together?
From those silent men
That lie in the pen
Of our pearly prisons,
Canst thou hunt thy prey?
Like us canst thou stay
Awaiting thine hour,
And then rise like a tower
And crash and shatter?

There are neither trees nor bushes
In my country,
Said the tiny God.
But there are streams
And waterfalls
And mountain-peaks
Covered with lovely weed.
There are little shores and safe harbours,
Caves for cool and plains for sun and wind.
Lovely is the sound of the rivers,
Lovely the flashing brightness
Of the lovely peaks.
I am content.

But Thy kingdom is small,
Said the God of the Sea.
Thy kingdom shall fall;
I shall not let thee be.
Thou art proud!
With a loud
Pealing of laughter,
He rose and covered
The tiny God's land
With the tip of his hand,
With the curl of his fingers:
And after--

The tiny God
Began to cry