Theodore Sturgeon poem

[doranwen.livejournal.com]

Poem someone posted on whatwasthatbook, from a book they'd read ages ago.


To the loneliest one,

There is in certain living souls
A quality of loneliness unspeakable,
So great it must be shared
As company is shared by lesser beings.
Such a loneliness is mine; so know by this
That in immensity
There is one lonelier than you.

~Theodore Sturgeon~

Owen, Wilfred -- Purple

[mm511.livejournal.com]

Purple
    -Wilfred Owen

Vividly gloomy, with bright darkling glows
Of nebulae and warm, night-shimmering shores!
Stain of full fruits, wines, passions, and the cores
Of all quick hearts! Yet from its deeps there blows
Aroma and romance of violets;
Softness of far land, hazed; pacific lift
Of smoke through quiet trees; and that wild drift
Of smoulder when the flare of evening sets.

Solemn, columnar, thunder-throning cloud
Wears it so stately that therein the King
Stands before men, and lies in death's hand, proud.
Purest, it is the diamond dawn of spring;
And yet the veil of Venus, whose rose skin,
Mauve-marbled, purples Eros' mouth for sacred sin.

(no subject)

[seamusd.livejournal.com]

David Wojahn

Dirge Sung with Marianne Faithful

The heart laid siege upon too long. The heart
imploding starlike on its violent chambers.
Dope-sick, booze-sick, heart-sick heart, cliche

and creaking ruby-colored rope. Piaf-throated heart,
its whiskey trill, noosed tonight against the notes of
"Madame George," its plundered ravishments

and ventricles. The heart most shut and always
the heart most naked, inward-traveling heart,
and always away from us. Heart in the form

of a single spot, the Bottom Line in Nineteen
Eighty-something, though her hair's still golden,
impossibly long, and the song remains

her ravaged "As Tears Go By." Her 'Sing about me
when I die and I'll come back to haunt you.'
Cliche and ruby-colored rope: when I hear her I can only

feel terror; when I hear her I can only
think of you. It is the evening of the day.
It is memory and the coffin-narrow bedroom

of the rented house in London, and the figures that I can't
make out, one of them strung-out and shivering,
are you and I upon the lambent sheets. And you

still living, though the thread that bound you there
was not my arms, not my fingers that stroked
damp hair, but only "Strange Weather," then again

strange weather, bass pulse, cymbal-brush slur, her growl
and wail trembling the tiny speaker, yellow ember
of the tape deck's dial, over and over, bristling through

our dream-rinsed sleepless night. Let me leave this place,
your voices' dual necromancy, mingling of terror,
lament and rave: fetal with the shakes,

punctum of the needle marks, blue ellipses
laddering the arms. Let me leave this place
unhaunted, love. How sad the inward-

traveling heart. How sad the heart when it has won.

(from The Falling Hour, U. of Pittsburgh Press, 1997)

(no subject)

[schroederjt.livejournal.com]

I think this is one of Margaret Atwood's.

---

It doesn't matter how it is done
these hints, these whispers:

whether it is some god
blowing through your head
as through a round bone
flute, or bright
stones fallen on the sand

or a charlatan, stringing you
a line with bird gut,
or smoke, or the taut hair
of a dead girl singing.

It doesn't matter what is said
but you can feel
those crystal hands, stroking
the air around your body
tull the air glows white

and you are like the moon
seen from the earth, oval and gentle
and filled with light.

The moon seen from the moon
a different thing.

Impenetrable Forest

[skopparakringla.livejournal.com]

The person you have in mind is lost. That's the picture I'm getting. He believes he is lost in the middle of an impenetrable forest. His head is full of trees. Branches he's bumping into. Brambles he's tangled up in. Paths that lead nowhere. Animals that jeer at him and run away. Here and there the glimpse of an elusive maiden, wearing a dress of what appears to be white cheesecloth. I'm getting some insects too, the stinging variety. This is not pleasant. The sun is sinking. The shadows are darkening. Things could hardly be worse.

Then there's you. Where do you come into it? You're not one to resist an opportunity, the sort of opportunity he presents. Some would call it meddling, but you think of it as helpfulness. I apologize for being so frank but I'm just the messenger. Here you come, descending in your pinkish cloud, glowing like a low-wattage light bulb or an aquarium in a chintzy bar. Feathers sprout from your shoulders, rays of light shoot out from you, silver-and-gold confetti wafts down from you like metallic dandruff. It does not occur to you that your dress is covered with tiny fish hooks. On some of them scraps of bait are still hanging: cricket wings, worm torsos, old bank deposit slips.

There there, you say. A whisk here, a flick there, with your magic wand - transparent plastic, with a miniature motorcar in it that slides up and down in a sparkly fluid when shaken - and the brambles vanish. The sun reverses direction, the paths straighten out, dawn occurs.

Voila! you say. Your debts are paid, your emotional problems are solved, your illnesses are cured. Not only that, but your childhood sorrows - the ones that held you back and bogged you down - they've been erased. Now you can get on with it.

He looks at you without gratitude. What is this it I'm supposed to be getting on with? he says.

You don't know? you ask, with an irritation you try to conceal. I've come down into this stupid woodlot, gone to major trouble, cleared away a lifetime of junk for you, and you still don't know?

You don't understand much, he says. Why do you think I was lost in the impenetrable forest in the first place?

- Margaret Atwood

Apollo Takes Charge of His Muses, by A. E. Stalling

[doranwen.livejournal.com]

Found this poem a few years back online and liked it, saved in a document, and rediscovered it today so I decided to share.


Apollo Takes Charge of His Muses --
A.E. Stallings

They sat there, nine women, much the same age,
The same poppy-red hair, and similar complexions
Freckling much the same in the summer glare,
The same bright eyes of green melting to blue
Melting to golden brown, they sat there,
Nine women, all of them very quiet, one,
Perhaps, was looking at her nails, one plaited
Her hair in narrow strands, one stared at a stone,
One let fall a mangled flower from her hands,
All nine of them very quiet, and the one who spoke
Said, softly,

"Of course he was very charming, and he smiled,
Introduced himself and said he'd heard good things,
Shook hands all round, greeted us by name,
Assured us it would all be much the same,
Explained his policies, his few minor suggestions
Which we would please observe. He looked forward
To working with us. Wouldn't it be fun? Happy
To answer any questions. Any questions? But
None of us spoke or raised her hand, and questions
There were none; what has poetry to do with reason
Or the sun?"

to jim lowel's goldfish; d.a. levy

[ubicumque.livejournal.com]

there is little or nothing
of the minds nightwork
so there is pretending & amusement
a goldfish in a toilet bowl
a piece of the captured sun
the heart of a melons wisdom
if of the Spanish marauders
a ripping up of alabaster by its iron roots
carries this treasure off to store in a
galleon that is to die young

instead, i anchor him with old memories
and change his water by day
he thinks it is the tide

(no subject)

[2much-estrogen.livejournal.com]

THE END OF THE WORLD by Archibald MacLeish

Quite unexpectedly as Vasserot
The armless ambidextran was lighting
A match between his great and second toe,
And Ralph the lion was engaged in biting
The neck of Madame Sossman while the drum
Pointed, and Teeny was about to cough
In waltz-time swinging Jock by the thumb—
Quite unexpectedly the top blew off:

And there, there overhead, there, there hung over
Those thousands of white faces, those dazed eyes,
There in the starless dark, the poise, the hover,
There with vast wings across the canceled skies,
There in the sudden blackness the black pall
Of nothing, nothing, nothing— nothing at all.