Wuthering Heights

[judgewargrave.livejournal.com]

Sylvia Plath

The horizons ring me like faggots,
Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.
Touched by a match, they might warm me,
And their fine lines singe
The air to orange
Before the distances they pin evaporate,
Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color.
But they only dissolve and dissolve
Like a series of promises, as I step forward.

There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.

The sheep know where they are,
Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,
Grey as the weather.
The black slots of their pupils take me in.
It is like being mailed into space,
A thin, silly message.
They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,
All wig curls and yellow teeth
And hard, marbly baas.

I come to wheel ruts, and water
Limpid as the solitudes
That flee through my fingers.
Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;
Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.
Of people the air only
Remembers a few odd syllables.
It rehearses them moaningly:
Black stone, black stone.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright
Among the horizontals.
The grass is beating its head distractedly.
It is too delicate
For a life in such company;
Darkness terrifies it.
Now, in valleys narrow
And black as purses, the house lights
Gleam like small change.

(no subject)

[seamusd.livejournal.com]

Pablo Neruda

Ode to My Socks

Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder's hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,

Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons:
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.

They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.

Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere as schoolboys
keep fireflies,
as learned men collect
sacred texts,
I resisted the mad impulse to put them
in a golden cage and each day give them
birdseed and pieces of pink melon.

Like explorers in the jungle
who hand over the very rare green deer
to the spit and eat it with remorse,
I stretched out my feet and pulled on
the magnificent socks and then my shoes.

The moral of my ode is this:
beauty is twice beauty
and what is good is doubly good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool in winter.

(translated by Robert Bly)

( original Spanish )

(no subject)

[seamusd.livejournal.com]

David Wojahn

For Townes Van Zandt, 1946-1997

Death was his subject & music & drink his form, & upon him
was bestowed the dubious gift of prophecy--that he would die
at fifty-two, in homage to his father, & on New Year's Day,

in homage to Hank Williams. Death his subject, which is to say
he understood tradition, that life, for example, is brutish
& short, but absolved by moments of defining clarity:

rain on a conga drum, the days like rain
on a conga drum. Melodies plaintive & the voice
hurled out from a shaman's cave you visit

when all other means have failed. & you stand
with his ensemble in the winter rain, the outlaws
& chain-smoking whores, the track marks & betrayals,

the dead beloveds forever asleep
on culvert blankets beneath the four-lanes,
the brown bag passed & shared on the curb

with your pals before the heat of the day,
to celebrate your windfall from the sale of plasma.
Our longings are content & content is error.

& our longings are form, which is error as well.
Drink was his form & death was his music,
music his drink & death his form, & a silence

prowls between the notes of his every song,
which is not error, a terrible soothing silence
which tells me, for I love his songs, that the likes

of Townes Van Zandt will never come again, which is
another way to understand tradition,
& another absolving of clarity. It was Tucson
( Read more... )

To Dreams

[guillams-ocean.livejournal.com]

To Dreams

I'm still living at all the old addresses,
Wearing dark glasses even indoors,
On the hush-hush sharing my bed
With phantoms, visiting in the kitchen

After midnight to check the faucet.
I'm late for school, and when I get there
No one seems to recognize me.
I sit disowned, sequestered and withdrawn.

These small shops open only at night
Where I make my unobtrusive purchases,
These back-door movie houses in seedy neighborhoods
Still showing grainy films of my life,

The hero always full of extravagant hope
Losing it all in the end?-whatever it was-
Then walking out into the cold, disbelieving light
Waiting close-lipped at the exit.

--Charles Simic