(no subject)

[spiderskein.livejournal.com]

Elegy for Whatever Had a Pattern in It

                                                  1

Now that the Summer of Love has become the moss of tunnels
and the shadowy mouths of tunnels & all the tunnels lead into the city,

I'm going to put the one largely forgotten, swaying figure of Ediesto Huerta
right in front of you so you can watch him swamp fruit

out of an orchard in the heat of an August afternoon, I'm going to let you

keep your eyes on him as he lifts & swings fifty-pound boxes of late
Elberta peaches up to me where I'm standing on a flatbed trailer & breathing in
tractor exhaust so thick it bends the air, bends things seen through it

so that they seem to swim through the air.

It is a lousy job, & no one has to do it, & we do it.

We do it so that I can show you even what isn't there,
what's hidden. And signed by Time itself. And set spinning,

and is only a spider, after all, with its net waiting for what falls,
for what flies into it, & ages, & turns gray in a matter of minutes. The web
is nothing's blueprint, bleached by the sun & whitened by it, it's what's left

after we've vanished, after we become what falls apart when anyone

touches it, eyelash & collarbone dissolving into air, & time touching
the boxes we are wrapped in like gifts & splintering them

into wood again, at the edge of a wood.

                                      ( 2 )



       -Larry Levis

(no subject)

[wildblueangel47.livejournal.com]

1975

A son asks his father to spiral a football over a tree,
to arc it so the ball arrives an instant before the child.

The child dives—tendons extended, heart bucking, hands
opening jaw-like to clutch what descends from the sky:

mother left today for the institution.
If the ball hits the ground she dies.

That December afternoon the boy’s mother passed away
thirty-three times in the first hour.

Each time he grabbed her head from the snow
and ran it back to his father. Promised

to do better. And he did. He ran hard, focused, dove.
He caught mother’s skull thirteen times in a row

and she’s still not coming home.

~Jeffrey McDaniel, alibi school

Excerpt from "Jubliate Agno," by Christopher Smart

[kleenexwoman.livejournal.com]

Written in a mad-house between 1758 and 1763. More info can be found here; it's a fascinating document.
This section is from Fragment B, part 4. It is not all of the fragment, but it is my favorite part, and I consider it to be the best poem ever written about a cat.

( For I will consider my cat Jeoffry... )

the double image, by anne sexton

[herquivers.livejournal.com]

1.

I am thirty this November.
You are still small, in your fourth year.
We stand watching the yellow leaves go queer,
flapping in the winter rain.
falling flat and washed. And I remember
mostly the three autumns you did not live here.
They said I’d never get you back again.
I tell you what you’ll never really know:
all the medical hypothesis
that explained my brain will never be as true as these
struck leaves letting go.

I, who chose two times
to kill myself, had said your nickname
the mewling mouths when you first came;
until a fever rattled
in your throat and I moved like a pantomine
above your head. Ugly angels spoke to me. The blame,
I heard them say, was mine. They tattled
like green witches in my head, letting doom
leak like a broken faucet;
as if doom had flooded my belly and filled your bassinet,
an old debt I must assume.

( i rot on the wall, my own dorian gray )

Detroit Annie, Hitchhiking by Judy Grahn

[pilgrimaging.livejournal.com]

Her words pour out as if her throat were a broken
artery and her mind were cut-glass, carelessly handled.
You imagine her in a huge velvet hat with great
dangling black feathers,
but she shaves her head instead
and goes for three-day midnight walks.
Sometimes she goes down to the dock and dances
off the end of it, simply to prove her belief
that people who cannot walk on water
are phonies, or dead.
When she is cruel, she is very, very
cool and when she is kind she is lavish.
Fisherman think perhaps she's a fish, but they're all
fools. She figured out that the only way
to keep from being frozen was to
stay in motion, and long ago converted
most of her flesh into liquid. Now when she
smells danger, she spills herself all over,
like gasoline, and lights it.
She leaves the taste of salt and iron
under your tongue, but you don't mind
The common woman is as common
as the reddest wine

(no subject)

[theotherchicago.livejournal.com]

blue blanket

still

there are days

when there is no way

not even a chance

that i'd dare for even a second
glance at the reflection of my body in the mirror
and she knows why

like i know why
she
only cries
when she feels like she's about to lose control

( she knows how much control is worth )

- andrea gibson

Lay your sleeping head, my poetical exegesis...

[mm511.livejournal.com]

( Help me? )

( The poem in question. )

( More excessive text. )