(no subject)

[projectmatt.livejournal.com]

Nikki Giovanni - We Are Virginia Tech

nothing false and possible is love (xxxiv)

[magneticsyntax.livejournal.com]

nothing false and possible is love
(who's imagined,therefore is limitless)
love's to giving as to keeping's give;
as yes is to if,love is to yes

must's a schoolroom in the month of may:
life's the deathboard where all now turns when
(love's a universe beyond obey
or command,reality or un-)

proudly depths above why's first because
(faith's last doubt and humbly heights below)
kneeling,we-true lovers-pray that us
will ourselves continue to outgrow

all whose mosts if you have known and i've
only we our least begin to guess

-----------------------------------------------------------
nothing false and possible is love (xxxiv)
by E. E. Cummings

"The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" - Li Po

[ex-allenb.livejournal.com]

"The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter"
(from Cathay, 1915)
by Ezra Pound (1885-1972)

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chōkan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-tō-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
                      As far as Chō-fū-sa.

                                 By Rihaku (Li Po)

(no subject)

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

[This was posted about 2 years ago. Much time has passed; I hope it is okay to post it again]

Meditation at Lagunitas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves : justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Robert Hass

Bike Messenger Leading the People--Dominique Lowell

[aria-muse.livejournal.com]

I burn my own house down cause it ain’t my house
it’s your house
your shit your shit your shit
incitement to riot
burn it down burn it down burn it down burn it
down burn it down
there’s so much paper
burn it down burn it down burn it down
the kindling’s there the fuel for the fire
it would glow burn beautiful orange licking flames
paper paper paper paper
it’s all just fuel for the fire
the big bonfire
violence against buildings
violence against property
the ultimate act of rebellion
and I’m gonna build me a guillotine
at One Sansome
right by The Wall
right where it says “The Sharper Image”
grab these fuckers by the hair
drag em by their power nooses
and chop their lousy heads off
it’s French Revolution time
burn it down
and there’ll be a huge famous painting of me
bike messenger leading the people
yeah

( 43 years she said )

I am shocked, shocked! by the shortage of David Ignatow in the archives.

[ex-catachre.livejournal.com]

"I would be buried beside my parents..."
by David Ignatow

I would be buried beside my parents
to be told, Yes, our darling son,
it could have been better,
but we loved you. Lie down
beside us, face up to the sky.


from Shadowing The Ground


Rescue The Dead
by David Ignatow

Finally, to forgo love is to kiss a leaf,
is to let rain fall nakedly upon your head,
is to respect fire,
is to study man's eyes and his gestures
as he talks,
is to set bread upon the table
and a knife discreetly by,
is to pass through crowds
like a crowd of oneself.
Not to love is to live.

To love is to be led away
into a forest where the secret grave
is dug, singing, praising darkness
under the trees.
To live is to sign your name,
is to ignore the dead,
is to carry a wallet
and shake hands.

To love is to be a fish.
My boat wallows in the sea.
You who are free,
rescue the dead.


from Rescue The Dead

"Medusa" by Patricia Smith

[fly-nimue-fly.livejournal.com]

Poseidon was easier than most.
He calls himself a god,
but he fell beneath my fingers
with more shaking than any mortal.
He wept when my robe fell from my shoulders.

I made him bend his back for me,
listened to his screams break like waves.
We defiled that temple the way it should be defiled,
screaming and bucking our way from corner to corner.
The bitch goddess probably got a real kick out of that.
I'm sure I'll be hearing from her.

She'll give me nightmares for a week or so;
that I can handle.
Or she'll turn the water in my well into blood;
I'll scream when I see it,
and that will be that.
Maybe my first child
will be born with the head of a fish.
I'm not even sure it was worth it,
Poseidon pounding away at me, a madman,
loosing his immortal mind
because of the way my copper skin swells
in moonlight.

Now my arms smoke and itch.
Hard scales cover my wrists like armor.
C'mon Athena, he was only another lay,
and not a particularly good one at that,
even though he can spit steam from his fingers.
Won't touch him again. Promise.
And we didn't mean to drop to our knees
in your temple,
but our bodies were so hot and misaligned.
It's not every day a gal gets to sample a god,
you know that. Why are you being so rough on me?

I feel my eyes twisting,
the lids crusting over and boiling,
the pupils glowing red with heat.
Athena, woman to woman,
could you have resisted him?
Would you have been able to wait
for the proper place, the right moment,
to jump those immortal bones?

Now my feet are tangled with hair,
my ears are gone. My back is curving
and my lips have grown numb.
My garden boy just shattered at my feet.
Dammit, Athena,
take away my father's gold.
Send me away to live with the lepers.
Give me a pimple or two.
But my face. To have men never again
be able to gaze at my face,
growing stupid in anticipation
of that first touch,
how can any woman live like that?
How will I be able
to watch their warm bodies turn to rock
when their only sin was desiring me?
All the want is to see me sweat.
They only want to touch my face
and run their fingers through my...
my hair


is it moving?

"Instructions to Vampires" by Fleur Adcock

[bennmorland.livejournal.com]

I have a peculiar way of attributing and citing poems, but the body of the poem is unchanged, always.

( Instructions to Vampires )

"The Old Astronomer to His Pupil" by Sarah Williams

[bennmorland.livejournal.com]

This poem's concluding couplet is on the tombstone of a famous astronomer, whose name escapes me right now. I noticed it on someone's icon here in this community, checked the community's index, and was shocked to see it wasn't up here! So, here it is:

( The Old Astronomer to His Pupil )