Elizabeth in Italy

[jlsh.livejournal.com]

Elizabeth in Italy

'Suddenly she slapped me, hard across the face.
I implored, but she declined to have any further
Social or sexual (so she put it) intercourse with me.
Neither would she give me either a personal picture
Or a lock of her most beautful hair.
Indeed, she demanded, her exquisite voice
Quite hard, the return of her handkerchief
And any other things (I murmured, 'mementoes,'
But she repeated 'things') I might have stolen
From her in my privileged position as her servant.
God only knew what had made her ask me
Fetch her the bathrobe that terrible night.
('That beautiful night,' I recollected aloud.)
Did I believe our positions were reversed?
(I whitened at the accusation.) Well, then,
She wished to make clear now and for so long
As the relationship ('Madam!' cried I) lasted,
That it could only do so if I went to bed first,
Where she would come at her pleasure.
I could make no clearer sign of my heartfelt
Than by the impassioned and repeated kissing,
There and then, of her magnificent left breast
Which had come out of hiding towards the end
Of her peroration. Whereupon she slapped me again.'


-Richard Weber

from the new poet laureate

[bravest-unsaid.livejournal.com]

Pigeons at Dawn
by Charles Simic

Extraordinary efforts are being made
To hide things from us, my friend.
Some stay up into the wee hours
To search their souls.
Others undress each other in darkened rooms.

The creaky old elevator
Took us down to the icy cellar first
To show us a mop and a bucket
Before it deigned to ascend again
With a sigh of exasperation.

Under the vast, early-dawn sky
The city lay silent before us.
Everything on hold:
Rooftops and water towers,
Clouds and wisps of white smoke.

We must be patient, we told ourselves,
See if the pigeons will coo now
For the one who comes to her window
To feed them angel cake,
All but invisible, but for her slender arm.

charles simic named new poet laureate

[meandyouyouyou.livejournal.com]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/02/books/02poet.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Private Eye

To find clues where there are none,
That's my job now, I said to the
Dictionary on my desk. The world beyond
My window has grown illegible,
And so has the clock on the wall.
I may strike a match to orient myself

In the meantime, there's the heart
Stopping hush as the building
Empties, the elevators stop running,
The grains of dust stay put.
Hours of quiescent sleuthing
Before the Madonna with the mop

Shuffles down the long corridor
Trying doorknobs, turning mine.
That's just little old me sweating
In the customer's chair, I'll say.
Keep your nose out of it.
I'm not closing up till he breaks.

- Charles Simic

Love - Matthew Dickman

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

Love

We fall in love at weddings and auctions, over glasses
of wine in Italian restaurants where plastic grapes hang
on the lattice, our bodies throb
in the checkout line, the bus stop, at basketball games
and we can’t keep our hands off each other
until we can—
so we turn to rubber masks and handcuffs,
falling in love again.
We go to movies and sit in the air conditioned dark
with strangers who are in love
with heroes like Peter Parker
who loves a girl he can’t have
because he loves saving the world in red and blue tights
more than he would love to have her ankles wrapped around
his waist or his tongue between her legs.
While we watch films
in which famous people play famous people
who experience pain,
the boy who sold us popcorn loves the girl
who sold us our tickets
and stares at the runs in her stockings
every night,
even though she is in love
with the skinny kid who sold her cigarettes at the 7-11,
and if the world had any compassion
it would let the two of them pass
a Marlboro Light back and forth
until their fingers eventually touched, their mouths
sucking and blowing.
If the world knew how
the light bulb loved the socket
then we would all be better off.
We could all dive head first into the sticky parts.
We could make sweat a religion
and praise the holiness of smelliness.

( I am going to stop here )

---Matthew Dickman

from The Wasteland - T.S. Eliot

[opheliablue.livejournal.com]

T.S. Eliot reading part of 'The Wasteland': (audio over photos, not actual footage of him reading)

'Her Kind' - Anne Sexton

[opheliablue.livejournal.com]

I meant to post this ages ago but I've got a feeling I didn't.

I hope it's ok to post this, since part of it is about Anne Sexton rather than her reading - but it does contain her reading 'Her Kind' and it's rare to find footage of her reading.

ship to shore

[meandyouyouyou.livejournal.com]

Ship to Shore

A wire down, hissing
in the water between two
hollow tin towers bolted
down to different stones
on opposite shores. Fish
that swam too near now
bob on the surface like purses—
their eyes the identical yellow
of anti-freeze. Can you see
yourself in the opaque eye?
Get closer—right up to it. Now
tell that poor dead fish something—
something helpful. The last thing
you told me was that I was
getting fat. True, I was oh
so much fatter then.

- Jennifer L. Knox

David Malouf, "Reading Horace Outside Sydney: 1970"

[the-grynne.livejournal.com]

READING HORACE OUTSIDE SYDNEY: 1970

The distance is deceptive. Sydney glitters invisible
in its holocaust of air just thirty miles away. In Rome,
two thousand years from here, a goosequill scrapes, two crack divisions
are hurled against a furclad barbarous northern people pushing

south into history, small throats are cut at committee-tables,
a marriage dies in bed; bald officials like old pennies
worn smooth by time and trade were once my copper-keen school-fellows
who studied Cicero and shook their heads over the fall

of virtue in high places - now on pills, twelve stories high
in air, they shake their heads and fall and rise and walk again.
Somewhere across a border shabby barefoot warriors
stumble into grass, an empire mourns, in small wars seeking

boundaries against death. Over the traffic, over the harbour, lions
roar, schoolboys scramble out of nightmares, mineral stocks
fall with a noiseless crash, the sigh of millions. Cicadas
are heard, shrill under stones, in the long suspension of our breath.

Out here wheat breathes and surges, poplars flare. On the highway, lorries
throb toward city squares. Off in the blue a Cessna bi-plane,
crop-dusting lucerne, turns to catch the sun. The brilliant granule
climbs on out of sight. Its shadows dance in my palm.


DAVID MALOUF

(no subject)

[ravengirl.livejournal.com]

The night still frightens you.
You know it is interminable
And of vast, unimaginable dimensions.
"That's because His insomnia is permanent,"
You've read some mystic say.
Is it the point of His schoolboy's compass
That pricks your heart?

Somewhere perhaps the lovers lie
Under the dark cypress trees,
Trembling with happiness,
But here there's only your beard of many days
And a night moth shivering
Under your hand pressed against your chest.

Oldest child, Prometheus
Of some cold, cold fire you can't even name
For which you're serving slow time
With that night moth's terror for company.


The Oldest Child
by Charles Simic

(no subject)

[suthnoli.livejournal.com]

Bloody music. I hate the way it infiltrates.
Its nasty line in eavesdropping on what's
going on inside. Good spying, because it
knows exactly when it can make you open
the can, uncork the bottle, break the seal on
the jar- all the nooks where you had hidden
the raw unchewed material. it hoiks out
and waves it about in front of your eyes. Look
and remember, it says. You thought you could
lock this away? Can blood hide from a cat?
Can petrol hide from a flame? No more shall
this be concealed. Listen to me, listen to me,
listen to me.

-Michael Rosen.