RIP Liam Rector

[lovelineny.livejournal.com]

http://www.nypost.com/seven/08162007/news/regionalnews/top_n_y__poet_kills_self_regionalnews_peter_cox_____and_andy_geller.htm



The Remarkable Objectivity Of Your Old Friends

We did right by your death and went out,
Right away, to a public place to drink,
To be with each other, to face it.

We called other friends—the ones
Your mother hadn't called—and told them
What you had decided, and some said

What you did was right; it was the thing
You wanted and we'd just have to live
With that, that your life had been one

Long misery and they could see why you
Had chosen that, no matter what any of us
Thought about it, and anyway, one said,

Most of us abandoned each other a long
Time ago and we'd have to face that
If we had any hope of getting it right.

Christina Rossetti - L.E.L.

[speckofinfinity.livejournal.com]

'Whose heart was breaking for a little love.'

Downstairs I laugh, I sport and jest with all;
  But in my solitary room above
I turn my face in silence to the wall;
  My heart is breaking for a little love.
    Though winter frosts are done,
    And birds pair every one,
And leaves peep out, for springtide is begun.

I feel no spring, while spring is wellnigh blown,
  I find no nest, while nests are in the grove:
Woe's me for mine own heart that dwells alone,
  My heart that breaketh for a little love.
    While golden in the sun
    Rivulets rise and run,

( While lilies bud, for springtide is begun. )

The Promise // Sharon Olds

[iatrogenicmyth.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure if this is allowed, but it's a thought-provoking commentary on how the classical style of poetry has disappeared in favor of free-verse poetry: Our Poet Laureate: What's His Name?

And, now, a poem by Sharon Olds that is (shockingly) not in the memories and is exactly the type of poem that the above literary critic hates and that I adore.

The Promise

With the second drink, at the restaurant,
holding hands on the bare table,
we are at it again, renewing our promise
to kill each other. You are drinking gin,
night-blue juniper berry
dissolving in your body, I am drinking Fume,
chewing its fragrant dirt and smoke, we are
taking on earth, we are part soil already,
and wherever we are, we are also in our
bed, fitted, naked, closely
along each other, half passed out
after love, drifting back
and forth across the border of consciousness,
our bodies buoyant, clasped. Your hand
tightens on the table. You're a little afraid
I'll chicken out. What you do not want
is to lie in a hospital bed for a year
after a stroke, without being able
to think or die, you do not want
to be tied to a chair like a prim grandmother,
cursing. The room is dim around us,
ivory globes, pink curtains,
bound at the waist - and outside,
a weightless, luminous, lifted-up
summer twilight. I tell you you do not
know me if you think I will not
kill you. Think how we have floated together
eye to eye, nipple to nipple,
sex to sex, the halves of a creature
drifting up to the lip of matter
and over it - you know me from the bright, blood-
flecked delivery room, if a lion
had you in its jaws I would attack it, if the ropes
binding your soul are your own wrists, I will cut them.

(no subject)

[mercywaits.livejournal.com]

Reflection

You say, This feels like goodbye,
and I stay quiet, curl the sheets
in my hands so I can touch
something solid. Through the dark
I see the bicycle in the corner,
the map on the wall, the dragons
rising from the flat ocean.
I’m sad, you say, are you?
No answer. Enough talk tonight.

No answer? Enough talk tonight,
you say. I’m sad – are you?
Rising from the flat ocean
of the map on the wall, dragons
wrest the bicycle from the corner.
Nothing’s solid in the dark,
or in my hands. I want touch
but stay quiet, curl up in the sheets.
You say, This feels like goodbye.

-- Katharine Hunt

Lines for Winter; Mark Strand.

[acreofbones.livejournal.com]

I was inspired to post Mark Strand because of the darling dopamine_shadow, and her recent post here.


Lines For Winter.

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself --
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

Mark Strand.

(no subject)

[zhai.livejournal.com]

THE EMPRESS OF CERTAIN
by Norbert Hirschhorn

In a Levantine land
her lips are filled with milk and honey.

I approach with laughter, cymbals, ankle-bells,
with horses, flutes, basil and marjoram,

coming as guest, coming as caravan.
Chilled infusions of hibiscus await, blood red.

I come to her incomplete, a chrysalis.
If I am silk,

she will nurture me on her mulberry skin
until I burst into ecdysis.

She sits cross-legged inside her pavilion,
its gossamer curtains shadow

color-striped walls, wind
from the west lifting her henna-red hair.

"Men," she smiles, "men are like dogs — call they come,
throw stones they run."

She captures with silk: A guest and a fish each lasts three days,
"But we can always find another fish."

Princes amuse, Queens are her friends. Every child
dreams of the Empress -- to be her, to be taken by her,

radiant beneath her rainbows.
Some mistake her clarity for cruelty. Good enough is not enough.

"Are you fasting, Sister," asks the man with dark,
melodic eyes. "Not if I lay the table," she replies.

Take me and plant me in her land.

On that day it ends, as one day it must,
she intends I shall be brave.

Say lemon-tree. Say lavender.
Cold moon. Stone arch. Oregano.

(no subject)

[liliths-nymph.livejournal.com]

THE SACRED WAY ~ Angelos Sikelianos

Through the new wound that fate opened in me
I felt the setting sun piercing my heart,
like the sudden surge of the wave
entering through a gash
in a ship rapidly sinking
or at last that evening,
like a man long sick who first comes out
to milk life from the outside world,
I was a solitary walker on the road
that starts from Athens,
and has Eleusis as its sacred goal,
for this road always was for me
Like the road of the soul…flowing
like a great manifest river:
wagons slowly drawn by oxen,
full of haystacks or logs, and other
carriages quickly passing
with the people inside them like shadow
but farther on, as if the world were lost
and nature alone were left, little by little
a stillness settled…and the rock
I saw rooted at the edge,
appeared like a throne the centuries
had destined for me. And, as I sat,
I crossed my hands around my knees,
forgetting whether I had started that day
or whether I had taken
this same road centuries ago.

Langston Hughes

[moonglows.livejournal.com]

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

After a Long, Dry Spell- Tomas Tranströmer (translated by Robert Bly)

[ilex011-reboot.livejournal.com]

The weather is grey now, strange evening
rain creeps down from the sky
and lands silently on the field
as if it intended to overpower a sleeper.

Circles swarm on the fjord's surface;
and that is the only surface there is right now,
the rest is height and depth:
to rise and to sink.

Two pine trunks shoot up
and continue in long, hollow signal-drums.
Cities and the sun gone off.
In the high grass there is thunder.

It's ok to telephone the island that is a mirage.
It's ok to listen to that grey voice.
To thunder, iron ore is honey.
It's ok to live by your own code.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko... as always.

[acreofbones.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine, dopamine_shadow, (who I've grown to care for very deeply) is going through a really rough time with a past break up, and I was reading through my Yevtushenko, as I can always find at least one of his poems for each person I ever come in contact with, this one reminded me of her, (and it explains a lot of what I'm going through at the moment) -  I thought I would post it here.


Breaking Up.

I fell out of love: that’s our story’s dull ending,
as flat as life is, as dull as the grave.
Excuse me--I’ll break off the string of this love song
and smash the guitar. We have nothing to save.

The puppy is puzzled. Our furry small monster
can’t decide why we complicate simple things so--
he whines at your door and I let him enter,
when he scratches at my door, you always go.

Dog, sentimental dog, you’ll surely go crazy,
running from one to the othe like this--
too young to conceive of an ancient idea:
it’s ended, done with, over, kaput. Finis.

Get sentimental and we end up by playing
the old melodrama, "Salvation of Love."
"Forgiveness," we whisper, and hope for an echo;
but nothing returns from the silence above.

Better save love at the very beginning,
avoiding all passionate "nevers," "forevers;"
we ought to have heard what the train wheels were shouting,
"Do not make promises!" Promises are levers.

We should have made note of the broken branches,
we should have looked up at the smokey sky,
warning the witless pretensions of lovers--
the greater the hope is, the greater the lie.

True kindness in love means staying quite sober,
weighing each link of the chain you must bear.
Don’t promise her heaven--suggest half an acre;
not "unto death," but at least to next year.

And don’t keep declaring, "I love you, I love you."
That little phrase leads a durable life--
when remembered again in some loveless hereafter,
it can sting like a hornet or stab like a knife.

So--our little dog in all his confusion
turns and returns from door to door.
I won’t say "forgive me" because I have left you;

I ask pardon for one thing: I loved you before.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko.
Translator Unknown.