cartographic by joshua rivkin

[mythgene.livejournal.com]

In maps of antiquity continents
threaten to fall
from the world and vanish

into a serpent's open jaw as if
land drawn
in relief could disappear in blue-

gray mouths of ocean or demon.
A skin over
things, we guard ourselves

flesh with clothes, eyes with shade, distance
between one
love and the next. Carefully

we watch objects of worry
glass marks
on coffee tables, widening rings

of Saturn or Jupiter, a dangerous orbit
of stain and scare,
then risk each other whenever possible.

Like how we threw you, water on fire,
all of us and couldn't
stop. This was before

and I didn't think you'd make it.
We passed you
between us. Gave you up instead

of each other as if you were the offering
for sins we had yet
to name. We were young enough
( Read more... )

Landscape

[meandyouyouyou.livejournal.com]

Landscape

You can take blood from my arm but you can't have my shoes. The shoes are the windows onto the soul. Mine were made for walking but I drive everywhere. When I have to walk I get cranky. Or I think about things, things I don't want to think about. Like the time they pushed all the pianos into the street and doused them with gasoline, and that young woman, the journalist, they shot her in the neck with a tranquilizer dart. Or the kittens I saw floating down the river on the refrigerator door. Pieces of the city drifted past us. There was the red moon. There were the fake doctors with their fake doctors' bags loaded with dynamite. I threw my sweater in the river. Big deal. A day later it turned up on my doorstep, folded and smelling like lemons. This made me furious.

- Michael Earl Craig

Help! A dire request and a gift of Frank O'Hara

[nattyleedread.livejournal.com]

Hello, I am in desperate need of sports poems, a kind of poems that I wouldn't even know where to find except through here and you wonderful folks. They can be about any sport at all, the only requirement is that they have to be about sports, and I would appreciate so much any that you can think of or lead me to!

Thanks ever so much.

here's one of my favorite Frank O'Hara poems

Steps

How funny you are today New York
like Ginger Rogers in Swingtime
and St. Bridget's steeple leaning a little to the left

here I have just jumped out of a bed full of V-days
(I got tired of D-days) and blue you there still
accepts me foolish and free
all I want is a room up there
and you in it
and even the traffic halt so thick is a way
for people to rub up against each other
and when their surgical appliances lock
they stay together
for the rest of the day (what a day)
I go by to check a slide and I say
that painting's not so blue

where's Lana Turner
she's out eating
and Garbo's backstage at the Met
everyone's taking their coat off
so they can show a rib-cage to the rib-watchers
and the park's full of dancers with their tights and shoes
in little bags
who are often mistaken for worker-outers at the West Side Y
why not
the Pittsburgh Pirates shout because they won
and in a sense we're all winning
we're alive

the apartment was vacated by a gay couple
who moved to the country for fun
they moved a day too soon
even the stabbings are helping the population explosion
though in the wrong country
and all those liars have left the UN
the Seagram Building's no longer rivalled in interest
not that we need liquor (we just like it)

and the little box is out on the sidewalk
next to the delicatessen
so the old man can sit on it and drink beer
and get knocked off it by his wife later in the day
while the sun is still shining

oh god it's wonderful
to get out of bed
and drink too much coffee
and smoke too many cigarettes
and love you so much

Frank O'Hara

"Eternal Youth" by Ben Gleib

[thegreatxavier.livejournal.com]

(no subject)

[little-lady-d.livejournal.com]

e.e. cummings - o thou to whom the musical white spring

O Thou to whom the musical white spring

offers her lily inextinguishable,
taught by thy tremulous grace bravely to fling

Implacable death's mysteriously sable
rob from her redolent shoulders,
Thou from whose
feet reincarnate song suddenly leaping
flameflung, mounts, inimitably to lose
herself where the wet stars softly are keeping

their exquisite dreams - O Love! upon thy dim
shrine of intangible commemoration,
(from whose faint close as some grave languorous hymn

pledge to illimitable dissipation
unhurried clouds of incense fleetly roll)

i spill my bright incalculable soul.