Nicole Blackman - In The Movie Now

[bloodrebel333.livejournal.com]

Nothing like listening to a poet reading her own work.

Nicole Blackman – In The Movie Now

There is no glory in trying to make love to men who only know how to fuck. Man after man after man after man. Raised on porn. Out all day, while he's been watching two-dollar videos, now piles by the VCR. Out all day, at work, at class, at the gym, while he's been making plans.

( You don't fight, he takes it from you, he takes it from you, he takes it from you now it isn't yours, how could it be, isn't yours anymore, never will be again. One eye open focusing on a window years of this and you don't even say anything anymore. This is how it is, how it will always be. You're in the movie now. It doesn't hurt anymore. You shut down, examining fibres in the pillowcase, counting them until he's finished. Seventy-seven, seventy-eight, seventy-nine he says look at me, look at me it's no good unless you look at me you look right through him look at your bookshelf your grandmother's patio your list of things to do this weekend the basal leaves drying by the window.  )

Robert Hass - A Story About The Body

[bloodrebel333.livejournal.com]

A Story About The Body

Robert Hass

 

The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had
watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and
he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was
like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly
when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One
night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she
turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like
that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and
when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance
that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity---like music---
withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said,
"I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin
through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the
porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found
when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the
bowl---she must have swept them from the corners of her studio---was
full of dead bees.

from Elegy for Alto, Christopher Okigbo

[moireach.livejournal.com]

from Elegy for Alto
Christopher Okigbo [1932-1967]

For beyond the blare of sirened afternoons, beyond the motorcades;
The voices and days, the echoing highways; beyond the latescence
Of our dissonant airs; through our curtained eyeballs, through our shuttered sleep,
Onto our forgotten selves, onto our broken images; beyond the barricades
Commandments and edicts, beyond the iron tables beyond the elephant's
Legendary patience, beyond the inviolable bronze bust; beyond our crumbling towers --

Beyond the iron path careering along the same beaten track --

The glimpse of a dream lies smouldering in a cave,
together with the mortally wounded birds.
Earth, unbind me; let me be the prodigal;
let this be the ram's ultimate prayer to the tether ...

An old star departs, leaves us here on the shore
Gazing heavenward for a new star approaching;
The new star appears, foreshadows its going
Before a going and coming that goes on forever ...


[Christopher Okigbo was killed in the Nigerian Civil War; this is from his last book of poems.]

"The Book of Yolek" by Anthony Hecht

[pirate-poet.livejournal.com]

The Book of Yolek

Wir haben ein Gesetz
Und nach dem Gesetz soll er sterben

We have a law,
and by that law he must die

The dowsed coals fume and hiss after your meal
Of grilled brook trout, and you saunter off for a walk
Down the fern trail, it doesn't matter where to,
Just so you're weeks and worlds away from home,
And among midsummer hils have set up camp
In the deep bronze glories declining day.

You remember, peacefully, an earlier day
In childhood, remember a quite specific meal:
A corn roast and bonfire in summer camp.
That summer you got lost on a Nature Walk;
More than you dared admit, you thought of home;
No one else knows where the mind wanders to.

The fifth of August, 1942.
It was morning and very hot. It was the day
They came at dawn with rifles to The Home
For Jewish Children, cutting short the meal
Of bread and soup, lining them up to walk
In close formation off to a special camp.

How often you have thought about that camp,
As though in some strange way you were driven to,
And about the children, and how they were made to walk,
Yolek who had bad lungs, who wasn't a day
Over five years old, commanded to leave his meal
And shamble between armed guards to his long home.

We're approaching to August again. It will drive home
The regulation torments of that camp
Yolek was sent to, his small, unfinished meal,
The electric fences, the numeral tattoo,
The quite extraordinary heat of the day
They were all forced to take on that terrible walk.

Whether on a silent, solitary walk
Or among crowds, far off or safe at home,
You will remember, helplessly, that day,
And the smell of smoke, and the loudspeakers of the camp.
Wherever you are, Yolek will be there, too.
His unuttered name will interrupt your meal.

Prepare to receive him in your home some day.
Though they killed him in the camp they sent him to,
He will walk in as you're sitting down to a meal.


--Anthony Hecht