I AM

[eullipia.livejournal.com]

John Clare is famously a poet of the rural working class and the Northamptonshire countryside, but he is also a well-known inmate of an insane asylum. This poem, reflecting on the poet’s life, his forgotten achievements and abandonment, was written at the the beginning of twenty years or so in the asylum.

I am!

I am! yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death’s oblivion lost;
And yet I am! and live with shadows tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life nor joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
And e’en the dearest–that I loved the best–
Are strange–nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man has never trod;
A place where woman never smil’d or wept;
There to abide with my creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept:
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie;
The grass below–above the vaulted sky.

–John Clare, written around 1845.

And if you thought that was good, take a look at the John Clare blog.

Tears Idle Tears

[eullipia.livejournal.com]

Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.

Fresh as the first beam glittering on a sail,
That brings our friends up from the underworld,
Sad as the last which reddens over one
That sinks with all we love below the verge;
So sad, so fresh, the days that are no more.

Ah, sad and strange as in dark summer dawns
The earliest pipe of half-awakened birds
To dying ears, when unto dying eyes
The casement slowly grows a glimmering square;
So sad, so strange, the days that are no more.

Dear as remembered kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feigned
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more.

Calling the Snakes

[persephone-blue.livejournal.com]

Nin Andrews

I KNOW THIS story can't be true. But I remember it. I can close my eyes and see it. I'm eleven years old. I know this because it's my birthday, and it's hot as Texas outside. 92 degrees in the shade. It's the first day I'm allowed to go barefoot all year. But I have to ask permission from my dad who says it's never hot enough to take off your shoes. Why? He's from Memphis. My mom hates heat because she's from Boston. I wonder if all marriages are like that. I think so--but that's not what this story is about. Maybe it's not even a story. Maybe I just dreamt it. To explain things--like why I don't like the number eleven. Two ones, side by side, two skinny legs. Stilts, awkward to walk on. Eleven, too old to be a kid, too young to be a woman. I still wear underpants with the days of the week embroidered on each one. Seven pairs, seven colors. My sister is fifteen, and she has a whole collection of pink brassieres. My sister wants to go fishing over at Milton's pond, and she says she will take me because it's my eleventh birthday. But I know that's not why. She doesn't give a hoot about my birthday. Oh no. She knows that if we fish, then Jimmy will fish too. He will talk to me and glance at her. Me, I want to say. Look at me. But he won't. He'll just brag. And I don't want to be there, listening to Jimmy tell stories. Like the one about snakes. Jimmy says he can call the snakes. I don't believe him. I call him a liar. I say, Go ahead, prove it then. And he does. Jimmy calls the snakes. Sitting beside us on the bank of Milton's pond, looking at my sister, he makes a strange noise with his throat and then smirks. He's full of shit. I think he's just showing off. Creep, I say, and stare past him and out at the lake. That's when I see them. Two water moccasins, side by side, a perfect eleven, swimming. Jimmy sees them too, so he starts tossing pebbles at the water. They turn their heads in our direction. I see their sleek heads, the glint of their eyes, the U-swirl in the water as they change directions. The snakes head right for us, and they don't just stop at the water's edge. No Sir, they glide up the red-clay bank, slipping over rocks as Jimmy sings snake tunes and laughs until they're so close he could pick them up. Then he pelts them with stones. When they're almost dead, he slices their heads off with his jack knife, but their bodies continue to dance in slow S's. Why? I ask. Why'd you do that? Because they're two of them, he says. One snake never comes by itself. I'm so mad, I want to punch him, but my sister is shrieking and crying, putting on a big show so Jimmy will put his arm around her. And he does. And they walk off across the meadow towards home, leaving me with the fishing gear. I hear them laugh a little, and watch Jimmy lean his face into hers. Their faces glow in the late afternoon sun. That's the first time they kiss. I hate them then. I hate them both.

Variations on a Text by Vallejo

[lonelybusiness.livejournal.com]

Variations on a Text by Vallejo
by Donald Justice

Me moriré en París con aguacero...

I will die in Miami in the sun,
On a day when the sun is very bright,
A day like the days I remember, a day like other days,
A day that nobody knows or remembers yet,
And the sun will be bright then on the dark glasses of strangers
And in the eyes of a few friends from my childhood
And of the surviving cousins by the graveside,
While the diggers, standing apart, in the still shade of the palms,
Rest on their shovels, and smoke,
Speaking in Spanish softly, out of respect.

I think it will be on a Sunday like today,
Except that the sun will be out, the rain will have stopped,
And the wind that today made all the little shrubs kneel down;
And I think it will be a Sunday because today,
When I took out this paper and began to write,
Never before had anything looked so blank,
My life, these words, the paper, the grey Sunday;
And my dog, quivering under a table because of the storm,
Looked up at me, not understanding,
And my son read on without speaking, and my wife slept.

Donald Justice is dead. One Sunday the sun came out,
It shone on the bay, it shone on the white buildings,
The cars moved down the street slowly as always, so many,
Some with their headlights on in spite of the sun,
And after a while the diggers with their shovels
Walked back to the graveside through the sunlight,
And one of them put his blade into the earth
To lift a few clods of dirt, the black marl of Miami,
And scattered the dirt, and spat,
Turning away abruptly, out of respect.

39

[22by7.livejournal.com]

Because he has bright white teeth, Eg-
    natius whips out a 
tooth-flash on all possible
    (& impossible) occasions.
You're in court. Counsel for defence
    concludes a moving per-
oration. (Grin.) At a funeral,
    on all sides heart-broken
mothers weep for only songs. (Grin.)
    Where, when, whatever the
place or time -- grin. It could be a
    sort of 'tic. If so, it's
a very vulgar tic, Egnatius,
    & one to be rid of.
A Roman, a Tiburtine or
    Sabine, washes his teeth.
Well-fed Umbrians & over-
    fed Etruscans wash theirs
daily. The dark Lanuvians
    (who don't need to), & we
Veronese, all wash our teeth ....
    But we keep them tucked in.
We spare ourselves the nadir of
    inanity -- inane
laughter. You come from Spain. Spaniards
    use their morning urine
for tooth-wash. To us that blinding
    mouthful means one thing &
one only -- the quantity of
    urine you have swallowed. 

- Catullus translated by Peter Whigham.