since its snowing here

[glass-doll.livejournal.com]

"The Only Rose"
by Yves Bonnefoy
Translated by John Naughton

I

It's snowing, it's returning to a town
Where, as I discover as I go through
Empty streets I come upon by chance,
I might have happily lived some other childhood.
Beneath the snowflakes I notice façades
More beautiful than anything in this world.
Among us, only Alberti, then Sangallo,
At San Biagio, in the most intense room
That desire has ever built, have approached
This perfection, this absence.

And so I gaze avidly
At these masses the snow hides from me.
I seek, above all, in the wandering
Whiteness, those pediments that rise
To a higher level of appearance.
They tear apart the mist, it is as though,
With a hand freed from weight,
The mortal architect had brought to life,
In a single floral stroke,
The form sought for centuries by
The pain of being born into matter.


( the rest )

two poems by alfred yuson

[magneticsyntax.livejournal.com]

The Beach, Plus Pablo

Pablo walked the beach,

Small waves rippled
As large words
Round his sandals.

His sonnets slipped
On the wet stones
Until the passion

Of winds and love
Of sun dried the page
Of the poet's longing.

The beach walked Pablo.

On this island
Their mutual desire
Found a homeland.

Distant was this exile
From the first hearts
The poet touched.

But now as an alien
Calmly reaching out
To the postman.

Pablo became the beach.

Became all waves, all winds,
All sonnets, all stones,
All hearts, all islands.

And the beach became
All poems, all passion,
All longing, all desire.

Together Pablo and the beach
Reached out to sun and sheets,
To poets and seas and postmen.

Together they walked homelands.

Before and After
 

In the beginning
was the word before
it was made flesh
by assigning names
to a man, a woman
and the first garden.

After which the habitat
became a commercial stall
where a sly serpent
sold the first apple
for a bargain between
a tree and the first sin.

Before the garden,
the apple, the sin
was the word
after which flesh
recognized an appetite
for temptation.

Before the fiction
was the need for words
to turn all sins
into a tree of knowledge
where man and woman
can climb one another.

And after, have a final
meal in the garden
before that turned
into a shopping mall
with a busy parking lot
for gods and serpents.

You, Beautiful Anon.

[childecleon.livejournal.com]

Most poets secretly believe
they run on heart-break,
so you have to watch yourself
when a poet tells you that they love you
especially, with their eyes or through a gesture.

When this happens you should seek out
pockets of resistance, scan the horizon for
possible escape routes, remain calm.
This may not be brief, this could hurt very much.

The poet wants to draw the click of vanishing
heels across your path, would like to offer you up
as blood sacrifice for rain; but understands
your ambivalence, and hopes you come round to the idea,
for great poems die laughing from this lack of courage,
their veteran ghosts stalking hope with a pen.

One old soldier sets up camp in your heart.
You only know this from spies, and from
the bloodless trace left in the corner of your eyes.

-Tracy Horn

a bit nonconventional, hope that's alright with you guys...

[suspensionpoint.livejournal.com]

Eric Ott, aka Big Poppa E:
( The Wussy Boy Manifesto )

Dying, Emily Dickinson

[http://users.livejournal.com/rearranged_/]

I heard a fly buzz when I died;
The stillness round my form
Was like the stillness in the air
Between the heaves of storm.

The eyes beside had wrung them dry,
And breaths were gathering sure
For that last onset, when the king
Be witnessed in his power.

I willed my keepsakes, signed away
What portion of me I
Could make assignable,-and then
There interposed a fly,

With blue, uncertain, stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see to see.