In the same way that the mindless diamond keeps

one spark of the planet's early fires

trapped forever in its net of ice,

it's not love's later heat that poetry holds,

but the atom of the love that drew it forth

from the silence: so if the bright coal of his love

begins to smoulder, the poet hears his voice

suddenly forced, like a bar-room singer's -- boastful

with his own huge feeling, or drowned by violins;

but if it yields a steadier light, he knows

the pure verse, when it finally comes, will sound

like a mountain spring, anonymous and serene.

Beneath the blue oblivious sky, the water

sings of nothing, not your name, not mine.

pyreneeees.livejournal.com

I hate to be this person, but I am going through a terrible breakup of a three-year relationship and I would love poetry to make me feel better. Any poetry! Poetry about love, loss, breakups - or just poetry you read when you're having a tough time, poetry that cheers you up, anything. I know this is rather general but if you can't ask your favorite poetry community ("if you can't say it at Christmas, when can you, eh?") for poetry love then the world is a pretty bleak place.

In exchange, here is a very funny poem about the period after a breakup. I think it's just 30 lines so I'm going to keep it above the cut, but let me know if I should add a cut.

Bitcherel
by Eleanor Brown

You ask what I think of your new acquisition;
and since we are now to be 'friends',
I'll strive to the full to cement my position
with honesty. Dear - it depends.

It depends upon taste, which must not be disputed;
for which of us does understand
why some like their furnishings pallid and muted,
their cookery wholesome, but bland?

There isn't a law that a face should have features,
it's just that they generally do;
God couldn't give colour to all of his creatures,
and only gave wit to a few;

I'm sure she has qualities, much underrated,
that compensate amply for this,
along with a charm that is so understated
it's easy for people to miss.

And if there are some who choose clothing to flatter
what beauties they think they possess,
when what's underneath has no shape, does it matter
if there is no shape to the dress?

It's not that I think she is boring, precisely,
that isn't the word I would choose;
I know there are men who like girls who talk nicely
and always wear sensible shoes.

It's not that I think she is vapid and silly;
it's not that her voice makes me wince;
but - chilli con carne without any chilli
is only a plateful of mince...

catpaws.livejournal.com

Why Do You Stay Up So Late?
by Don Paterson

I'll tell you if you really want to know;
remember that day you lost two years ago
at the rockpool where you sat and played the jeweller
with all those stones you'd stolen from the shore?
Most of them went dark and nothing more,
but sometimes one would blink the secret colour
it had locked up somewhere in its stony sleep.
This is how you knew the ones to keep.

So I collect the dull things of the day
in which I see some possibility
but which are dead and which have the surprise
I don't know, and I have no pool to help me tell -
so I look at them and look at them until
one thing makes a mirror in my eyes
then I paint it with the tear to make it bright.
This is why I sit up through the night.

corinthian-wolf.livejournal.com

I have never opened a book in my life,
made love to a woman, picked up a knife,
taken a drink, caught the first train
or walked beyond the last house in the lane.

Nor could I put a name to my own face.
Everything we know to be the case
draws its signal colour off the sight
till what falls into that intellectual night

we tunnel into this view or another
falls as we have fallen. Blessed Mother,
when I stand between the sunlit and the sun
make me glass: and one night I looked down
( to find the girl look up at me and through )

It was a joy to read out, and perhaps you may spend a few minutes to, in your office, bedroom, on the bus on your iphone.

bohemiabythesea.livejournal.com

Don Paterson

The Shut-In

Good of them, all told, to leave me locked
inside my favourite hour: the whole one early
I came to wait for one I loved too dearly
in this coffered snug below the viaduct
with my dark vernacular ale, Stevenson's
short fiction, and the little game I played
of not thinking of her, except to thumb away
the exquisite stitch that gathers at my breastbone.

The minute hand strains at its lengthening tether
like Achilles on the hare; the luscious beer
refills; the millionth page flowers on the last
of The Bottle Imp… O Fathers, leave me here,
beyond the night, the stars, beyond the vast
infinitesimal letdown of each other!

(From: Don Paterson, Landing Light, London: Faber and Faber, 2003.)

anysomething.livejournal.com

I love all films that start with rain:
rain, braiding a windowpane
or darkening a hung-out dress
or streaming down her upturned face;

one long thundering downpour
right through the empty script and score
before the act, before the blame,
before the lens pulls through the frame

to where the woman sits alone
beside a silent telephone
or the dress lies ruined on the grass
or the girl walks off the overpass,

and all things flow out from that source
along their fatal watercourse.
However bad or overlong
such a film can do no wrong,

so when his native twang shows through
or when the boom dips into view
or when her speech starts to betray
its adaptation from the play,

I think to when we opened cold
on a rain-dark gutter, running gold
with the neon of a drugstore sign,
and I’d read into its blazing line:

forget the ink, the milk, the blood—
all was washed clean with the flood
we rose up from the falling waters
the fallen rain’s own sons and daughters

and none of this, none of this matters.

from Rain, Faber and Faber, London, 2009.

pachamama.livejournal.com

The Swing
by Don Paterson

The swing was picked up for the boys,
for the here-and-here-to-stay
and only she knew why it was
I dug so solemnly

I spread the feet two yards apart
and hammered down the pegs
filled up the holes and stamped the dirt
around its skinny legs

I hung the rope up in the air
and fixed the yellow seat
then stood back that I might admire
my handiwork complete

and saw within its frail trapeze
the child that would not come
of what we knew had two more days
before we sent it home

( I know that there is nothing here )

From Rain, Faber and Bafer, London, 2009. Go buy the book -- it's great!

pachamama.livejournal.com

The Lie
by Don Paterson

As was my custom, I'd risen a full hour
before the house had woken to make sure
that everything was in order with The Lie,
his drip changed and his shackles all secure.

I was by then so practised in this chore
I'd counted maybe thirteen years or more
since last I'd felt the urge to meet his eye.
Such, I liked to think, was our rapport.

I was at full stretch to test some ligature
when I must have caught a ragged thread, and tore
his gag away; though as he made no cry,
I kept on with my checking as before.

Why do you call me The Lie? he said. I swore:
it was a child's voice. I looked up from the floor.
The dark had turned his eyes to milk and sky
and his arms and legs were all one scarlet sore.

He was a boy of maybe three or four.
His straps and chains were all the things he wore.
Knowing I could make him no reply
I took the gag before he could say more

and put it back as tight as it would tie
and locked the door and locked the door and locked the door

from Rain, Faber and Faber, London, 2009.

pachamama.livejournal.com

From his new book released last week.

Two Trees
by Don Paterson

One morning, Don Miguel got out of bed
with one idea rooted in his head:
to graft his orange to his lemon tree.
It took him the whole day to work them free,
lay open their sides and lash them tight.
For twelve months, from the shame or from the fright
they put forth nothing; but one day there appeared
two lights in the dark leaves. Over the years
the limbs would get themselves so tangled up
each bough looked like it gave a double crop,
and not one kid in the village didn't know
the magic tree in Don Miguel's patio.

The man who bought the house had had no dream
so who can say what dark malicious whim
led him to take his axe and split the bole
along its fused seam, then dig two holes.
And no, they did not die from solitude;
nor did their branches bear a sterile fruit;
nor did their unhealed flanks weep every spring
for those four yards that lost them everything,
as each strained on its shackled root to face
the other's empty, intricate embrace.
They were trees, and trees don't weep or ache or shout.
And trees are all this poem is about.

tealight-rookie.livejournal.com

From The Eyes, a 'spiritual portrait' of poems by Spanish poet Antonio Machado.

Profession of Faith
Don Paterson

God is not the sea, but of its nature:
He scatters like the moonlight on the water
or appears on the horizon like a sail.
The sea is where He wakes, or sinks to dreams.
He made the sea, and like the clouds and storms
is born of it, over and over. Thus the Creator
finds himself revived by his own creature:
he thrives on the same spirit he exhales.

I'll make you, Lord, as you made me, restore
the soul you gifted me; in time, uncover
your name in my own. Let that pure source
that pours its empty heart out to us pour
through my heart too; and let the turbid river
of every heartless faith dry up forever.

pachamama.livejournal.com

Cycles

Today, if you listen, you can hear the rough breath
of the early harrows, the human rhythm sing
in the deep ingathered stillness of the earth,
the strong Earth rising in its early Spring...

The word is old, but never seems outdated
and every year arrives like something new,
though it has come so often. Always anticipated,
though not once did you catch it. It caught you.

Even the old leaves of the wintered oak
seem in this late light, some future hue.
The winds exhcange a word in their own tongue.

The leafless trees are black, and yet the horse-dung
heaped up in the fields, a richer black.
Each hour grows younger as it passes through.

-- Don Paterson
from Orpheus, his version of Rilke's Die Sonette an Orpheus
Faber and Faber, 2006

liliths-nymph.livejournal.com

.

This is the animal that never was.
Not knowing that, they loved it anyway;
its bearing, its stride, its high, clear whinny,
right down to the still light of its gaze.

It never was. And yet such was their love
the beast arose, where they had cleared the space;
and in the stable of its nothingness
it shook its white mane out and stamped its hoof.

And so they fed it, not with hay or corn
but with the chance that it might come to pass.
All this gave the creature such a power

its brow put out a horn; one single horn.
It grew inside a young girl’s looking glass,
then one day walked out and passed into her.

~ Don Paterson

pachamama.livejournal.com

The Rat
by Don Paterson

A young man wrote a poem about a rat.
It was the best poem ever written about a rat.
To read it was to ask the rat to perch
on the arm of your chair until you turned the page.
So we wrote to him, but heard nothing; we called,
and called again; then finally we sailed
to the island where he kept the only shop
and rapped his door until he opened up.

We took away his poems. Our hands shook
with excitement. We read them on lightboxes,
under great lamps. They were not much good.
So then we offered what advice we could
on his tropes and turns, his metrical comportment,
on the wedding of the word to the event,
and suggested that he might read this or that.
We said Now: write us more poems like The Rat.

All we got was cheek from him. Then silence.
We gave up on him. Him with his green arrogance
and ingratitude and his one lucky strike.
But today I read The Rat again. Its reek
announced it; then I saw its pisshole stare;
line by line it strained into the air.
Then it hissed. For all the craft and clever-clever
you did not write me, fool. Nor will you ever.

pachamama.livejournal.com

Waking with Russell
by Don Paterson

Whatever the difference is, it all began
the day we woke up face-to-face like lovers
and his four-day-old smile dawned on him again,
possessed him, till it would not fall or waver;
and I pitched back not my old hard-pressed grin
but his own smile, or one I'd rediscovered.
Dear son, I was mezzo del cammin
and the true path was as lost to me as ever
when you cut in front and lit it as you ran.
See how the true gift never leaves the giver:
returned and redelivered, it rolled on
until the smile poured through us like a river.
How fine, I thought, this waking amongst men!
I kissed your mouth and pledged myself forever.

pachamama.livejournal.com

The Wreck
by Don Paterson

But what lovers we were, what lover,
Even when it was all over -

the deadweight bull-black wines we swung
towards each other rang and rang

like bells of blood, our own great hearts.
We slung the drunk boat out of port

and watched our unreal sober life
unmoor, a continent of grief;

The candlelight strange on our faces
like the silent tiny blazes

And coruscations of its wars.
We blew them out and took the stairs

Into the night for the night's work,
stripped off in the timbered dark,

Gently hooked each other on
like aqualungs, and thundered down

To mine our lovely secret wreck.
We surfaced later, breathless, back

To back, then made our way alone
up the mined beach of the dawn.

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I Eat Poetry

Entries tagged with don paterson

Poetry - Don Paterson

Request + poem

Why Do You Stay Up So Late? by Don Paterson

The White Lie

Don Paterson - The Shut-In

The Shut-In

Don Paterson - Rain

sorry, but there are so many good ones in this new book!

did someone say they wanted more?

Two Trees by Don Paterson

Profession of Faith

there may be ice in Texas, but here Spring is on the way...

Unicorn;

apparently based on a true story...

Waking with Russell by Don Paterson

The Wreck, by Don Paterson

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