Anna Baladian is a Russian poet that I know nothing about, but I love, love, love this poem.

Magic Spell of Rain

I love the rain, I passionately love the rain,
the mad rains and the gentle rains
the chaste rains and the rains like unbridled women,
refreshing rains and endless boring rains.
I love the rain, I passionately love the rain.
I like to wallow in its tall white grass,
I like to break its threads and walk with them
in my teeth
so that men watching me grow dizzy.
I know it isn't so nice to say,
I am the most beautiful
woman on earth,
it isn't nice and maybe it isn't even true,
but allow me, when it rains,
only when it rains,
to say the magic words,
I am the most beautiful
woman on earth,
the most beautiful because it is raining,
and the fringes of rain in my hair become me.
I am the most beautiful woman because
the wind blows
and my dress desperately struggles to hide my knees.
I am the most beautiful woman because you
are far away, and I am waiting for you,
and you know I am waiting.
I am the most beautiful woman because I know
how to wait,
and still I wait.
There's an intense scent of love in the air.
People passing by sniff the rain to catch its traces.
In such a rain, one can fall in love in an instant.
All those who pass by are in love
and I am waiting for you.
I love the rain, I passionately love the rain,
the mad rains and the gentle rains
the chaste rains and the rains like unbridled women.

WOW. I'm with you, Anna.

I suppose its original language was Russian?

You know, I really don't know. I took a poetry class back in '98 at U of L, and the prof, Dr. Skinner, came sauntering into class one day with just this poem, which he read as the class opened. He read it very well and we were all ga-ga for it by the end. Maybe I'll look it up later today.

So, what happens when poems are translated? I mean, does the translator attempt to match rhythm and such? Or just the literal wording?

Perfect! Especially since it's International Women's Day.

Having studied (as an amateur) a few translations (Beowulf is a good one for this, as is Dante's Divine Comedy), translations are valued based on how well they convey the sense of the poem. Sometimes this doesn't always mean the literal wording. Sometimes it doesn't even follow the original structure. A lot of Beowulf translations move lines around, sometimes forty lines from the original placement. But if it conveys the meaning to the intended audience, it's perfectly acceptable.

Translators usually also try to keep the rhythm of the poetry to whatever extent is possible. Consider the triplets in the Divine Comedy or the exquisite doggerel in Goethe's Faust. Sometimes the line lengths or speech patterns are different from the original, because the translators are trying to convey the effect as much as the literal meaning.

That's just what I know. I'm no professor of international poetry or anything. I'm barely even a student.

Thanks to Anna for the beautiful poem. I'd like to hear it in Russian. I love hearing well-spoken Russian. Like many languages when spoken well. It seems like it would flow like the rain through her hair.

This has been a favorite o' mine for a long, long time.

You Fit Into Me

You fit into me
like a hook into an eye
A fish hook
An open eye

— Margaret Atwood

Sonnet (1928)

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling finger-tips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

~ Elizabeth Bishop

Mark Strand is probably my favorite poet.

And here's a couple of reasons why:

Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

From: Reasons For Moving

Giving Myself Up

I give up my eyes which are glass eggs.
I give up my tongue.
I give up my mouth which is the constant dream of my
tongue.
I give up my throat which is the sleeve of my voice.
I give up my lungs which are trees that have never seen
the moon.
I give up my smell which is that of a stone traveling
through rain.
I give up my hands which are ten wishes.
I give up my arms which have wanted to leave me anyway.
I give up my legs which are lovers only at night.
I give up my buttocks which are the moons of childhood.
I give up my penis which whispers encouragement to my
thighs.
I give up my clothes which are walls that blow in the wind
and I give up the ghost that lives in them.
I give up. I give up.
And you will have none of it because already I am beginning
again without anything.

From: Darker - 1. Giving Myself Up

Holy crap, folks, all these are good! What a good morning to wake up to fabulous poetry... *SIGH* Thanks for sharing.

I must agree with you, Annabelle. Do you think chosen favorites reveal personalites, moods, or tastes?

There are several poets that are my favorites, but I keep returning to both Strand and the short poems of AR Ammons. Perhaps its because I really enjoy writing short poetry. I enjoy the challenge of purporting something with the fewest and best words possible.

In the chapter entitled "Notes On the Craft Of Poetry," from Weather Of Words, Strand includes the follwoing rules:

1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

He goes on to say (I'm paraphrasing here) that even following these elemetary rules one could keep all of them and still write bad English, but not as bad as he/she could have.

Just ruminating this afternoon.

Cher

Here are a couple of favorites written by friends of mine:

The River
Raphael Kosek

I am not inclined to write of places.
A river, say, for if you don't know it,
you will right away be bored,
tired to hear of some strange water,
how it flows and where it glitters.
Not interested to learn how the trees bend
over the river at just such a spot,
or how deer drink there, tentative,
in early amber light.

If I begin to tell you how
she loved and lost, you will say,
I've heard that one before. How
she is crippled and mends herself
at the place where the trees bend
over the river in just such a way.
She has seen the deer, watched
their mincing progress, loved them
for their fear.

I could send a train along the river,
but then I'd have to tell you
what kind and how many cars.
And even I wouldn't care, but she might
hear its whistle and take it as an omen.

I could write about myself, how my pen
flickers over paper making green pictures.
But, by God, you've had enough
of Emily Dickinson with thousands of poems
under the bed, her hair pinned tightly,
the pale round face
peering into your soul.

So it's best, I think,
if you see this river for yourself.
The woman might be there sitting
on a stone, expecting the deer.
Or you might find yourself waving
from a green boat
heading north in amber light.


Monster
Anna Belle Patterson

Sometimes,
though less often now that I'm older,
I feel like a monster--as sure as Frankenstein
of my complete alienation from humanity.
It is probably a lie--I am as ordinary
as any Scotch-Irish-Dutch-German-Cherokee mutt
'round here, the same gray skin and crooked teeth
as the rest of my herd, the same weak movement.

I could make it so--become a monster,
build myself piece by piece into the stuff of old fiction,
the cauldron of story, rake the pit of my brain for ideas;
a scaly tail, like a favored feather boa, feels familiar.
Yes, I want wings too! Not the feathered froth of angels,
but real, human wings, naked with skin, alive--a maze of veins
apparent through the milky stretch, dry patches like ash-piles.

And I could move them--that's how far we've come.
I could roil my tail along the floor or aloft,
shaking it with fury and passion, an imposing figure
to be sure, behinded by such a monolith,
though nothing compared to the unfurling
of my massive wings, misplaced rib bones
and sculpted artificial kelson,
pressed with ass flesh, no doubt, it's always ass flesh,
some malleable magic in those fatty mounds.

I couldn't fly, of course, that's just going too far.
No science to support it--too much weight for wingspan,
marrowed bone-veins, a defiance of natural law.
Limbs can be mapped; attach a tail and a tiny tail-shaped
portion of the brain lights up, permanently decorated for Halloween,
tiny neural connections stitching out the path to adaptation.
Shelley's mistake was patching cadavers.

To live my alienation, instead of the cheap imitation
we call feeling--that is behind the desire for wings,
my want of a tail and coral horns, grown ever larger
as my magnificently ordinary brain connects with primordial
substance, something ancient in me recognizing
and integrating, creating, propelling my own evolution,
playing my own god; illuminating my own dark cowardice,
frail human form etched in relief on the floor of my brain.

Man I love that poem too. She so deserved that award. Bone-chilling, if ya ask me.



This one, eh, not so good. Seriously, you make me blush, Keith. That's pretty hard to do these days.

And I hear ya Cher! Thanks for sharing Strands list with us.

The street
drowns in tomatoes:
noon,
summer,
light
breaks
in two
tomato
halves,
and the streets
run
with juice.
In December
the tomato
cuts loose,
invades
kitchens,
takes over lunches,
settles
at rest
on sideboards,
with the glasses,
butter dishes,
blue salt-cellars.
It has
its own radiance,
a goodly majesty.
Too bad we must
assassinate:
a knife
plunges
into its living pulp,
red
viscera,
a fresh,
deep,
inexhaustible
sun
floods the salads
of Chile,
beds cheerfully
with the blonde onion,
and to celebrate
oil
the filial essence
of the olive tree
lets itself fall
over its gaping hemispheres,
the pimento
adds
its fragrance,
salt its magnetism--
we have the day's
wedding:
parsley
flaunts
its little flags,
potatoes
thump to a boil,
the roasts
beat down the door
with their aromas:
it's time!
let's go!
and upon
the table,
belted by summer,
tomatoes,
stars of the earth,
stars multiplied
and fertile
show off
their convolutions
canals
and plenitudes
and the abundance
boneless,
without husk,
or scale or thorn,
grant us
the festival
of ardent color
and all-embracing freshness.


-- Pablo Neruda

Here is one i like:

To make a prairie (1755)
Emily Dickinson

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

Here is one of my ALL TIME FAVORITES!!!

God's Grandeur
Gerard Manley Hopkins

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs--
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Two years ago at Poetry On the Green here at VU, I had the pleasure of hearing a Neruda poem read in Spanish by one of our international students. Although I couldn't understand, it was lovely to hear.

Cher

I made sure to get a volume of Neruda's poems with both the original and translated text on facing pages. My Spanish is not very good, but I can at least tell how each word is pronounced from its spelling (a great concept for a language, IMO). The translations I have seem pretty good at preserving the imagery and flow of the originals, but some of the "music" is inevitably lost. For example,

Yo te recordaba con el alma apretada
de esa tristeza que tú me conoces.

just sounds much prettier than

I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.

Here's one I dearly love.

Fever 103°
Sylvia Plath

Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple

Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean

The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell

Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora's scarves, I'm in a fright

One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,

But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak

Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,

Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.

Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.

Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.

Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.

I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern ---

My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.

Does not my heat astound you. And my light.
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.

I think I am going up,
I think I may rise ---
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I

Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,

By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean.
Not you, nor him.

Not him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) ---
To Paradise.

This translation is good, but for some reason when I read the original I have the image of the soul trapped and squeezed in the sadness as in a steel vise...

FWIW, my favorite Neruda translator (so far) is W.S. Merwin. He offers fewer reasons for frustration than others I've yet seen. Side-by-side editions are definitely the way to go.

When You are Old

When you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

~ W.B. Yeats

A wry masterpiece by Stephen Dunn.

Poem For People That Are Understandably Too Busy To Read Poetry

Relax. This won't last long.
Or if it does, or if the lines
make you sleepy or bored,
give in to sleep, turn on
the T.V., deal the cards.
This poem is built to withstand
such things. Its feelings
cannot be hurt. They exist
somewhere in the poet,
and I am far away.
Pick it up anytime. Start it
in the middle if you wish.
It is as approachable as melodrama,
and can offer you violence
if it is violence you like. Look,
there's a man on a sidewalk;
the way his leg is quivering
he'll never be the same again.
This is your poem
and I know you're busy at the office
or the kids are into your last nerve.
Maybe it's sex you've always wanted.
Well, they lie together
like the party's unbuttoned coats,
slumped on the bed
waiting for drunken arms to move them.
I don't think you want me to go on;
everyone has his expectations, but this
is a poem for the entire family.
Right now, Budweiser
is dripping from a waterfall,
deodorants are hissing into armpits
of people you resemble,
and the two lovers are dressing now,
saying farewell.
I don't know what music this poem
can come up with, but clearly
it's needed. For it's apparent
they will never see each other again
and we need music for this
because there was never music when he or she
left you standing on the corner.
You see, I want this poem to be nicer
than life. I want you to look at it
when anxiety zigzags your stomach
and the last tranquilizer is gone
and you need someone to tell you
I'll be here when you want me
like the sound inside a shell.
The poem is saying that to you now.
But don't give anything for this poem.
It doesn't expect much. It will never say more
than listening can explain.
Just keep it in your attaché case
or in your house. And if you're not asleep
by now, or bored beyond sense,
the poem wants you to laugh. Laugh at
yourself, laugh at this poem, at all poetry.
Come on:

Good. Now here's what poetry can do.

Imagine yourself a caterpillar.
There's an awful shrug and, suddenly,
You're beautiful for as long as you live.

Goodness, this thread is beautiful. Try printing it out and reading it end to end in the sunlight. WOW.

I am in love with this poem. So much so that I've copied it to Word, along with a small picture of Dunn and a short bio and printed off enough for my senior writing seminar classmates. I practiced reading it thrice at the cemetery today, so I hope my prof will let me read it.

eating poetry,
belly

Well, I'm glad! I can't believe you haven't dined on this particular poem before. If you've never read Dunn's series about famous 19th century literary figures living in contemporary New Jersey (I think I sent you the one about Henry James some time ago), do yourself a favor and check Local Visitations out of the library. It's brilliant and hilarious, like a great deal of his work.

And with that, Cher opened up ITunes and fired up Poetry Sung, Poetry Said, a night with Lucinda and Miller Williams expressively to hear Miller read The Caterpillar.

The Caterpillar
Miller Williams

Today on the lip of a bowl in the backyard
we watched a caterpillar caught in the circle
of his larvel assumptions
my daughter counted
27 times he went around
before rolling back and laughing
I'm a caterpillar, look
she left him
measuring out his slow green way to some place
there must have been a picture of inside him
After supper
coming from putting the car up
we stopped to look
figured he crossed the yard
once every hour
and left him
when we went to bed
wrinkling no closer to my landlord's leaves
than when he somehow fell into his private circle
Later I followed
barefeet and doorclicks of my daughter
to the yard the bowl
a milkwhite moonlight eye
in the black grass
it died
I said honey they don't live very long
In bed again
re-covered and re-kissed
she locked her arms and mumbling love to mine
until yawning she slipped
into the deep bone-bottomed dish of sleep
Stumbling drunk around the rim
I hold
the words she said to me across the dark
I think he thought he was
going in a straight line.

Thanks, Keith, it's been too long since I last gave this wonderful show a listen.

Cher

You're very welcome, Cher.

LOL. You will be pleased to learn that this poem is ripping through IUS like a bullet through flesh. People from my Senior Writing seminar are now reading it in their other classes and it's making the rounds with the profs. Your ripple effect is gorgeous, my friend.

What kind of English department do you have there at IUS?? Stephen Dunn has a Pulitzer, fer Gawd's sake!

Seriously, I'm glad y'all are enjoying it so much.

Another one I love.

Peter Quince At The Clavier
Wallace Stevens

I

Just as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,

Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music. It is like the strain
Waked in the elders by Susanna;

Of a green evening, clear and warm,
She bathed in her still garden, while
The red-eyed elders, watching, felt

The basses of their beings throb
In witching chords, and their thin blood
Pulse pizzicati of Hosanna.

II

In the green water, clear and warm,
Susanna lay.
She searched
The touch of springs,
And found
Concealed imaginings.
She sighed,
For so much melody.

Upon the bank, she stood
In the cool
Of spent emotions.
She felt, among the leaves,
The dew
Of old devotions.

She walked upon the grass,
Still quavering.
The winds were like her maids,
On timid feet,
Fetching her woven scarves,
Yet wavering.

A breath upon her hand
Muted the night.
She turned --
A cymbal crashed,
Amid roaring horns.

III

Soon, with a noise like tambourines,
Came her attendant Byzantines.

They wondered why Susanna cried
Against the elders by her side;

And as they whispered, the refrain
Was like a willow swept by rain.

Anon, their lamps' uplifted flame
Revealed Susanna and her shame.

And then, the simpering Byzantines
Fled, with a noise like tambourines.

IV

Beauty is momentary in the mind --
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.

The body dies; the body's beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden's choral.

Susanna's music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death's ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

Is it arrogance or confidence or just the way an open eye view makes a person jaded in familiar situations after a time? Likely I apologize too much but even more likely I'm alone (with maybe the company of a carribean penguin) in the orchard, having donned arm length gloves to help a cow get a calf... coming and going, put a brand iron to calf hide and sheep skin, chased a stray whatever across the desert and dallied a loaded lariat on the saddle horn with a horse smarter than you breaking the momentum... and all the other shit that comes with a brand inspector / dog catcher job in Carbon County Utah. Does anyone else get it when they read or listen to Baxter Black? Trudes?

Oh.. and I love this

Most people here are familiar with Dunn, just not this particular poem...

I swear, we HAVE to do an Orchard poetry reading somehow! ...our own stuff, other people's stuff, whatever.

Wow...found this just now. Nice.

Belly Good

A heap of wheat, says the Song of Songs
but I've never seen wheat in a pile.
Apples, potatoes, cabbages, carrots
make lumpy stacks, but you are sleek
as a seal hauled out in the winter sun.
I can see you as a great goose egg
or a single juicy and fully ripe peach.
You swell like a natural grassy hill.
You are symmetrical as a Hopewell mound,
with the eye of the navel wide open,
the eye of my apple, the pear's port
window. You're not supposed to exist
at all this decade. You're to be flat
as a kitchen table, so children with
roller skates can speed over you
like those sidewalks of my childhood
that each gave a different roar under
my wheels. You're required to show
muscle striations like the ocean
sand at ebb tide, but brick hard.
Clothing is not designed for women
of whose warm and flagrant bodies
you are a swelling part. Yet I confess
I meditate with my hands folded on you,
a maternal cushion radiating comfort.
Even when I have been at my thinnest,
you have never abandoned me but curled
round as a sleeping cat under my skirt.
When I spread out, so do you. You like
to eat, drink and bang on another belly.
In anxiety I clutch you with nervous fingers
as if you were a purse full of calm.
In my grandmother standing in the fierce sun
I see your cauldron that held eleven children
shaped under the tent of her summer dress.
I see you in my mother at thirty
in her flapper gear, skinny legs
and then you knocking on the tight dress.
We hand you down like a prize feather quilt.
You are our female shame and sunburst strength.

Marge Piercy

That's a great idea. And then Cher could hear as much Spanish poetry as she likes! Someday...

Seriously, poetry reading could go with the pre-show dinner and karaoke with the post-show drinking!

Count me in. I'll even EmCee if no one else wants to... Check it out; we could invite TAPERS!! Hehe.

I'll give a resounding 'shout out' for a poetry reading. I LOVE reading out, mine or my favorites of others. I think it would be awesome to have an Orchard reading. Who knows, it may happen some day.

Cher, who loves eating poetry.

Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop

I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
'Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.'

'Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,' I cried.
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart's pride.

'A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.'

~ another Yeats favorite for St. Patrick's day

Here's my favorite Yeats. It always makes me despair over the poverty of my own imagination.

The Cap and Bells

The jester walked in the garden:
The garden had fallen still;
He bade his soul rise upward
And stand on her window-sill.

It rose in a straight blue garment,
When owls began to call:
It had grown wise-tongued by thinking
Of a quiet and light footfall;

But the young queen would not listen;
She rose in her pale night-gown;
She drew in the heavy casement
And pushed the latches down.

He bade his heart go to her,
When the owls called out no more;
In a red and quivering garment
It sang to her through the door.

It had grown sweet-tongued by dreaming
Of a flutter of flower-like hair;
But she took up her fan from the table
And waved it off on the air.

'I have cap and bells,' he pondered,
'I will send them to her and die';
And when the morning whitened
He left them where she went by.

She laid them upon her bosom,
Under a cloud of her hair,
And her red lips sang them a love-song
Till stars grew out of the air.

She opened her door and her window,
And the heart and the soul came through,
To her right hand came the red one,
To her left hand came the blue.

They set up a noise like crickets,
A chattering wise and sweet,
And her hair was a folded flower
And the quiet of love in her feet.

A few favorites:

Insomnia
The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles) far and
away beyond sleep, or perhaps she's
a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb and
drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea is
now deep, and you love me.

-- Elizabeth Bishop

Praise in Summer
Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air, I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
Such savo'rs in this wrenching things awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derage
The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?

-- Richard Wilbur

37
now that, more nearest even than your fate

and mine (or any truth beyond perceive)
quivers this miracle of summer night

her trillion secrets touchably alive

-while and all mysteries which i or you
(blinded by merely things believable) could
only fancy we should never know

are unimaginably ours to feel

how should some world (we marvel) doubt, for just
sweet terrifying the particular
moment it takes one very falling most
(there: did you see it?) star to disappear,

that hugest whole creation may be less
incalcuable than a single kiss

-- e.e. cummings

Like Lilly Like Wilson
By Taylor Mali
www.taylormali.com

I'm writing the poem that will change the world,
and it's Lilly Wilson at my office door.
Lilly Wilson, the recovering like addict,
the worst I've ever seen.
So, like, bad the whole eighth grade
started calling her Like Lilly Like Wilson Like.
ŒUntil I declared my classroom a Like-Free Zone,
and she could not speak for days.

But when she finally did, it was to say,
Mr. Mali, this is . . . so hard.
Now I have to think before I . . . say anything.


Imagine that, Lilly.

It's for your own good.
Even if you don't like . . .
it.

I'm writing the poem that will change the world,
and it's Lilly Wilson at my office door.
Lilly is writing a research paper for me
about how homosexuals shouldn't be allowed
to adopt children.
I'm writing the poem that will change the world,
and it's Like Lilly Like Wilson at my office door.

She's having trouble finding sources,
which is to say, ones that back her up.
They all argue in favor of what I thought I was against.

And it took four years of college,
three years of graduate school,
and every incidental teaching experience I have ever had
to let out only,

Well, that's a real interesting problem, Lilly.
But what do you propose to do about it?
That's what I want to know.

And the eighth-grade mind is a beautiful thing;
Like a new-born baby's face, you can often see it
change before your very eyes.

I can't believe I'm saying this, Mr. Mali,
but I think I'd like to switch sides.

And I want to tell her to do more than just believe it,
but to enjoy it!
That changing your mind is one of the best ways
of finding out whether or not you still have one.
Or even that minds are like parachutes,
that it doesn't matter what you pack
them with so long as they open
at the right time.
O God, Lilly, I want to say
you make me feel like a teacher,
and who could ask to feel more than that?
I want to say all this but manage only,
Lilly, I am like so impressed with you!

So I finally taught somebody something,
namely, how to change her mind.
And learned in the process that if I ever change the world
it's going to be one eighth grader at a time.

The Old Stoic

Riches I hold in light esteem,
And Love I laugh to scorn;
And lust of fame was but a dream
That vanish’d with the morn;

And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is, “Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty!”

Yes, as my swift days near their goal,
’T is all that I implore:
In life and death a chainless soul,
With courage to endure.

~ Emily Brontë

Spring is like a perhaps hand
E. E. Cummings



------------------------------------

III

Spring is like a perhaps hand
(which comes carefully
out of Nowhere)arranging
a window,into which people look(while
people stare
arranging and changing placing
carefully there a strange
thing and a known thing here)and

changing everything carefully

spring is like a perhaps
Hand in a window
(carefully to
and fro moving New and
Old things,while
people stare carefully
moving a perhaps
fraction of flower here placing
an inch of air there)and

without breaking anything.

Another reason why I don't keep a gun in the house
Billy Collins

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

In honor of spring and the approaching summer, here's a couple from William Carlos Williams:

Queen Anne's Lace

Her body is not so white as
anemone petals nor so smooth - nor
so remote a thing. It is a field
of the wild carrot taking
the field by force; the grass
does not raise above it.
Here is no question of whiteness,
white as can be, with a purple mole
at the center of each flower.
Each flower is a hand's span
of her whiteness. Wherever
his hand has lain there is
a tiny purple blemish. Each part
is a blossom under his touch
to which the fibres of her being
stem one by one, each to its end,
until the whole field is a
white desire, empty, a single stem,
a cluster, flower by flower,
a pious wish to whiteness gone over--
or nothing.


The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

Yo Cher,

Good ones! I love WCW!

Come Spring Come All!

Walking Around
Pablo Neruda
(translated by Robert Bly )

It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailor shops and movie houses
dried up, waterproof, like a swan made of felt
steering my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.
It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.

Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great
to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.

I don't want so much misery.
I don't want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.

That's why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoeshops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.

There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors
that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.
I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes,
my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling.


(sorry, but Mark Strand is an a**hole)

I don't know why I haven't posted to this thread. . .anyhoo, probably my favorite poem by one of my favorite poets, Willam Blake.

The Garden of Love, William Blake

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen:
A chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this chapel were shut,
And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love,
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tomb-stones where flowers should be,
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

Click to view attachment

And a couple of my favorite Walt Whitman poem's. First from Song of Myself,

51

The past and present wilt — I have fill'd them, emptied them,
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a
minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through
with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?
Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too
late?

. . . .

and from Song of the Open Road

6

Now if a thousand perfect men were to appear it would not
amaze me,
Now if a thousand beautiful forms of women appear'd it
would not astonish me.

Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,
It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the
earth.

Here a great personal deed has room,
(Such a deed seizes upon the hearts of the whole race of men,
Its effusion of strength and will overwhelms law and mocks
all authority and all argument against it.)

Here is the test of wisdom,
Wisdom is not finally tested in schools,
Wisdom cannot be pass'd from one having it to another not
having it,

Wisdom is of the soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own
proof,
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities and is content,
Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and
the excellence of things;
Something there is in the float of the sight of things that
provokes it out of the soul.

Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all
under the spacious clouds and along the landscape and
flowing currents.

Here is realization,
Here is a man tallied — he realizes here what he has in him,
The past, the future, majesty, love — if they are vacant of you,
you are vacant of them.

Only the kernel of every object nourishes;
Where is he who tears off the husks for you and me?
Where is he that undoes stratagems and envelopes for you
and me?

Here is adhesiveness, it is not previously fashion'd, it is
apropos;
Do you know what it is as you pass to be loved by strangers?
Do you know the talk of those turning eye-balls?

A favorite of mine for a long, long time, and something that I rediscovered on the web today.

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe---
Sailed on a river of crystal light,
Into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going, and what do you wish?"
The old moon asked the three.
"We have come to fish for the herring fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we!"
Said Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

The old moon laughed and sang a song,
As they rocked in the wooden shoe,
And the wind that sped them all night long
Ruffled the waves of dew.
The little stars were the herring fish
That lived in that beautiful sea---
"Now cast your nets wherever you wish---
Never afeard are we";
So cried the stars to the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

All night long their nets they threw
To the stars in the twinkling foam---
Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
Bringing the fishermen home;
'T was all so pretty a sail it seemed
As if it could not be,
And some folks thought 't was a dream they 'd dreamed
Of sailing that beautiful sea---
But I shall name you the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,
And Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
Is a wee one's trundle-bed.
So shut your eyes while mother sings
Of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
As you rock in the misty sea,
Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

Eugene Field (1850-1895)

edited for format

ordeal

i promise to make you more alive than you've ever been.
for the first time you'll see your pores opening
like the gills of fish and you'll hear
the noise of blood in galleries
and feel light gliding on your corneas
like the dragging of a dress across the floor.
for the first time, you'll note gravity's prick
like a thorn in your heel,
and your shoulder blades will hurt from the imperative of wings.
i promise to make you so alive that
the fall of dust on furniture will deafen you,
and you'll feel your eyebrows like two wounds forming
and your memories will seem to begin
with the creation of the world.

-nina cassian