Friday, May 30, 2008
Fifteen Sonnets
"Interpreting the Foreign Queen"
I rush home after class to slurp her thigh,
to pounce on baby belly, press my lips deep
to spray wet-raspberry kisses. They make her writhe.
I'm spilling giggles, nibbling ticklish feet.
My husband, the anti-tickler, disapproves.
He says she'd just been resting in his lap,
she'd just had food (she's always just had food) --
now, overstimulated, she won't nap.
He swears I shouldn't toss her, not so high.
She gives a shriek -- pure terror, pure delight?
We read our own emotions in her eyes.
If only she could speak to say who's right --
to say I am. For him, I put her down.
Just two more days till he goes out of town.
-- Beth Ann Fennelly
* * *
"At Quark's Bar, Deep Space Nine"
My maker took your fascists' cartoon-Jew,
Scaled back its nose but gave me ears like clams
So I won't take abuse, old chap, from you,
Cocksure from pornographic holograms.
Consider an off-camera position:
You called me Shylock when I brought your bill;
I've read outside the Rules of Acquisition
And never bought this worship of your Will --
The 'many-coloured life' he gave each part?
Did that include his Jewish moneylender?
He makes the bar-bill read like Jean-Paul Sartre.
You're new, so I won't write you off, big spender,
But I keep tabs and bills and records straight.
Now pay. I'm not here just to educate.
-- Ian Duhig
* * *
"Orion the Hunter"
The chair of Women's Studies wrote to the
University administration
On the glut of men as constellations.
After much debate a vast committee
Was created to render gender-free
The universe. Soon sky charts were redone
In ways that cast into oblivion
The cosmic heteropatriarchy.
And yet Orion stil rose winter nights.
His bright, expansive rays inflamed parked cars,
Department windows, each roof on campus.
Security then installed blinding lights
So coeds leaving classes after dusk
Would not be taken by that blaze of stars.
-- Alan R. Wilson
* * *
"My Daughter Considers Her Body"
She examines her hand, fingers spread wide.
Seated, she bends over her crossed legs
to search for specks or scars and cannot hide
her awe when any mark is found. She begs
me to look, twisting before her mirror,
at some tiny bruise on her hucklebone.
Barely awake, she studies creases her
arm developed as she slept. She has grown
entranced with blemish, begun to know
her body's facility for being
flawed. She does not trust its will to grow
whole again, but may learn that too, freeing
herself to accept the body's deep thirst
for risk. Learning to touch her wounds comes first.
-- Floyd Skoot
* * *
"Wedding"
From time to time our love is like a sail
and when the sail begins to alternate
from tack to tack, it's like a swallowtail
and when the swallow flies it's like a coat;
and if the coat is yours, it has a tear
like a wide mouth and when the mouth begins
to draw the wind, it's like a trumpeter
and when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions . . .
and this, my love, when millions come and go
beyond the need of us, is like a trick;
and when the trick begins, it's like a toe
tip-toeing on a rope, which is like luck;
and when the luck begins, it's like a wedding,
which is like love, which is like everything.
-- Alice Oswald
* * *
"Down from the Country"
When we came down from the country, we were strangers to the sea.
The rise and fall of waters without rain,
the lunglike breathing of the estuary
caused our amazement; and the white stain
of salt on the rocks, when the tide receded,
where we were used to dark mud that a flood leaves behind,
held us enthralled; and we needed
some mental adjustment which people noticed. when the mind
is confronted by such magnitudes of sight and sound
there is no mask for refuge in frown or grimace;
but the face looks blank, as if it were dragged up, drowned.
How much loneliness is there in a different place,
out of one's shell, out of all knowledge, to be caught
out of the dullness of self by such alien thought?
-- John Blight
* * *
"The throat-flute uttering its constant note"
The throat-flute uttering its constant note
of claim and name and wake and never-same
and nuanced cadences of sate, remote
days translated into a breathing frame,
knows its viewless voice is future's lend,
surpassing present where it grows and dwells
momently, glancing vocable, to spend
blooming fullness as it spills and swells
in the air ear, othered. Heard, is it the same?
Future-fathered, present-mothered -- instrument
of mute contingencies its songs declaim
note by note by stopless increment
in the sounding, silenced. Audible degree
nights the note that lets mind's nighttime see.
-- Karen Volkman
* * *
"The Skaters"
Extending hands, we shape the ice in games
by poles of light that sluice upon the pond.
Through pines the moon had shown; now slipped beyond
where skaters cannot see or skate their names.
Now only blackness, such a blackness now
as hides all sight of trees, stiff reeds that sprout
by ice we marked gliding deft figures out
from side to side, and in a truce (although
we scarcely see beneath our knees) blow
a hot skater's breath that leaves no trace
as we slice wider rings and wider race
leaning from the edge where dark shapes grow,
tilting parallel, holding tight,
our arms a skipping rope for leaps of night.
-- George Ellenbogen
* * *
"When Weaver Ants Cut (A Valentine)"
I love the dance of every one helping.
Each ant chews and chews a bit of juicy leaf
and stands on his back four legs to raise
the leaf shape up high above his head.
The congo line -- a honey shimmer of bodies
rushingj to bring the cut leaf home. For twelve
years, the ruler of Garwara, India was a jackal.
All the laughing in that town cannot
compare to what you have brought
into my home: a filament of light inside
a dark jellyfish bell. It's this dance of ants
down a tree, around a stubborn frog -- I want
to dance with you -- how brave the line,
how tiny the step, a hundred green valentines.
-- Aimee Nezhukumatathil
* * *
"Even As We Sleep"
Avoidance has found someone else to blame,
Obsession seeks a mantra to repeat,
And swift with Panic, runs across the street
In order not to have to deal with Shame,
Who urges Rage and Folly to come meet
Denial, going by another name;
Now unmarked cards cost Honesty the game,
As Confidence turns out to be Deceit,
And Guilt refuses to complain about
The way she's being treated by her men,
While ever-diffident Anxiety
Is wondering if best is not to be,
In this dark cavern between now and when,
Of whose existence he is much in doubt.
-- Charles Martin
* * *
"The Age of Mechanical Reproduction"
If we laugh and photograph ourselves
which is difficult but not impossible
we create a system for analysing humour
and days later we are stuck with it
like Marxism too quickly understood
and thus betrayed. Is a smile a role?
The snapshots make a guess, and unavoidably
a complex answer is building up inside us
conditioned by empiricism. we love and burn
just for a year or so, then take those photos
and lose a precious ability and a sweetheart
and nothing seems the same, ever again.
This dogging loss chews at my heel and soon
years later, we are less than what we knew.
-- John Tranter
* * *
"Wrong Again"
I did the right thing once (may God reward me);
Restrained myself. I took a moral stance.
Virtue, I found, was not my thing -- it bored me
Rigid, and I would like another chance
To earn myself a wicked reputation
Equal to yours. I'll match you sin for sin.
Lies, promiscuity, inebriation --
It all sounds lovely. What can we begin?
I used to be afraid of rumours spreading.
You made my fear seem fussy, immature.
Here's my new motto, the: just change the bedding
And carry on exactly as before.
A single, happy night beneath your quilt
Is all I want. I'll risk post-coital guilt.
-- Sophie Hannah
* * *
"The Rising Sun"
As i was driven into smoky Tokyo,
The yen declined again. It had been going down
All day against the buoyant Hibernian Pound.
Black rain descended like a harp arpeggio.
The Professor took me to a bonsai garden
To imbibe some thimblefuls of Japanese poteen.
We wandered through the forest of the books of Arden.
The number of their syllables was seventeen.
I met a maiden of Hiroshima who played
The hammer dulcimer like psychedelic rain.
The rising sun was hid behind a cloud of jade.
She sang to me of Fujiyama and of Zen,
Of yin and yang, and politics, and crack cocaine,
And Plato's caverns, which are measureless to men.
-- Ciaran Carson
* * *
"Carrion Crows"
Yes, I have seen them perched on paling posts --
Brooding with evil eyes upon the road,
Their black wings hooded -- and they left those roosts
When I have hissed at them. Away they strode
clapping their wings in a man's stride away
Over the fields. and I have seen them feast
On swollen carrion in the broad eye of day,
Pestered by flies, and yet they never ceased.
But I have seen them emperors of the sky,
Balancing gracefully in the wind's drive
With their broad sails just shifting or again
Throwing huge shadows from the sun's eye
To brush so swiftly over the fields' plain,
And winnowing the air like beauty come alive.
-- A. J. Seymour
* * *
"Missing Fact"
Noli me tangere, for Caesars I ame;
And wylde for to hold, though I seeme tame.
-- Thomas Wyatt, c. 1535
Sometimes time turns perfect rhyme to slant,
as in Wyatt's famous sonnet -- how the couplet
no longer chimes, his "ame" turned "am," now coupled
more by pattern, form. so everything gets bent
and tuned by time's tectonic slippage. You and
I, for instance, no longer click or chord
the sharp way we did, when secretly wired
two decades back (not fifty -- but then human
prosody shifts faster); and surely that's best --
half-rhyme better suits the human, and consonance,
not a flawless fit, is mostly what counts
over years. but still, this urge (from the past?
our genes?) to shirk all, for one more perfect-
coupling rhyme: for two again as one pure fact.
-- Steven Heighton
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Another Dozen Poems I Like
"You Gave Me Hyacinths First a Year Ago"
The world's a stranger's room, we meet to part,
I stand, transfixed, an arrow through my heart.
My ageing Cupid, careful of his aim,
plucks out the shaft, and causes twice the pain.
My awkward arms are full of brandy, sin,
helpless I watch our promenade begin.
Hands touch, eyes falter, tremble, fix and cling,
the heart leaps up, the blood beneath the skin
tingles like frost, then all disguise is shed,
until he husks me naked in my bed.
My hyacinths are nettles, the cold breath
of the Toad Prince is in my ear like death.
'What will become of us?' 'We'll live to die,'
and in that restless void, disfigured, lie
forever, and forever answer, 'No.'
Contending on heaven's plain we'll weep and go.
So without choice, and convinced of doom,
I go to meet you in the stranger's room.
-- Dorothy Hewitt
* * *
"All the Way from Akkad, from Elam, from Sumer"
Awakener, uprooter
Suffered breath, hastener breath
Master of the three paths, you are facing a man
who has walked a lot.
All the way from Elam. From Akkad. From Sumer.
Master of the three paths, you are facing a man
who has carried a lot.
All the way from Elam. From Akkad. From Sumer.
I have carried the commandant's body. I have carried the commandant's railroad. I have carried the
commandant's locomotive, the commandant's cotton. On my wooly head which works so fine
without a little cushion I have married God, the machine, the road -- the God of the commandant.
Master of the three paths I have carried under the sun, I have carried in the fog I have carried over
the ember shards of legionary ants.
I have carried the parasol I have carried the explosives I have carried the iron-collar.
All the way from Akkad. From Elam. From Sumer.
Master of the three paths, Master of thek three channels, for once only the first time since Akkad
since Elam since Sumer may you grant that -- my muzzle apparently more tanned than the calluses
on my feet but in reality softer than the raven's scrupulous beak and as if draped in bitter folds
provided by my borrowed grey skin (a livery that men force onto me every winter)
-- I advance across the dead leaves with my little sorcerer steps
toward where the inexhaustible injunction of men thrown to the knotted sneers of the hurricane
threatens triumphantly.
All the way from Elam from Akkad from Sumer.
-- Aime Cesaire
(translated from the French by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith)
* * *
"A Cup of Stone"
Water leaves its mark on stone. What falls
moves mountains. In the mines my father
worked in the great darkness of stones,
bringing from the belly of the earth
silver for the wrists and necks of women
in the far cities. The quartz he sucked
into his lungs hissed with each breath
he took, so that laying my head
on his breast I thought his ribs held
in their cage a crystal chime. His death
was another kind of mountain. His life
was the measure I made from time,
so like a stone whose belly is hollowed
by falling water, the sound in the empty
mine shafts where he laboured is what I hear
when I place my ear against his earth.
A cup of stone. I have seen everything
and I have done nothing in this world.
There are days I want to kill my mind:
the woman who leans toward her man,
her necklace making the softest sound,
as silver does against silver, as water
does when it touches hollow stone.
-- Patrick Lane
* * *
"Practicing Ballerina"
Thew large gymnasium in morning light
Filled with notes from a tired piano,
Mirrored walls' staring images of mirrors.
She scratches her right armpit
Through a hole in her worn leotard,
Does stretches and lays her palms
On the floor's scuffed parquet,
Presses her ballet slippers together
Before the kaleidoscope is shaken
And movement explodes time's musty immobility.
A hazy conception of rhythms and patterns
In secret union with an ancient sun.
Inklings that sharpen into burning certainty
As the blood races ecstatically toward the heart.
The primeval gods' passionate breath
Where they whirled above the earth as newborn titans
Glimpsed here in an empty practice room
In a decrepit century
That's wearing a smooth pubescent mask
Over its torpid old-man's skin.
The ballerina in sweaty concentration
Hides in her taut body
The sacred source
Of life's rebellious daughter, Dance.
Not even death can obliterate her:
Her imprint, clear and sharp, remains
As the universe's glowing chaos hardens
Into the shape of the new world.
-- Henning Kramer Dahl
(Translated from the Norwegian by Roger Greenwald)
* * *
"White Lily"
Gnomish in its rounded hunch
of greeny folds, three-fourths of the year
it resembles a weed. Now spring's
unseasonable heat
brings vindication. trumpet
over frilled, frail trumpet
spills its bone-white notes
in April air. Below, in shadow --
shrunken, overawed -- skulks
the novice rosebush
we rooted in the fall. This
spendthrift, who's squandered
brilliant buds for months,
today knows the earthy weight
of morning-after. Our double
hibiscus, also, pinkly plumed,
succumbed to a plumber's truck
\that veered too soon. but the lily
in her straight ascetic's
rigid pose, white as the ember
of a low, enduring fire
takes her pleasure like
the wife of the pastor
come to bed -- prim in her cotton frock
throughout the day, precise
in her firm instructions
to the maid, who cradled
in the rough caress of muslin sheets
bares her stoic shoulders to the room
and seizes in her strong white legs
the truant moon.
-- Karen Volkman
* * *
"Winter Elegy"
how quick: the quiet avarice in whitening;
blackening, vanishing into furrows in the road a crow flock crumbles.
How clear my breath is on the pane. Fractured with violet, fields
wide, gaping. Parched ponds as docile
as if touched by gentle hands,
not bandages of frost.
The hills grow cold over the crowns of apples and alders,
in the window a light is lit in the distance. sparks of warmth wander
into the ashes of dusk,
unthinking I break off a hunk of bread:
and we, how quick, into furrows of time, into mute
and like stones
-- Marzanna Bogumila Kielar
(translated from the Polish by W. Martin)
* * *
"Finishing Touch"
Ever since the painter depicted
Your finger extended to Your creature,
we have known we crave a surrogate touch.
We press others' palms to our faces,
as if we were still being molded,
polished by an apprenticed love revising
our rougher destinies: Each hand found
more skillful than the last, each imprint closer
to Your transforming seal. I know this,
and still I have to ask for reprieve
in illusion, to linger in this present
flesh, believe in her finishing touch.
I want this hand: its knowing strokes
inside my thighs where all portrayal begins.
Let this hand complete me for the stretch,
the soft edges of these fingers be the last
of earth I feel, let itk be her own
hand -- hers alone -- that will close these eyes.
-- Martha Serpas
* * *
"Dawn Images"
Water from the sprinkler obscured the scene
like a fog,
like white-hot flame, mistress
of itself, of its shifting spew, of its
ritual
and cadenced pulse.
A bit farther and farther still
it reaches the rocks. sheets of sun
on the misty rim; quartz rain; an interior
silent
wave. Its own
dependable
movement centers it; sinks it
to its astonished heart. Deep, drizzling
vortex.
It restarts, in spurts, its palpitations. Marmoreal and slow,
bubbling brightness.
A little farther, and farther still, its limpid stroke
shudders. They're sluggish,
the rocks,
in that stellar swarm, in its incessantly lit
snow. For a moment,
its silk slinks across the garden. submissively,
the tree trunks give in
and bend out over the grass;
long dark paths beneath the sieve through
which dawn pours. when its rains
drift toward the east,
the shadows thin
and the trunks harden and straighten up.
Then the arc reappears,
resplendent. a new blaze obscures the scene,
a scent of magnolias
and wet rocks.
-- Coral Bracho
(translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander)
* * *
"Black Woman"
Naked woman, black woman
Dressed in your color that is life, in your form that is beauty!
I grew up in your shadow. the softness of your hands
Shielded my eyes, and now at the height of Summer and Noon,
From the crest of a charred hilltop I discover you, Promised Land
And your beauty strikes my heart like an eagle's lightning flash.
Naked woman, dark woman
Ripe fruit with firm flesh, dark raptures of black wine,
Mouth that gives music to my mouth
Savanna of clear horizons, savanna quivering to the fervent caress
Of the East Wind, sculptured tom-tom, stretched drumskin
Moaning under the hands of the conqueror
Your deep contralto voice is the spiritual song of the Beloved.
Naked woman, dark woman
Oil no breeze can ripple, oil soothing the thighs
Of athletes and the thighs of the princes of Mali
Gazelle with celestial limbs, pearls are stars
Upon the night of your skin. delight of the mind's riddles,
The reflections of red gold from your shimmering skin
In the shade of your hair, my despair
Lightens in the close suns of your eyes.
Naked woman, black woman
I sing your passing beauty and fix it for all Eternity
before jealous Fate reduces you to ashes to nourish the roots of life.
-- Leopold Sedar Senghor
(translated from the French by Melvin Dixon)
* * *
"Grapefruit"
This morning I rediscover the grapefruit: they smile up
from their iced platter. How soigne. Aunt Shirley
in her pink-tiled kitchen, tomato sauce already
simmering, rolling the fruit on the breadboard, slicing,
digging the edges, sugaring. Special knives, serrated,
doll-sized, plastic-handled: a rite of passage. Much later,
tart juice squeezed into crystal: so much more
adult than the orange. Even now I feel a certain weight
as I dig my spoon into the fruit: ruby, glistening,
and even without sugar, I do not wince, dribble, or squint.
-- Sina Queyras
* * *
"Your Muse Is Visiting"
Your muse is visiting. Again.
She's a bad guest,
demands attention at all hours.
She dirties the dishes
and never cleans a cup,
wears your clothes
and never does the wash.
She won't even give you time to buy the groceries.
Your muse won't stay in the guest room.
She hangs a do not disturb sign on your door.
Also, please make up this room.
Think a dog is bad?
Try making love
with a muse in the bed.
Your muse puts empty milk cartons
back in the fridge, leaves wet towels on the floor,
piles crockery in the sink.
While the two of you talk about art,
I wash her dirty sheets.
-- Alison Calder
* * *
"Gnats"
As if children reciting the exaggerated prayers of harvest,
there is one lesson we have been taught this fall --
to treat earth as if there is something concealed
behind what is given. In the yard, an orb of gnatted rotation
throbs like the mouth of the God of shorn fields.
There are many gods here that we have forgotten,
those that coaxed fire & bloom from a basilica
inscripted with nightcrawlers. god of nightshade
& milkweed. God of ordinary October illumination,
facts preserved beyond a lightning bug's
unfocused S.O.Sing across the windows.
God of delicately carved wolf tracks in front
of the porch; High Priestess of wishbones waiting
to be pulled from a body & tucked away in a cedar drawer.
War God of black & red ant's microscopic ballet
washed into ruins by a garden hose's quick spirals.
God of pheasant tribes wandering shivered corridors of corn,
of a wife in the upstairs bathroom mouthing her minor chords
of suffering. God of poison ivy accumulated in overgrowth,
scattering rags as if alms for the poor.
Underlord of desperate mathematics spiraling down
to the prime factors of mercy. God of the original
moment when tadpoles muster legs, when light
on the pond reminds us that human knowledge
will never know the code for croak, bray,
cicada-roar. God of thistle. God of once-fed tomcats
bringing scraps of dead robin as an offering,
Deity of insects clotted in fresh paint, of cardinals
fanning a dust bath. God of tires unceremoniously
crushing them. What clings over these small losses
is a cloud of gnats that kiss our cheeks as if we were dead,
halo of the last god our bodies will pass through.
-- Andrew Grace
* * *
