The Jackdaw's Nest

Some Summer Poems

2010-06-23T12:15:00.004-04:00

"High Summer"

I never wholly feel that summer is high

However green the trees, or loud the birds,

However movelessly eye-winking herds

Stand in field ponds, or under large trees lie,

Till I do climb all cultured pastures by,

That hedged by hedgerows studiously fretted trim,

Smile like a lady's face with lace laced prim,

And on some moor or hill that seeks the sky

Lonely and nakedly, -- utterly lie down,

And feel the sunshine throbbing on body and limb,

My drowsy brain in pleasant drunkenness swim,

Each rising thought sink back and dreamily drown,

Smiles creep o'er my face, and smother my lips, and cloy,

Each muscle sink to itself, and separately enjoy.

-- Ebenezer Jones

* * *

"You Knew Summer By Its Fragrance"

You knew summer by its fragrance,

the ancient silence

of the wall, the frenzy of the cicadas,

you invent the lightly bitter perpendicular

light, the brief shadow

in which a young urchin has dropped asleep,

the luster of his shoulder blades.

It is that that blinds you, the sunlight of the flesh.

-- Eugenio de Andrade

translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin

* * *

"June"

O month whose promise and fulfilment blend,

And burst in one! it seems the earth can store

In all her roomy house no treasure more;

Of all her wealth no farthing have to spend

On fruit, when once this stintless flowering end.

And yet no tiniest flower shall fall before

It hath made ready at its hidden core

Its tithe of seed, which we many count and tend

Till harvest. Joy of blossomed love, for thee

Seems it no fairer thing can yet have birth?

No room is left for deeper ecstacy?

Watch well if seeds grow strong, to scatter free

Germs for thy future summers on the earth.

A joy which is but joy soon comes to dearth.

-- Helen Hunt Jackson

* * *

"Early Summer Hail with Rhymes in O"

Suddenly the bush was America:

dark woods, and in them like snow.

The highway was miles of bath house,

bulk steam off ice shovelled over blue.

It was parallel shoals of Mikimoto,

glazy, banked, inching with pocked cars,

blindsided with vans slewed on water.

Had I not stopped off to buy plants

just back, mine could have been similar.

With unpredictable suns evaporating

I drove by guess in ancestral country

threading the white dark of afternoon.

Hills west of hills, twigs, hail to Dubbo,

all dunes of pursed constraint exhaling Ohh.

-- Les Murray

* * *

"Summer Wind"

It is a sultry day; the sun has drank

The dew that lay upon the morning grass,

There is no rustling in the lofty elm

That canopies my dwelling, and its shade

Scarce cools me. All is silent, save the faint

And interrupted murmur of the bee,

Settling on the sick flowers, and then again

Instantly on the wing. The plants around

Feel the too potent fervors; the tall maize

Rolls up its long green leaves; the clover droops

Its tender foliage, and declines its blooms.

But far in the fierce sunshine tower the hills,

With all their growth of woods, silent and stern,

As if the scorching heat and dazzling light

Were but an element they loved. Bright clouds,

Motionless pillars of the brazen heaven; --

Their bases on the mountains -- their white tops

Shining in the far ether -- fire the air

With a reflected radiance, and make turn

The gazer's eye away. For me, I lie

Languidly in the shade, where the thick turf,

Yet virgin from the kisses of the sun,

Retains some freshness, and I woo the wind

That still delays its coming. Why so slow,

Gentle and voluble spirit of the air?

Oh, come and breathe upon the fainting earth

Coolness and life. Is it that in his caves

He hears me? See, on yonder woody ridge,

The pine is bending his proud top, and now,

Among the nearer groves, chestnut and oak

Are tossing their green boughs. He comes!

Lo, where the grassy meadow runs in waves!

The deep distressful silence of the scene

Breaks up with mingling of unnumbered sounds

And universal motion. He is come,

Shaking a shower of blossoms from the shrubs,

And bearing on the fragrance; and he brings

Music of birds, and rustling of young boughs,

And sound of swaying branches, and the voice

Of distant waterfalls. All the green herbs

Are stirring in his breath; a thousand flowers,

By the road-side and the borders of the brook,

Nod gaily to each other; glossy leaves

Are twinkling in the sun, as if the dew

Were on them yet, and silver waters break

Into small waves and sparkle as he comes.

-- William Cullen Bryant

* * *

"Summer Green"

The voluntary world is far from me

Therefore I came here, where the woods fall down

Pell-mell into the fields. The timber lies

Broken and does not care, the spread leaves hold

Like fingers, air and let it run away.

-- C. H. Sisson

* * *

"In July"

Why do I make no poems? Good my friend

Now there is silence through the summer woods,

In whose green depths and lawny solitudes

The light is dreaming; voicings clear ascend

Now from no hollow where glad rivulets wend,

But murmurings low of inarticulate moods,

Softer than stir of unfledged cushat broods,

Breathe, till o'erdrowsed the heavy flower-heads bend.

Now sleep the crystal and heart-charmed waves

Round white, sunstricken rocks the noontide long,

Or 'mid the coolness of dim lighted caves

Sway in a trance of vague deliciousness;

And I, -- I am too deep in joy's excess

For the imperfect impulse of a song.

--= Edward Dowden

* * *

"Peonies at Dusk"

White peonies blooming along the porch

send out light

while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human

heads! They're staggered

by their own luxuriance; I had

to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,

and the moon moves around the barn

to find out what it's coming from.

In the darkening June evening

I draw a blossom near, and bending close

search it as a woman searches

a loved one's face.

-- Jane Kenyon

* * *

"The Midday Hour of Twelve the Clock Counts O'er"

The midday hour of noon the clock counts o'er;

A sultry stillness lulls the air asleep;

The very buzz of fly is heard no more,

Nor one faint wrinkle o'er the waters creep;

Like one large sheet of glass the pool does shine

Reflecting in its face the burnt sun beam;

The very fish their sturting play decline,

Seeking the willow shadows side the stream,

And where the hawthorne branches o'er the pool

The little bird forsaking song and nest

Flutters on dripping twigs his limbs to cool

And splashes in the stream his burning breast.

O free from thunder for a sudden shower

To cherish nature in this noonday hour.

-- John Clare

* * *

"Another July"

Earth on my foot.

Bhims. Bhams. Hooplas.

Gorgeous morning cakes

Air without stripes.

Under the eyes a new fragrance of shine;

Blossoms and tints at someone's doorstep

(Schuyler eating salami in his kitchen

thinking of the empty ghost of Clare,

extending his hand with a little mayonnaise

toward it)

Downstreet a postbox blue as phlox.

Thus.

Some weeding. Out.

Ouch.

Earth falls on my foot

Warm as death. Or

In memory of it.

-- Barbara Guest

* * *

"A Summer Night in the Beehive"

The little bee returns with evening's gloom,

To join her comrades in the braided hive,

Where, housed beside their mighty honeycomb,

They dream their polity shall long survive.

Still falls the summer night -- the browsing horse

Fills the low portal with a grassy sound

From the near paddock, while the water-course

Sends them sweet murmurs from the meadow-ground;

None but such peaceful noises break the hush,

Save Pussy, growling, in the thyme and sage,

Over the thievish mouse, in happy rage:

At last, the flowers against the threshold brush

In morning airs -- fair shines the uprisen sun,

Another day of honey has begun!

-- Charles Tennyson Turner

* * *

"Full of Summer"

This is the full of summer, this is all

Bold bumblebees have always dreamed about;

This floating is my rise that has no fall;

This steadiness my in that has no out.

And this my body's happiness -- the call

Persuading me to pause deep in today

As purple clover scents the swaying air

Bold bumblebees have always dreamed about.

I watch more ripeness ripening the way

A whirling orange blur of oriole

Blends with lake water blazing everywhere;

A hummingbird suspended at a rose

As if in mimic of the sun whose flare

Holds her eternal moment in my mind.

This is my opening that has no close;

This is my now with then now left behind

And icy wind a thought thought can forestall:

This is the full of summer, this is all.

-- Robert Pack

* * *

"In August"

Heat urges secret odors from the grass.

Blunting the edge of silence, crickets shrill.

Wings veer: inane needles of light, and pass.

Laced pools: the warm wood-shadows ebb and fill.

The wind is casual, loitering to crush

The sun upon his palate, and to draw

Pungence from pine, frank fragrances from brush,

Sucked up through thin grey boughs as through a straw.

Moss-green, fern-green and leaf and meadow-green

Are broken by the bare, bone-colored roads,

Less moved by stirring air than by unseen

soft-footed ants and meditative toads.

Summer is passing, taking what she brings:

Green scents and sounds, and quick ephemeral wings.

-- Babette Deutsch

* * *

"Once was full summer"

Once was full summer.

Down the valley blew

a cheesecloth wind,

screening the curds of cloud

from the whey of haze.

Soon the mists burned off.

Sun sipped the dew

from the long grasses,

then laid them limp with heat;

waxing towards mid-day,

made them sweat

their own juices,

meadow-sweet.

Sun made his rounds

under the blue dome,

striding his realm

while all afternoon

hills cooled facing hills

with their shadows.

-- Robyn Sarah

* * *

"Lull"

Drunken bees cling

and doze in the cups

of the rainy hollyhocks

and afternoon is still,

the day a dull silver.

Summer malingers.

Soon she will drop

her kid gloves

and abdicate to fall,

but for now

this lull

is our cradle.

-- Robyn Sarah

* * *

And what collection of works about summer could possibly

be complete without the best of all -- Gershwin's "Summertime"?

Take your pick of Ella Fitzgerald's or Billie Holiday's versions.

Or both. Enjoy.

Twelve Poems with Flowers

2010-05-27T21:33:00.002-04:00

"End of May"

Atop each stem

an iris or two has turned in

on itself with no regrets and given up

color. Pink, yellow, and red,

the rosepetals are spread

so wide they already tend

toward total drop.

Peony litter covers the ground.

On earlier days

friends and neighbors in pairs have been summoned

to have a drink and see the bloom,

have admired everything and gone.

I sit in my suntan oil alone --

almost alone -- a jay

\tries to flap me away

from his drinking trough.

His coarse, demanding rebukes

pierce my ears. He chirks

news of impending drought.

But under my feet as I tan

is no longer a brick patio,

rather a light brown

paisley made of seed wings

from the silver maple, which can sow

faster than I can sew

this fine fabric into something.

And in the air,

like a great snow,

are flakes alive with purpose.

The cottonwood huffs and puffs

them everywhere.

On oil that sheathes me from the sun

they cling to bare parts of person.

All the long, late

day,

my arms and legs are furred

with such a will to beget

I think I can almost afford

to forget it's only skin-deep.

It's like taking dope.

It's too late, I tell the tree,

you've settled on somebody seedless.

Equivocally, it nods its head.

But I have been overheard.

Maybe for you but not for me,

the seedy old world says.

-- Mona Van Duyn

* * *

"Poem"

I wished to describe

leaf-fall

in South Park

five white swans

standing on a clouded mirror

of water

I wished to paint

black chrysanthemums

oxidized by hoar-frost

light on the lips

of a passing

girl

I recalled the poets

of The Middle Kingdom

they had mastered the skill

of composing the perfect work

they are extinguished

but the light of their poems

reaches me

across thousands of years

a leaf touched the ground

I now understood

weeping pictures

the silence of music

the mystery of crippled poetry

When I got home

my hand began writing

a deaf-and-dumb

poem

it wished to be

to see the light

but I have no wish to write it

I hear how it slowly

stops breathing

November 1982

-- Tadeusz Rozewicz

translated from the Polish by Adam Czerniawski

* * *

"Radical Grace"

I see a man bathe through a hotel window.

He has long hair. One bright geranium is placed in a jar.

Standing by the garden he picked it in

I can almost see long legs through autumn night and steam.

Vital grace essential; there must be slow jazz playing

on an old radio, the glass he lifts a ruby venous bell.

The city is Vancouver, night tired just before rain.

He turns to watch me, ambivalence and grace.

This is still the first rule. The world reinvents itself.

All pulse, continuous hesitation into what is lovely;

re-invention. Hands urge to dry his sopping hair

now I can't name him man or woman.

-- Tanya Kern

* * *

"Yellow Iris"

It's early morning

and a woman

from a previous

world is wading

up the stream.

Very stately and

sturdy with double-

jointed elbows she's

still in her

grave clothes,

her crinkled three-ply

surcoat made of

cloth of June.

She has one

gold-webbed glove,

one withered hand.

She's resting, considering

her next pose,

behind the blades

of slatted blinds.

Her name is

Iris, the Rainbow,

the messenger, the

water's secretary, the

only word she

speaks is 'yellow'.

Lost ghost Queen

of the Unbetween

it's lovely listening

to the burp

of mud as

she sinks her

feet right in.

-- Alice Oswald

* * *

"August 1952"

It's still distant, but there are hints of springtime:

some flowers, aching to bloom, have torn open their collars.

In this era of autumn, almost winter, leaves can still be heard:

their dry orchestras play, hidden in corners of the garden.

Night is still where it was, but colors at times take flight,

leaving red feathers of dawn on the sky.

Don't regret our breath's use as air, our blood's as oil --

some lamps at last are burning in the night.

Tilt your cup, don't hesitate! Having given up all,

we don't need wine. we've freed ourselves, made Time irrelevant.

When imprisoned man opens his eyes, cages will dissolve: air, fire,

water, earth -- all have pledged such dawns, such gardens to him.

Your feet bleed, Faiz, something surely will bloom

as you water the desert simply by walking through it.

-- Faiz Ahmed Faiz

translated from the Urdu by Agha Shahid Ali

* * *

"Gray Light in May"

The soft gray light between rains

This enveloping light

Under a canopy of green

Oak chestnut maple

Last night the moon, orange and full

Over Manhattan's West side

Edgewater below so sleepy

The neighborhood asleep

My family asleep

Coming back here how many years now

And the ride in from Newark

Manhattan looming over the meadows

The beauties of travel are due to

The strange hours we keep to see them

This soft windless air

Away now nearly thirty years

You can smell the tidal flats below

Passenger jets silent overhead

In and out of Kennedy, LaGuardia

As if gliding across the night

My heart abrim

A glass of wind, spilling over

The air like wine

I am a stranger to myself

The soft gray light

The still moist air

The azaleas in these yards

Under the canopies of leaves

Fiercely abloom in this gray light

Between rains

Almost stereoscopic

The broad green leaves overhead as well

Painters know it, photographers too

The smell of lilac

Nudging my chest like the muzzle of a dog

The manner in which this gray light

Wraps itself around things

Saturating them

Bringing up their color

So much a part of me

So much of what is dearest

I can barely stand upright under the weight of it

The song of the wood thrush

Reverberates through the heavy air

And around its hidden columns

Who knows the Palisades as I do

Lilac and dogwood

Flowering pear blossoms, mingling

Drifting into gutters

How many years

For how many years

A stranger to my own heart

-- August Kleinzahler

* * *

"The Arrival Matters"

Down this white-hot avenue

In a grayish-silver haze,

I am driving under blue

And brilliant centuries of days;

And a south wind blows and blows,

Tosses the crepe-myrtle trees

White and mauve and pink and rose,

Blows the pollen and the bees;

Where the paving-lines converge

In their clot of blazing mist,

Where the sky and city merge,

Is the point where I exist.

-- Frederick Turner

* * *

"Poinsettia"

red was always a fickle color

but who cared when the mad woman

screamed off her head

or your mother didn't speak to you

and the words you needed

ran off and left you stranded

red could be capricious all she wants

that doesn't alter the beauty of hibiscus

or make them any less useful for

shining shoes

dangerous or bold

as women sitting legs spread

using their skirts to fan the heat

between their thighs

or peppered shrimp

soliciting water from your eyes

red is that mean sometimes

-- Opal Palmer Adisa

* * *

"With Quevedo, In Springtime"

Everything has flowered in

these fields, apple trees,

hesitant blues, yellow weeds,

and in green grass the poppies thrive.

The inextinguishable sky, the new air

of each day, the invisible shine within,

that gift of a wide and vast springtime.

But spring hasn't come to my room.

diseases, dubious kisses,

that stuck like the church's ivy

to the black windows of my life,

and love alone is never enough, not even the wild

and expansive fragrance of spring.

And, to you, what can these mean now:

the orgiastic light, the evidence unfolding

like a flower, the green song

in the green leaves, the presence

of the sky with its goblet of freshness?

External spring, do not torment me,

unleashing wine and snow in my arms,

corolla and battered bouquet of sorrow,

just for today give me the sleep of nocturnal

leaves, the night of the dead, the metals, the roots,

and so many extinguished springtimes

that awaken to life every spring.

-- Pablo Neruda

translated from the Spanish by William O'Daly

* * *

"Freshen the Flowers, She Said"

So I put them in the sink, for the cool porcelain

was tender,

and took out the tattered and cut each stem

on a slant,

trimmed the black and raggy leaves, and set them all --

roses, delphiniums, daisies, iris, lilies,

and more whose names I don't know, in bright new water --

gave them

a bounce upward at the end to let them take

their own choice of position, the wheels, the spurs,

the little sheds of the buds. It took, to do this,

perhaps fifteen minutes.

Fifteen minutes of music

with nothing playing.

-- Mary Oliver

* * *

"At Stinson Beach"

Trompe l'oeil stillness in a steady rain

The coast road: morning glories in a drainage ditch

Pale touch-me-nots: suicide in early spring,

Its particular agony, the false note

By what name, when blossom

Falls on blossom, rain

On rain

What she brought back from that minute tranquillity

She never said

How the flower of her body

Danced her dresses into light

Fog and the early sun, an easy wind

She danced swaying in the stalled light

She danced easily without occasion

Variations in green, ferns, redwood,the rain

-- Robert Hass

* * *

"How to Walk in the Dark with Flowers"

Open your eyes to the light

in the armful of lilies you are holding

Move forward and be guided

by the sheen of their white curves

quavering stamens of dizzy gold

shimmering back at you as you

take the first step

A torch of flower-light

does not allow itself

to feel

cut from the earth

Just think: to be beautiful

and dying at the same, last time

Lay the lilies down on the body

Leve them, and say goodbye

Now, groping along

on hands and knees

the help you need

you generate yourself

as you wait for lucidity

to descend

with its burden

of resolve

which you'll readily embrace, arms eager

glad to push upright again

dark clay at a good distance

wind from the sky heaping around you

living aromas

from beings of light someone planted

many years ago

-- David Zieroth

* * *

Twelve Poems with Three-Word Titles

2010-04-30T23:10:00.004-04:00

"At The Piccolo"

Sitting in the jazz café at four a. m.

plotting a future in another country and a change of heart

I see a friend walk past with a 'striking woman'

I happen to know has syphilis. His last girl was a lesbian

the one before that slit her wrist

four times in a week. Sitting at my table

with a Spanish coffee and a diary of despair

scribbling its lunatic message in my eyes

I think of two foreign girls with brutal inclination

grappling on the gymnasium floor with their legs

awkwardly apart, smelling of stale perfume, honest toil

and a frank desire to please.

The girl thinks she might make the coffee

'on the house'. I'd back out of such a contract

on principle, remembering the advice of a friend:

Don't shit on your own doorstep, he said. Outside

the street takes on a pale radiance and a hint of mist.

My friend walks in, alone, and we talk

carefully avoiding references to women, love, despair

and the pale carnage of the street.

-- John Tranter

* * *

"Natural Science Teacher"

Finally I spy that bundle of light, slowly flowing into the woods. Like a

silent stream, leaving a waterfall, myriad specks of dust, like spores, float

among the beams, exploring, or aimlessly wander off.

They enter the woods. there's a child fascinated by insects, going on and

on about plants with me. there's a youngster who loves climbing

mountains and fording streams, who will someday trace every range I've

crossed. As for that girl who writes like a poem, she's never grown up,

still that same likeness of an 11-year-old I dote on.

They'll come across my death, in different places. It might be like the

shards of a beetle shell, or possibly a rotting, withered tree.

And, by chance, they'll encounter my birth, a kind of essence even more

concrete than tender shoots and new leaves, sitting by their side in

lonesome moments.

They continue going into the woods. Inside my aged sea-turtle's body

they squirm about, vexing me, tiring me, harassing me. It's always been

my living question mark, my uncertainty.

-- Liu Kexiang

translated from the Chinese by Nicholas A. Kaldis

* * *

"In This January"

This must be the month when someone decided

to make months; to count sunsets and full moons and only give it

so much time. And though Janus looks both ways, this January

is intent only on winter's face. It cups and kisses it

on the forehead, on the eyelashes. Why could winter

ever want to leave, if all that attention kept up.

I pass a half-built church on my walk every morning

and every morning I'm filled with the envy thinking of the dreams

the people building it must have. My dreams are shoeboxes

filled with bones from my feet. When I wake it's with a mouthful

of mother-may-I's and the taunting of another day,

daring me to take a step as it pulls the walls up even higher.

No, it doesn't look both ways, it makes me do that.

This house is a maze of those bare walls, perfect

for showing home movies on. And I've become the projector.

-- Susan Goyette

* * *

"Inside the Redwood"

Floating tiers and worlds

a green heaven doll house

dense microwood spaces

needle masses stretch out

big rain shroud wings over

air runways imagined solid

as clouds flown through in planes

thick stacked tufted landings

branch bales piled up feathery

no sky shows through

in there the greens so dark

like blacks with orange edged

light lower lift-ups

of needle tip droopers poised

to move up and down in

the water weighted wind

-- Tom Clark

* * *

"Out of Body"

That wasn't love; that was

you unravelling quietly

on the backseat,

lying back thinking

you never dreamed

phallic was this big.

You skipped

your favourite:

stew peas and rice,

for this?

You should eat something

before you take in

too much air. Fill yourself

with yellow and gold

or the sounds of rain

falling out of a movie

you remember watching

when no one was on top of you.

You move your right hand

down the slope of back.

Jesus!

You've never prayed like this,

for flesh and flood.

You've found a village.

This place is your own:

the smell of you

like damp earth and curry.

What sex are we

twined like bamboo stalks

in a farmer's hands,

journeying to the sound

of a car engine?

Me, somewhere on a gravelled road.

-- Tanya Shirley

* * *

"Washing the Grain"

Round and round the year tilts

from nighttime to dawn from sunlight to shadow

and the pale days falling from this side to that

yield a fine cloudiness only

We are so far now, so far, cry the grains

the home-field only a memory warm

in the husk

and that too sloughed off

that too lost

in the mortar's pounding

Round and round spin the days

another year of this churning

and tilting, washing at last

quite over the rim

will we lie in clear water,

pure, transparent,

delicately separate?

We shall become

consumable: our pale substance

will satisfy somebody

And this dark grit

trapped in the bowl's fine furrows

may be disposed of, thrown

out upon the wattles and dry grass

-- Yasmine Gooneratne

* * *

"Their Canvases Are"

full of the timeless faces

of their kind, gazing out

at a distance that is empty

of our inventions and serene

so. the trees are dark

flames, burning in the Florentine

weather in answer to

their need of the blind hand

for form, kindling nothing

but the imagination, for

the earth that produced

these was fertile of

worse things: our shadows,

for instance. fortunate

people, foreseeing so much

on the horizon, but never ourselves coming.

-- R. S. Thomas

* * *

"Configuration of One"

A friend wrote: "you know of course

the 'you' in that short piece I wrote

beginning 'I dreamed that you were in

my dream' etc. was you" and you know

last night I dreamed

someone had put a fine wire

across my path and I tripped.

And I told someone the reason I thought

I like green so much is because

I was once a bird. "An owl," he said.

Some people have said I was

in Italy during the time of the Medici

but I think it was earlier, back

when Giotto was pressing angels into

flat chapel walls. When you came

into the room last night I was that again.

--Ann Lauterbach

* * *

"What It Does"

The sea bit,

As they said it would,

And the hill slid,

As they said it would,

And the poor dead

Nodded agog

The poor head.

O topmost lofty

Tower of Troy,

The poem apparently

Speaks with joy

Of terrible things.

Where is the pleasure

The poetry brings?

Tell if you can,

What does it make?

A city of man

That will not shake,

Or if it shake,

Shake with the splendor

Of the poem's pleasure.

-- David Ferry

* * *

"Always, Not Always"

Always evening. always fall

or early winter. Street lights burn;

soft discs smudge into brown

haze. Not always.

Sometimes, in the green

and white of spring

she sat with an old friend

in the park, where mint

made its own season,

cool summer; fragrant

warmth in winter's rain.

He told her of waking

to its smell, subtle blossoming

in tea. Of the fountain where

his daughter liked to play;

the plane's white wings, stains

on shuddering tarmac

where he trained younger men.

Back in the city where they talked

she wakes. cut-glass

in a strange apartment shimmers

deep, obsessive blue,

fills her eye. In the air,

he told her, land, your loved ones

fall away so easily . . . . It's here,

now, you feel it, faces

turn dispassionate, eyes

glance off you, flicker with some

hostile feeling. but there,

you let it go, hands free.

Except in the whining surge

of take-off and descent

when the earth, its contents,

pull with such force

you beg them not

to let you leave.

-- Diana Fitzgerald Bryden

* * *

"Little Night Music"

Of neighbors' voices and dishes

Being cleared away

On long summer evenings

With the windows open

As we sat on the back stairs,

Smoking and sipping beer.

The memory of that moment,

So sweet at first,

The two of us chatting away,

Till the stars made us quiet.

We drew close

And held fast to each other

As if in sudden danger.

That one time, I didn't recognize

Your voice, or dare turn

To look at your face

As you spoke of us being born

With so little apparent cause.

I could think of nothing to say.

The music over, the night cold.

-- Charles Simic

* * *

"The New Pastoral"

The first man had flint to spark. He had a wheel

to read his world

I'm in the dark.

I am a lost, last inhabitant --

displaced person

in a pastoral chaos.

All day I listen to

the loud distress, the switch and tick of

new herds.

But I'm no shepherdess.

Can I unbruise these sprouts or clean this mud flesh

till it roots again?

Can I make whole

this lamb's knuckle, butchered from its last crooked suckling?

I could be happy here,

I could be something more than a refugee

were it not for this lamb unsuckled, for the nonstop

switch and tick

telling me

there was a past

there was a pastoral,

and these chance sights

what are they all

but amnesias of a rite

I danced once on a frieze?

-- Eavan Boland

* * *

Twenty More Poems with 3-Line Stanzas

2010-03-16T12:28:00.005-04:00

Here's the earlier thread of 3-line stanza poems.

"Transits of Venus"

Vancouver airport. I have crossed this space before,

leaving lovers -- a small planet moving slowly

over a vast and polished floor, circled by strangers.

Beyond the lounge window, gray skies, gray tarmac.

Straight white painted lines plane off across

the wide-winged delta and intersect the arc

of the horizon. I watch a train of luggage carts

cut a tangent towards me, towed through a bubble

of silence -- sound severed from me by glass --

and think of moon buggies, vehicles designed

to cross the surface of a satellite, exploring flat

gray plains, Mare Oscularum, Mare Incognita.

I am exploring the thought of leaving you --

you, the men who stayed there on the Island,

you, the men who left on flights back east.

Transits of Venus occur perhaps too often

in my life. the inner planets, small separate

circles, cross the blazing surface of the sun

and then separate, depart to shine alone,

the wandering ones together only for a time,

contained by the bright circumference of love.

-- Alice Major

* * *

"Moonstone Woman"

Moonstone woman combs her hair;

blind since before birth

she is in her own inner light

From somewhere the sound of a great jar cracking

water comes flowing down a long staircase

o the bottom of this dark violet hole

When she illuminates her loneliness

at the four corners of earth

crouching dogs loom

One day she will pass beyond the pagoda

and on through corridors of clouds

guided by fish with lidless eyes

But for now with sour fruit in her mouth

she sits combing moonlight

being consumed by shadow

-- Tada Chimako

translated from the Japanese by Robert Brady & Odagawa Kazuko

* * *

"Landscape with Teeth"

Cattle dusk-sculpted on a plinth of skyline.

Breast of chaffinch a watered strawberry.

Inishturk a whale-shape on the glazed sea.

Bog, clod, soggy, sod, plod. Nimbus

of light over boggy pasture; couchgrass

in flattened mats; blunt push of mushrooms

through loamy hush. Nests, passage graves,

crosses. Steam-clouds out of the cows'

rosy mouths. Soft furnaces of their body-bulk.

Three girls moving through rainmist

under a huge blue umbrella, waiting for Monet

to paint them as they are on the headland:

grey swell of sea, horizon a pale lapis, sky

chequered with cloud; a pointillist silvering

shiver of rain. Their poppy-coloured laugh.

Indoors, a window-ledge of books, that umber

Italian vase of meadowsweet and loosestrife,

a spray of fuchsia against the verdigris

and plumblue bulges of Tully Mountain.

In the foreground one rusted sickle, a single

blip of sunlight igniting its bent tip.

But where do the real dreams come from

in their primary colours -- with their small teeth

sharpened and their warm wet tongue?

-- Eamon Grennan

* * *

"Old People"

Their old skin has the marks of the sea in it.

The patterns of waves. Traces of sand crabs in the patterns.

Wind traces. Splinters of seashells. Markings of kelpfronds.

Their voices are loud against the waves coming in.

They shout out into the wind that blows back into

Their mouths the words they are trying to shout out into

The wind that blows against them. What they possess

They possess with a fierceness that comes from a deafness that isn't

Deaf, but it hears the waves say take them, take them.

But they cry out against the waves in voices

Violent and weak I won't give in to them.

They're in a room full of people almost without

Any furniture only some metal chairs,

So the walls resound and Cerberus barks a lot.

It is a nightmare of the high school lunchroom.

-- David Ferry

* * *

"Yellow Rooms"

In Grenada for the first time, my woman

island, without her, at my writer-friend place

in Morne Jaloux, verandah view

out to bush bush bush

then the Carenage,

we were liming in the kitchen

talking good talk bout books

and freshness over oil-down

cook up by her boxer-boyfriend

when, just so, a bat fly in the place,

flapping wild, nearly buck up

the walls. Everybody duck,

scream with a kind of delight.

It fly fly fly like a madness,

like moth on fire.

The radar off, my friend say.

The damn thing couldn't find

the door it fly in from.

Is a fruit bat, right?, I laugh,

I laugh a tremble-laugh.

This creature just come

and mash up all the vibes,

all blind, hairy, all clamour of wings.

Even love, I learn, could be just so,

not meant for this house,

these small, yellow rooms,

a notion, a thing-thing,

old suckblood idea;

who say it could fly in,

dance up in the air and thing;

not a window open again

to chase the thing back out.

Come in like it want stay

for true,

come cause commotion

in I heart.

-- Christian Campbell

* * *

"Meadowsweet"

Tradition suggests that certain of the Gaelic

women poets were buried face down

So they buried her, and turned home,

a drab psalm

hanging about them like haar,

not knowing the liquid

trickling from her lips

would seek its way down,

and that caught in her slowly

unraveling plait of grey hair

were summer seeds:

meadowsweet, bastard balm,

tokens of honesty, already

beginning their crawl

toward light, so showing her,

when the time came,

how to dig herself out --

to surface and greet them,

mouth young, and full again

of dirt, and spit, and poetry.

-- Kathleen Jamie

* * *

"Eclipse with Object"

There is a spectacle and something is added to history.

It has as its object an indiscretion: old age, a

gun, the prevention of sleep.

I am placed in its stead

and the requisite shadow is yours.

It casts across me, a violent coat.

It seems I fit into its sleeve.

So the body wanders.

Sometime it goes where light does not reach.

You recall how they moved in the moon dust? Hop, hop.

What they said to us from that distance was stupid.

They did not say I love you for example.

The spectacle has been placed in my room.

Can you hear its episode trailing,

pretending to be a thing with variegated wings?

Do you know the name of this thing?

It is a rubbing from an image.

The subject of the image is that which trespasses.

\You are invited to watch. the body

in complete dark casting nothing back.

The thing turns and flicks and opens.

-- Ann Lauterback

* * *

"I am like the leaf that knows its limits"

I am like the leaf that knows its limits

And doesn't want to extend beyond them,

Not to blend with nature, not to flow into the big world.

I am so quiet now that

I can't imagine

I ever shouted, even as a baby in pain.

And my face, what is left

After they hewed it for love,

Like a quarry. Now abandoned.

--Yehuda Amichai

translated from the Hebrew by Benjamin & Barbara Harshav

* * *

"In a White Town"

She never looked like other boys' mums.

No one ever looked without looking again

at the pink kameez and balloon'd bottoms,

mustard-oiled trail of hair, brocaded pink

sandals and the smell of curry. That's why

I'd bin the letters about Parents' Evenings,

why I'd police the noise of her holy songs,

check the net curtains were hugging the edges,

lavender-spray the hallway when someone knocked,

pluck all the gold-top milk from its crate

in case the mickey-takers would later disclose it,

never confessing my parents' weird names

or the code of our address when I was licked

by Skinheads (by a toilet seat)

desperate to flush out the enemy within.

I would have felt more at home had she hidden

that illiterate body, bumping noisily into women

at the market, bulging into its drama'd gossip,

for homework -- in the public library with my mates,

she'd call, scratching on the windows. Scratching again

until later, her red face would be in my red face,

two of us alone, she'd duck at my stuttered Punjabi,

laughing, say I was a gora, I'd only be freed

by a bride from India who would double as her saathi.

Nowadays, when I visit, when she hovers upward,

hobbling towards me to kiss my forehead

as once she used to, I wish I could fall forward.

-- Daljit Nagra

* * *

"Cleaning St. Anne"

St. Anne holds Mary on her ample impastoed lap,

they're both grown but Anne's got knees

the size of ham bones and Mary's light as a conscience.

They say Leonardo painted with his fingertips,

dragged the paint across the surface, blending one tone

into another, precious pigment into sealer.

Everyone's barefoot and plump, reclining

on high rocks somewhere higher than Montana.

Jesus is squeezing a lamb. Mary reaches out placidly.

I love St. Anne this way, butch and nurturing.

How will her restorers decide what's actual varnish

and what's original pigment? That's the question.

I moved into St. Anne's parish in 1958.

I hadn't been tweaked or rulered yet, no one'd

threatened me with sadism or molested my little brother.

Now her head is cracking badly, she needs

analysis and restoration, the paint above her eyes thin

as mother's milk, her daughter's robes greasy as makeup.

I say: It's women who keep the church alive.

There we are, week after week, filling the pews,

handing men the reins. What do we expect?

Still, there is little left between modesty and acrimony,

little that the cruciform does not polarize

like a magnet in iron filings -- you here, you here.

Transcendence comes late, well after seven, that

age of reason when you're finally able, after games

of catechism, to figure out equations for salvation.

Honey, you need a good cleaning. Your face

is covered with a dark green veil and your eyes

have lost their watery sheen. Mona Lisa's next, and look

at Ginevra de'Benci, cross-eyed as the day she was born,

now pearly as a baby's behind. the tints of her face

appear not to be colors at all -- but living breathing flesh.

-- Maureen Seaton

* * *

"Trinket"

I love watching the water

ooze through the crack in the fern pot,

it's a small thing

that slows time

and steadies

and gives me ideas of becoming

having nothing to do

with ambition or even reaching,

it isn't necessary at such times

to describe this,

it's no image for mean keeping,

it's no thing that small

but presence.

Other men look at the ocean,

and I do too,

though it is too many

presences for any

to absorb.

It's this other,

a little water, used, appearing

slowly around the sounds

of oxygen and small frictions,

that gives the self

the notion of the self

one is always losing

until these tiny embodiments

small enough to contain it.

-- Marvin Bell

* * *

"The Alfa Romeo"

I admired the Parthenon

in its every column

I found the golden mean

but today if I may say so

I find the good and beautiful

in a sports Alfa Romeo

Summer and winter let there be

all around me olive groves

behind me centuries

When the road before me takes off

and leads me into temptation

I step on it and floor the gas

With the power of a lion

and a background of birds

I reach a hundred miles per hour

Good-bye seas and mountains

good-bye and full speed ahead

for the Kore of Lightning.

-- Odysseus Elytis

translated from the Greek by Jeffrey Carson & Nikos Sarris

* * *

"Your horse"

has arrived and is bending himself into the room,

refolding his legs. I knuckle his nose,

which reminds me of the arm of a chair.

He is talking low and steady,

rolling back an eye towards his chestnut brain.

Man-words are climbing his long throat.

I show him to the bathroom

and he is embarrassed. Next he is hoofing

through your photo album.

There are more of me than of him.

We are crunching on polo mints together

and remembering the way your body used to move.

-- Jack Underwood

* * *

"The Greeks"

I would have like to live among the Greeks,

talk with Sophocles' disciples,

learn the rites of secret mysteries,

but when I was born the pockmarked

Georgian still lived and reigned,

with his grim henchmen and theories.

Those were years of memory and grief,

of sober talks and silence;

there was little joy --

although a few birds didn't know this,

a few children and trees.

To wit, the apple tree on our street

blithely opened its white blooms

each April and burst

into ecstatic laughter.

-- Adam Zagajewski

translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

* * *

"White Cockatoos"

Spectres inverting sunlit

paddocks after late rain

field into quadrature out

of blind-spots, raucous

it's said, like broken glass

in a nature reserve

but that'

s no comparison;

cowslip orchids' yellow parameters

curl like tin, or cowslip orchids'

yellow parameters reflect clusters

of white feathers from canopies

of wandoos or sheaths of flight,

down in deep green crops

ready to turn when rains are gone,

beaks turned back towards

whereabouts unknown,

but almost certain to appear,

at least as atmosphere.

-- John Kinsella

* * *

"Lucia"

My hair, voluminous from sleeping in

six different positions, redolent with your scent,

helps me recall that last night was indeed real,

that it's possible for a bedspread to spawn

a watershed in the membrane that keeps us

shut in our own skins, mute without pleasure,

that I didn't just dream you into being.

You fit like a fig in the thick of my tongue,

give my hands their one true purpose,

find in my shoulder a groove for your head.

In a clinch, you're clenched and I'm pinched,

we're ;spooned, forked, wrenched, lynched

in a chestnut by a mob of our own making,

only to be resurrected to stage several revivals

that arise from slightest touch to thwart

deep sleep with necessities I never knew

I knew until meeting you a few days

or many distant, voluptuous lifetimes ago.

-- Ravi Shankar

* * *

"Traffic"

The semitrailer crawls through the fog.

It is the lengthened shadow of a dragonfly larva

crawling over the murky lakebottom.

Headlights cross among dripping branches.

You can't see the other driver's face.

Light overflows through the pines.

We have come, shadows chassis from all directions

in failing light, we go in tandem after each other,

past each other sweep on in a modest roar

into the open where the industries are brooding,

and every year the factory buildings go down another

eighth of an inch -- the earth is gulping them slowly.

Paws no one can identify leave a print

on the glossiest artifacts dreamed up here.

Pollen is determined to live in asphalt.

But the horse-chestnut trees loom up first, melancholy

as if they intended to produce clusters of iron gloves

rather than white flowers, and past them

the reception room -- a fluorescent light out of order

blinks off and on. Some magic door is around here! Open!

and look downward, through the reversed periscope,

down to the great mouths, the huge buried pipes

where algae is growing like the beards on dead men

and the Cleaner swim on in his overcoat of slime

and his strokes weaker and weaker, he will be choked soon.

And no one knows what will happen, we only know

the chain breaks and grows back together all the time.

-- Tomas Transtromer

translated from the Swedish by Robert Bly

* * *

"My Perpendicular Daughter"

My perpendicular daughter grew taller

than they said she would do when I got her;

I wish they hadn't lied to me like that.

I thought a daughter would be light and quiet --

not at all; they hung her upside down inside me

and now she sticks straight out, gets in the way

when I stand close to walls. I tried to take her back

but they said I should be glad a man had known me

and I'd only got what I'd been begging for.

Would I like a booklet? Instead i asked for milk

and tipped its long white screech right down,

it furred my throat and stayed there, curdling

all afternoon. there are no returns on daughters,

they pointed out. I aimed her at them like a gun:

This is how death begins, I told them.

-- Emily Berry

* * *

"Leda"

You think a god is coming his wing

makes a kind of shadow I

you say and you are changed

You were just sleeping but now you can

never stop the shock even

if he hands you hat and whip bit and rein

like lightning he rises with you, memory

blows off you where were you first casually

you stroke the down that is burning you

-- Eva Gerlach

translated from the Dutch by Alissa Valles

* * *

"What Price"

We wear down bars of soap

with our palms, stone

steps with our feet. Light

will rub that drawing,

imperceptibly at first, till

the girl's face vanishes.

Will a field, crossed often

enough, sink? Your clavicle,

where my head rests?

There is a room where light

tracks the day along the wall,

simply, without tenderness.

It leaves no deep impression,

nor do our thrown shadows.

But the earth. It shifts, in time.

--Stephanie Bolster

* * *

Twelve March Poems

2010-02-28T19:57:00.008-05:00

"March Snow"

There is something hopeful about March,

something benevolent about the light,

and yet wherever I look snow

has fallen or is about to fall, and the cold

is so unexpected, so harsh,

that even the spider lily blooming

on the windowsill seems no more

than another promise, soon to be broken.

It is like a lover who speaks

the passionate language of fidelity, but

when you look for him, there he is

in the arms of winter.

-- Linda Pastan

* * *

"March morning unlike others"

Blue haze. Bees hanging in the air at the hive-mouth.

Crawling in prone stupor of sun

On the hive-lip. Snowdrops. Two buzzards,

Still-wings, each

Magnetized to the other,

Float orbits.

Cattle standing warm. Lit, happy stillness.

A raven, under the hill,

Coughing among bare oaks.

Aircraft, elated, splitting blue.

Leisure to stand. The knee-deep mud at the trough

Stiffening. Lambs freed to be foolish.

The earth invalid, dropsied, bruised, wheeled

Out into the sun,

After the frightful operation.

She lies back, wounds undressed to the sun,

To be healed,

Sheltered from the sneapy chill creeping North wind,

Leans back, eyes closed, exhausted, smiling

Into the sun. Perhaps dozing a little.

While we sit, and smile, and wait, and know

She is not going to die.

-- Ted Hughes

* * *

"Sunny Day in March"

Even the weathercock turns with the sun on such a day.

It must be spring. Outside the cellar wall the cat

has found himself shelter. He's asleep, no doubt,

but his fur is well puffed up and his paws

well tucked under. A fly has been tempted out

from a crack in the warm plank wall -- starts

buzzing. Soon stiffens. It's too cold.

-- Olav H. Hauge

translated from the Norwegian by Robin Fulton

* * *

"A Death in March"

Even so the Spring goes forward.

The rind of the trees weepy with sap. No spigot to carry it off.

From here to the other side, ice is motley. The river's current

expression: a stutter of ice cakes on the shore. Fret of spume.

Some days, though, we waken to snow,

fugacious erasure of mud and broken branches.

We feel the setback. Want the spectacular squalor

of Spring: its colourless smear. There's no word for that.

For snow falling, fugue slow, through fog. Earth and air

unable to settle what it's to be. Now is after. Or, ahead?

Interrugnum: Its beauty is brutal. A raw wind through bereft.

-- Anne Compton

* * *

"Spring Equinox Full Moon"

I breathe to you

love in the south of the many

months of spring

hibiscus in dark hair water

at the source

shadows glistening to hips

thighs slender sunset shining shores

fingers rolled fragrant leaves

presence of deep woods

earth veiled in green drift

that hides running

of small airs

untraceable fine sounds

passing as on a face

feet first drops of rain on a mountain

hands greeting flowers

holden stolen flowers

closed eyes of every creature

sepia and amber days

back

of tall tree

arms' glide

voice of rain forests

birds in tree heights

throat of palm

wrist of palm

palm of palm

morsel breasts

melon navel waist of high waterfall

surf laughter face hearing music

body of flight

secret

beach

away from you on a corner of the earth

I want to think for six hours of your hair

which is the invention of singing

daughter of islands

born in the flood of the fish harvest

I see long mornings

lying on your hair

I remember looking for you

-- W. S. Merwin

* * *

"March 2003"

In March exact shadows on snow,

blue in the spectrum overtakes lavender;

the pillows of vapor at a slow bedroom gallop.

Up, up, the whistle pierces; the burn

of one and one, couples the rising

yearn, twin twine, dare,

and thickening flash in shoals.

Even deep-rooted conifers,

their green wax fangs open,

hustling in the languorous swells.

-- Ruth Stone

* * *

"Unknown Things"

were set before me on earth .

But once I touched them I'd known them

right back from the blinding sight I caught

of the glacier by whose foot red and golden

birds foraged in the shadow of tall mammoths

and the noise I heard from the bells and the smell

of church porches, earth in March, so many springs . . .

Every day tools they were. A hammer, a saw and

the things which people during the time they have on earth

learn the names of, and cut into each other with.

-- Henrik Nordbrandt

translated from the Danish by Robin Fulton

* * *

"March 21"

The vernal equinox is to blame

for the celestial uproar, Anne

Carson said, and nothing surprises

me more than the streaks of white

sunlight this morning with Dexter

Gordon's version of "Tangerine"

in my mind the day is a rhyme

the pencil broke, no need to shout,

I want a girl to write sonnets about

in college & love is the food

that nourishes what it consumes

in springlike days in furnished rooms

I'm hungry, please come and touch me

and I'll whisper your name the only

thing missing in this picture is you

-- David Lehman

* * *

"March"

A bear under the snow

Turns over to yawn.

It's been a long, hard rest.

Once, as she lay asleep, her cubs fell

Out of her hair,

And she did not know them.

It isk hard to breathe

In a tight grave:

So she roars,

And the roof breaks.

Dark rivers and leaves

Pour down.

When the wind opens its doors

In its own good time,

The cubs follow that relaxed and beautiful woman

Outside to the unfamiliar cities

Of moss.

-- James Wright

* * *

"If I Could Paint Essences"

(Hay on Wye)

Another day in March. Late

rawness and wetness. I hear my mind say,

if only I could paint essences.

Such as the mudness of mud

on this rainsoaked dyke where coltsfoot

displays its yellow misleading daisy.

Sch as the westness of west here

in England's last thatched, rivered

county. Red ploughland. Green pasture.

Black cattle. Quick water. Overpainted

by lightshafts from layered gold

and purple cumulus. A cloudness of clouds

which are not likie anything but clouds.

But just as I arrive at true sightness of seeing,

unexpectedly I want to play on those bell-toned

cellos of delicate not-quite-flowering larches

tht offer, on the opposite hill, their unfurled

amber instruments -- floating, insubstantial, a rising

horizon of music embodied in light.

And in such imagining I lose sight of sight.

Just as I'll lose the tune of what

hurls in my head, as I turn back, turn

home to you, conversation, the inescapable ache

of trying to catch, say, the catness of cat

as he crouches, stalking his shadow,

on the other side of the window.

-- Anne Stevenson

* * *

"Three Things That Make Me Outrageously

Happy in March"

Begin with the evergreen Clematis montana. Shy

about opening, blooms pulse into view

a few at a time against the night sky. Some

morning, a creamy tsunami

sweeps over the chain-link fence in a spring

seizure of yearning. Drenches the passerby in

dizzying scent and charges winter's

dark air without warning.

Next, the black umbrella

ribs of Styrax japonica open to rain. Their

delicate green incipient leaves

reverse the gradual losses of autumn. remember

this overture to the Japanese Snowbell

symphony in May when it's time to clean up

the carpet of dried flowers and pods, time to

cart uprooted seedlings away.

When navel oranges

kissed by lazy California sun, glow like

moons in every supermarket, I go

crazy, buy all I can carry. At home, they

tumble from the sack to kiss my eager lips, and as

that nectar of the gods floods my veins, I live

in lovers' paradise every juicy moment

of Seattle rains.

-- Madeline DeFrees

* * *

"March"

A Caribbean airflow

shampoos the brook.

The deepsea deepwarm look of

sky wakes green below

amid the rinds of snow.

Though all seems melt and rush,

earth-loaf, sky-wine,

swept to bright new horizons

with hill-runnel, and gash,

all soaked in sunwash,

far north, the ice

unclenches, booms

the chunks and floes, and river brims

vanish under cold fleece:

the floods are loose!

The sullen torn

old skies through tattery trees

clack, freezing

stiffens loam; the worn

earth's spillways then relearn

how soaring bliss

and sudden-rigoring frost

release

without all lost.

-- Margaret Avison

* * *

Fifteen Poems from Europe

2010-02-07T00:34:00.007-05:00

"The Dump"

O glorious dump, how shall I sing your praise!

You lie in the flickering sunset, sprawling, dishevelled;

A subfusc cat, immaculate in evening dress,

Tweaks at your swelling paunch, deft as a pianist.

The rotting backs and shattered glass of mirrors

Enclose a wormwood's straggling roots;

You are as grand as Venice! (No, far grander!)

The cat is your gondolier, and sings a serenade.

The ruined wreck of an ottoman

Lies cramped in a pool of lilac shade,

Whispering tales of hookahs by the Golden Horn

To lionising clumps of willowherb.

July bobs to admire its face in shards of glass.

A crow dives slowly, then plumps down,

And struts upon you, stately as Sulla,

Holding doom, or mercy, gripped in each claw.

You're peaches' slimy shreds, and berries' slippery bubbles,

Lost lenses, torn book-covers, broken medals;

Your skin is leprous; you're pink and blistered

As a child inundated in scalding soup.

You're Dionysus ritually dismembered,

You're a microcosm in a make-up mirror.

But I say this to you: shake your sleepy limbs,

Get up on your feet, and walk. And then,

You monster, incubus of night,

Open your tattered mouth and speak.

O glorious dump, shake out your limbs and walk!

Sing of the days spent lying in the sun,

Your body warm, your giant's brain crackling, burning,

Yet unifying all that you survey.

May great thoughts bloom and rot in you

As you feast on vodka droplets, chicken bones.

O glorious dump, get to your feet and sing!

O Rosa mystica, he gods must hear your voice.

-- Elena Shvarts, Russia

translated from the Russian by Catriona Kelly

* * *

"Night Breeze"

Unexpectedly the windows open

Wide during the night. The rectangle

Swallows the bedroom, it's a different night where

Life turns inside out like a glove. A veined hand

Emerges, leaf of a negative

Hope on the phantom wall

Pointing towards what? The cliff of a lake

Sea-snows, lunar suns. A rough but tender

Tongue darts from it, paying no attention

To the guard-rails of speech.

Come unstuck, drawings, framed mirrors

The scribblings of the world

Slip from the walls docile and unafraid

Their fibers will be ripped.

A lamp gleams its star's hope in their wake

The sheets knot themselves for an escape

Exchange close body heat

For the sweet cold freedom of the clouds.

-- Claire Malroux, France

translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker

* * *

"Masterpiece"

The only masterpiece

I ever created

was a picture of the moth Thysania agrippina

in pastel on gray paper.

Because I was never

much good at painting. The essence of art

is that we aren't very good at it.

The moth Thysania agrippina

rose from the stiff gray paper

with outstretched, comb-like antennae,

with a plush bottom resembling the buttocks

of the pigwidgeons of Hieronymus bosch,

with thin legs on a shrunken chest

lie those on Breughel's grotesque figures

in "Dulle Griet," it turned into Dulle Griet

with a bundle of pots and pans in her bony hand,

it turned into Bodhiddharma

with long sleeves,

it was Ying or Shade

and Yang or Light, Chwei or Darkness

and Ming or Glow, it had

the black color of water, the ochre color of earth,

the blue color of wood,

I was as proud of it as an Antwerp councilor

or the Tenth Patriarch from the Yellow River,

I sprinkled it with shellac, which is

the oath that painters swear on Goethe's Science of Colors,

and then the art teacher took it to his study

and I forgot all about it

the way Granny used to forget

her dentures in a glass.

-- Miroslav Holub, Czechoslovakia

translated from the Czech by Dana Habova and David Young

* * *

"Relativity"

(Homage to Maurice Cornelius Escher)

Picking up green bottle ends and golden shells

on the beach may be an innocent act, full of beauty

for the walker who uses his eyes. But it can also be

a treacherous episode, if your wandering thoughts frame

an alien face, unknown to the bodies that are yours

and which concern you.

But that does not make less beautiful or strange your objets trouves,

stored in the tubular glass belly of your hope.

Now, the figures you see when you rub your eyes

are green snow crystals, a negative looked at through the microscope

of a hurricane's eye. Your life like a drawing

where you see two faces: an old woman and, afterward, the woman when young;

a rabbit if you look at it with the left eye (and this is love

entirely); if with the right, a duckling's beak aimed

directly at the open heart of a patient in theater.

Even so, although we stayed on the edge, we were afraid

of the trucks backfiring.

Today, a calm mind sees how past and future rush by

haughty and utterly opposed. Let us not cease to thank the man

who painted it: spring, the present, the dividing line.

-- Anna Aguilar - Amat, Spain

translated from the Catalan by Anna Crow

* * *

"The House"

The man alone listens to the calm voice

with half-closed eyes, as if a breath

were blowing on his face, a friendly breath

rising -- astonishing -- from a lost time.

The man alone hears the ancient voice

that his fathers, in their day, heard, clear

and collected, a voice that, like the green

of ponds and hills, deepens with evening.

The man alone knows a shadow voice,

caressing, that rises up in the calm tones

of secret springs: he drinks it intently,

eyes closed. Its presence isn't apparent.

This is the voice that once stopped the father

of his father, and on back through dead blood.

The secretive voice of a woman that comes

from a doorway a the falling of dusk.

-- Cesare Pavese, Italy

translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock

* * *

"The Leaf of the Poplar"

It trembled so, the wind carried it away,

it trembled so, how could the wind not carry it away

in the distance

a sea

in the distance

an island in the sun

and hands grasping the oars

dying the moment the port came into sight

and eyes closed

in sea anemones.

It trembled so much

I wanted it so much

in the cistern with the eucalyptus trees

spring and autumn

in all the woods naked

my God I wanted it.

-- George Seferis, Greece

translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

* * *

"Wood and Shavings"

Of hornets I will say nothing,

since they are so easy to spot.

Also, the current revolutions

are not that dangerous.

Death has always been chosen

amid a fanfare of noise.

Yet beware the May flies and women,

beware the Sunday hunters,

beauticians, the undecided, the well meaning,

the ones devoid of contempt.

Out of the forests we carried branches and logs,

and for a long time there was no sun.

Intoxicated by paper on the conveyer belt,

I no longer recognize the branches

nor the moss, carved into the bark,

impudent and true.

Wasted paper, banners,

black posters . . . . By day and by night

the machine of faith rumbles beneath

this or that star. But in wood,

as long as it is still green, and with bile,

as long as it is still bitter, I am

willing to write what happened at the start!

Make sure you stay awake.

The swarm of hornets chases the shavings

blown by the wind, while at the fountain,

resisting the curled allure

that once made us weak,

my hair bristles.

-- Ingeborg Bachmann, Germany

translated from the German by Peter Filkins

* * *

"Still Life"

Here in a summer full of dust

the dampness of winter

trails us into dark corners.

I bought the shoes days ago

but they remain untouched in the box

heel to heel.

Blessed is the sunbeam that falls upon us

like the eye of a stranger focused on a natura morte.

A platter of the season's finest fruit

so plump, and nestled among it, a shiny dagger.

It's not dangerous

but as alluring and peaceful

as the fruit that surrounds it.

What has become of us?

My hands, skillful and transparent,

slice the atmosphere into rabbit feed.

Another new pair of shoes

to help you enjoy a stroll around the grounds.\

Since you've left I dream of only one thing:

the sound they would make

in the evening

as you reach the front door.

-- Luljeta Lleshanaku, Albania

translated from the Albanian by the author and Henry Israeli

* * *

"The Old Gods"

Now they are condemned

to live in cracks,

in bubbles of plaster and rust,

and spiders' webs

behind the furniture:

speaking a derelict language

to empty space,

sealed with the vapour

in bottles, closed in the blown

robins' eggs

in some abandoned loft.

Each has its given power.

Each has its hearth, its secret,

its local name,

and each has its way of learning

the skill of return,

the science of bleeding through, when anger or fear

is fuzzing the surface,

making us dizzy and whole.

-- John Burnside, Scotland

* * *

"Voice"

I walk on the sea-shore

to catch that voice

between the breaking of one wave

and another

but there is no voice

only the senile garrulity of water

salty nothing

a white bird's wing

stuck dray to a stone

I walk to the forest

where persists the continuous

hum of an immense hour-glass

sifting leaves into humus

humus into leaves

powerful jaws of insects

consume the silence of the earth

I walk into the fields

green and yellow sheets

fastened with pins of insect beings

sing at every touch of he wind

where is that voice

it should speak up

when for a moment there is a pause

in the unrelenting monologue of the earth

nothing but whispers

clappings explosions

I come home

and my experience take on

the shape of an alternative

either the world is dumb

or I am deaf

but perhaps

we are both

doomed to our afflictions

therefore we must

arm in arm

go blindly on

toward new horizons

toward contracted throats

from which rises

an unintelligible gurgle

-- Zbigniew Herbert, Poland

translated from the Polish by Alissa Valles

* * *

"Apples"

The apples have fallen and rot in the yard.

And you aren't here.

Otherwise, everything goes on like before.

The cricket creaks in the dry grass.

The windowpane is shattered.

The stone has fallen by the bed.

Shards of glass cover the pillow.

-- Lyubomir Nikolov, Bulgaria

translated from the Bulgarian by Miroslav Nikolov

* * *

"Moths"

Tonight the air smells of cut grass.

Apples rust on the branches. already summer is

a place mislaid between expectation and memory.

This has been a summer of moths.

Their moment of truth comes well after dark.

Then they reveal themselves at our window-

ledges and sills as a pinpoint. A glimmer.

The books I look up about them are full of legends:

ghost-swift moths with their dancing assemblies at dusk.

Their courtship swarms. How some kinds may steer by the moon.

The moon is up. the back windows are wide open.

Mid-July light fills the neighbourhood. I stand by the hedge.

Once again they are near the windowsill --

fluttering past the fuchsia and the lavender,

which is knee-high, and too blue to warn them

they will fall down without knowing how

or why what they steered by became, suddenly,

what they crackled and burned around. They will perish --

I am perishing -- on the edge and at the threshold of

the moment all nature fears and tends towards:

the stealing of light. Ingenious facsimile.

And the kitchen bulb which beckons them makes

my child's shadow longer than my own.

-- Eavan Boland, Ireland

* * *

"Essay"

Life begins with the reptiles:

the amoeba, the snails, the spiders,

the water with a tusk on each wave,

the space-hungry paths,

the roots, when they're hungry.

Even the minerals

devour one another.

A diamond has all the others

inside its guts.

What we see as vertical

is the various forms

of courtship dances which,

in poplars for instance, come close to being sublime,

in mountain ranges, to being grotesque,

in snakes, to being rainbows.

At night from the moon rattles

the hour of multiplication,

even seeds are on heat;

wax grows most frenzied of all.

The fishes, the birds, the mammals with great hopes

(among them humans too)

lay their eggs straight into sand

which they forget as soon as the kiss is over.

As you can see,

everything round about is perfect

as a sphere

containing neither an angle

nor a broken line

with which one could hang oneself.

-- Marin Sorescu, Romania

translated from the Romanian by Michael Hamburger

* * *

"Star, Meteor, Some Shooting Thing"

That one coming out of a building with a full-face crash helmet,

jumping toward an afternoon of tar

and wind against his neck, impatient, and savoring

the scent of mixture and of the two-stroke engine

or perhaps of fresh-cut grass, the short kilometers

that will zip by free of care, pure images

of faces and fleeting bodies, windows

like screens or glimpsed nostalgias, forgettable

sorrows: a light accompanies him. To leave,

just to leave, to get lost, to become

\star, meteor, some shooting thing.

Suburbs of nothingness, and in every house

the same blue flame, and clear signs

of frustrated hopes and oppositions

that have been utterly crushed.

Dogs on leashes, old folks, playgrounds.

"Do you know that once upon a time some forth head

of cattle used to graze here?" says one,

tapping his foot on the polyurethane surface of the small field.

This is the afternoon: a diffused dazzle,

the unexpected greeting of those you pass by.

And some knowing looks, that say thank you.

That say we are here, in spite of it all.

The watermelon, for example, that a group of Turks

kindly offered us, was delicious.

-- Fabio Pusterla, Switzerland

translated from the Italian by Marella Feltrin-Morris

* * *

"Silence"

Silence

Like the one before the world was created

Fog slides over the river

Tangles in bushes on shore

Dew trembles on a branch

A bud bursts open

A fledgling moves in a nest

Silence

Like the one before the first word was spoken

Church bells lick their lips

-- Ronalds Briedis, Latvia

translated from the Latvian by Margita Gailitis and J. C. Todd

* * *

Twelve Poems Beginning With The Word "The"

2010-01-20T23:08:00.004-05:00

"Essex Rag"

Do not play this piece fast.

It is never right to play ragtime fast.

-- Scott Joplin

The piano years . . . Too young to drive

I played pedal to the metal,

full reverb, wah-wah and fuzz,

a collision course bending Chopsticks

into hairpins, trilling the hell

out of cheesy Fur Elise.

The teacher's 'grown-up' bait

was a bowdlerised Ode to Joy,

heavy goods I slammed through,

dropping a trail of exhausted parts

-- like the juggernauts

shouldering the lane past our door.

If the point is not to bring the house down,

what better place

than somewhere you wake up

to everything years after it's moved on?

The times I tried to move on . . .

But from here, I mean there, wherever

you get to is not far and still nowhere, so

there's nothing for it but to head home,

unsure whether the last bus has gone.

There's slow and there's the discovery of slow.

The last bus has not gone.

It never comes.

-- Lavinia Greenlaw

* * *

"12th-Century Chinese Painting

with a Few Dozen Seal Imprints Across It"

The tea has given way to plum wine,

and still they're talking, animated down to points

of fire deep in their pupils -- two scholars. "Look,"

one motions at what's outside the sliding panels: landscape

where the purling of river leads to foothills,

then to the tree-frowzed mountains themselves, and

up from there . . . . The sky

has opened. Out of it, as large as temple gongs

yet floating as easily as snowflakes, pour

transistor circuits, maps of topiaries, cattle brands,

IUDs, the floorplans of stockades, cartouches,

hibachi grills, lace doilywork, horsecollars,

laboratory mouse-mazes, brain-impressions, all of it

sketching the air like a show of translucent

kites in blacks and reds, a few beginning

("Look, there . . .") to snag in the treeline, or hover

above the whorling bunched rush of a riverbend . . . .

"You see?" says one with a shrug and eloquent

tenting-up of his eyebrows, "You see?? -- he's

too polite to declaim it in words.

They've been arguing if The Other World exists.

-- Albert Goldbarth

* * *

"Golden Mountains"

The first time

I saw mountains

I was

twenty-six

In their presence

I didn't laugh

I didn't shout

I spoke in whispers

When I returned home

I meant to tell

mother

what mountains were like

That was difficult to do

at night

everything looks different

even mountains and words

Mother was silent

perhaps tired

she fell asleep

The moon

the golden mountain

of humble folk

waxed in the clouds

--Tadeusz Rozewicz

translated from the Polish by Adam Czerniawski

* * *

"Rabbit Cry"

The season? Not yet spring. The place? Beside

A knot of sapling birches, under sky

Silver as birch-bark. Here were gaping wide

A warren's crumbling mouths to catch our feet.

We stooped; the nets were staked, the bag untied,

And into day's eye glared a blood-red eye --

The ferret trembled, with a sudden slide

Plunged white to darkness. Hearts resumed their beat.

Yet memory's fixed by what I did not see.

It was as if I heard the birches creak

Under a troubling gust, as if each tree

Now drew up from its roots those shreds of words

That in the windless day surrounded me.

It was the warren's mouths began to shriek --

I saw their breathless immobility

Ajar to the still sky stripped bare of birds.

-- Edward Lucie - Smith

* * *

"Daily"

The fork, leaving

my mouth, travels to plate, then sink,

dishwasher, drawer, in your hand

beats eggs in Grandma's bowl.

You cook as though you're still pipetting

DNA. You're always measuring.

As stings sailed us down the aisle,

you checked your watch. Reaching

to set the timer, you make

an egg yolk cataract. There is

the broken bowl, my grief,

you don't know how much,

how many spoons of blood leak

from me each month, amount

of anxiety held while scrubbing egg

from tines. So little time; my fingers

would rather be quiet on the porch

ofl your eyelashes. that time, obsessed

with BOOP (Bronchiolitis Obliterans

with Organizing Pneumonia), you didn't

see me for days, although we rose,

ate breakfast, faced the sun, felt

the same counter, toothpaste tube --

parallel circuits; calculate

the distance between. The fork is clean.

I'd love to take in

the lovely souffle, but you --

you are the sun

with headlamp in he next room,

holding out a soccer ball, spun

(its axis is your thumb) for our son

into its countless days.

-- Barbara Nickel

* * *

"The Empty Sky"

The empty sky. The empty sky.

I can't tell what might satisfy.

No more perhaps than a few bars

across the window to stop my eye.

-- Agnes Nemes Nagy

translated from the Hungarian by George Szirtes

* * *

"What It Really Means"

The cemetery where the college

students went to screw

was where we went to test

this S. M. business after

drinking up to it. I tried

to put a rose-thorn

through your ear lobe but

you ran off screaming while I

didn't feel a god-damned thing:

you weren't a masochist,

I wasn't a sadist, we

weren't even lovers, but

we did remain friends

back in philosophy class

where "The truth

of a theory is

demonstrated by

its practical application."

This is what it really

means, Pragmatism.

-- Alan Dugan

* * *

"The New Style Western"

the two horsemen

on opposite banks of the Rio Grande

shook

their fists

then solemnly turned

their knob-kneed steeds

and rode away

they would be back

but not in this movie

which was about the strange and amusing ways

prairie dog

owl and rattler have

of living together

--Anselm Hollo

* * *

"The Kitchen Grammars"

The verb in a Sanskrit or Farsi

or Latin or Japanese sentence

most frequently comes last,

as if the ingredients and spices

only after collection, measure and

even preservation might get cooked.

To all these cuisines renown attaches.

It's the opening of a Celtic sentence

is a verb. And it was more fire and pot

for us very often than ingredients.

Had we not fed our severed heads on poetry

final might have been our fame's starvation.

Upholding cuisine for us are the French

to be counting in scores and called Gallic.

In English and many more, in Chinese

the verb surrounds itself nucleus-fashion

with its subjects and qualifiers.

Down every slope of the wok they go

to the spitting middle, to be sauced,

ladled, lidded, steamed, flipped back up,

becoming verbs themselves often

and the calm egg centres the meatloaf.

-- Les Murray

* * *

"The Egg"

The old woman dried an egg

with her working apron

heavy egg the color of ivory

which nobody claims from her

then she looks at the autumn

through the little dormer

and it is like a fine painting

the size of a picture book

nothing is

out of season

and the fragile egg

that she holds in her palm

remains the one thing that is new.

-- Jean Follain

translated from the French by W. S. Merwin

* * *

"Harp Trees"

the cast-iron moon on the wall

vibrates a kind of speech

at the edge of thought

in the dark

I lay my cheek

against her cold lace, crescent

and our hair blows out into the world

the glint into which we're gone

speaking

she was the symbol of a group

called the maidens

and before that she was part

of the wall of the ice-cream

parlour, Owl Drugstore, San

Francisco, 1915

her speech is the kindness of

the house

as the Royal Hudson passes

whistling down the steam tracks

and the trees speak on the

feathered wind a greenness

harp-sequoias lost at the windows

neither kisses nor wounds in the nests

-- Robin Blaser

* * *

"Torch Song"

The heaven of her

hips -- over me, such sway --

She got some saint

standing at the gate

keeping the crowds away.

I would get down

on knees, or pay

to build a stain-glass mission

if that would get me in --

I'd slave

& scrub & sing

in Sunday best till I was clean

as a broke-leg dog --

I'd save & spring

for a whole new church wing

if that would let me see

my Lady of Fog

& the Forty

Sorrows again --

--Kevin Young

* * *

Twelve Poems with Food in Them

2010-01-09T22:41:00.013-05:00

"Sonnets from Hellas 6: Desfina"

Mount Parnassus placid on the skyline:

Slieve na mBard, Knock Filiocht, Ben Duan.

We gaelicized new names for Poetry Hill

As we wolfed down horta, tarama, and houmos

At sunset in the farmyard, drinking ouzos,

Pretending not to hear the Delphic squeal

Of the streel-haired cailleach in the scullery.

Then it was time to head into Desfina

To allow them to sedate her. And so retsina,

Anchovies, squid, dolmades, french fries even.

My head was light, I was hyper, boozed, borean

As we bowled back down towards the olive plain

Siren-tyred and manic on the horn

Round hairpin bends looped like boustrophedon.

-- Seamus Heaney

* * *

"Poui"

yellow is decidedly hot

like curried goat simmered with peper

or jumping-rope to the rhythm of

your desire's name

it's love bush covering

everything it clings to

like wormy fingers

crawling up your legs

and you not knowing

how to say stop

or even if you want to say stop

or how to pretend as if

it's not awakening something

somewhere inside you

you cannot draw a line

between guinep and june-plum

or jack-fruit to an adolescent kiss

tongue on tongue

at a sunday evening cricket match

yellow is like that

a poui tree in blossom

golden goblets

hanging from branches

yes yellow is

that innocent and all desire too

-- Opal Palmer Adisa

* * *

"How to Make Pesto"

Go out in mid sunny morning

a day bright as a bluejay's back

after the dew has vanished

fading like the memory of a dream.

Go with scissors and basket.

Snip to encourage branching.

Never strip the basil plant

but fill the basket to overarching.

Take the biggest garlic cloves

and cut them in quarter to ease

off the paper that hides the ivory

tusk within. grind Parmesan.

I use pine nuts. Olive oil

must be a virgin. I like Greek

or Sicilian. Now the aroma

fills first the nose, then the kitchen.

The UPS man in the street sniffs.

The neighbors complain; the cats

don't. We eat it on pasta, chicken,

on lamb, on beans, on salmon

and zucchini. we add it to salad

dressings. We rub it behind our

ears. We climb into a tub of pesto

giggling to make aromatic love.

-- Marge Piercy

* * *

"The Orange Is Ripe"

The orange is ripe

the sun-filled orange is ripe

Let me into your heart

heavily laden with love

The orange is ripe

its skin exudes a fine mist

Let me into your heart

grief becomes a fountain of joy

The orange is ripe

a bitter net contains each segment

Let me into your heart

to find my shattered dream

The orange is ripe

the sun-filled orange is ripe

-- Bei Dao

translated from the Chinese by Bonnie S. McDougall

* * *

"The Dinner Guest"

Let's begin with dinner, the menu:

oiled lettuce, lemon juice, broken bread,

noodles spun with crushed tomatoes,

and the matchstick julienne

of fennel and skin of an orange.

I'm not angry yet, stirring the sauce.

The wine taste like a ripe field.

Let the fly rub his legs together

over the wet cutting board,

let him hold still in the bright aroma.

Dinner's next: sipping, chewing,

talk of a high order among men.

The female side of the table

is motherly, leaning with spoons

to serve the salad. No one says thanks --

is this 1953? Sorry.

The newest year's dashed outside,

wind takes the trees,

and pine needles fly,m a dry shower,

a needle storm. There's no decorum outside.

Stirring, stirring more sauce,

while his words cascade around me,

I focus on the spoon,

ruined with red. The spoon

is the center of the rising heat world.

The spoon with its shreds of red

holds the glory of taste and submission

in its olive grain.

Bump, bump, bump, I tap the spoon

on the bowl's edge.

I keep undercutting the beauty.

The guest is sated, sips his wine,

tips the chair on two legs.

The fly has found the leftovers.

Let him eat from the same plate.

-- Ann Townsend

* * *

"Potatoes"

No one knows

what potatoes do.

Quiet and secretive

they stick together.

So many under one roof

there is talk of incest.

The pale, dumb faces,

the blank expressions.

Potatol dumplings.

Potato pancakes.

Potato head.

In dark cellars

they reach across the potato bin

to hold one another

in their thin white arms.

-- Lorna Crozier

* * *

"The Human Sacrament"

Is nothing new sacred? The book, the sky,

The women on the blue and red screen

Painted in Japan about five hundred years ago. Someone

Has tipped the screen over. I'll set it back up

Putting all the emotion in the thing felt at the thing done. A mirror can be clearer

Than a dog, but a small dog can run. Sacred

is perhaps the relation that caused

My daughter to be born. Yet is she sacred?

She is a woman with someone's arm

Around her shoulders. she is of this world

The way the pipe is, that goes from the well to the house,

and the way the grass is that at this season leaps about up and under it,

And as the cigarette is that the gardener throws in the grass.

Has it a sacred flame? The pope going to the house. Later, who knows?

The sacred is the sacrament. and it is what

We wanted once to be --

Give me some more coffee,

Some more milk, some more bread, some more breakfast!

Is nothing new sacred? The screen is standing up.

My daughter and her baby come for tea. The baby comes for milk.

They're here in time.

--Kenneth Koch

* * *

"Summer Food"

Green, the shape of a man

with the insides of a woman,

they swim and dive around each other

in the boiling water, like porpoises.

O, to put the whole pod

of okra in the mouth.

Tomatoes, it is time to taste

ourselves, in these wet, red rooms,

the rooms of our mouths,

where lives the sigh

of language.

Corn, the tassels pull apart,

ears and silk, ears and silk and teeth,

Cantaloupe, a globe in tight webbing,

crisscross imprint. the onion underground,

in crumbs of dirt and old fabric.

Heat waves take form. without fear or panic,

the air becomes visible.

Cucumbers, turning and sinking in the vinegar bowl.

I hold a head of cauliflower in my hand.

It's the head of someone whose name escapes,

which is not so strange. there are many names

for the ones we love, and wonderful to say:

Broccoli, Lettuce, Cabbage,

String Beans, Snow Peas, Pear,

Watermelon, Pomegranate, Plum.

\Let us eat the solid forms of sunlight,

and walk around after supper

in the gold time,

loving each other and talking vegetables.

-- Coleman Barks

* * *

"Making Salad"

after Eihei Dogen

I rub the dark hollow of the bowl

with garlic, near to the fire enough

so that fire reflects on the wood,

a reverie that holds emptiness

in high regard. I enter the complete

absence of any indicative event,

following the swirl of the grain,

following zero formal and immanent

in the wood, bringing right to

the surface of the bowl the nothing

out of which nothing springs.

I turn open the window above the sink

and see fire, reflected on the glass,

spring and catch on a branch a light

wind tosses about. Here or there,

between new leaves the Pleiades,

like jewels in the pleromatic lotus,

flash. I watch the leaves swirl

and part, gathering light fresh

from Gemini, ten millennia away, fresh

from Sirius -- holding each burning

leaf, each jewel within whatever light

a speck of conscious mind can make,

unshadowed by reflection or design,

impartial. Out the tap, from a source

three hundred feet down, so close

I feel the shudder in the earth, water

spills over my hands, over the scallions

still bound in a bunch from the store.

I had thought to make salad, each element

cut to precision, tossed at random

in the turning bowl. Now I lay the knife

aside. I consider the scallions. I consider

the invisible field. Emptiness is bound

to bloom -- the whole earth, a single flower.

-- Margaret Gibson

* * *

"Preserves"

Great love goes mad to be spoken: you went out

to the ranked tent-poles of the butterbean patch,

picked beans in the sun. You bent, and dug

the black ground for fat purple turnips.

You suffered the cornstalk's blades, to emerge

triumphant with grain. You spent all day in a coat

of dust, to pluck the difficult word

ofka berry, plunk in a can. You brought home

voluminous tribute, cucumbers, peaches,

five-gallon buckets packed tightly with peas,

cords of sugar-cane, and were not content.

You had not yet done the pure, the completed,

the absolute deed. Out of that vegetable ore,

you wrought miracles: snap-beans broke

into speech, peas spilled from the long slit pod

like pearls, and the magical snap of your nail

filled bowls with the fat white coinage of beans.

Still, you were unfinished. Now fog swelled

in the kitchen, your hair wilted like vines.

These days drove you half-wild -- you cried, sometimes,

for invisible reasons. In the yard, out of your way,

we played in the leaves and heard

the pressure-cooker blow out its musical shriek.

Then it was done: you had us stack up the jars

like ingots, or books. In the dark of the shelves,

quarts of squash gave off a glow like late sun.

That was the last we thought of your summer

till the day that even the johnson grass died.

Then, bent over sweet relish and black-eyed peas,

over huckleberry pie, seeing the dog outside

shiver with cold, we would shiver, and eat.

-- Jack Butler

* * *

"Meditation for a Pickle Suite"

Morning: the soft release

As you open a jar of pickles.

The sun through the window warm

And moving like light through the brine,

The shadows of pickles swim the floor.

And in the tree, flowing down the chimney,

The songs of fresh birds clean as pickles.

Memories float through the day

Like pickles, perhaps sweet gherkins.

The past rises and falls

Like curious pickles in dark jars,

Your hands are sure as pickles,

Opening dreams like albums,

Pale Polish pickles.

Your eyes grow sharp as pickles,

Thoughts as green, as shining

As rows of pickles, damp and fresh,

Placed out in the afternoon sun.

-- R. H. W. Dillard

* * *

"Ode to Pork"

I wouldn't be here

without you. Without you

I'd be umpteen

pounds lighter & a lot

less alive. You stuck

round my ribs even

when I treated you like a dog

dirty, I dare not eat.

I know you're the blues

because loving you

may kill me -- but still you

rock me down slow

as hamhocks on the stove.

Anyway you come

fried, cued, burnt

to within one inch

of your life I love. Babe,

I revere your every

nickname -- bacon, chitlin,

cracklin, sin.

Some call you murder,

shame's stepsister --

then dress you up

& declare you white

& healthy, but you always

come back, sauced, to me.

Adam himself gave up

a rib to see y ours

piled pink beside him.

Your heaven is the only one

worth wanting --

you keep me all night

cursing your four-

letter name, the next

begging for you again.

-- Kevin Young

* * *