Re: poetry thread

[Guest]

...eddie...your last post was on the 19th of August...that's ten days ago. Ten days without a word. Are you okay?

[Guest]

Wind on the Hill
by A.A. Milne

No one can tell me,
Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from,
Where the wind goes.

It’s flying from somewhere
As fast as it can,
I couldn’t keep up with it,
Not if I ran.

But if I stopped holding
The string of my kite,
It would blow with the wind
For a day and a night.

And then when I found it,
Wherever it blew,
I should know that the wind
Had been going there too.

So then I could tell them
Where the wind goes…
But where the wind comes from
Nobody knows.

[Guest]

^ Nice.



EL VIENTO EN LA ISLA

El viento es un caballo:
óyelo cómo corre
por el mar, por el cielo.

Quiere llevarme: escucha
cómo recorre el mundo
para llevarme lejos.

Escóndeme en tus brazos
por esta noche sola,
mientras la lluvia rompe
contra el mar y la tierra
su boca innumerable.

Escucha como el viento
me llama galopando
para llevarme lejos.

Con tu frente en mi frente,
con tu boca en mi boca,
atados nuestros cuerpos
al amor que nos quema,
deja que el viento pase
sin que pueda llevarme.

Deja que el viento corra
coronado de espuma,
que me llame y me busque
galopando en la sombra,
mientras yo, sumergido
bajo tus grandes ojos,
por esta noche sola
descansaré, amor mío.



WIND ON THE ISLAND

The wind is a horse:
hear how he runs
through the sea, through the sky.

He wants to take me: listen
how he roves the world
to take me far away.

Hide me in your arms
just for this night,
while the rain breaks
against sea and earth
its innumerable mouth.

Listen how the wind
calls to me galloping
to take me far away.

With your brow on my brow,
with your mouth on my mouth,
our bodies tied
to the love that consumes us,
let the wind pass
and not take me away.

Let the wind rush
crowned with foam,
let it call to me and seek me
galloping in the shadow,
while I, sunk
beneath your big eyes,
just for this night
shall rest, my love.


By Pablo Neruda.

[eddie]

Eddie, did you give it to her? I hope that's the reason you haven't looked in since Sunday

No discernable reaction yet. A couple of cryptic anonymous texts/emails, but- since I've recently changed my ISP- it's difficult to be sure.

I believe my beloved is presently befriending sharks off the coast of North Africa, so I won't be seeing her for weeks. Plodding on with my sensational LU Memoirs in the interim. It's just as well, really: "The pram in the hallway is the enemy of Art"- and all that.

[Constance]

I'm wonderin' what in the devil could it all possibly mean

No, come on Moony, what did you REALLY think of my love poem?

I need to know because I'm thinking of actually presenting it to the fair maid in question.

Do you think this would be a REALLY bad idea?

Eddie, did you give it to her? I hope that's the reason you haven't looked in since Sunday

Eddie wrote a poem? Where is it? I've scrolled through and I can't find it!

[Constance]

. It's just as well, really: "The pram in the hallway is the enemy of Art"- and all that.

The truest thing of all.

[Guest]

...hi constance, this is on page 12.

RENEGADE PRIEST SEEKS TREACHEROUS YOUNG WITCH (*)

(* Ad spotted in the Personal column of the London listings magazine Time Out c 1979 referencing a line from Bob Dylan's Changing of the Guard)

Tip toe-er
Ballet pointer
Jaw dropper
Shape shifter
Caul wearer
Wart charmer
Cobweb spinner
Sun bather
Changeling stealer
Phrase hurler
Mirror cracker
Gryffindorer
Sign scryer
Sky walker
Ticket puncher
Arsenal mugger
Swine preserver
Tomato purer
Groat counter
Quiche Lorrainer
Apple scrumper
Quorn hunter
Egg scrambler
HP saucer
Shark befriender
Sleep disturber
Nose twitcher
Cupid gooser
Periwinkler
Hair slider
Dietrich mover
Hufflepuffer
Back turner
Getawayer
Luciferens


by Eddie

[Guest]

...in a fit of desperation re your whereabouts eddie I consulted the I Ching, which led me to believe you were marrying...it didn't specifically say what type of MS....book or babe.

[Guest]

Monet Refuses The Operation
by Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

[Constance]

...hi constance, this is on page 12.

RENEGADE PRIEST SEEKS TREACHEROUS YOUNG WITCH (*)

(* Ad spotted in the Personal column of the London listings magazine Time Out c 1979 referencing a line from Bob Dylan's Changing of the Guard)

Tip toe-er
Ballet pointer
Jaw dropper
Shape shifter
Caul wearer
Wart charmer
Cobweb spinner
Sun bather
Changeling stealer
Phrase hurler
Mirror cracker
Gryffindorer
Sign scryer
Sky walker
Ticket puncher
Arsenal mugger
Swine preserver
Tomato purer
Groat counter
Quiche Lorrainer
Apple scrumper
Quorn hunter
Egg scrambler
HP saucer
Shark befriender
Sleep disturber
Nose twitcher
Cupid gooser
Periwinkler
Hair slider
Dietrich mover
Hufflepuffer
Back turner
Getawayer
Luciferens


by Eddie

Thanks, Moonie!

I like the Dietrich mover. Is that Marlene?

But what's a Quorn?

[eddie]

...in a fit of desperation re your whereabouts eddie I consulted the I Ching, which led me to believe you were marrying...it didn't specifically say what type of MS....book or babe.

Kinnell!

This is a bit of a bolt from the blue, I can tell you.

[eddie]

what's a Quorn?

A pun, of sorts:

QUORN:

1. Health food favoured by vegetarians.
2. Name of an apparently famous group of English fox-hunters of the 'D'ye ken John Peel?' variety. Very well known in field sports circles- or so I'm told.

[Guest]

Kinnell!
This is a bit of a bolt from the blue, I can tell you.

...eddie! How on earth did you know I was going to post this?

When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone
by Galway Kinnell

1

When one has lived a long time alone
one refrains from swatting the fly
and lets him go, and one hesitates to strike
the mosquito, though more than willing go slap
the flesh under her, and one lifts the toad
from the pit too deep for him to hop out of
and carries him to the grass, without minding
the toxic urine he slicks his body with,
and one envelops, in a towel, the swift
who fell down the chimney and knocks herself
against the window glass and releases her outside
and watches her fly free, a life line flung at reality,
when one has lived a long time alone.


2

When one has lived a long time alone,
one grabs the snake behind the head
and holds him until he stops trying to stick
the orange tongue, which splits at the end
into two black filaments and jumps out
like a fire-eater's belches and has little
in common with the pimpled pink lump that shapes
sounds and sleeps inside the human mouth,
into one's flesh, and clamps it between his jaws,
letting the gaudy tips show, as children do
when concentrating, and as very likely
one down oneself, without knowing it,
when one has lived a long time alone.

3

When one has lived a long time alone,
among regrets so immense the past occupies
nearly all the room there is in consciousness,
one notices in the snake's eyes, which look back
without paying less attention to the future,
the first coating of the opaque milky-blue
leucoma snakes to get when about to throw
their skins and become new––meanwhile continuing,
of course, to grow old––the exact bleu passé
that discolors the corneas of the blue-eyed
when they lie back at last and look for heaven,
a blurring one can see means they will never find it,
when one has lived a long time alone.

4

When one has lived a long time alone,
one holds the snake near a loudspeaker disgorging
gorgeous sound and watches him crook
his forepart into four right angles
as though trying to slow down the music
flowing through him, in order to absorb it
the milk of paradise into the flesh,
and now a glimmering appears at his mouth,
such a drop of intense fluid as, among humans,
could form after long exiting at the tip
of the the penis, and as he straightens himself out
he has the pathos one finds in the penis,
when one has loved a long time alone.

5

When one has lived a long time alone,
one can fall to poring upon a creature,
contrasting its eternity's-face to one's own
full of hours, taking note of each difference,
exaggerating it, making it everything,
until the other is utterly other, and then,
with hard effort, possibly with tongue sticking out,
going back over each one once again
and cancelling it, seeing nothing now
but likeness, until . . . half an hour later
one starts awake, taken aback at how eagerly
one swoons into the happiness of kinship,
when one has lived a long time alone.

6

When one has lived a long time alone
and listens at morning to mourning doves
sound their kyrie eleison, or the small thing
spiritualizing onto one's shoulder cry "pewit-phoebe!"
or peabody-sparrows at midday send schoolboys'
whistlings across the field, or at dusk, undamped,
unforgiving clinks, as from stonemasons' chisels,
or on trees' backs tree frogs scratch the thighs'
needfire awake, or from the frog pond pond frogs
raise their ave verum corpus—listens to those
who hop or fly call down upon us the mercy
of other tongues—one hears them as inner voices,
when one has lived a long time alone.

7

When one has lived a long time alone,
one knows only consciousness consummates,
and as the conscious one among these others
uttering compulsory cries of being here—
the least flycatcher witching up "che-bec,"
or redheaded woodpecker clanging out his
music from a metal drainpipe, or ruffed grouse
drumming "thump thrump thrump thrump-thrump-
thrump-thrump-rup-rup-rup-rup-rup-r-r-r-r-r-r"
through the treees, all of them in time's
unfolding trying to cry themselves into self-knowing—
one knows one is here to hear them into shining,
when one has lived a long time alone.

8
When one has loved a long time alone,
one likes alike the pig, who brooks no deferment
of gratification, and the porcupine, or thorned pig,
who enters the cellar but not the house itself
because of eating down the cellar stairs on the way up,
and one likes the worm, who by bunching herself together
and expanding rubs her way through the ground,
no less than the butterfly, who totters full of worry
among the day-lilies, as they darken,
and more and more one finds one likes
any other species better than one's own,
which has gone amok, making one self-estranged,
when one has lived a long time alone.

9

When one has lived a long time alone,
sour, misanthropic, one fits to one's defiance
the satanic boast—It is better to reign
in hell than to submit on earth—
and forgets one's kind, as does the snake,
who has stopped trying to escape and moves
at ease across one's body, slumping into its contours,
adopting its temperature, and abandons hope
of the sweetness of friendship or love
—before long can barely remember what they are—
and covets the stillness in organic matter,
in a self-dissolution one may not know how to halt,
when one has lived a long time alone.

10

When one has loved a long time alone,
and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,
and the bullfrog, head half out of water, remembers
the exact sexual cantillations of his first spring,
and the snake slides over the threshold and disappears
among the stones, one sees they all live
to mate with their kind, and one knows,
after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken
away from one's kind, toward the kingdom of strangers,
the hard prayer inside one's own singing
is to come back, if one can, to one's own,
a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,
when one has lived a long time alone.

11

When one has lived a long time alone,
one wants to live again among men and women,
to return to that place where one's ties with the human
broke, where the disquiet of death and now
also of history glimmers its firelight on faces,
where the gaze of the new baby looks past the gaze
of the great-granny, and where lovers speak,
on lips blowsy from kissing, that language
the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak
blether the song that is both earth's and heaven's,
until the sun has risen, and they stand
in a light of being united: kingdom come,
when one has lived a long time alone.

[eddie]

^

As striking an instance of online Jungian synchronicity as one is likely to come across.

Thank you for posting this poem, Moony. It is very beautiful.

[Guest]

...hey eddie...I heard Kinnell read this on a cassette tape (from a collection called 'cadmus' or something...I can't find it online).
...it's riveting, when he reads it.

The Dead Shall Be Raised Incorruptible
by Galway Kinnell

1
A piece of flesh gives off
smoke in the field --

carrion,
caput mortuum,
orts,
pelf,
fenks,
sordes,
gurry dumped from hospital trashcans.

Lieutenant!
This corpse will not stop burning!

2
"That you Captain? Sure,
sure I remember -- I still hear you
lecturing at me on the intercom, Keep your guns up, Burnsie!
and then screaming, Stop shooting, for crissake, Burnsie,
those are friendlies! But crissake, Captain,
I'd already started, burst
after burst, little black pajamas jumping
and falling . . . and remember that pilot
who'd bailed out over the North,
how I shredded him down to catgut on his strings?
one of his slant eyes, a piece
of his smile, sail past me
every night right after the sleeping pill. . .

"It was only
that I loved the sound
of them, I guess I just loved
the feel of them sparkin' off my hands . . ."

3
On the television screen:

Do you have a body that sweats?
Sweat that has odor?
False teeth clanging into your breakfast?
Case of the dread?
Headache so steady it may outlive you?
Armpits sprouting hair?
Piles so huge you don't need a chair to sit at a table?

We shall not all sleep, but we shall be changed . . .

4
In the Twentieth Century of my trespass on earth,
having exterminated one billion heathens,
heretics, Jews, Moslems, witches, mystical seekers,
black men, Asians, and Christian brothers,
every one of them for his own good,

a whole continent of red men for living in community,
one billion species of animals for being sub-human,
and ready and eager to take on
the bloodthirsty creatures from the other planets,
I, Christian man, groan out this testament of my last will.

I gave my blood fifty parts polystyrene,
twenty-five parts benzene, twenty-five parts good old gasoline,
to the last bomber pilot aloft, that there shall be one acre
in the dull world where the kissing flower may bloom,
which kisses you so long your bones explode under its lips.

My tongue
goes to the Secretary of the Dead
to tell the corpses, "I'm sorry, fellows,
the killing was just one of those things
difficult to pre-visualize -- like a cow,
say, getting hit by lightning."

My stomach, which has digested
four hundred treaties giving the Indians
eternal right to their land, I give to the Indians.
I throw in my lungs which have spent four hundred years
sucking in good faith on peace pipes.

My soul I leave to the bee
that he may sting it and die, my brain
to the fly, his back the hysterical green color of slime,
the he may suck on it and die, my flesh to the advertising man,
the anti-prostitute, who loathes human flesh for money.

I assign my crooked backbone
to the dice maker, to chop up into dice,
for casting lots as to who shall see his own blood
on his shirt front and who his brother's
for the race isn't to the swift but to the crooked.

To the last man surviving on earth
I give my eyelids worn out by fear, to wear
in the absolute night of radiation and silence,
so that his eyes can't close, for regret
is like tears seeping through closed eyelids.

I give the emptiness my hand: the little finger picks no more noses,
slag clings to the black stick of the ring finger,
a bit of flame jets from the tip of the fuck-you finger,
the first finger accuses the heart, which has vanished,
on the thumb stump wisps of smoke ask a ride into the emptiness.

In the Twentieth Century of my nightmare
on earth, I swear on my chromium testicles
to this testament
and last will
of my iron will,
my fear of love, my itch for money, and my madness.

5
In the ditch
snakes crawl cool paths
over the rotted thigh, the toe bones
twitch in the smell of burnt rubber,
the belly
opens like a poison nightflower,
the tongue has evaporated,
the nostril
hairs sprinkle themselves with yellowish-white dust,
the five flames at the end
of each hand have gone out, a mosquito
sips a last meal from this plate of serenity.

And the fly,
the last nightmare, hatches himself.

6
I ran
my neck broken I ran
holding my head up with both hands I ran
thinking the flames
the flames may burn the oboe
but listen buddy boy they can't touch the notes!

7
A few bones
lie about in the smoke of bones.

Membranes,
effigies pressed into grass,
mummy windings,
desquamations,
sags incinerated mattresses gave back to the world,
memories shocked into the mirrors on whorehouse ceilings,
angel's wings
flagged down into the snows of yesteryear,

kneel
on the scorched earth
in the shapes of men and animals:

do not let this last hour pass,
do not remove the last, poison cup from our lips.

And a wind holding
the cries of love-making from all our nights and days
moves among the stones, hunting
for two twined skeletons to blow its last cry across.

Lieutenant!
This corpse will not stop burning!

[eddie]

^


Well, well.

[Guest]

...Kinnell...born in 1927, so he'd have been about 41 in 1968 when he was active in protesting the Vietnam war (earlier in life he'd been in the navy). He's on my "dinner party" guest list.



Telephoning In Mexican Sunlight

Talking with my beloved in New York
I stood at the outdoor public telephone
in Mexican sunlight, in my purple shirt.
Someone had called it a man/woman
shirt. The phrase irked me. But then
I remembered that Rainer Maria
Rilke, who until he was seven wore
dresses and had long yellow hair,
wrote that the girl he almost was
"made her bed in his ear" and "slept him the world."
I thought, OK this shirt will clothe the other in me.
As we fell into long-distance love talk
a squeaky chittering started up all around,
and every few seconds came a sudden loud
buzzing. I half expected to find
the insulation on the telephone line
laid open under the pressure of our talk
leaking low-frequency noises.
But a few yards away a dozen hummingbirds,
gorgets going drab or blazing
according as the sun struck them,
stood on their tail rudders in a circle
around my head, transfixed
by the flower-likeness of the shirt.
And perhaps also by a flush rising into my face,
for a word -- one with a thick sound,
as if a porous vowel had sat soaking up
saliva while waiting to get spoken,
possibly the name of some flower
that hummingbirds love, perhaps
"honeysuckle" or "hollyhock"
or "phlox" -- just then shocked me
with its suddenness, and this time
apparently did burst the insulation,
letting the word sound in the open
where all could hear, for these tiny, irascible,
nectar-addicted puritans jumped back
all at once, as if the air gasped.

[Guest]

A Blessing
by James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

[eddie]

...in a fit of desperation re your whereabouts eddie I consulted the I Ching, which led me to believe you were marrying...it didn't specifically say what type of MS....book or babe.

Can you remember which hexagram?

[eddie]

...Kinnell...born in 1927, so he'd have been about 41 in 1968 when he was active in protesting the Vietnam war (earlier in life he'd been in the navy). He's on my "dinner party" guest list.

First name? Fuh, perhaps?

[Guest]

...Kinnell...born in 1927, so he'd have been about 41 in 1968 when he was active in protesting the Vietnam war (earlier in life he'd been in the navy). He's on my "dinner party" guest list.

First name? Fuh, perhaps?

[Guest]

...in a fit of desperation re your whereabouts eddie I consulted the I Ching, which led me to believe you were marrying...it didn't specifically say what type of MS....book or babe.

Can you remember which hexagram?

...I can, actually...

Hexagram 22, ELEGANCE,
6 (for the fourth place):
'He so adorns himself as to seem white as snow. He is, as it were, a white steed. (What delays his progress is) not an obstacle but a matter of betrothal. COMMENTARY: this ruling line indicates the existence of suspicion; however, as revealed by the last sentence, nothing blameworthy is involved*
*it would seem that someone is suspected of loitering or hesitating for a somewhat sinister reason, but that his motive is in fact an honourable one.'

[eddie]

^

I'm going to have to give this some thought.

[Guest]

...weirdo synchronicity rears again

I googled 'white steed marrying' in "images", hoping to find an appropriate image for your hexagram...this image appeared on page 2:



...ooh goody, that looks likely I thought as I clicked.
...you'll never guess where it led

[eddie]

^

Bob Dylan's excellent Jokerman video, natch.

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