Tomas Transtromer

After a Death

Once there was a shock

that left behind a long, shimmering comet tail.

It keeps us inside. It makes the TV pictures snowy.

It settles in cold drops on the telephone wires.

One can still go slowly on skis in the winter sun

through brush where a few leaves hang on.

They resemble pages torn from old telephone directories.

Names swallowed by the cold.

It is still beautiful to hear the heart beat

but often the shadow seems more real than the body.

The samurai looks insignificant

beside his armor of black dragon scales.

Tomas Transtromer

Sometimes my life opened its eyes in the dark. A feeling as if crowds drew through the streets in blindness and anxiety on the way towards a miracle, while I invisibly remain standing.

Tim Buckley

Song To The Siren

 

Long afloat on shipless oceans
I did all my best to smile
'Til your singing eyes and fingers
Drew me loving to your isle
And you sang
Sail to me
Sail to me
Let me enfold you
Here I am
Here I am
Waiting to hold you

Did I dream you dreamed about me?
Were you here when I was full sail?
Now my foolish boat is leaning
Broken lovelorn on your rocks,
For you sing, "Touch me not, touch me not, come back tomorrow:
O my heart, O my heart shies from the sorrow"

I am puzzled as the newborn child
I am riddled as the tide.
Should I stand amid the breakers?
Should I lie with Death my bride?
Hear me sing, "Swim to me, Swim to me, Let me enfold you:
Here I am, Here I am, Waiting to hold you"

Songwriters: TIM BUCKLEY, LARRY BECKETT

Song To The Siren lyrics © BMG PLATINUM SONGS OBO THIRD STORY MUSIC, INC.

Salvatore Quasimodo (1901-1968)

 

 

Ancient Winter

 

(Desiderio delle tue mani chiare)

 

Desire of your hands bright

in the penumbra of fire:

they knew of oak-trees, roses,

death. Ancient winter.

 

The birds searched for seed,

and were suddenly snow;

so, the word.

A little sun, an angelic halo,

and then the mist; and trees,

and we making dawn from the air.

Eugenio Montale (1896-1981)

The Eel

 

(L’anguilla, la sirena)

 

Eel, siren

of icy seas that quits the Baltic

to reach these seas of ours,

our estuaries, rivers,

that returns in the depths, under the back-flow,

from branch to branch, and then

from thread to thread, thinning down

penetrating always deeper, further into the heart

of granite, infiltrating

among rills of mud till one day

light exploding from the chestnut-trees

kindles a flicker in dead-water pools,

in ditches that slope

from the Apennine cliffs to Romagna;

eel, torch, whiplash,

arrow of Love on earth,

that only our gorges or the desiccated

stream-beds of the Pyrenees lead back

to paradises of fecundity;

green spirit that searches

for life where only

drought and desolation bite,

spark that says

everything starts where everything seems

burned dry; buried branch;

brief rainbow, twin

to that which marks your limits

and lets you shine intact among the sons

of men, immersed in your mud, do you

not recognize your sister?

Steely Dan

AJA

Up on the hill
People never stare
They just don't care
Chinese music under banyan trees
Here at the dude ranch above the sea
Aja
When all my dime dancin' is through
I run to you

Up on the hill
They've got time to burn
There's no return
Double helix in the sky tonight
Throw out the hardware
Let's do it right
Aja
When all my dime dancin' is through
I run to you

Up on the hill
They think I'm okay
Or so they say
Chinese music always sets me free
Angular banjoes
Sound good to me
Aja
When all my dime dancin' is through
I run to you

Nicola Verlato

Lucie Brock-Broido

Carnivorous

 

By Lucie Brock-Broido b. 1956        

I was lying loose from God. Strange is it not best   

Beloved, in the New World, in this skinny life,

Intemperate with chance, my spirit quickens   

For the fall’s estate. In India, the half

Hour is the hour, we were like that then—

Jammed wrong & wrong in the diurnal

Mangy chambers of our carnall

Hearts, the rose robes rustling loose as velvet

Curtains at the stage prow, passing   

Into the strange salt air of an Indian

Ocean, hoarding kindling, heading   

West with hours, later than we might

Have known, counting tins of meats & oil left,   

If they should lose or last the night.

Tim Davis

'Centered non-event'


i'm not home right now, howing
furrows up
myshkin's junkmail
cold medicine in the doorbell hole
let us go then
end this sentence
could say
episteme off
men butt heads
among reduncancies
as the visual world has finished pissing, it's
now safe to say

a covert sensation
where once were one-to-ones
quit aping pathogens
the heart's four cameras
load with nothingness and blood
take a few minutes, quaking

i pretty much think
of all the intact blisters to have come away with
families surviving by redeeming empties
make the oilcan of sky a wave machine
no image, presto!
but a bucketful of greater thans in baggies

Ian Anderson

"Requiem"

Well, I saw a bird today --- flying from a bush and the
wind blew it away.
And the black-eyed mother sun scorched the butterfly
at play --- velvet veined.
I saw it burn.
With a wintry storm-blown sigh, a silver cloud blew
right on by.
And, taking in the morning, I sang --- O Requiem.
Well, my lady told me, ``Stay.''
I looked aside and walked away along the Strand.
But I didn't say a word, as the train time-table blurred
close behind the taxi stand.
Saw her face in the tear-drop black cab window.
Fading in the traffic; watched her go.
And taking in the morning, heard myself singing ---
O Requiem.
Here I go again.
It's the same old story.
Well, I saw a bird today --- I looked aside and walked
away along the Strand.

Sara Morais

Jane Kenyon (1947-1995)

Twilight: After Haying

Yes, long shadows go out
from the bales; and yes, the soul
must part from the body:
what else could it do?

The men sprawl near the baler,
too tired to leave the field.
They talk and smoke,
and the tips of their cigarettes
blaze like small roses
in the night air. (It arrived
and settled among them
before they were aware.)

The moon comes
to count the bales,
and the dispossessed--
Whip-poor-will, Whip-poor-will
--sings from the dusty stubble.

These things happen. . .the soul's bliss
and suffering are bound together
like the grasses. . .

The last, sweet exhalations
of timothy and vetch
go out with the song of the bird;
the ravaged field
grows wet with dew.

Jane Kenyon :

Richard Hescox

Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)

Hitchhiker

'Tryna get to sunny Californy' -
Boom. It's the awful raincoat
making me look like a selfdefeated self-murdering imaginary gangster, an idiot in a rueful coat, how can they understand my damp packs - my mud packs -
„Look John, a hitchhiker'
„He looks like he's got a gun underneath that I. R. A. coat'
'Look Fred, that man by the road' „Some sexfiend got in print in 1938 in Sex Magazine' –
„You found his blue corpse in a greenshade edition, with axe blots'

Jack Kerouac :

Lew Welch (1926-1971)

Dear Joanne

Dear Joanne,

Last night Magda dreamed that she,
you, Jack, and I were driving around
Italy.

We parked in Florence and left
our dog to guard the car.

She was worried because he
doesn't understand Italian.

Daniel Corcuera

Rupert Brooke (c.1914)

1914 I. Peace

Brooke, Rupert (1887 - 1915)

1Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour

2    And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,

3With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,

4    To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

5Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,

6    Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,

7And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,

8    And all the little emptiness of love!

9Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,

10    Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,

11        Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;

12Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there

13    But only agony, and that has ending;

14        And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

Gwendolyn Macewen (1941-1987)

Poems in Braille

Gwendolyn MacEwen
From:   A Breakfeast for Barbarians. TorontoL The Ryerson Press, 1966

1
all your hands are verbs,
now you touch worlds and feel their names -
thru the thing to the name
not the other way thru (in winter
I am Midas, I name gold)

the chair and table and book
extend from your fingers;
all your movements
command these things back to their
places; a fight against familiarity
makes me resume my distance

2
they knew what it meant,
those egyptian scribes who drew
eyes right into their hieroglyphs,
you read them dispassionate until
the eye stumbles upon itself
blinking back from the papyrus

outside, the articulate wind
annotates this; I read carefully
lest I go blind in both eyes, reading with
that other eye the final hieroglyph

3
the shortest distance between 2 points
on a revolving circumference
is a curved line; O let me follow you,
Wencelas

4
with legs and arms I make alphabets
like in those children's books
where people bend into letters and signs,
yet I do not read the long cabbala of my bones
truthfully; I need only to move to alter the design

5
I name all things in my room
and they rehearse their names,
gather in groups, form tesseracts,
discussing their names among themselves

I will not say the cast is less than the print
I will not say the curve is longer than the line,
I should read all things like braille in this season
with my fingers I should read them
lest I go blind in both eyes reading with
that other eye the final hieroglyph

Caro Niederer

Ralph Hawkins

The Poems of Abakan Tatar

1.

the light weaves water into ice from
the sea where 8 rivers run
a series of pontoons protons and plateaus (games and moods?)
the Kalmucks neural firing
contains preservatives and invention (intervention?)
apricot hills, mountain peach, arboreal rice
here at Earth's top you can see (me & you?)
the glistening world — lights and traffic in endless chains
of rice bead grains
there the settled and unsettled live in a state of
many positions (positrons)

Peter Hughes

XVI
A me stesso di me pietate vène
& still my cogs emit this high-pitched whine
although they never mesh with the planet’s
transmission systems or anyone else:
self-portrait of the artist as duff clutch
so I’m stuck between vibrating mayhem
& a car that’s never heading down the road
Christ it’s like I’ve got Elmore James playing
right in the tips of each of my fingers
with none of the sound ever getting out
through the skin or sudsy marigold gloves
sink kitchen isolated house or town
it’s already the end of whatever
they’re calling this period nowadays
& what you hear here is just an echo

Bradley Mason Hamlin

Naked Girl Sitting on a Chair

when
working in the madhouse
on Stockton boulevard
drove me out
of the psychology major
I switched to art
for one semester


took a course
in drawing
and received a “B”
because
the instructor
said my drawing style
looked like
graffiti …


maybe
the best compliment
I received in college
but I ended up switching
back to psych
before
taking on creative
writing


the art teacher
worked
part time
in a men’s clothing store
and although
I liked to draw


I didn’t like to draw
what they told me to draw
and I didn’t seem to draw
like the “A” students …


and I didn’t know
jack-shit
about men’s clothing.

Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012)

Hunger Camp At Jaslo

Write it. Write. In ordinary ink
on ordinary paper: they were given no food,
they all died of hunger. "All. How many?
It's a big meadow. How much grass
for each one?" Write: I don't know.
History counts its skeletons in round numbers.
A thousand and one remains a thousand,
as though the one had never existed:
an imaginary embryo, an empty cradle,
an ABC never read,
air that laughs, cries, grows,
emptiness running down steps toward the garden,
nobody's place in the line.

We stand in the meadow where it became flesh,
and the meadow is silent as a false witness.
Sunny. Green. Nearby, a forest
with wood for chewing and water under the bark-
every day a full ration of the view
until you go blind. Overhead, a bird-
the shadow of its life-giving wings
brushed their lips. Their jaws opened.
Teeth clacked against teeth.
At night, the sickle moon shone in the sky
and reaped wheat for their bread.
Hands came floating from blackened icons,
empty cups in their fingers.
On a spit of barbed wire,
a man was turning.
They sang with their mouths full of earth.
"A lovely song of how war strikes straight
at the heart." Write: how silent.
"Yes."

Christian Bravery

Andrew Nawroski

Elise Partridge

Chemo Side Effects: Memory

By Elise Partridge b. 1959       

Where is the word I want?

Groping

in the thicket,

about to pinch the

dangling

berry, my fingerpads

close on

air.

I can hear it

scrabbling like a squirrel

on the oak's far side.

 

Word, please send over this black stretch of ocean

your singular flare,

blaze

your topaz in the mind's blank.

I could always pull the gift

from the lucky-dip barrel,

scoop the right jewel

from my dragon's trove....

Now I flail,

the wrong item creaks up

on the mental dumbwaiter.

No use—

it's turning

out of sight,

a bicycle down a

Venetian alley—

I clatter after, only to find

gondolas bobbing in sunny silence,

a pigeon mumbling something

I just can't catch.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

A Fairy Song

Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire!
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moon's sphere;
And I serve the Fairy Queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green;
The cowslips tall her pensioners be;
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours;
In those freckles live their savours;
I must go seek some dewdrops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.

William Shakespeare :

Anne Spencer (1882-1975)

Lines to a Nasturtium
A lover muses

Flame-flower, Day-torch, Mauna Loa,
I saw a daring bee, today, pause, and soar,
Into your flaming heart;
Then did I hear crisp crinkled laughter
As the furies after tore him apart?
A bird, next, small and humming,
Looked into your startled depths and fled....
Surely, some dread sight, and dafter
Than human eyes as mine can see,
Set the stricken air waves drumming
In his flight.

Day-torch, Flame-flower, cool-hot Beauty,
I cannot see, I cannot hear your fluty
Voice lure your loving swain,
But I know one other to whom you are in beauty
Born in vain;
Hair like the setting sun,
Her eyes a rising star,
Motions gracious as reeds by Babylon, bar
All your competing;
Hands like, how like, brown lilies sweet,
Cloth of gold were fair enough to touch her feet . . . .
Ah, how the senses flood at my repeating,
As once in her fire-lit heart I felt the furies
Beating, beating.

Anne Sexton (1928-1974)

Anna Who Was Mad

Anna who was mad,
I have a knife in my armpit.
When I stand on tiptoe I tap out messages.
Am I some sort of infection?
Did I make you go insane?
Did I make the sounds go sour?
Did I tell you to climb out the window?
Forgive. Forgive.
Say not I did.
Say not.
Say.

Speak Mary-words into our pillow.
Take me the gangling twelve-year-old
into your sunken lap.
Whisper like a buttercup.
Eat me. Eat me up like cream pudding.
Take me in.
Take me.
Take.

Give me a report on the condition of my soul.
Give me a complete statement of my actions.
Hand me a jack-in-the-pulpit and let me listen in.
Put me in the stirrups and bring a tour group through.
Number my sins on the grocery list and let me buy.
Did I make you go insane?
Did I turn up your earphone and let a siren drive through?
Did I open the door for the mustached psychiatrist
who dragged you out like a gold cart?
Did I make you go insane?
From the grave write me, Anna!
You are nothing but ashes but nevertheless
pick up the Parker Pen I gave you.
Write me.
Write.

 

Anne Sexton :

Dave Correia

Patti Jordan

Kevin Doran

2 Morning, First Day
a: a light to be caught in/on.

face-tied place;
         back in, dipping.

syrup hair.
         ‘home’ friends.

attractive: not not my face
         in shaving cream.

a shower with–                   what's hidden
         under that coffee?

taste tastes.
         it’s currently hair/time . . .

spoon-left tea-rings on the stainless
         draining board.

think instrument.
         wish for more fire,
         fine sil(t/k).

you day: every day.
         we smile; her scent:
         so long.

in either talk, home/made laugh.
         what is your [deleted]?
         I ask.

last death: b/rain cell.