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Mayo 23, 2007
A Walk in March
This hill
crossed with broken pines and maples
lumpy with the burial mounds of
uprooted hemlocks (hurricane
of ’38) out of their
rotting hearts generations rise
trying once more to become
the forest
just beyond them
tall enough to be called trees
in their youth like aspen a bouquet
of young beech is gathered
they still wear last summer’s leaves
the lightest brown almost translucent
how their stubbornness has decorated
the winter woods
on this narrow path ice tries
to keep the black undecaying oak leaves
in its crackling grip it’s become
too hard to walk at last a
sunny patch oh! i’m in water
to my ankles APRIL
Grace Paley
Posted by sarita at 4:27 PM
Mayo 16, 2007
Juke Box Love Song
I could take the Harlem night
and wrap around you,
Take the neon lights and make a crown,
Take the Lenox Avenue busses,
Taxis, subways,
And for your love song tone their rumble down.
Take Harlem's heartbeat,
Make a drumbeat,
Put it on a record, let it whirl,
And while we listen to it play,
Dance with you till day—
Dance with you, my sweet brown Harlem girl.
Langston Hughes
Posted by sarita at 6:19 PM
Nocturne I
Appearing unannounced, the moon
Avoids a mountain's jagged prongs
And sweeps into the open sky
Like one who knows where she belongs.
To me, immediately, my heart:
"Adore Her, Mother, Virgin, Muse,
A Face worth watching Who can make
Or break you as Her fancy choose."
At which the reflex of my mind:
"You will not tell me, I presume,
That bunch of barren craters care
Who sleeps with or who tortures whom."
Tonight, like umpteen other nights,
The baser frankness wins of course,
My tougher mind which dares admit
That both are worshippers of force.
Granted what both of them believe,
The Goddess, clearly, has to go,
Whose majesty is but the mask
That hides a faceless dynamo;
And neither of my natures can
Complain if I should be reduced
To a small functionary whose dreams
Are vast, unscrupulous, confused.
Supposing, though, my face is real
And not a myth or a machine,
The moon should look like x and wear
Features I've actually seen,
My neighbor's face, a face as such,
Neither a status nor a sex,
Constant for me no matter what
The value I assign to x;
That gushing lady, possibly,
Who brought some verses of her own,
That hang-dog who keeps coming back
For just a temporary loan;
A counter-image, anyway,
To balance with its lack of weight
My world, the private motor-car
And all the engines of the State.
W. H. Auden
Posted by sarita at 6:16 PM
The City and its Own
Among the absolute graffiti which
—stenciled, stark, ambiguous—command
from empty walls and vacant lots,
POST NO BILLS, NO TRESPASSING HERE:
age and youth—Diogenes, say,
and Alexander, dog-philosophy
and half-divine, too-human imperium—
colliding, linger to exchange ideas
about proprietorship of the turf.
Hey, mister, you don’t own the sidewalk!
Oh yeah?
Yeah! the city owns the sidewalk—mister!
Oh yeah! says who?
Thus power's rude ad hominem walks all over
the civil reasoner, the civic reason.
Everyone has something.
Everything is someone's.
The city is the realm of selves in rut
and delirium of ownership, is property,
objects made marvelous by prohibition
whereby mere things of earth become ideas,
thinkable beings in a thought-of world
possessed by men themselves possessed by gods.
. . .
So I understood at twelve and thirteen,
among the throngs of Manhattan,
that I dodged within a crowd of gods
on the streets of what might be heaven.
And streets, stores, stairs, squares, all
that glory of forbidden goods, pantheon
of properties open to the air,
gave poor boys lots to think about!
And then splendor of tall walkers
striding wide ways, aloof and thoughtful
in their nimbuses of occupation,
advancing with bright assurance as if
setting foot to say, This is mine, I
am it—and passing on to add,
Now yield it to you, it is there.
Powers in self-possession, their thinking
themselves was a whirling as they went,
progressing beyond my vista to possess
unthought-of worlds, the wilderness.
These definitions, too, have meant to draw
a line around, to post and so prohibit,
and make our vacant lot a sacred ground.
Here then I civilize an empty page
with lines and letters, streets and citizens,
making its space a place of marvels now
seized and possessed in thought alone.
You may gaze in, you must walk around.
—Aha (you say), conceit stakes out its clay!
—That is a cynic's interpretation,
pulling the ground out from under my feet;
I fall, I fear, within your definition
which, rising and dusting off my knees,
civilly I here proclaim our real estate,
ours in common, the common ground
of self, a mud maddened to marvel
and mingle, generously, in generation.
Irving Feldman
Posted by sarita at 6:13 PM
Mayo 1, 2007
A Day on the Connecticut River
The billionth-or-so dawn,
And yet how primitive
The little factory looks, upstream,
Its brickwork that of "early man"
Launched and paddling through creation's
At-a-stroke venerable inventory
Baked into clay banks, bedded onto stone,
The day meanwhile our own.
Tire after scuttled tire
Glides under the canoe,
Manholes of a twilit avenue.
Better admire
The tannin-tinted clarity
—An opal freckle? A bug's wing—
Dimpled, asway, working
Cures for singularity,
Each view, to its least defect,
Flawlessly duplicated, healed . . .
Or was that last cornfield
Greener in reflection than in fact?
Duck! Museum
Skylight lowers
Like a boom. Through bowers
Of the no-see-um
One broad-bowed solo
Chord subtending, now,
Brindled cow,
Barn and silo,
Carries the Ur-
Conceptualist further
Into mimesis:
Life ever truer
To life, begun
Afresh with a few like-minded species,
While the rest of our whizzes
Down Route 91
Whose traffic drone
(Or falls ahead?
Stay, reconnoiter
This white water—)
Yields to the eternal
Drumming of bees
In a noon tree's
Bleached bone.
Ah but, our zenith passed, my friend,
Two galley slaves, retracing a dead end
Of scum-glaze, lilypad, Atari dragonfly,
We're cuffed alert by headwind—empty sky—
Miles from a landing—every pulse a mean
Swipe of the palette knife—painstaking sheen
In jeopardy—the master's touch lost—sun
Cross-questioned, mutely reddening—damage done:
What good's "eternity" if it won't get
Us anywhere in time to build a fire
And pitch a tent and heat our stew before
Night falls, and share a final cigarette
Whereby new-smelted leads of the moonrise
Nonplus the prowling far-off headlight eyes,
And twin dreams fumble, enter and earth chill,
Shadow and cave, for on another—? Still
Once more in the event
All came to pass
First light. Then, piece by piece,
Exact scales weight the fortune lent
On such fair terms. From clay,
Cuneiform cliff swallows whistling dart—
Transaction noted here, in part—
Up and away.
James Merrill
Posted by sarita at 5:51 PM
After
Where I am going now
I don't yet know:
I have, it appears, no destination, no plan.
In fact no particular longing to go
on anymore, at the moment, the cold
weightless fingers encircling my neck
to make me recite, one more time,
the great reasons for being alive.
Permanent address: unknown.
In the first place, we are not convinced
I exist at all. And if I have
a job
it is to be that hour
when the birds who sing all night long wake
and cease one by one,
and the last stars blaze and go out.
It is to be the beam of morning in the room,
the traveler at your front door;
or, if you wake in the night,
the one who is not
at the door.
The one who can see, from far off,
what you hiddenly go through.
The hammer's shadow in the shadow of a hand.
No one,
and the father of no one.
Franz Wright
Posted by sarita at 5:50 PM