Alice Notley

 

SONNET

The late Gracie Allen was a very lucid comedienne, 
Especially in the way that lucid means shining and bright. 
What her husband George Burns called her illogical logic 
Made a halo around our syntax and ourselves as we laughed. 

George Burns most often was her artful inconspicuous straight man. 
He could move people about stage, construct skits and scenes, write 
And gather jokes. They were married as long as ordinary magic 
Would allow, thirty-eight years, until Gracie Allen's death. 

In her fifties Gracie Allen developed a heart condition. 
She would call George Burns when her heart felt funny and fluttered 
He'd give her a pill and they'd hold each other till the palpitation 
Stopped—just a few minutes, many times and pills. As magic fills 
Then fulfilled must leave a space, one day Gracie Allen's 
heart fluttered 
And hurt and stopped. George Burns said unbelievingly to the doctor, 
'But I still have some of the pills.'

Antonio Machado

 

• Wanderer, your footprints are
  the path, and nothing else;
  wanderer, there is no path,
  the path is made by walking.
  Walking makes the path,
  and on glancing back
  one sees the path
  that must never be trod again.
  Wanderer, there is no path—
  Just your wake in the sea.
  • "Proverbios y cantares XXIX" [Proverbs and Songs 29], Campos de Castilla (1912); trans. Betty Jean Craige in Selected Poems of Antonio Machado (Louisiana State University Press, 1979)

Marianne Moore

 

Marianne Moore and mus

 NO SWAN SO FINE

"No water so still as the 

dead fountains of Versailles." No swan, 

with swart blind look askance 
and gondoliering legs, so fine 
as the chinz china one with fawn- 
brown eyes and toothed gold 
collar on to show whose bird it was. 

Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth 
candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-

tinted buttons, dahlias, 
sea-urchins, and everlastings, 
it perches on the branching foam 
of polished sculptured 
flowers--at ease and tall. The king is dead.

Wallace Stevensl

 

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon, by Wallace Stevens

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

W. S. Merwin

 

Before the Flood (1998)

Why did he promise me
that we would build ourselves
an ark all by ourselves
out in back of the house
on New York Avenue
in Union City New Jersey
to the singing of the streetcars
after the story
of Noah whom nobody
believed about the waters
that would rise over everything
when I told my father
I wanted us to build
an ark of our own there
in the back yard under
the kitchen could we do that
he told me that we could
I want to I said and will we
he promised me that we would
why did he promise that
I wanted us to start then
nobody will believe us
I said that we are building
an ark because the rains
are coming and that was true
nobody ever believed
we would build an ark there
nobody would believe
that the waters were coming

W.S. Merwin

 

Berryman

I will tell you what he told me

in the years just after the war

as we then called

the second world war

 

don't lose your arrogance yet he said

you can do that when you're older

lose it too soon and you may

merely replace it with vanity

 

just one time he suggested

changing the usual order

of the same words in a line of verse

why point out a thing twice

 

he suggested I pray to the Muse

get down on my knees and pray

right there in the corner and he

said he meant it literally

 

it was in the days before the beard

and the drink but he was deep

in tides of his own through which he sailed

chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

 

he was far older than the dates allowed for

much older than I was he was in his thirties

he snapped down his nose with an accent

I think he had affected in England

 

as for publishing he advised me

to paper my wall with rejection slips

his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled

with the vehemence of his views about poetry

 

he said the great presence

that permitted everything and transmuted it

in poetry was passion

passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

 

I had hardly begun to read

I asked how can you ever be sure

that what you write is really

any good at all and he said you can't

 

you can't you can never be sure

you die without knowing

whether anything you wrote was any good

if you have to be sure don't write

William Carlos Williams

 

St. Francis Einstein of the Daffodils

On the first visit of Professor Einstein to
the United States in the spring of 1921.

"Sweet land"

at last!

out of sea—

the Venusremembering wavelets

rippling with laughter—

freedom

for the daffodils!

—in a tearing wind

that shakes

the tufted orchards—

Einstein, tall as a violet

in the lattice-arbor corner

is tall as

a blossomy peartree

 

O Samos, Samos

dead and buried. Lesbia

a black cat in the freshturned

garden. All dead.

All flesh they sung

is rotten

Sing of it no longer—

Side by side young and old

take the sun together—

maples, green and red

yellowbells

and the vermillion quinceflower

together—

 

The peartree

with fœtid blossoms

sways its high topbranches

with contrary motions

and there are both pinkflowered

and coralflowered peachtrees

in the bare chickenyard

of the old negro

with white hair who hides

poisoned fish-heads

here and there

where stray cats find them—

find them

 

Spring days

swift and mutable

winds blowing four ways

hot and cold

shaking the flowers—

Now the northeast wind

moving in fogs leaves the grass

cold and dripping. The night

is dark. But in the night

the southeast wind approaches.

The owner of the orchard

lies in bed

with open windows

and throws off his covers

one by one

Agha Shahid Ali

 

Snowmen

My ancestor, a man

of Himalayan snow,

came to Kashmir from Samarkand,

carrying a bag

of whale bones:

heirlooms from sea funerals.

His skeleton

carved from glaciers, his breath

arctic,

he froze women in his embrace.

His wife thawed into stony water,

her old age a clear

evaporation.

This heirloom,

his skeleton under my skin, passed

from son to grandson,

generations of snowmen on my back.

They tap every year on my window,

their voices hushed to ice.

No, they won’t let me out of winter,

and I’ve promised myself,

even if I’m the last snowman,

that I’ll ride into spring

on their melting shoulders.

Paul Blackburn

 

7th Game: 1960 Series

Nice day, 
sweet October afternoon 
Men walk the sun-shot avenues, 
Second, Third, eyes 
intent elsewhere 
ears communing with transistors in shirt pockets 
Bars are full, quiet, 
discussion during commercials 
only 
Pirates lead New York 4-1, top of the 6th, 2 
Yankees on base, 1 man out 

What a nice day for all this ! 
Handsome women, even 
dreamy jailbait, walk 
nearly neglected : 
men's eyes are blank 
their thoughts are all in Pittsburgh 

Last half of the 9th, the score tied 9-all, 
Mazeroski leads off for the Pirates 
The 2nd pitch he simply, sweetly 
CRACK! 
belts it clean over the left-field wall 

Blocks of afternoon 
acres of afternoon 
Pennsylvania Turnpikes of afternoon . One 
diamond stretches out in the sun 
the 3rd base line 
and what men come down 
it 

The final score, 10-9 

Yanquis, come home

Paul Blackburn

Brooklyn Narcissus

Straight rye whiskey, 100 proof
you need a better friend?
Yes. Myself.

The lights
the lights
the lonely lovely fucking lights
and the bridge on a rainy Tuesday night
Blue/green double-stars the line
that is the drive and on the dark alive
gleaming river
Xmas trees of tugs scream and struggle

Midnite

Drops on the train window wobble . stream
My trouble
is
it is her fate to never learn to make
anything grow
be born or stay
Harbor beginnings and that other gleam . The train
is full of long/way/home and holding lovers whose
flesh I would exchange for mine
The rain, R.F.,

sweeps the river as the bridges sweep
Nemesis is thumping down the line
But I have premises to keep
& local stops before I sleep
& local stops before I sleep

The cree-
ping train
joggles
rocks across
I hear
the waves below lap against the piles, a pier
from which ships go
to Mexico

a sign which reads

PACE O MIO DIO

oil
“The flowers died when you went away”

Manhattan Bridge
a bridge between
we state, one life and the next, we state
is better so
is no
backwater, flows
between us is
our span our bridge our
naked eyes
open her
see
bridging whatever impossibility. . . PACE!

PACE O MIO DIO

oil

“The flowers died. . .”
Of course the did

Not that I was a green thing in the house

I was once.
No matter.

The clatter of cars over the span, the track
the spur
the rusty dead/pan ends of space
of grease

We enter the tunnel.

The dirty window gives me back my 

Donald Justice

Absences

It's snowing this afternoon and there are no flowers.

There is only this sound of falling, quiet and remote,

Like the memory of scales descending the white keys

Of a childhood piano—outside the window, palms!

And the heavy head of the cereus, inclining,

Soon to let down its white or yellow-white.

Now, only these poor snow-flowers in a heap,

Like the memory of a white dress cast down . . .

So much has fallen.

                                    And I, who have listened for a step

All afternoon, hear it now, but already falling away,

Already in memory. And the terrible scales descending

On the silent piano; the snow; and the absent flowers

      abounding.

Donald Justice

On A Painting By Patient B Of The Independence State Hospital For The Insane

 

1
These seven houses have learned to face one another,
But not at the expected angles. Those silly brown lumps,
That are probably meant for hills and not other houses,
After ages of being themselves, though naturally slow,
Are learning to be exclusive without offending.
The arches and entrances (down to the right out of sight)
Have mastered the lesson of remaining closed.
And even the skies keep a certain understandable distance,
For these are the houses of the very rich.
2
One sees their children playing with leopards, tamed
At great cost, or perhaps it is only other children,
For none of these objects is anything more than a spot,
And perhaps there are not any children but only leopards
Playing with leopards, and perhaps there are only the spots.
And the little maids that hang from the windows like tongues,
Calling the children in, admiring the leopards,
Are the dashes a child might represent motion by means of,
Or dazzlement possibly, the brilliance of solid-gold houses.
3
The clouds resemble those empty balloons in cartoons
Which approximate silence. These clouds, if clouds they are
(And not the smoke from the seven aspiring chimneys),
The more one studies them the more it appears
They too have expressions. One might almost say
They have their habits, their wrong opinions, that their
Impassivity masks an essentially lovable foolishness,
And they will be given names by those who live under them
Not public like mountains' but private like companions'.

N

Mark Strand

A Piece Of The Storm

For Sharon Horvath

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed.
That's all There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
"It's time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening."

Mark Strand on Donald Justice

 

Don's precision in esthetic matters and his courtesy in personal ones masked, I believe, a vivid inwardness—an inwardness of the sort we sense in the paintings of Edward Hopper or even further back, say, in the paintings of Piero della Francesca. It may have been a sympathy with such projections of hiddeness that moved Don late in life to try his hand at painting. I can recall many instances of his phoning me up and asking me—because I had once been an art student—questions relating to technique. He wanted his paintings to look like they were done by a painter and not a poet. He had no desire to appear amateurish, nor to have it seem as though the making of his paintings entailed a struggle. In his artistic pursuits, which, it should be mentioned, also included musical composition, he was very much a purist, but quirkily and beguilingly so. Still, the work for which he will be remembered is of course his poems whose principle beauty lies in the wistful articulation and sad acknowledgement that little or nothing survives the great drama and effort that is life. Sorry news, but conveyed always with a certain dark, inimitable charm, beautifully, unforgettably.

Pee Wee Herman

 

© Christophe Von Hohenberg.

Joan Retallack

 

Elliptical Ice Terriers

 

Just as your blades describe an icy metaphysic of

parallel curves, I will be your personal pronoun

for the duration of this sentence. You will be my

personal pronoun for the duration of this sentence.

It’s all about remaining in motion. Exquisite poetries

and theories of everything propel flying spins,

no-hands bicycle arias on the way home. More

reciprocal alterity, more biomimicry, less blood

sausage fealty, explosions of sweetest beauty.

My child, why repeat what some poet or another

has already said—we live our lives forever taking

leave—when a custom-fitted speech act can be

yours within 24 hours. With it you can perform

rites and ceremonies, weddings, baptisms,

extreme unctions, forgiveness of sins, funerals—

visit correctional facilities, start your own church.

Joan Retallack

 

None Too Soon

 

Located in memories without precedent, fine stock of syllables

not yet squandered in pliant affirmation. Don’t be scared. The

more non-existent of the gods are the only ones counting your

blunders. Hard to forget what’s never been known for sure.

Yearning minds conjure thoughts bound to deform the

musculature of the most determined smile. The only

worthwhile thought experiment of which I’m currently aware

is to construct a logical space-time bracket in which all of us

—animal, mineral, vegetable—are sometimes dreaming.

Joan Retallack

from

A I D /I/ S A P P E A R A N C E 

for Stefan Fitterman

B H J C E R T
fo fn Fmn
1. n on w mn of onnuy n uomy pon
2. of nu nvly of qunum of on qu n nl
3. lmn of onnuy plly ppn oug uon of
4. nu of lg o o yng n lug ll ly
5. l  uy of nu moon wx un o o wn wn
6. o ung lp o wn ngng on ng mkng n ng
7. pp n no pl o n on n ngly w gl
 

F G  K Q U
o n mn
1. no n w m no on ny no my pon
2. o n nvly o nm o on n nl
3. lm no onny plly pp no on o
4. no l o o yn nl ll ly
5. l y o n  moon wx no own wn
6. o n l pow n n no n n mn n n
7. pp n no pl o no n n nly w l