William Matthews

Fellow Oddballs


The sodden sleep from which we open like umbrellas,
the way money keeps us in circulation, the scumbled lists
we make of what to do and what, God help us, to undo ---

an oddball knows an oddball at forty or at 40,000
paces. Let's raise our dribble glasses. Here's to us,
morose at dances and giggly in committee,

and here's to us on whose ironic bodies new clothes
pucker that clung like shrink wrap to the manikins.
And here's to the threadbare charm of our self-pity.

For when the waiters, who are really actors between parts,
have crumbed for the last time our wobbly tables,
and we've patted our pockets for keys and cigarettes

enough until tomorrow, for the coat-check token
and for whatever's missing, well then, what next? God knows,
who counts us on God's shapely toes, one and one and one.


-from "Search Party: Collected Poems"

Stanley Kunitz

The Quarrel


The word I spoke in anger
weighs less than a parsley seed,
but a road runs through it
that leads to my grave,
that bought-and-paid-for lot
on a slat-sprayed hill in Truro
where the scrub pines
overlook the bay.
Half-way I'm dead enough,
strayed from my own nature
and my fierce hold on life.
If I could cry, I'd cry,
but I'm too old to be
anybody's child.
Liebchen,
with whom should I quarrel
except in the hiss of love,
that harsh, irregular flame?

-from "The Collected Poems"

Carolyn Kizer

On a Line from Julian


I have a number and my name is dumb.
Living for death, this paradox I take:
Such a barbarian have I become.

Because historians are growing numb,
They will not say we love what we forsake,
To be a number when a name is dumb.

Our leaders urge us further to succumb.
Our privy hearts in unison must ache,
Says a barbarian. Have I become

A vessel that is empty of aplomb
To ornament the century's mistake,
And be a number when my name is dumb?

Subsisting on a drop of blood, a crumb,
When wine is gone, and bread too hard to break,
A small barbarian have I become.

I can be private in delirium,
Indifferent to the noises that I make.
I have a number, and my name is dumb.
Such a barbarian have I become!

Carolyn Kizer

Plain of the Poet in an Ignorant Age


I would I had a flower-boy!
I'd sit in the mid of an untamed wood
Away from tame suburbs beyond the trees.
With my botany-boy to fetch and find,
I'd sit in a rocker by a pot of cold coffee
Noodling in a notebook on my knee,
Calling, "Flower-boy, name me that flower!
Read me the tag on that tree!
But here I sit by an unlit fire
Swizzling three martinis
While a thousand metaphors doze outdoors,
And the no-bird sings in the no-name tree.

I would I had a bug-boy
With a bug-book and a butterfly net,
To bring me Nature in a basket of leaves:
A bug on a leaf by the goldfish bowl;
I'd sit in a rocker, a pocketful of pine-nuts
And a nutcracker knocking my knee,
Cracking nuts, jokes, and crying to my bug-boy,
"Read me the caterpillar on the leaf,
Count the number of nibbled veins
By a tree's light, in fire!"
While I, in my rocker, rolled and called,
A caterpillar crawled on the long-named leaf.

If I had a boy of Latin and Greek
In love with eleven-syllable leaves,
Hanging names like halos on herb and shrub!
A footnote lad, a lexicon boy
Who would run in a wreath around my rocker
To kneel at my chair, at my knee
Saying, "Here is your notebook, here is your pen! -
I have found you a marvelous tree!"
But all I have is a poetry-boy,
A bottle-cap King: he cries,
Thudding from the garden, "What do you call
The no-bird that sings in the no-name tree?"

-from "Cool, Calm & Collected: Poems 1960 - 2000"

Maxine Kumin

Ghazal: On the Table


I was taught to smooth the aura at the end,
said my masseuse, hands hovering at the end.

Inches above my placid pummeled self
did I feel something floating at the end?

Or is my naked body merely prone
to ectoplasmic vapors to no end?

Many other arthritics have lain here
seeking to roll pain's boulder end on end.

Herbal oils, a DC playing soft
loon calls, wave laps, bird trill now must end.

I rise and dress, restored to lift and bend,
my ethereal wisp invisible at the end.

-from The Long Marriage

Comment

Well, if anyone is still checking in for new posts after nearly a week of silence, here come a few more. I will try to post 2 - 3 a day so I catch up before the end of the week, and month. So here are three, one from Kumin, who has pretty words but doesn't read like poetry to me, and 2 from Kizer who I now plan to read extensively. I really like her work a lot so far. The two I have chosen are not necessarily representative, simply those I have picked out from a single night's perusal of a very large volume. These are probably not best examples of her work, or Kumin's, I just liked the use of form.

Galway Kinnell

The Room


The door closes on pain and confusion.
The candle flame wavers from side to side
as though trying to break itself in half
to color the shadows too with living light.
The andante movement plays over and over
its many triplets, like farm dogs yapping
at a melody made of the gratification-cries
of cocks. I will not stay long.
Nothing in experience led me to imagine
having. Having is destroying, according
to my version of the vow of impoverishment.
But here, in this brief, waxen light,
I have, and nothing is destroyed. The flute
that guttered those owl's notes into the waste hours
of childhood joins with the piano
and they play, Being is having. Having
may be simply the grace of the shell
moving without hesitation, with lively pride,
down the stubborn river of woe. At the far end,
a door no one dares open begins opening.
To go through it will awaken such regret
as only closing it behind can obliterate.
The candle flame's staggering makes the room
wobble and shift- matter itself, laughing.
I can't come back. I won't change.
I have the usual capacity for wanting
what may not even exist. Don't worry.
That is dew wetting my face.
You see? Nothing that enters the room
can have only its own meaning ever again.


-from " New and Selected Poems"

Mark Doty

Ararat


Wrapped in gold foil, in the search
and shouting of Easter Sunday,
it was the ball of the princess,
it was Pharaoh's body
sleeping its golden case.
At the foot of the picket fence,
in grass lank with the morning rain,
it was a Sunday school prize,
silver for second place, gold
for the triumphant little dome
of Ararat, and my sister
took me by the hand and led me
out onto the wide, wet lawn
and showed me to bend into the thick nests
of grass, into the darkest green.
Later I had to give it back,
in exchange for a prize,
though I would rather have kept the egg.
What might have coiled inside it?
Crocuses tight on their clock-springs,
a bird who'd sing himself into an angel
in the highest reaches of the garden,
the morning's flaming arrow?
Any small thing can save you.
Because the golden egg gleamed
in my basket once, though my childhood
became an immense sheet of darkening water
I was Noah, and I was his ark,
and there were two of every animal inside me.


-from "Fire to Fire: New and Collected Poems"

Mark Doty

Theory of Marriage (The Hug)


Arden would turn his head toward the one
he loved, Paul or me, and look downward,
and butt the top of his skull against us, leaning forward,
hiding his face, disappearing into what he'd chosen.

Beau had another idea. He'd offer his rump
for scratching, and wag his tail while he was stroked,
returning that affection by facing away, looking out
toward whatever might come along to enjoy.

Beau had no interest in an economy of affection;
why hoard what you can give away?
Arden thought you should close your eyes
to anything else; only by vanishing

into the beloved do you make it clear:
what else is there you'd want to see?

- from "Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems"

Donald Justice

Villanelle at Sundown

Turn your head. Look. The light is turning yellow.
The river seems enriched thereby, not to say deepened.
Why this is, I'll never be able to tell you.

Or are Americans half in love with failure?
One used to say so, reading Fitzgerald, as it happened.
(That Viking Portable, all water-spotted and yellow--

Remember?) Or does mere distance lend a value
To things?--false it may be, but the view is hardly cheapened.
Why this is, I'll never be able to tell you.

The smoke, those tiny cars, the whole urban milieu--
One can like anything diminishment has sharpened.
Our painter friend, Lang, might show the whole thing yellow

And not be much off. It's nuance that counts, not color--
As in some late James novel, saved up for the long weekend
And vivid with all the Master simply won't tell you.

How frail our generation has got, how sallow
And pinched with just surviving! We all go off the deep end
Finally, gold beaten thinly out to yellow.
And why this is, I'll never be able to tell you.


-from The Sunset Maker, 1987, Collected Poems

Donald Justice

Sea Wind: A Song


Sea wind, you rise
From the night waves below,
Not that we see you come and go,
But as the blind know things we know
And feel you on our face,
And all you are
Or ever were is space,
Sea wind, come from so far
To fill us with this restlessness
That will outlast your own--
So the fig tree,
When you are gone,
Sea wind, still bends and leans out toward the sea
And goes on blossoming alone.

-from The Sunset Maker, 1987, in Collected Poems

Donald Justice

Presences


Everyone, everyone went away today.
They left without a word, and I think
I did not hear a single goodbye today.

And all that I saw was someone's hand, I think,
thrown up out there like the hand of someone drowning,
But far away, too far to be sure what it was or meant.

No, but I saw how everything had changed
Later, just as the light had; and at night
I saw that from dream to dream everything changed.

And those who might have come to me in the night,
The ones who did come back but without a word,
All those I remembered passed through my hands like clouds--

Clouds out of the south, familiar clouds--
But I could not hold on to them, they were drifting away,
Everything going away in the night again and again.


from Departures, 1973, in Collected Poems

Comment

Well, I have been reading Donald Justice these last 3 days, but not taking time to post. I had not read any of his work and now I have been through many of them, I think he is not a favorite. There is both whimsy and some meanness I think in him, or maybe just in the things he writes about. Anyway, here are three that I liked more than some others. Meanness is probably unfair, and not present in these. Well, if you have another take on him, feel free to comment. I like that he has played with form a little, in addition to the villanelle, there is a pantoum and a couple of sestinas in this collection.

Jane Hirshfield

The Envoy

One day in that room, a small rat.
Two days later, a snake.

Who, seeing me enter,
whipped the long stripe of his
body under the bed,
then curled like a docile house-pet.

I don't know how either came or left.
Later, the flashlight found nothing.

For a year I watched
as something - terror? happiness? grief? -
entered and then left my body.

Not knowing how it came in,
Not knowing how it went out.

It hung where words could not reach it.
It slept where light could not go.
Its scent was neither snake nor rat,
neither sensualist nor ascetic.

There are openings in our lives
of which we know nothing.

Through them
the belled herds travel at will,
long-legged and thirsty, covered with foreign dust.


-from Given Sugar, Given Salt

Louise Gluck

The Doorway


I wanted to stay as I was
still as the world is never still,
not in midsummer but the moment before
the first flower forms, the moment
nothing is as yet past-

not midsummer, the intoxicant,
but late spring, the grass not yet
high at the edge of the garden, the early tulips
beginning to open-

like a child hovering in a doorway, watching the others,
the ones who go first,
a tense cluster of limbs, alert to
the failures of others, the public falterings

with a child's fierce confidence of imminent power
preparing to defeat
these weaknesses, to succumb
to nothing, the time directly

prior to flowering, the epoch of mastery

before the appearance of the gift,
before possession.


-from The Wild Iris

Louise Gluck

Heaven and Earth


Where one finishes, the other begins.
On top, a band of blue; underneath,
a band of green and gold, green and deep rose.

John stands at the horizon: he wants
both at once, he wants
everything at once.

The extremes are easy. Only
the middle is a puzzle. Midsummer-
everything is possible.

Meaning: never again will life end.

How can I leave my husband
standing in the garden
dreaming this sort of thing, holding
his rake, triumphantly
preparing to announce this discovery

as the fire of the summer sun
truly does stall
being entirely contained by
the burning maples
at the garden's border.


-from The Wild Iris

Seamus Heaney

Girls Bathing, Galway, 1965


The swell foams where they float and crawl,
A catherine-wheel of arm and hand;
Each head bobs curtly as a football.
The yelps are faint here on the strand.

No milk-limbed Venus ever rose
Miraculous on this western shore.
A pirate queen in battle clothes
Is our sterner myth. The breakers pour

Themselves into themselves, the years
Shuttle through space invisibly.
Where crests unfurl like creamy beer
the queen's clothes melt into the sea

And generations sighing in
The salt suds where the wave has crashed
Labour in fear of flesh and sin
For the time has been accomplished

As through the shallows in swimsuits,
Bare-legged, smooth-shouldered and long-backed,
they wade ashore with skips and shouts.
So Venus comes, matter-of-fact.

-from Door into the Dark
published in 1969

Anne Carson

Apostle Town


After your death.
It was windy every day.
Every day.
Opposed us like a wall.
We went.
Shouting sideways at one another.
Along the road it was useless.
The spaces between.
Us got hard they are.
Empty spaces and yet they.
Are solid and black.
And grievous as gaps.
Between the teeth.
Of an old woman you.
Knew years ago.
When she was.
Beautiful the nerves pouring around in her like palace fire.

-from The Life of Towns, in "Plainwater"

Anne Carson

Freud (1st draft)


Freud spent the summer of 1876 in Trieste
researching hermaphroditism in eels.
In the lab of zoologist Karl Klaus

he dissected
more than a thousand to check whether they had testicles.

"All the eels I have cut open are of the tenderer sex,"
he reported after the first 400.
Meanwhile

the "young goddesses" of Trieste were proving
unapproachable.
"Since

it is not permitted
to dissect human beings I have
in fact nothing to do with them," he confided in a letter.


-from "Men in the Off Hours"

Comment

Well, it is easy to get behind with this project. I am reading most days, but not always finding something I think suitable for posting. Maybe its too esoteric, or its not grabbing me. In the last two days I have been through Wallace Stevens, Anne Carson, Seamus Heaney, and part of a volume of German poets, with few I feel moved to share. Carson is just difficult to post because she writes with physical form and the blog format won't let me reproduce it. But here are some gleanings anyway.

Pablo Neruda

To Sadness

Sadness, I need
your black wing,
so much sun, so much honey in the topaz,
each ray smiles
in the meadow
and everything is round light on all sides of me,
everything is an electric bee in the heights.
And so
give me
your black wing,
sister sadness:
I need the sapphire to be
extinguished sometimes and the oblique
mesh of the rain to fall,
the weeping of the earth:
I want
that shattered beam in the estuary,
the vast house in darkness,
and my mother
searching
for paraffin
and filling the lamp
until it gave not light but a sigh.

The night wasn't born.

The day was sliding
toward its provincial graveyard,
and between the bread and the shadow
I remember
myself
in the window
looking out at what didn't exist,
what wasn't happening,
and a black wing of water that came
over that heart which there perhaps
I forgot forever, in the window.

Now I miss
the black light.

Give me your slow blood,
cold
rain,
give me your astonished flight!
Give me back
the key
of the door that was shut,
destroyed.
For a moment, for
a short lifetime,
take the light from me and let me
feel myself
lost and miserable,
trembling among the threads
of twilight,
receiving into my soul
the trembling
hands
of
the
rain.

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Elizabeth Bishop

Insomnia

The moon in the bureau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

Billy Collins

The Four-Moon Planet

I have envied the four-moon planet.
-The Notebooks of Robert Frost

Maybe he was thinking of the song

"What a Little Moonlight Can do"
and became curious about
what a lot of moonlight might be capable of.

But wouldn't this be too much of a good thing?
and what if you couldn't tell them apart
and they always rose together
like pale quadruplets entering a living room?

Yes, there would be enough light
to read a book or write a letter at midnight,
and if you drank enough tequila
you might see eight of them roving brightly above.

But think of the two lovers on a beach,
his arm around her bare shoulder,
thrilled at how close they were feeling tonight
while he gazed at one moon and she another.

Billy Collins
-Ballistics

Mary Oliver

Mockingbird



Always there is something worth saying
about glory, about gratitude.
But I went walking a long time across the dunes
and in all that time spoke not a single word,
nor wrote one down, nor even thought anything at all
at the window of my heart.

Speechless the snowy tissue of clouds passed over, and more came,
and speechless they passed also.
The beach plums hung on the hillsides, their branches
heavy with blossoms; yet not one of them said a word.

And nothing there anyway knew, don't we know, what a word is,
or could parse down from the general liquidity of feeling
to the spasm and bull's eye of the moment, or the logic,
or the instance,
trimming the fingernails of happiness, entering the house
of rhetoric.

And yet there was one there eloquent enough,
all this time,
and not quietly but in a rhapsody of reply, though with
an absence of reason, of querulous pestering. The mockingbird
was making of himself
an orchestra, a choir, a dozen flutes,

a tambourine, an outpost of perfect and exact observation,
all afternoon rapping and whistling
on the athlete's lung-ful of leafy air. You could not
imagine a steadier talker, hunched deep in the tree,
then floating forth decorative and boisterous and mirthful,
all eye and fluttering feathers. You could not imagine
a sweeter prayer.


Mary Oliver
-from "What Do We Know"

WS Merwin

Raiment


Believing comes after
there were coverings
who can believe
that we were born without them
he she or it wailing
back the first breath
from a stark reflection
raw and upside-down
early but already
not original

into the last days
and then some way past them
the body that we
are assured is more
than what covers it
is kept covered
out of habit which
is a word for dress
out of custom
which is an alteration
of the older word costume
out of decency
which is handed down
from a word for what
is fitting

apparently we believe
in the words
and through them
but we long beyond them
for what is unseen
what remains out of reach
what is kept covered
with colors and sizes
we hunger
for what is undoubted yet dubious
known to be different
and our fabrics tell
of difference
we dress in difference
calling it ours


W.S. Merwin
- from The Shadow of Sirius

W.S. Merwin

Accompaniment


The wall in front of me is all one black
mirror in which I see my hands
washing themselves all by themselves
knowing what they are doing
as though they belong to someone
I do not see there and have never seen
who must be older than I am
since he knows what he is doing
above the basin of bright metal
in the black wall where the water looks
still as a frozen lake at night
though the bright ripples on it
are trembling and under me the floor
and my feet on it are trembling
it is late it was late when we started
over my shoulder my mother's voice
is telling me what we do next
on the way and how the train is made
that is taking us away and in a while
I will be asleep and I will
wake up far away
we are going south
where I know that my father
is going to die
but I will grow up before he does that
the hands go on washing by themselves


-from The Shadow of Sirius
Copper Canyon Press, 2009
Winner, Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

April Fool for Poetry

Well, this is hopefully welcome...a time-limited blog with almost no commentary or personal revelation. Just the words of others, as I discover them, mostly from my own shelves of neglected collected. There will be nothing planned here, just what I happen to like from my daily reading, which is the selfish point of this.

But hopefully you will like some of what I do and will feel free to comment on what wows or wilts.

And now for the first....