Poetry

Edward Hirsch, 2020

Moon-head is shouting at me
to back the fuck up
on the forklift
I am trying to jab
into a tower
of wooden pallets
stacked all the way
to the sprinklers
laid out under the roof
of the warehouse
where I am struggling
to control the prongs
of a monster
and avoid dousing
everyone on the floor
of E.H. Sargent & Co.,
my summer of chemicals,
the school where I learned
that someone
is always shouting
at someone else on the job
to back the fuck up.

Nikainetos, 3 BCE

Traveler, I am the grave of Biton:
if you go from Torone to Amphipolis,
give Nicagoras this message: his only son
died in a storm, in early winter, before sunrise.

Muriel Rukeyser, 1962

This journey is exploring us. Where the child stood
An island in a river of crisis, now
The bridges bind us in symbol, the sea
Is a bond, the sky reaches into our bodies.
We pray : we dive into each other’s eyes.

Whatever can come to a woman can come to me.

This is the long body : into life from the beginning,
Big-headed infant unfolding into child, who stretches and finds
And then flowing the young one going tall, sunward,
And now full-grown, held, tense, setting feet to the ground,
Going as we go in the changes of the body,
As it is changes, in the long strip of our many
Shapes, as we range shifting through time.
The long body : a procession of images.

This moment in a city, in its dream of war.
                                We chose to be,
Becoming the only ones under the trees
                                                            when the harsh sound
Of the machine sirens spoke. There were these two men,
And the bearded one, the boys, the Negro mother feeding
Her baby. And threats, the ambulance with open doors.
Now silence. Everyone else within the walls. We sang.
                                We are the living island,
We the flesh of this island, being lived,
Whoever knows us is part of us today.

Whatever can happen to anyone can happen to me.

Fire striking its word among us, waterlilies
Reaching from darkness upward to a sun
Of rebirth, the implacable.     And in our myth
The Changing Woman who is still and who offers.

Eyes drinking light, transforming light, this day
That struggles with itself, brings itself to birth.
In ways of being, through silence, sources of light
Arriving behind my eye, a dialogue of light.

And everything a witness of the buried life.
This moment flowing across the sun, this force
Of flowers and voices body in body through space.
The city of endless cycles of the sun.

I speak to you     You speak to me

Muriel Rukeyser, 1962

I think of the image brought into my room
Of the sage and the thin young man who flickers and asks.
He is asking about the moment when the Buddha
Offers the lotus, a flower held out as declaration.
“Isn’t that fragile?” he asks.     The sage answers:
“I speak to you.     You speak to me.     Is that fragile?”

Muriel Rukeyser, 1962

Many of us     Each in his own life waiting
Waiting to move     Beginning to move     Walking
And early on the road of the hill of the world
Come to my landscapes emerging on the grass

The stages of the theatre of the journey

I see the time of willingness between plays
Waiting and walking and the play of the body
Silver body with its bosses and places
One by one touched awakened into into

Touched and turned one by one into     flame

The theatre of the advancing goddess     Blossoming
Smiles as she stands intensely being in stillness
Slowness in her blue dress advancing standing I go
And far across a field over the jewel grass

The play of the family stroke by stroke acted out

Gestures of deep acknowledging on the journey stages
Of the playings the play of the goddess and the god
A supple god of searching and reaching
Who weaves his strength     Who dances her more alive

The theatre of all animals, my snakes, my great horses

Always the journey     long     patient     many haltings
Many waitings for choice and again easy breathing
When the decision to go on is made
Along the long slopes of choice and again the world
The play of poetry approaching in its solving

Solvings of relations in poems and silences
For we were born to express     born for a journey
Caves, theatres, the companioned solitary way
And then I came to the place of mournful labor

A turn in the road and the long sight from the cliff

Over the scene of the land dug away to nothing and many
Seen to a stripped horizon carrying barrows of earth
A hod of earth taken and emptied and thrown away
Repeated farther than sight.     The voice saying slowly

But it is hell.     I heard my own voice in the words
Or it could be a foundation     And after the words
My chance came.     To enter.     The theatres of the world.

Muriel Rukeyser, 1962

Born of this river and this rock island, I relate
The changes : I born when the whirling snow
Rained past the general’s grave and the amiable child
White past the windows of the house of Gyp the Blood.
General, gangster, child.     I know in myself the island.

I was the island without bridges, the child down whose blazing
Eye the men of plumes and bone raced their canoes and fire
Among the building of my young childhood, houses;
I was those changes, the live darknesses
Of wood, the pale grain of a grove in the fields
Over the river fronting red cliffs across—
And always surrounding her the river, birdcries, the wild
Father building his sand, the mother in panic her parks—
Bridges were thrown across, the girl arose
From sleeping streams of change in the change city.
The violent forgetting, the naked sides of darkness.
Fountain of a city in growth, and island of light and water.
Snow striking up past the graves, the yellow cry of spring.

Whatever can come to a city can come to this city.
Under the tall compulsion
                                                            of the past
I see the city
                                change like a man changing
I love this man
                                with my lifelong body of love
I know you
                                among your changes
                                                            wherever I go
Hearing the sounds of building
                                                            the syllables of wrecking
A young girl watching
                                                    the man throwing red hot rivets
Coals in a bucket of change
How can you love a city that will not stay?
I love you
                                like a man of life in change.

Leaves like yesterday shed, the yellow of green spring
Like today accepted and become one’s self
I go, I am a city with bridges and tunnels,
Rock, cloud, ships, voices.     To the man where the river met
The tracks, now buried deep along the Drive
Where blossoms like sex pink, dense pink, rose, pink, red.

Towers falling.     A dream of towers.
Necessity of fountains.     And my poor,
Stirring among our dreams,
Poor of my own spirit, and tribes, hope of towers
And lives, looking out through my eyes.
The city the growing body of our hate and love.
The root of the soul, and war in its black doorways.
A male sustained cry interrupting nightmare.
Male flower heading upstream.

Among a city of light, the stone that grows.
Stigma of dead stone, inert water, the tattered
Monuments rivetted against flesh.
Blue noon where the wall made big agonized men
Stand like sailors pinned howling on their lines, and I
See stopped in time a crime behind green glass,
Lilies of all my life on fire.
Flash faith in a city building its fantasies.

I walk past the guards into my city of change.

Muriel Rukeyser. 1962

Girl grown woman     fire     mother of fire
I go to the stone street turning to fire.      Voices
Go screaming        Fire        to the green glass wall.
And there where my youth flies blazing into fire
The     dance      of sane and insane images, noon
Of seasons and days.     Noontime of my one hour.

Saw down the bright noon street the crooked faces
Among the tall daylight in the city of change.
The scene has walls        stone        glass        all my gone life
One wall a web through which the moment walks
And I am open, and the opened hour
The world as water-garden        lying behind it.
In a city of stone, necessity of fountains,
Forces water fallen on glass, men with their axes.

An arm of flame reaches from water-green glass,
Behind the wall I know waterlilies
Drinking their light, transforming light and our eyes
Skythrown under water, clouds under those flowers,
Walls standing on all things stand in a city noon
Who will not believe a waterlily fire.
Whatever can happen in a city of stone,
Whatever can come to a wall can come to this wall.

I walk in the river of crisis toward the real,
I pass guards, finding the center of my fear
And you, Dick, endlessly my friend during storm.

The arm of flame striking through the wall of form.

Adrienne Rich, 1973

A man in terror of impotence
or infertility, not knowing the difference
a man trying to tell something
howling from the climacteric
music of the entirely
isolated soul
yelling at Joy from the tunnel of the ego
music without the ghost
of another person in it, music
trying to tell something the man
does not want out, would keep if he could
gagged and bound and flogged with chords of Joy
where everything is silence and the
beating of a bloody fist upon
a splintered table

Allen Ginsberg, 1980

Pigeons shake their wings on the copper church roof
out my window across the street, a bird perched on the cross
surveys the city's blue-grey clouds. Larry Rivers
'll come at 10 AM and take my picture. I'm taking
your picture, pigeons. I'm writing you down, Dawn.
I'm immortalizing your exhaust, Avenue A bus.
O Thought, now you'll have to think the same thing forever!

William Blake, 1793

Why should I care for the men of Thames
Or the cheating waves of charter'd streams
Or shrink at the little blasts of fear
That the hireling blows into my ear

Tho born on the cheating banks of Thames
Tho his waters bathed my infant limbs
The Ohio shall wash his stains from me
I was born a slave but I go to be free.

Patti Smith, from Early Works 1970--1979

picture this. I’ll play the killer. 16 millimeter.
ebony and ivory. the purest contrast. iris closed.
open sesame. a screen of creamy white satin.
on that wedding lap a white persian cat. a pale
hand pets. milk purr. pan up slow. it’s me see.
in a black silk suit. dark glasses. kid gloves.
as sinister as the law allows. I’ve returned
from the opera. prowl cat tom cat.
if I’m male it doesn’t matter.

I’m on the ledge. that’s a several story drop.
how did I execute my brilliant cat walk? that’s
up to you, franju. but there I am. perched on her
window sill like a dirty bluebird. the back of my
neck is wet. I sit there what seems for hours.
a human chess game. she makes the first move.

it’s quite simple. she gets up to adjust her
sloppy stocking. her easter spikes could use
some vaseline. her matt gesture is reflected
in black patent leather. shoot to the ruffled
vanity. mirror image. look at the kisser
gazing from that mica. lipstick so thick
you could carve your initials in it.

no alias not me. my initials are PLS and I’d be
pleased to leave my monogram. close-up shot
of my steady fist. I’m cool as menthol, the kind
of confidence one achieves thru an open nose.

cocaine. I can do it. watch me raise my leather
fingers. bluebeard itching for a fleshy white neck.
I strike. she’s no match for me. the cold adhesive
touch of the octopus. I remove my glove.
struggle struggle. glub glub. she’s gone.

as the opening credits roll up. the killer,
swift as an athlete, is escaping.
springing from roof top to roof top.
racing against pyramid shapes
into the black seine.

search party music. the killer.
16 mm. black and white.
g. franju. with patti smith.

george franju. media me.
shoot me on the kodak.
I’ll do it for free.

Hart Crane, 1926

Often beneath the wave, wide from this ledge
The dice of drowned men’s bones he saw bequeath
An embassy. Their numbers as he watched,
Beat on the dusty shore and were obscured.

And wrecks passed without sound of bells,
The calyx of death’s bounty giving back
A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
The portent wound in corridors of shells.

Then in the circuit calm of one vast coil,
Its lashings charmed and malice reconciled,
Frosted eyes there were that lifted altars;
And silent answers crept across the stars.

Compass, quadrant and sextant contrive
No farther tides ... High in the azure steeps
Monody shall not wake the mariner.
This fabulous shadow only the sea keeps.

Catullus, trans. Carl Sesar 1974

Quaenam te mala mens, miselle Rauide,
agit praecipitem in meos iambos?
quis deus tibi non bene aduocatus
uecordem parat excitare rixam?
an ut peruenias in ora uulgi?
quid uis? qualubet esse notus optas?
eris, quandoquidem meos amores
cum longa uoluisti amare poena.

Lost your mind Ravidus, you poor ass,
landing smack into one of my poems like this?
Is some god getting you into trouble
because you didn't say your prayers right?
Or are you just out to get talked about?
What do you want? To be famous, never mind how?
Okay you will, and being that it's my girl you're after,
you're going to suffer for a long, long time.

Image version (original is also right-aligned but i couldn't do that in lemmy)

The first sound was the quieting
of my fingers brushing
the first, brief shocks of hair
from your head. Still. There
when our father said
we had five seconds to cry
before he’d get angry
or cry himself. When the child psychiatrist
watched you play
with ghosts, diagnosed
seems like a perfectly happy
child to me. Am I

both or neither of us
now? My fingers through your hair
aren’t so much fingers
anymore. My touch not so much
touch. Only breeze, your dark hair
like mine, this absence
you’ll hear now and for the rest of
our lives. Half-drowned
tree in the lake shrouded
in mist. Listening, beyond
the doorway of that haunted
shore where you wake
from every dream, our mother saying,
I speak with the dead. If I can

reach and hold across this always,
these galaxies, your forehead
like a steaming cup
to my lips. If I can mouth my silent swan-
song into you, know this without
my saying it: Brother,
lend your ear. There are many
different ways to sing yourself
to sleep. Like in your head? Our father pleads.
No, she mouths. Like I’m speaking
to you now.

I'm not a big podcast listener myself, but this caught my eye

archive.is to bypass paywall

from The Paris Review

C.P. Cavafy, 1915

Ordinary people know what’s happening now,
the gods know future things
because they alone are totally enlightened.
Of what’s to come the wise perceive
things about to happen.

Sometimes during moments of intense study
their hearing’s troubled: the hidden sound
of things approaching reaches them,
and they listen reverently, while in the street outside
the people hear nothing whatsoever.

by Tracy K. Smith

3

Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,

That the others have come and gone—a momentary blip—

When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,

Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel

Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,

Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,

Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones

At whatever are their moons. They live wondering

If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,

And the great black distance they—we—flicker in.

Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,

Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on

At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns

Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want to be

One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.

Wide open, so everything floods in at once.

And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,

Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.

So that I might be sitting now beside my father

As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe

For the first time in the winter of 1959.

John Berryman, 1948

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball.
What, what is he to do? I saw it go
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
Merrily over—there it is in the water!
No use to say 'O there are other balls':
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy
As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down
All his young days into the harbour where
His ball went. I would not intrude on him,
A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now
He senses first responsibility
In a world of possessions. People will take balls,
Balls will be lost always, little boy,
And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.
He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
Knowing what every man must one day know
And most know many days, how to stand up
And gradually light returns to the street,
A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight.
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere,
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
With all that move me, under the water
Or whistling, I am not a little boy.

Philip Larkin, 1974

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Just stumbled upon this place while browsing /all and I also happen to have written some lines just yesterday, for the first time in years.
Some coïncidence.

I was inspired by a really nice photo in [email protected] shared by @lewosadebu and I wasn't even writing verses at first but it kinda became something half-way through.

Don't get too excited, the lines aren't that great but the photo is nice to look at.
Peace

David Wojnarowicz, 1976

I stood in the doorway noticing you did the same
as I’ve done while packing to vacate a room
that strange unexplained action where we’ll even pack
personal bits of refuse like scraps of paper
even the covering for some long ago candy bar
munched slowly in the quietness of an afternoon room

Langston Hughes, 1943

I was setting on the hen-house steps
When the hen begin to crow.
Setting on the hen-house steps
When the hen begin to crow.
I ain't gonna set on
Them hen-house steps no mo'!

I had a cat, I called him
Battling Tom McCann.
Had a big black cat, I called him
Battling Tom McCann.
Last night that cat riz up and
Started talking like a man.

I said to Baby,
Baby, what do you hear?
I said, Baby,
What on earth do you hear?
Baby said, I don't hear nothin'
But your drunken snorin', dear.

Ummmm-mmm-m-huh! I wish that
Domineck hen wouldn't crow!
Oh-ooo-oo-o, Lawd! Nor that
Black cat talk no mo'!
But, woman, if you don't like it,
Find someplace else to sleep and snore---
Cause I'm gonna drink my licker
Till they burn the licker store.