Poem of the Day

I read this poem last year in an anthology and I was dismayed to find that I couldn’t locate it in its entirety anywhere online. I was even more dismayed to find that Donald Hall’s Old and New Poems had been lost from the public library. For some reason I didn’t check the UT library. Anyway, I was alerted to the fact that Donald Hall is the new Library of Congress’ 14th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by Ryan. I remembered that I never got to post the lovely cheese poem so I checked and the UT library did indeed have the book. So here you go. It’s best if read out loud enthusiastically! Enjoy!

O Cheese
By Donald Hall

In the pantry the dear dense cheeses, Cheddars and harsh
Lancashires; Gorgonzola with its magnanimous manner;
the clipped speech of Roquefort; and a head of Stilton
that speaks in a sensuous riddling tongue like Druids.

O cheeses of gravity, cheeses of wistfulness, cheeses
that weep continually because they know they will die.
O cheeses of victory, cheeses wise in defeat, cheeses
fat as a cushion, lolling in bed until noon.

Liederkranz ebullient, jumping like a small dog, noisy;
Pont l’Evêque intellectual, and quite well informed; Emmentaler
decent and loyal, a little deaf in the right ear;
and Brie the revealing experience, instantaneous and profound.

O cheeses that dance in the moonlight, cheeses
that mingle with sausages, cheeses of Stonehenge.
O cheeses that are shy, that linger in the doorway,
eyes looking down, cheeses spectacular as fireworks.

Reblochon openly sexual; Caerphilly like pine trees, small
at the timberline; Port du Salut in love; Caprice des Dieux
eloquent, tactful, like a thousand-year-old hostess;
and Dolcelatte, always generous to a fault.

O village of cheeses, I make you this poem of cheeses,
O family of cheeses, living together in pantries,
O cheeses that keep to your own nature, like a lucky couple,
this solitude, this energy, these bodies slowly dying.

I’m reading The World According to Garp by John Irving (and quite enjoying it). This poem was quoted therein.

The Plot Against the Giant
By Wallace Stevens

FIRST GIRL
When this yokel comes maundering,
Whetting his hacker,
I shall run before him,
Diffusing the civilest odors
Out of geraniums and unsmelled flowers.
It will check him.

SECOND GIRL
I shall run before him,
Arching cloths besprinkled with colors
As small as fish-eggs.
The threads
Will abash him.

THIRD GIRL
Oh, la…le pauvre!
I shall run before him,
With a curious puffing.
He will bend his ear then.
I shall whisper
Heavenly labials in a world of gutturals.
It will undo him.

I leafed through Rita Dove’s Selected Poems and this one jumped out at me. I love the images she creates.

Pearls
By Rita Dove

You have broken the path of the dragonfly
who visits my patio at the hour when
the sky has nearly forgotten the sun.
You have come to tell me
how happy we are, but I know
what you would and would not do
to make us happy. For example this necklace
before me: white eyes,
a noose of guileless tears.

My file of poems is getting perilously low, but I found this one on americanpoems.com and I really like it!

if you like my poems let them
By e e cummings

if you like my poems let them
walk in the evening,a little behind you

then people will say
“Along this road i saw a princess pass
on her way to meet her lover(it was
toward nightfall)with tall and ignorant servants.”

Here’s another one from Good Poems.

A Ritual to Read to Each Other
By William Stafford

If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes, no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

Here’s another one from Adrienne Jones. This is from Written in Stone.

The Voice in the Mirror
By Adrienne Jones

I belong to a secret corps of women
with passwords known only to those
in their forties and beyond.
So this is how it is.
We didn’t know!
We didn’t know!

My journey
took me far beyond my native country,
or any I had traveled.
Desire was Paradise at eye level
but the landscape was rocky
and cut my feet up to the heart.

Through its center ran a river.
My battered guidebook said,
“Don’t drink the water;”
but I was so thirsty I drank.
It sickened me for the better part
of a year.

When I strengthened
I set about my escape.

My fragile map said
I could not return the same way.
So I set off through the desert
on wounded feet
and made my way to the woods
where I walked in shadows
along deer trails.

Many times I looked back to Desire,
hearing the river calling,
but I caught dew in laurel leaves
and drank of that.

When I returned to my house
I looked for my face in the mirror
and knew for sure
I’d been lost.
What came back in my place
was an older woman
I hardly knew
who had walked the desert
and trailed the forest deer.

Every day the river called me.

I put my house in order and
after a few seasons it began to feel
like home.
I looked out from my upper window
and scanned the horizon with wondering eyes.
I watched the changing of my hands
and felt the heat begin to steal
into my bed at night,
soaking one shirt
and eyeing another.
I found old Notions scattered about
and discarded them.
The woman in the mirror became
familiar
and friendly, and one day she smiled back at me
and I smiled back and said,
nice haircut,
and she said gently,
do you still want to go back?
I said, I know I can’t go back,
and I don’t want to go back,
but oh, I own the bright beauty of Desire
and the pain which is its shadow.

And she said, yes, you’ve found the secret;
you own it,
it does not own you.

When she finished speaking
I saw my lips had moved.

I finished The Flanders Panel this morning. This poem was quoted therein. I can’t seem to find the poem in its entirety online, but this is part II.

Chess
By Jorge Luis Borges

II

Faint-hearted king, sly bishop, ruthless queen,
Straightforward castle, and deceitful pawn—
Over the checkered black and white terrain
They seek out and begin their armed campaign.

They do not know it is the player’s hand
That dominates and guides their destiny.
They do not know an adamantine fate
Controls their will and lays the battle plan.

The player too is captive of caprice
(The words are Omar’s) on another ground
Where black nights alternate with whiter days.

God moves the players, he in turn the piece.
But what god beyond God begins the round
Of dust and time and sleep and agonies?

I’m reading The Flanders Panel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte and it’s about the murder of a knight 500 years ago. Then I came across this poem, so I had to post it.

Fast rode the knight
By Stephen Crane

Fast rode the knight
With spurs, hot and reeking,
Ever waving an eager sword,
“To save my lady!”
Fast rode the knight,
And leaped from saddle to war.
Men of steel flickered and gleamed
Like riot of silver lights,
And the gold of the knight’s good banner
Still waved on a castle wall.
.    .    .    .    .    .
A horse,
Blowing, staggering, bloody thing,
Forgotten at foot of castle wall.
A horse
Dead at foot of castle wall.

Poor Shelley… drowned at the age of 29!

Time
By Percy Bysshe Shelley

Unfathomable Sea! whose waves are years,
Ocean of Time, whose waters of deep woe
Are brackish with the salt of human tears!
Thou shoreless flood, which in thy ebb and flow
Claspest the limits of mortality,
And sick of prey, yet howling on for more,
Vomitest thy wrecks on its inhospitable shore;
Treacherous in calm, and terrible in storm,
Who shall put forth on thee,
Unfathomable Sea?

I love the uncertainty in this poem.

I live my life in growing orbits
By Rainer Maria Rilke

I live my life in growing orbits
which move out over the things of the world.
Perhaps I can never achieve the last,
but that will be my attempt.

I am circling around God, around the ancient tower,
and I have been circling for a thousand years,
and I still don’t know if I am a falcon, or a storm,
or a great song.

Time for another ESVM!

Lines Written in Recapitulation
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

I could not bring this splendid world nor any trading beast
In charge of it, to defer, no, not to give ear, not in the least
Appearance, to my handsome prophecies,
which here I ponder and put by.

I am left simpler, less encumbered, by the consciousness
that I shall by no pebble in my dirty sling avail
To slay one purple giant four feet high and distribute arms
among his tall attendants, who spit at his name
when spitting on the ground:
They will be found one day Prone where they fell, or dead sitting
—and pock-marked wall
Supporting the beautiful back straight as an oak
before it is old.

I have learned to fail. And I have had my say.
Yet shall I sing until my voice crack
(this being my leisure, this my holiday)
That man was a special thing, and no commodity,
a thing improper to be sold.

Today’s poem is thanks to the lovely Jennifer. She e-mailed me with a memory of a poem she read in high school, but couldn’t remember the poet or the exact words. I did a little Nancy Drew work with her clues and this is what I found.

Sudden Light
By Dante Gabriel Rossetti

   I have been here before,
      But when or how I cannot tell:
   I know the grass beyond the door,
      The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

   You have been mine before,—
      How long ago I may not know:
   But just when at that swallow’s soar
      Your neck turned so,
Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore.

   Has this been thus before?
      And shall not thus time’s eddying flight
   Still with our lives our love restore
      In death’s despite,
And day and night yield one delight once more?

I’m now reading The Seville Communion by Arturo Pérez-Reverte and he quoted D.H. Lawrence. I haven’t posted a poem from him in a while so I was glad for the reminder.

Song of a Man Who Has Come Through
By D.H. Lawrence

Not I, not I, but the wind that blows through me!
A fine wind is blowing the new direction of Time.
If only I let it bear me, carry me, if only it carry me!
If only I am sensitive, subtle, oh, delicate, a winged gift!
If only, most lovely of all, I yield myself and am borrowed
By the fine, fine wind that takes its course though the chaos of the world
Like a fine, an exquisite chisel, a wedge-blade inserted;
If only I am keen and hard like the sheer tip of a wedge
Driven by invisible blows,
The rock will split, we shall come at the wonder, we shall find the Hesperides.

Oh, for the wonder that bubbles into my soul,
I would be a good fountain, a good well-head,
Would blur no whisper, spoil no expression.

What is the knocking?
What is the knocking at the door in the night?
It is somebody wants to do us harm.

No, no, it is the three strange angels.
Admit them, admit them.

I just read this poem over at Ted Kooser’s site and it gave me chills so I had to share it right away.

Grandmother Speaks of the Old Country
By Lola Haskins

That year there were many deaths in the village.
Germs flew like angels from one house to the next
and every family gave up its own. Mothers
died at their mending. Children fell at school.
Of three hundred twenty, there were eleven left.
Then, quietly, the sun set on a day when no one
died. And the angels whispered among themselves.
And that evening, as he sat on the stone steps,
your grandfather felt a small wind on his neck
when all the trees were still. And he would tell us
always, how he had felt that night, on the skin
of his own neck, the angels, passing.

How about another by Adrienne Rich. This is most depressing, but very powerful.

Why Else But To Forestall This Hour
By Adrienne Rich

Why else but to forestall this hour, I stayed
Out of the noonday sun, kept from the rain,
Swam only in familiar depths, and played
No hand where caution signaled to refrain?

For fourteen friends I walked behind the bier;
A score of cousins wilted in my sight.
I heard the steeples clang for each new year,
Then drew my shutters close against the night.

Bankruptcy fell on others like a dew;
Spendthrifts of life, they all succumbed and fled.
I did not chide them with the things I knew:
Smiling, I passed the almshouse of the dead.

I am the man who has outmisered death,
In pains and cunning laid my seasons by.
Now I must toil to win each hour and breath;
I am too full of years to reason why.

I’m reading Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s The Fencing Master and one of the characters quoted a line from Byron’s The Deformed Transformed, so I thought I’d post a poem of Byron’s.

So, we’ll go no more a-roving
By George Gordon, Lord Byron

So, we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no more a-roving
By the light of the moon.

For some reason it sounds windy outside from where I’m sitting (at my desk in my bedroom). When I look outside it doesn’t seem windy. Regardless, I thought I’d post this poem today.

The Bare Arms of Trees
By John Tagliabue

Sometimes when I see the bare arms of trees in the evening
I think of men who have died without love,
Of desolation and space between branch and branch,
I think of immovable whiteness and lean coldness and fear
And the terrible longing between people stretched apart as these
     branches
And the cold space between.
I think of the vastness and the courage between this step and that step
Of the yearning and the fear of the meeting, of the terrible desire
     held apart.
I think of the ocean of longing that moves between land and land
And between people, the space and ocean.
The bare arms of the trees are immovable, without the play of
     leaves, without the sound of wind;
I think of the unseen love and the unknown thoughts that exist
     between tree and tree,
As I pass these things in the evening, as I walk.

I’m currently reading Lolita so I thought I’d post a poem of Nabokov’s. (It was slightly difficult to find one online, though.)

On Discovering a Butterfly
By Vladimir Nabokov

I found it and I named it, being versed
in taxonomic Latin; thus became
godfather to an insect and its first
describer—and I want no other fame.

Wide open on its pin (though fast asleep),
and safe from creeping relatives and rust,
in the secluded stronghold where we keep
type specimens it will transcend its dust.

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.

Here’s another from Good Poems. I like this one because I can just picture the little girl and her father in the kitchen.

Egg
By C.G. Hanzlicek

I’m scrambling an egg for my daughter.
“Why are you always whistling?” she asks.
“Because I’m happy.”
And it’s true,
Though it stuns me to say it aloud;
There was a time when I wouldn’t
Have seen it as my future.
It’s partly a matter
Of who is there to eat the egg:
The self fallen out of love with itself
Through the tedium of familiarity,
Or this little self,
So curious, so hungry,
Who emerged from the woman I love,
A woman who loves me in a way
I’ve come to think I deserve,
Now that it arrives from outside me.
Everything changes, we’re told,
And now the changes are everywhere:
The house with its morning light
That fills me like a revelation,
The yard with its trees
That cast a bit more shade each summer,
The love of a woman
That both is and isn’t confounding,
And the love
Of this clamor of questions at my waist.
Clamor of questions,
You clamor of answers,
Here’s your egg.

Like a good Austinite, I was excited when I came across this poem in Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems.

Bats
By Randall Jarrell

A bat is born
Naked and blind and pale
His mother makes a pocket of her tail
And catches him. He clings
to her long fur
By his thumbs and toes and teeth.
And then the mother dances through the night
Doubling and looping,
Soaring, somersaulting-
Her baby hangs on
underneath.
All night, in happiness,
She hunts and flies.
Her high sharp cries
Like shining needlepoints of sound
Go out into the night and
echoing back,
Tell her what they have touched.
She hears how far it is,
how big it is,
which way it’s going:
She lives by hearing.
The mother eats the moths and gnats
she catches
In full flight, In full flight.
The mother drinks the water of the pond,
She skims across,
Her baby hangs on tight.
Her baby drinks the milk she makes him.
In moonlight or starlight,
In midair
Their single shadow,
printed on the moon
Or fluttering across the stars,
Whirls on all night.
At daybreak,
the tired mother flaps home to her rafter
The others all are there.
They hang themselves up by their toes,
They wrap themselves in their brown wings.
Bunched upside down, they sleep in air.
Their sharp ears,
Their sharp teeth
Their quick sharp faces
Are dull and slow and mild.
All the bright day, as the mother sleeps,
She folds her wings about her sleeping child.

I haven’t posted one from Emily Dickinson in a while and this was in Garrison Keillor’s Good Poems. Enjoy!

We grow accustomed to the Dark—
By Emily Dickinson

We grow accustomed to the Dark—
When light is put away—
As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp
To witness her Goodbye—

A Moment—We uncertain step
For newness of the night—
Then—fit our Vision to the Dark—
And meet the Road—erect—

And so of larger—Darkness—
Those Evenings of the Brain—
When not a Moon disclose a sign—
Or Star—come out—within—

The Bravest—grope a little—
And sometimes hit a Tree
Directly in the Forehead—
But as they learn to see—

Either the Darkness alters—
Or something in the sight
Adjusts itself to Midnight—
And Life steps almost straight.

Here’s another one from Mary Oliver. It’s amazing, of course.

When Death Comes
By Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.Here’s another one from Mary Oliver. It’s amazing, of course.

When Death Comes
By Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

I’m reading The Nautical Chart so I thought I’d post a nautical-themed poem.

Sea Fever
By John Masefield

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

I finished Purity of Blood yesterday. This is the frontspiece. I couldn’t find anything about it online so I’m not sure if it’s a poem or if this is the text in its entirety.

Castilla
By Tomás Borrás

Glory and honor blazoned on the quarters
of the escutcheon, hidalgos, poets, priests,
fabulous Americas, ladies-in-waiting.

galleys that apprehend the infidel,
gibbets by the roadside, adventures,
and swords flashing on every corner.

I’m snagging another poem from Ted Kooser’s website. I like the poem, but my favorite aspect of this is Kooser’s comment: “It’s an endless struggle, and in the end, of course, the bindweed wins.” This for my mother and all the other gardeners out there.

Bindweed
By James McKean

There is little I can do
besides stoop to pluck them
one by one from the ground,
their roots all weak links,
this hoard of Lazaruses popping up
at night, not the Heavenly Blue
so like silk handkerchiefs,
nor the Giant White so timid
in the face of the moon,
but poor relations who visit
then stay. They sleep in my garden.
Each morning I evict them.
Each night more arrive, their leaves
small, green shrouds,
reminding me the mother root
waits deep underground
and I dig but will never find her
and her children will inherit
all that I’ve cleared
when she holds me tighter
and tighter in her arms.

Here’s one brought to my attention by Heather.

As It Was Written
By Anne Sexton

Earth, earth,
riding your merry-go-round
toward extinction,
right to the roots,
thickening the oceans like gravy,
festering in your caves,
you are becoming a latrine.
Your trees are twisted chairs.
Your flowers moan at their mirrors,
and cry for a sun that doesn’t wear a mask.

Your clouds wear white,
trying to become nuns
and say novenas to the sky.
The sky is yellow with its jaundice,
and its veins spill into the rivers
where the fish kneel down
to swallow hair and goat’s eyes.

All in all, I’d say,
the world is strangling.
And I, in my bed each night,
listen to my twenty shoes
converse about it.
And the moon,
under its dark hood,
falls out of the sky each night,
with its hungry red mouth
to suck at my scars.

I’m about to start reading Purity of Blood, the second book about Captain Alatriste by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. Since Francisco de Quevedo appears in both books, I thought I’d post a poem by him. I got the translation here and the original Spanish is here.

Death-Warnings
By Francisco de Quevedo

I saw the ramparts of my native land
   One time so strong, now dropping decay,
   Their strength destroyed by this new age’s way
That has worn out and rotted what was grand.
I went into the fields; there I could see
   The sun drink up the waters new thawed;
   And on the hills the moaning cattle pawed,
Their miseries robbed the light of day for me.

I went into my house; I saw how spotted,
   Decaying things made that old home their prize;
   My withered walking-staff had come to bend.
I felt the age had won; my sword was rotted;
   And there was nothing on which to set my eyes
   That was not a reminder of the end.

Today’s poem is for my mother, a fellow tea-lover.

The Tray
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Even on a sorrowing day
the little white cups without handles
would appear
filled with steaming hot tea
in a circle on the tray,
and whatever we were able
to say or not say,
the tray would be passed,
we would sip
in silence,
it was another way
lips could be speaking together,
opening on the hot rim,
swallowing in unison.

My aunt Paula sent me this poem, so I thought I’d share.

Loafing
By Raymond Carver

I looked into the room a moment ago,
and this is what I saw—
my chair in its place by the window,
the book turned facedown on the table.
And on the sill, the cigarette
left burning in its ashtray.
Malingerer! my uncle yelled at me
so long ago. He was right.
I’ve set aside time today,
same as every day,
for doing nothing at all.