Poem of the Day

I keep falling asleep while trying to read The Tempest and then I can barely drag myself upstairs to bed, but I remember I haven’t posted a poem yet. You’d think I could plan a little better, but here I am again. This is the last poem in my file. It was suggested by a reader some time ago.

Rat Song
By Margaret Atwood

When you hear me singing
you get the rifle down
and the flashlight, aiming for my brain,
but you always miss

and when you set out the poison
I piss on it
to warn the others.

You think: That one’s too clever,
she’s dangerous, because
I don’t stick around to be slaughtered
and you think I’m ugly too
despite my fur and pretty teeth
and my six nipples and snake tail.
All I want is love, you stupid
humanist. See if you can.

Right, I’m a parasite, I live off your
leavings, gristle and rancid fat,
I take without asking
and make nests in your cupboards
out of your suits and underwear.
You’d do the same if you could,

if you could afford to share
my crystal hatreds.
It’s your throat I want, my mate
trapped in your throat.
Though you try to drown him
with your greasy person voice,
he is hiding / between your syllables
I can hear him singing.

I copied this text from poets.org.

The Woman at the Washington Zoo
By Randall Jarrell

The saris go by me from the embassies.

Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet.
They look back at the leopard like the leopard.

And I. . . .
            this print of mine, that has kept its color
Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null
Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so
To my bed, so to my grave, with no
Complaints, no comment: neither from my chief,
The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief—
Only I complain. . . . this serviceable
Body that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses
But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns,
Wavy beneath fountains—small, far-off, shining
In the eyes of animals, these beings trapped
As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap,
Aging, but without knowledge of their age,
Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death—
Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!

The world goes by my cage and never sees me.
And there come not to me, as come to these,
The wild beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas’ grain,
Pigeons settling on the bears’ bread, buzzards
Tearing the meat the flies have clouded. . . .
                                                    Vulture,
When you come for the white rat that the foxes left,
Take off the red helmet of your head, the black
Wings that have shadowed me, and step to me as man:
The wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn,
To whose hand of power the great lioness
Stalks, purring. . . .
                       You know what I was,
You see what I am: change me, change me!

I found this one at Sonnet Central.

And the Stars
By Robinson Jeffers

Perhaps you did not know how bright last night,
Especially above your seaside door,
Was all the marvelous starlit sky, and wore
White harmonies of very shining light.
Perhaps you did not want to seek the sight
Of that remembered rapture any more.—
But then at least you must have heard the shore
Roar with reverberant voices thro’ the night.

Those stars were lit with longing of my own,
And the ocean’s moan was full of my own pain.
Yet doubtless it was well for both of us
You did not come, but left me there alone.
I hardly ought to see you much again;
And stars, we know, are often dangerous.

My mother is a crossword puzzle fiend, and I go through phases myself (curtailed now that I don’t get the paper). This poem (from American Life in Poetry) just about knocked me out of my chair.

Blank
By George Bilgere

When I came to my mother’s house
the day after she had died
it was already a museum of her
unfinished gestures. The mysteries
from the public library, due
in two weeks. The half-eaten square
of lasagna in the fridge.

The half-burned wreckage
of her last cigarette,
and one red swallow
of wine in a lipsticked
glass beside her chair.

Finally, a blue Bic
on a couple of downs
and acrosses left blank
in the Sunday crossword,
which actually had the audacity
to look a little smug
at having, for once, won.

For some reason I can’t keep my eyes open tonight. I’m calling on a suggestion from my poetry pal to avoid tanking on the PotD. This is from the collection Lucifer at the Starlight.

You with the Crack Running Through You
By Kim Addonizio

I can seep in, I can dry clear.

And yes it would still be there.
And no I couldn’t hold you forever.

But isn’t it drafty at night,

alone in that canyon
with the wind of the mind

dragging its debris—

I wanted to put
my mouth on you

and draw out whatever toxin …

—but I understand. There are limits
to love. Here is a flower

that needs no water.
It can grow anywhere,

nourished on nothing.
And yes.

Today is Australia Day, so I thought I’d share this poem that I found here.

The Vagabond
By Henry Lawson

White handkerchiefs wave from the short black pier
As we glide to the grand old sea–
But the song of my heart is for none to hear
If one of them waves for me.
A roving, roaming life is mine,
Ever by field or flood–
For not far back in my father’s line
Was a dash of the Gipsy blood.

Flax and tussock and fern,
Gum and mulga and sand,
Reef and palm—but my fancies turn
Ever away from land;
Strange wild cities in ancient state,
Range and river and tree,
Snow and ice. But my star of fate
Is ever across the sea.

A god-like ride on a thundering sea,
When all but the stars are blind—
A desperate race from Eternity
With a gale-and-a-half behind.
A jovial spree in the cabin at night,
A song on the rolling deck,
A lark ashore with the ships in sight,
Till—a wreck goes down with a wreck.

A smoke and a yarn on the deck by day,
When life is a waking dream,
And care and trouble so far away
That out of your life they seem.
A roving spirit in sympathy,
Who has travelled the whole world o’er—
My heart forgets, in a week at sea,
The trouble of years on shore.

A rolling stone!—’tis a saw for slaves—
Philosophy false as old—
Wear out or break ‘neath the feet of knaves,
Or rot in your bed of mould!
But I’D rather trust to the darkest skies
And the wildest seas that roar,
Or die, where the stars of Nations rise,
In the stormy clouds of war.

Cleave to your country, home, and friends,
Die in a sordid strife—
You can count your friends on your finger ends
In the critical hours of life.
Sacrifice all for the family’s sake,
Bow to their selfish rule!
Slave till your big soft heart they break—
The heart of the family fool.

Domestic quarrels, and family spite,
And your Native Land may be
Controlled by custom, but, come what might,
The rest of the world for me.
I’d sail with money, or sail without!—
If your love be forced from home,
And you dare enough, and your heart be stout,
The world is your own to roam.

I’ve never a love that can sting my pride,
Nor a friend to prove untrue;
For I leave my love ere the turning tide,
And my friends are all too new.
The curse of the Powers on a peace like ours,
With its greed and its treachery—
A stranger’s hand, and a stranger land,
And the rest of the world for me!

But why be bitter? The world is cold
To one with a frozen heart;
New friends are often so like the old,
They seem of the past a part—
As a better part of the past appears,
When enemies, parted long,
Are come together in kinder years,
With their better nature strong.

I had a friend, ere my first ship sailed,
A friend that I never deserved—
For the selfish strain in my blood prevailed
As soon as my turn was served.
And the memory haunts my heart with shame—
Or, rather, the pride that’s there;
In different guises, but soul the same,
I meet him everywhere.

I had a chum. When the times were tight
We starved in Australian scrubs;
We froze together in parks at night,
And laughed together in pubs.
And I often hear a laugh like his
From a sense of humour keen,
And catch a glimpse in a passing phiz
Of his broad, good-humoured grin.

And I had a love—’twas a love to prize—
But I never went back again…
I have seen the light of her kind brown eyes
In many a face since then.

* * * * *

The sailors say ’twill be rough to-night,
As they fasten the hatches down,
The south is black, and the bar is white,
And the drifting smoke is brown.
The gold has gone from the western haze,
The sea-birds circle and swarm—
But we shall have plenty of sunny days,
And little enough of storm.

The hill is hiding the short black pier,
As the last white signal’s seen;
The points run in, and the houses veer,
And the great bluff stands between.
So darkness swallows each far white speck
On many a wharf and quay.
The night comes down on a restless deck,—
Grim cliffs—and—The Open Sea!

It’s always time for more ESVM!

When you are dead, and your disturbing eyes
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

When you are dead, and your disturbing eyes
No more as now their stormy lashes lift
To lance me through—as in the morning skies
One moment, plainly visible in a rift
Of cloud, two splendid planets may appear
And purely blaze, and are at once withdrawn,
What time the watcher in desire and fear
Leans from his chilly window in the dawn—
Shall I be free, shall I be once again
As others are, and count your loss no care?
Oh, never more, till my dissolving brain
Be powerless to evoke you out of air,
Remembered morning stars, more fiercely bright
Than all the Alphas of the actual night!

Autumn was a distant memory this morning when I had to go shovel snow at -5F without the windchill. This one jumped out at me because of the title. I don’t think it’s made me any warmer, but I like the various images.

The Heat of Autumn
By Jane Hirshfield

The heat of autumn
is different from the heat of summer.
One ripens apples, the other turns them to cider.
One is a dock you walk out on,
the other the spine of a thin swimming horse
and the river each day a full measure colder.
A man with cancer leaves his wife for his lover.
Before he goes she straightens his belts in the closet,
rearranges the socks and sweaters inside the dresser
by color. That’s autumn heat:
her hand placing silver buckles with silver,
gold buckles with gold, setting each
on the hook it belongs on in a closet soon to be empty,
and calling it pleasure.

In addition to discussing Overtime by Joseph Millar at my poetry discussion group, we had each chosen a poem to share for our December meeting, which was canceled. So we did them yesterday. Mine was Eating Poetry by Mark Strand, which is probably one of my favorite poems of all time. A group member suggested I check out one by Billy Collins that I also might like. I liked it so much that I’m breaking my arbitrary three-week rule to post it today.

Introduction to Poetry
By Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

My poetry discussion group met today and our book for the month was Overtime by Joseph Millar. I especially liked the poems about historic personages, like this one about Sitting Bull.

Sitting Bull in Canada
By Joseph Millar

It’s three years since Little Bighorn,
          the Month of Blackening Cherries;
Crazy Horse has been murdered
and civilization keeps rinsing its glittering face in the dawn,
          perfecting the treaties and blueprints,
while the railroad pushes its stained fangs
                              west through the rivers of grass.

By now, from under the whispering skirts
          of the pale women who bore them,
Hawthorne and Poe have come forth, haunted.
Whitman leans over a Long Island bridge
          trying to keep his shadow from frightening the fish,
and across the Atlantic,
Swinburne is paying London whores to dress up like police
                              and whip his bare flanks with a strap.

Sitting Bull listens to the ravens
          folding their wings in the pines,
his village of women and old people turning over in its sleep.
There’s no place left, he thinks,
          watching the charred thorns of autumn fly upward,
a thick-bodied man leaning back in his lodge,
                              its skin walls sighing in the wind.
There’s no word for “art” in his language,
          though he’ll pose on the stages of Cody’s Wild West show,
the bonnet of carnival feathers flowing back
                              in the copper daguerreotypes.

Maybe he wonders if anything around him
          means what he thought:
                              evening, his horses, the buffalo;
and prays for a great storm to tear it all down.
Maybe the blind flowers of Sade and Baudelaire
          open their rank petals over him as he dozes,
too tired to look out at the stars,
          lying on his left side,
                              facing away from the fire.

This poem is glorious!

A New Poet
By Linda Pastan

Finding a new poet
is like finding a new wildflower
out in the woods. You don’t see

its name in the flower books, and
nobody you tell believes
in its odd color or the way

its leaves grow in splayed rows
down the whole length of the page. In fact
the very page smells of spilled

red wine and the mustiness of the sea
on a foggy day — the odor of truth
and of lying.

And the words are so familiar,
so strangely new, words
you almost wrote yourself, if only

in your dreams there had been a pencil
or a pen or even a paintbrush,
if only there had been a flower.

I found this one at American Life in Poetry.

Tomato Pies, 25 Cents
By Grace Cavalieri

Tomato pies are what we called them, those days,
before Pizza came in,
at my Grandmother’s restaurant,
in Trenton New Jersey.
My grandfather is rolling meatballs
in the back. He studied to be a priest in Sicily but
saved his sister Maggie from marrying a bad guy
by coming to America.
Uncle Joey is rolling dough and spooning sauce.
Uncle Joey, is always scrubbed clean,
sobered up, in a white starched shirt, after
cops delivered him home just hours before.
The waitresses are helping
themselves to handfuls of cash out of the drawer,
playing the numbers with Moon Mullin
and Shad, sent in from Broad Street. 1942,
tomato pies with cheese, 25 cents.
With anchovies, large, 50 cents.
A whole dinner is 60 cents (before 6 pm).
How the soldiers, bussed in from Fort Dix,
would stand outside all the way down Warren Street,
waiting for this new taste treat,
young guys in uniform,
lined up and laughing, learning Italian,
before being shipped out to fight the last great war.

How did I randomly come across this one today? I generally operate under the belief that my sweet Penny will live forever, but I was a bit sniffly over the weekend because she was starting to show her age (10.5 years) with reduced mobility. Luckily, she’s been doing a bit better the last couple days.

The Blue Bowl
By Jane Kenyon

Like primitives we buried the cat
with his bowl. Bare-handed
we scraped sand and gravel
back into the hole.
                           They fell with a hiss
and thud on his side,
on his long red fur, the white feathers
between his toes, and his
long, not to say aquiline, nose.

We stood and brushed each other off.
There are sorrows keener than these.

Silent the rest of the day, we worked,
ate, stared, and slept. It stormed
all night; now it clears, and a robin
burbles from a dripping bush
like the neighbor who means well
but always says the wrong thing.

There is quite a lot of old snow around my house, and I’ve also seen numerous pieces of newspaper and ad circulars…

A Patch of Old Snow
By Robert Frost

There’s a patch of old snow in a corner
That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain
Had brought to rest.

It is speckled with grime as if
Small print overspread it,
The news of a day I’ve forgotten—
If I ever read it.

I found this one here. I love the first two lines, mainly because craw is a great word.

Grace
By Maxine Kumin

Hens have their gravel; gravel sticks
The way it should stick, in the craw.
And stone on stone is tooth
For grinding raw.

And grinding raw, I learn from this
To fill my crop the way I should.
I put down pudding stone
And find it good.

I find it good to line my gut
With tidy octagons of grit.
No loophole and no chink
Make vents in it.

And in it vents no slime or sludge;
No losses sluice, no terrors slough.
God, give me appetite
for stone enough.

I discovered this one at The Poetry Foundation.

The Darkling Thrush
By Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate
   When Frost was spectre-grey,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
   The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
   Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
   Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be
   The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
   The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
   Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
   Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among
   The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
   Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
   In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
   Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
   Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
   Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
   His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
   And I was unaware.

This is really quite wonderful.

Celestial Music
By Louise Glück

I have a friend who still believes in heaven.
Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to God.
She thinks someone listens in heaven.
On earth she’s unusually competent.
Brave too, able to face unpleasantness.

We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.
I’m always moved by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality
But timid also, quick to shut my eyes.
Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out
According to nature. For my sake she intervened
Brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down
Across the road.

My friend says I shut my eyes to God, that nothing else explains
My aversion to reality. She says I’m like the child who
Buries her head in the pillow
So as not to see, the child who tells herself
That light causes sadness—
My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me
To wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person—

In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We’re walking
On the same road, except it’s winter now;
She’s telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:
Look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.
Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees
Like brides leaping to a great height—
Then I’m afraid for her; I see her
Caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth—

In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;
From time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.
It’s this moment we’re trying to explain, the fact
That we’re at ease with death, with solitude.
My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn’t move.
She’s always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image
Capable of life apart from her.
We’re very quiet. It’s peaceful sitting here, not speaking, The composition
Fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air
Going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering—
It’s this stillness we both love.
The love of form is a love of endings.

I snagged this from Sonnet Central.

The Music
By Emmeline Stuart-Wortley

There is a music in my mind tonight
A visitation of sweet thoughts, and rare!
I know not whence, but feel them springing there,
Aëry and delicate, as wind or light.
That music in my mind of magic might,
This light cast down, on every thought, so fair,
This stirring sweetness, like to moving air,
Can this be love?—the immortal and the bright!

It is surely love! for nought beside can be
So strange and yet so sweet, so soft yet strong.
It is love, the crown of all, crowned mystery!
My thoughts are gathering to a starry throng,
And scattering forth their brightness far and free;
Yet love, that sun, shines dazzling these among!

I was doing pretty well selecting a poem every day, but our recent snow and the audiobook I just got sucked into are reducing the time I want/can spend on my computer. This is one of the last few in my file.

At a Window
By Carl Sandburg

Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.

Whew! A full day at work sandwiched between snowblowing/shoveling. I’m pooped! Thank heavens my poetry pal has sent me quite a few poems. P.S. I adore my dog.

This was first published in the Summer 2009 issue of The Georgia Review.

My Dog Has No Nose
By Todd Boss

for beauty. She
knows not where it

nests, nor how it
flushes and goes,
nor how best

to close it
in her mouth’s
soft wallet, nor

whether, if she
brought it and
laid it at the feet

of her lord, he’d
mete out any but
the usual reward.

This one was suggested by a reader.

The Deaths of the Other Children
By Margaret Atwood

The body dies

little by little

the body buries itself

joins itself
to the loosened mind, to the black-
berries and thistles, running in a
thorny wind
over the shallow
foundations of our former houses,
dim hollows now in the sandy soil

Did I spend all those years
building up this edifice
my composite
self, this crumbling hovel?

My arms, my eyes, my grieving
words, my disintegrated children

Everywhere I walk, along
the overgrowing paths, my skirt
tugged at by the spreading briers

they catch at my heels with their fingers

My poetry pal just sent me this and it’s so awesome that I’m posting it right away.

I Go Back to the House for a Book
By Billy Collins

I turn around on the gravel
and go back to the house for a book,
something to read at the doctor’s office,
and while I am inside, running the finger
of inquisition along a shelf,
another me that did not bother
to go back to the house for a book
heads out on his own,
rolls down the driveway,
and swings left toward town,
a ghost in his ghost car,
another knot in the string of time,
a good three minutes ahead of me—
a spacing that will now continue
for the rest of my life.
Sometimes I think I see him
a few people in front of me on a line
or getting up from a table
to leave the restaurant just before I do,
slipping into his coat on the way out the door.
But there is no catching him,
no way to slow him down
and put us back in synch,
unless one day he decides to go back
to the house for something,
but I cannot imagine
for the life of me what that might be.
He is out there always before me,
blazing my trail, invisible scout,
hound that pulls me along,
shade I am doomed to follow,
my perfect double,
only bumped an inch into the future,
and not nearly as well-versed as I
in the love poems of Ovid—
I who went back to the house
that fateful winter morning and got the book.

At book club today, some of my compatriots (who are also in a poetry discussion group with me) mentioned Charles Simic. Since he’s awesome, I went and found another of his poems to post.

Prodigy
By Charles Simic

I grew up bent over
a chessboard.

I loved the word endgame.

All my cousins looked worried.

It was a small house
near a Roman graveyard.
Planes and tanks
shook its windowpanes.

A retired professor of astronomy
taught me how to play.

That must have been in 1944.

In the set we were using,
the paint had almost chipped off
the black pieces.

The white King was missing
and had to be substituted for.

I’m told but do not believe
that that summer I witnessed
men hung from telephone poles.

I remember my mother
blindfolding me a lot.
She had a way of tucking my head
suddenly under her overcoat.

In chess, too, the professor told me,
the masters play blindfolded,
the great ones on several boards
at the same time.

Feeling a little lazy today… Thank goodness for my poetry pal!

Discrepancies
By Stephen Dunn

It has something to do with ugliness,
even more, perhaps, with aggression,
but horseflies inspire no affection,
even though they’re superb pilots.

Maybe because they were once squirmy,
furry things, butterflies seem content
with their sudden beauty, no interest
in getting anywhere fast.

The small brown bird outside my window
has a lilt and a tune. Elsewhere, a baby
is screeching. Watch out, little ones,
there are hawks, there are sleep-deprived

parents, utterly beside themselves.
When I was a child I claimed a grasshopper
hopped over a rock like a rockhopper.
“He likes to play with language,” my mother

told her friends. “He’s so smart.”
She used to hide money in a coffee can,
place it behind the wooden matches
in the cupboard. I swear I never stole it.

She was beautiful, as was our neighbor
with the red jewel on her forehead.
That there’s so little justice in the world—
one of them believed, the other experienced.

To ants a sparrow might as well be
a pterodactyl, and a parrot just one more
bright enormity to ignore
as they go about their business. I’ve tried

to become someone else for a while,
only to discover that he, too, was me.
I think I must learn to scrunch down
to the size of the smallest thing.

At present I’m listening to an audio recording of Middlemarch by George Eliot. Each chapter has an epigraph, and Wordsworth has been mentioned on more than one occasion.

Star-Gazers
By William Wordsworth

What crowd is this? what have we here! we must not pass it by;
A Telescope upon its frame, and pointed to the sky:
Long is it as a barber’s pole, or mast of little boat,
Some little pleasure-skiff, that doth on Thames’s waters float.

The Showman chooses well his place, ’tis Leicester’s busy Square;
And is as happy in his night, for the heavens are blue and fair;
Calm, though impatient, is the crowd; each stands ready with the fee,
And envies him that’s looking;—what an insight must it be!

Yet, Showman, where can lie the cause? Shall thy Implement have blame,
A boaster, that when he is tried, fails, and is put to shame?
Or is it good as others are, and be their eyes in fault?
Their eyes, or minds? or, finally, is yon resplendent vault?

Is nothing of that radiant pomp so good as we have here?
Or gives a thing but small delight that never can be dear?
The silver moon with all her vales, and hills of mightiest fame,
Doth she betray us when they’re seen? or are they but a name?

Or is it rather that Conceit rapacious is and strong,
And bounty never yields so much but it seems to do her wrong?
Or is it, that when human Souls a journey long have had
And are returned into themselves, they cannot but be sad?

Or must we be constrained to think that these Spectators rude,
Poor in estate, of manners base, men of the multitude,
Have souls which never yet have risen, and therefore prostrate lie?
No, no, this cannot be;—men thirst for power and majesty!

Does, then, a deep and earnest thought the blissful mind employ
Of him who gazes, or has gazed? a grave and steady joy,
That doth reject all show of pride, admits no outward sign,
Because not of this noisy world, but silent and divine!

Whatever be the cause, ’tis sure that they who pry and pore
Seem to meet with little gain, seem less happy than before:
One after One they take their turn, nor have I one espied
That doth not slackly go away, as if dissatisfied.

Naturally, we need to hear from Miss Emily again.

I died for beauty
By Emily Dickinson

I died for beauty, but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
“For beauty,” I replied.
“And I for truth,—the two are one;
We brethren are,” he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

This is from Leonard Cohen’s Book of Longing, sent to me by the lovely Katie.

My Time
By Leonard Cohen

My time is running out
and still
I have not sung
the true song
the great song

I admit
that I seem
to have lost my courage

a glance at the mirror
a glimpse into my heart
makes me want
to shut up forever

so why do you lean me here
Lord of my life
lean me at this table
in the middle of the night
wondering
how to be beautiful

Here is another one shared by a poetry pal.

Sonnet for a Tango in the Twilight
By Jorge Luis Borges

Who was it who said it all in a homegrown tango
Whose drawn-out, lovely sweetness made me pause
Under some unassuming little balconies
In that leafy neighborhood that isn’t even yours?

All I know is that in its sorrow I saw a simple yard
Within whose earthen walls the whole sunset fit,
A place I’d glimpsed a few months ago in some slum,
And that I loved you more than ever, hearing it.

Caught in that music, I stayed there on the sidewalk
Facing the lonesome moon, the heart of the street,
In the relentless wind that came down driving the night.

That infinite tango pulled me toward everything.
Toward the fresh stars. Toward the chance of being a man.
And toward that clear memory my eyes keep seeking.

I’m pretty sure that I could open The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell, at 593 pages containing two columns of text, and be struck by whatever random poem I happen to lay eyes on first. This reminded me of any number of historical military forts I’ve visited. What I like most about this poem is the speaker’s vision of what “peaceful” life was like at the fort, contained in four lines at the end of the third stanza.

The Fort
By Amy Lowell

The disappearing guns
Are hidden in their concrete emplacements,
But, above them,
Meadow grasses fall and recover,
Bend and stiffen.
Go dark, burn light,
In the play of gusty wind.
A black-and-orange butterfly
Flits about among the butter-and-egg flowers,
And the sea stands up,
Tall in perspective,
With full-spread schooners
Sprinkled upon it
As roses are powdered
Over a ribbon of moiré blue.
The disappearing guns are black
In grey concrete emplacements
With here and there a touch of red rust.

Wind cuts through the grasses,
Rasps upon them,
Draws a bow note out along them.
Swish!—Oh-h-h!
And the low waves
Crash soft constant cymbals
On the shingle beach
At the foot of the cliff.
Good Gracious!
A seal!
After how many years?
He turns his head to look at us,
He lolls on his rock contented and hot with sun.
The disappearing guns would shoot over him
If they were to fire.
Is he held in the harbour
By the submarine nets, I wonder?

“You turn the crank so.
Do you see her move?
If you stand here, you can see the springs for the recoil.”
Perhaps I can,
But I cannot see the orange butterfly,
Nor the seal,
Nor the little ships
Drawn across the tall, streaked sea.
And all I can hear
Is the jingle of a piano
In the men’s quarters
Playing a comic opera tune.

Is it possible that, at night,
The little flitter-bats
Hang under the lever-wheels of the disappearing guns
In their low emplacements
To escape from the glare
Of the search-lights,
Shooting over the grasses
To the sea?

This was sent by a poetry pal.

How About Silence?
By Wendy Brown-Báez

What if we had no words?
What if the only way we could speak was with the
Expression in our eyes, arch of the eyebrow
Fingers touching
What if you came to me moving in silence
And laid beside me
With roses
What if I held your face in my hands
Like a crystal ball
Seeing the child in you, foreseeing the old man
Appreciating the fine lines
Forming around your eyes
While noting the twinkle
What if I gave myself into your hands
And there were no words to
Distract us
What if each touch was slow and distinct
If each breath formed a hum
A melody, a rhythm
And in the spaces between, only silence

What if we woke up creating patterns
Diagrams, scattered beams of light with our
Hands our legs our backs
Our breath
What if we used taste to tell each other
How much we love, how much we desire
How much we can not, how much we will
What if we swallowed truth like a holy wafer
Made from what we can know
With our blood our salt
Our bones

What if we no longer were capable of argument
Or misunderstandings
And we could only hear the way our bodies move
Toward each other and away
Like waves on a beach
Like buds opening to day
And folding at night
Like the spin of galaxies
And the journey of the moon
What if we ran out of words
What if we were unafraid to be completely silent?

Happy New Year!

The white bark writhed and sputtered like a fish
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

The white bark writhed and sputtered like a fish
Upon the coals, exuding odorous smoke.
She knelt and blew, in a surging desolate wish
For comfort; and the sleeping ashes woke
And scattered to the hearth, but no thin fire
Broke suddenly, the wood was wet with rain.
Then, softly stepping forth from her desire,
(Being mindful of like passion hurled in vain
Upon a similar task, in other days)
She trust her breath against the stubborn coal,
Bringing to bear upon its hilt the whole
Of her still body… there sprang a little blaze…
A pack of hounds, the flame swept up the flue!—
And the blue night stood flattened against the window, staring through.