kiss the apocalypse goodbye

Three days late for April 26, a poem that makes me feel things about a lot of things, but maybe especially the wildness of the English language. I just really love poetry, is the thing.

Never fear. I know the difference between
arteries and ardor, arbor and treed,
my bower and a weak-kneed need, a harbor
where one might moor tonight and a port worth
the oars’ effort to come ashore for, a bit
part and the serpent’s gravid apple. I won’t
flatter myself first or lasting, or
presume to fast and feint a martyr, making
mockery of sacrifice, fatten
for some sweet slaughter. I must believe that I’m
not on your mind. On your body? Sure.
That said, your body has a few ideas
so bright that we might meet some night and render
a dark room light as the last day before
the world ends, that doom that was supposed to dawn
today, but by now, hours worn on and in,
we know there’s no such luxury as fine
as that finality for now. For now,
at least, I’ll have to kiss apocalypse
goodbye, resign myself to this more mundane
pain, the solace of the solstice, year’s
earliest sunset and its longest night.
I try to catch that fade of color with,
without a flash. Both tries prove terrible.
The horizon smudges up against the sky’s blur
like a child’s heavy-handed landscape
and inept erasure. They’ll have to do.
The pictures that I have of you will never
do you justice, either, neither a camera’s
snap nor some synaptic crackle long
elapsed can come remotely close to holding
you. How else would you have it? You need
never fear. I need you, but I only need you
where you are: there, never far, never near.

—Dora Malech, "To the You of Ten Years Ago, Now," from The New Yorker, April 29, 2013.

why we shake

I read my first Ana Božičević poem in 2017, when I was in briefly in Croatia on a Mediterranean cruise with my parents and mistresscurvy, and was looking for Croatian poets. Her poetry has a kind of bite to it that I really love, and I've had this one on my list to post this year.

Eloquent
Silence of everyone I ever loved
This cloudy Friday evening
Spring but still cold
A smattering of new buds
Who's that
Swaddled in
The uneasy atmosphere
In silence
No chatter or pleasant surprise
The lusty rush of a weekend
With the beloved
Who's that
Sprouting now out of
The cottony silence
With silky whips
Still hanging from their little chops
Who is it straining
To pop out
Of the hardwood
Rings of time
Into the cool air
Like there's another cool world
On the other side of this one
Worth pushing
Through to or maybe
We're already there
Is that
Why we shake

—Ana Božičević (b. 1977), "Who's That," PoetryNow, 2017.

when day is gone and night is come

My quarantine Dorothy Dunnett book club finished reading A Game of Kings yesterday and started Queens' Play today, so here's some good old classic Robbie Burns, in honor of Scotland (and the OT3 I believe in most strongly in the Lymond Chronicles: Francis/Scotland/Naps).

It was a' for our rightful king
       That we left fair Scotland's strand;
It was a' for our rightful king
       We e'er saw Irish land,
              My dear,
       We e'er saw Irish land.

Now a' is done that men can do,
       And a' is done in vain!
My love, and native land, fareweel!
       For I maun cross the main,
              My dear,
       For I maun cross the main.

He turn'd him right and round about,
       Upon the Irish shore,
He gave his bridle-reins a shake,
       With, Adieu for evermore,
              My dear!
       And adieu for evermore!

The soldier frae the war returns,
       And the merchant frae the main.
But I hae parted frae my love,
       Never to meet again,
              My dear,
       Never to meet again.

When day is gone and night is come,
       And a' folk bound to sleep,
I think on him that's far awa
       The lee-lang night, and weep,
              My dear,
       The lee-lang night, and weep.

—Robert Burns (1759–1796), "It was a' for our Rightful King." According to a very small amount of Googling, likely originally published in 1796 anonymously, and "supposed to be spoken by a Jacobite" (I mean, yes). This poem reportedly provides "an interesting example of the use which Burns often made of earlier Scottish songs and ballads and is based on the ballad of Mallie Stewart." I am not a Burns expert in any way, but this seems plausible.

in the direction of your journey

This is another poem (it seems to be a theme this year) that I was shocked to discover I had not already posted. I first read it years and years ago, and I dug it back up again yesterday when I was looking for poems by Jewish poets for Passover. This is also not a Passover poem, but it is by a Jewish poet and translated from Hebrew, and it's beautiful.

In the middle of this century we turned to each other
With half faces and full eyes
like an ancient Egyptian picture
And for a short while.

I stroked your hair
In the opposite direction to your journey,
We called to each other,
Like calling out the names of towns
Where nobody stops
Along the route.

Lovely is the world rising early to evil,
Lovely is the world falling asleep to sin and pity,
In the mingling of ourselves, you and I,
Lovely is the world.

The earth drinks men and their loves
Like wine,
To forget.
It can't.
And like the contours of the Judean hills,
We shall never find peace.

In the middle of this century we turned to each other,
I saw your body, throwing shade, waiting for me,
The leather straps for a long journey
Already tightening across my chest.
I spoke in praise of your mortal hips,
You spoke in praise of my passing face,
I stroked your hair in the direction of your journey,
I touched your flesh, prophet of your end,
I touched your hand which has never slept,
I touched your mouth which may yet sing.

Dust from the desert covered the table
At which we did not eat
But with my finger I wrote on it
The letters of your name.

—Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000), "In the Middle of this Century," translated by Assia Gutmann, and in this case from the The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (2015) by way of Poetry Foundation; I wasn't able to find a composition date for the poem.

dolphins crossing the horizon

I missed yesterday, but here is a poem for today. 

Three times she bit the Atlantic but only once barked at thunder.

Lonely thunder and now her teeth-marks float to sea.

This is her first trip to how Ocracoke Island smells

and the ocean, I'll count my encounters 

with the wide, ineffable appetite as I go to bed, 

with the factory of liquid fold and unfold, 

there was Kittery in the morning and the tent-eating tide,

the naked bland Greek crotches of Sfakia. 

My dog is realizing she doesn't like salt water, I 

that a spiritual person could see angels in white winged waves, 

just as another might think of beer. Drunken angels abound. 

I had an actual dream last night, not a, to loosen 

the imaginative stops, I need to invite Carl Jung into the poem 

kind of dream, but my father and I and other men 

tried to save a crop that was probably just suburban 

crewcut lawn grass. I didn't know what to do 

and bleated questions until my father said that asking was rude. 

Which is when I tried to kill him, kill the idea 

that to not know but want to, that to ask, 

to form the voice into waves flowing out from mind, was wrong, 

and couldn't kill him because when I tried to lift 

so I could smash him down, he was heavy as Icarus falling 

and I woke to the sense of a shape breathing the darkness

of the room. I drove eleven hours to remember 

only the second dream in my life. A few feet to my right, 

a ghost crab pitches sand from a hole, its eyes 

on stalks above its sideways life. Sanderlings 

skitter wet sand and with their long bills, probe 

for small crustaceans, I dug one out yesterday 

as water trickled home, sunlight ballrooming 

on its shattering surface, the creature was white 

and writhed, the size of what I pick from my navel 

at the end of the day. My first thought was that I needed 

a name, a sound to wrap around the image, to which I'd attach 

other breaths, breaths of how it lives and what it eats, 

and immediately wanted to know nothing 

except how it felt on my skin, the smallest kiss 

to ever cross my fingerprint. Eleven hours 

to close my eyes and have them turn around. 

At this rate, I'll recall one more dream before I die. 

In the distance, black triangles surface and submerge, 

dolphins crossing the horizon like the teeth 

of a saw cutting this ocean from an ocean that has asked 

to sail away.

—Bob Hicock, "Rising dream tide," originally published—I believe—in the Spring 2006 issue of Ploughshares, although I definitely got it from wintercreek.

the branch, the iron blade

For April 19—yesterday—in honor of the news that Hadestown is COMING TO BROADWAY IN 2019, after a run at the National in London. I'm so excited? It's so good? Oh my god. Anyway, Rilke:

Rufe mich zu jener deiner Stunden,
die dir unaufhörlich widersteht:
flehend nah wie das Gesicht von Hunden,
aber immer wieder weggedreht,

wenn du meinst, sie endlich zu erfassen.
So Entzognes ist am meisten dein.
Wir sind frei. Wir wurden dort entlassen,
Wo wir meinten, erst begrüßt zu sein.

Bang verlangen wir nach einem Halte,
wir zu Jungen manchmal für das Alte
und zu alt für das, was niemals war.

Wir, gerecht nur, wo wir dennoch preisen,
Weil wir, ach, der Ast sind und das Eisen
Und das Süße reifender Gefahr.


Call me to the one among your moments
that stands against you, ineluctably:
intimate as a dog’s imploring glance
but, again, forever, turned away

when you think you’ve captured it at last.
What seems so far from you is most your own.
We are already free, and were dismissed
where we thought we soon would be at home.

Anxious, we keep longing for a foothold—
We, at times too young for what is old
and too old for what has never been;

doing justice only where we praise,
because we are the branch, the iron blade,
and sweet danger, ripening from within.

—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), II, 23 from The Sonnets to Orpheus, 1923, translated by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage International, 1989).

nothing was mine

I'm sick, and this week has basically been a bust so far, but here is a Dorianne Laux poem.

I couldn't name it, the sweet
sadness welling up in me for weeks.
So I cleaned, found myself standing
in a room with a rag in my hand,
the birds calling time-to-go, time-to-go.
And like an old woman near the end
of her life I could hear it, the voice
of a man I never loved who pressed
my breasts to his lips and whispered
"My little doves, my white, white lilies."
I could almost cry when I remember it.

I don't remember when I began
to call everyone "sweetie,"
as if they were my daughters,
my darlings, my little birds.
I have always loved too much,
or not enough. Last night
I read a poem about God and almost
believed it—God sipping coffee,
smoking cherry tobacco. I've arrived
at a time in my life when I could believe
almost anything.

Today, pumping gas into my old car, I stood
hatless in the rain and the whole world
went silent—cars on the wet street
sliding past without sound, the attendant's
mouth opening and closing on air
as he walked from pump to pump, his footsteps
erased in the rain—nothing
but the tiny numbers in their square windows
rolling by my shoulder, the unstoppable seconds
gliding by as I stood at the Chevron,
balanced evenly on my two feet, a gas nozzle
gripped in my hand, my hair gathering rain.

And I saw it didn't matter
who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone.
The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty
of the Iranian attendant, the thickening
clouds—nothing was mine. And I understood
finally, after a semester of philosophy,
a thousand books of poetry, after death
and childbirth and the startled cries of men
who called out my name as they entered me,
I finally believed I was alone, felt it
in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo
like a thin bell. And the sounds
came back, the slish of tires
and footsteps, all the delicate cargo
they carried saying thank you
and yes. So I paid and climbed into my car
as if nothing had happened—
as if everything mattered—What else could I do?

I drove to the grocery store
and bought wheat bread and milk,
a candy bar wrapped in gold foil,
smiled at the teenaged cashier
with the pimpled face and the plastic
name plate pinned above her small breast,
and knew her secret, her sweet fear,
Little bird. Little darling. She handed me
my change, my brown bag, a torn receipt,
pushed the cash drawer in with her hip
and smiled back.

—Dorianne Laux (b. 1952), "After Twelve Days of Rain," from What We Carry, 1994.

go out into your heart

I borrowed my friend K's copy of Rainer Maria Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God back in January, when I was upstate for her secret wedding. K told me to keep Rilke through poetry month, and I can't disappoint her, can I? There are a lot of really spectacular poems in this volume, but this one got me where I live.

You are not surprised at the force of the storm—
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee. Their flight
sets the boulevards streaming. And you know:
he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.

The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees' blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back
into the source of everything. You thought
you could trust the power
when you plucked the fruit;
now it becomes a riddle again,
and you again a stranger.

Summer was like your house: you knew
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain. Now
the immense loneliness begins.

The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered leaves.
Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you.

—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), II, i from "The Book of Pilgrimage," from Book of Hours, translated from the German by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy (New York: Riverhead Books, revised edition, 2005).

towards the songs' pretended sea

(For Blues People)

In the south, sleeping against
the drugstore, growling under  
the trucks and stoves, stumbling  
through and over the cluttered eyes  
of early mysterious night. Frowning  
drunk waving moving a hand or lash.  
Dancing kneeling reaching out, letting  
a hand rest in shadows. Squatting  
to drink or pee. Stretching to climb  
pulling themselves onto horses near  
where there was sea (the old songs  
lead you to believe). Riding out  
from this town, to another, where  
it is also black. Down a road
where people are asleep. Towards  
the moon or the shadows of houses.  
Towards the songs’ pretended sea.

—Amiri Baraka (1934-2013), "Legacy," from Black Magic (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1969).

oh, tourist

Tomorrow morning we disembark in Venice; we'll be in Venice through the end of the week, and I'm really looking forward to that (although I am admittedly still not entirely clear on how Venice even works), but I'm going to miss a lot of things about the boat. On the other hand, I think too much longer on the boat would make us go even more stir crazy than we already are, so a change is good. In honor—or something—of our imminent arrival in Venice, some Elizabeth Bishop:

Here is a coast; here is a harbor;
here, after a meager diet of horizon, is some scenery;
impractically shaped and—who knows?—self-pitying mountains,
sad and harsh beneath their frivolous greenery,

with a little church on top of one. And warehouses,
some of them painted a feeble pink, or blue,
and some tall, uncertain palms. Oh, tourist,
is this how this country is going to answer you

and your immodest demands for a different world,
and a better life, and complete comprehension
of both at last, and immediately,
after eighteen days of suspension?

Finish your breakfast. The tender is coming,
a strange and ancient craft, flying a strange and brillant rag.
So that's the flag. I never saw it before.
I somehow never thought of there being a flag,

but of course there was, all along. And coins, I presume,
and paper money; they remain to be seen.
And gingerly now we climb down the ladder backward,
myself and a fellow passenger named Miss Breen,

descending into the midst of twenty-six freighters
waiting to be loaded with green coffee beans.
Please, boy, do be more careful with that boat hook!
Watch out! Oh! It has caught Miss Breen's

skirt! There! Miss Breen is about seventy,
a retired police lieutenant, six feet tall,
with beautiful bright blue eyes and a kind expression.
Her home, when she is at home, is in Glens Fall

s, New York. There. We are settled.
The customs officials will speak English, we hope,
and leave us our bourbon and cigarettes.
Ports are necessities, like postage stamps, or soap,

but they seldom seem to care what impression they make,
or, like this, only attempt, since it does not matter,
the unassertive colors of soap, or postage stamps—
wasting away like the former, slipping the way the latter

do when we mail the letteres we wrote on the boat,
either because the glue here is very inferior
or because of the heat. We leave Santos at once;
we are driving to the interior.

—Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), "Arrival at Santos," January 1952 (published in The New Yorker, June 21, 1952, but in this case from The Complete Poems, 1927-1979, 1980.

art my way back

I went looking for contemporary poets from Croatia, ideally writing in English, and found Ana Božičević. Her poetry is weird and layered and very contemporary and not always entirely to my taste, but I also really like it; I especially like this one, which was a Poem-a-Day at the Academy of American Poets on November 26, 2013. I think my favorite thing about this poem is the enjambment and the accompanying punctuation, which is completely killer.

Skinny dirt road
In the middle of the ocean.
That led to the house of art.
I took it. The engine nearly
Drowned. I lied that it was fun
That I’d do it again. When I got to
That shore
The house was gone and when
I looked back, so was the path.
Now I’m old. Drown in my bed
A thousand miles inland.
For years I thought
I could
Art my way back. Cats sing
Of rose dawns. This country’s a
Mirror image
Of the one I left, except
I’ve bad dreams. And
You’re the only
Person who’s not here.
Is it the same
For you.

—Ana Božičević (b. 1977), "Joyride," 2013.

dreaming of cities

The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages
Of that stone made,
And crumbling roads
That turned on sudden hidden villages.

Now over these small hills, they have built the concrete
That trails black wire;
Pylons, those pillars
Bare like nude giant girls that have no secret.

The valley with its gilt and evening look
And the green chestnut
Of customary root,
Are mocked dry like the parched bed of a brook.

But far above and far as sight endures
Like whips of anger
With lightning's danger
There runs the quick perspective of the future.

This dwarfs our emerald country with its trek
So tall with prophecy:
Dreaming of cities
Where often clouds shall lean their swan-white neck.

—Stephen Spender (1909-1995), "The Pylons," from Poems, 1933.

I feel like Spender gets less attention from me by virtue of being the one of his set that's not Auden or Isherwood, but I like this poem a lot.

in storms and at sunset

Today we are in Kotor, Montenegro, which is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been in my life. It's kind of overwhelming. It also started raining part of the way through the day, and we got slightly drenched and then took the tender back to our boat in the rain, which was a little bit magic.

I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught  
in some moorings. I am always tying up  
and then deciding to depart. In storms and  
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide  
around my fathomless arms, I am unable  
to understand the forms of my vanity  
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder  
in my hand and the sun sinking. To  
you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage  
of my will. The terrible channels where  
the wind drives me against the brown lips  
of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet  
I trust the sanity of my vessel; and  
if it sinks, it may well be in answer  
to the reasoning of the eternal voices,
the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

—Frank O’Hara, "To the Harbormaster" from Meditations in an Emergency, 1957.

love is not as simple

When it's late at night and branches
are banging against the windows,
you might think that love is just a matter

of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
into the fire of someone else,
but it's a little more complicated than that.

It's more like trading the two birds
who might be hiding in that bush
for the one you are not holding in your hand.

A wise man once said that love
was like forcing a horse to drink
but then everyone stopped thinking of him as wise.

Let us be clear about something.
Love is not as simple as getting up
on the wrong side of the bed wearing the emperor's clothes.

No, it's more like the way the pen
feels after it has defeated the sword.
It's a little like the penny saved or the nine dropped stitches.

You look at me through the halo of the last candle
and tell me love is an ill wind
that has no turning, a road that blows no good,

but I am here to remind you,
as our shadows tremble on the walls,
that love is the early bird who is better late than never.

—Billy Collins (b. 1941), "Adage," from Ballistics, 2008.

One of the things I love about Billy Collins—and the things I love about Billy Collins are legion, because he's one of my favorite poets—is the way he takes familiar things, like tropes, and cliches, and daily life, and the ordinary world, and gives them just enough of a turn to show them in a different light, and make you see them in a different way. On some level that's just poetry, but the way Collins does it is transformative and delicate and magical, and sometimes funny and sharp-edged and dangerous, in a way that I really appreciate.

perhaps in the nook of a cousin universe

This is another poem I got from wintercreek. I think my favorite thing about this poem might actually be the title, but I do love a love poem.

My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish
at the same time. I think

praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think
staying up and waiting
for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this
is exactly what's happening,

it's what they write grants about: the chromodynamics
of mournful Whistlers,
the audible sorrow and beta decay of "Old Battersea Bridge."
I like the idea of different

theres and elsewheres, an Idaho known for bluegrass,
a Bronx where people talk
like violets smell. Perhaps I am somewhere patient, somehow
kind, perhaps in the nook

of a cousin universe I've never defiled or betrayed
anyone. Here I have
two hands and they are vanishing, the hollow of your back
to rest my cheek against,

your voice and little else but my assiduous fear to cherish.
My hands are webbed
like the wind-torn work of a spider, like they squeezed
something in the womb

but couldn't hang on. One of those other worlds
or a life I felt
passing through mine, or the ocean inside my mother's belly
she had to scream out.

Here when I say "I never want to be without you,"
somewhere else I am saying
"I never want to be without you again." And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet

in all of the lives we are, it's with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don't touch you it's a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

—Bob Hicok (b. 1960), "Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem," from Plus Shipping, 1998.

island

Rita Dove, always and forever.

Shape the lips to an o, say a.
That's island.

One word of Swedish has changed the whole neighborhood.
When I look up, the yellow house on the corner
is a galleon stranded in flowers. Around it

the wind. Even the high roar of a leaf-mulcher
could be the horn-blast from a ship
as it skirts to the misted shoals.

We don't need much more to keep things going.
Families complete themselves
and refuse to budge from the present,
the present extends its glass forehead to sea
(backyard breezes, scattered cardinals)

and if, one evening, the house on the corner
took off over the marshland,
neither I nor my neighbor
would be amazed. Sometimes

a word is found so right it trembles
at the slightest explanation.
You start out with one thing, end
up with another, and nothing's
like it used to be, not even the future.

—Rita Dove (b. 1952), "Ö" from The Yellow House on the Corner (Carnegie Mellon University Press, Pittsburgh, PA), 1980.

moon dust

Today I finally gave in to the National Poetry Month book-buying bug, and went to the bookstore on my way home. I bought probably more poetry books than I should have (my collection increases yearly), including Nikki Giovanni's new poetry and prose collection, Chasing Utopia (New York: William Morrow, 2013). I'm already kind of in love with it -- and not just the book design, which is lovely -- so it may be making frequent appearances in future years. Here's one of the poems:

I baked it
In a biscuit
And someone came along
While I wasn't looking
And stole it away

I had planned
To take it
For Show-and-Tell
Naked I would unveil
My prize
The moon would dress me
In moon dust

The stars settling over
My head
And you with your arms
Outstretched
Would awake me
Warm
In the light of day
While the night made its way
Into the kitchen
To become
Morning pancakes

—Nikki Giovanni (b. 1943), "Where Did The Night Go" from Chasing Utopia, 2013.

here is unfenced existence

Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows
And traffic all night north; swerving through fields
Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,
And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude
Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
And the widening river's slow presence,
The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,

Gathers to the surprise of a large town:
Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
And residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires -
Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers -

A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where only salesmen and relations come
Within a terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,
Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;
And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges
Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,
Isolate villages, where removed lives

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands
Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled air ascends;
And past the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.

—Philip Larkin (1922-1985), "Here" from The Whitsun Weddings, 1964. (Dates of poem composition: 6 September 1961 to 8 October 1961.)

I compulsively buy poetry books in March and April, which results in me owning things like The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin because it was only $12.50 at the Strand last March. It's a beautiful, sunny, perfect spring day in New York City, and yet, I don't know; I was feeling this poem. I'm listening to Vienna Teng's Aims as I write this up, which seems startling apropos.

Here is Larkin on the poem in 1981, when "asked whether he intended the poem as a brief for retirement, the simpler life": "Oh no, not at all ... well, it depends what you mean by retirement. If you mean not living in London, I suppose it might be interpreted along those lines. I meant it just as a celebration of here, Hull. It's a fascinating area, not quite like anywhere else. So busy, yet so lonely. The poem is frightful to read aloud: the first sentence goes on for twenty-four-and-a-half lines, which is three-quarters of the poem, and the rest is full of consonants." He also called it "a pointless shapeless thing about Hull," which I sort of adore. A+ Larkin. I love the enjambment in this poem so much that I don't even mind that the first sentence goes on for twenty-four-and-a-half lines. (The Complete Poems of Philip Larkin, edited by Archie Burnett (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), 391-392.)

toward the summer isle

I am in a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad mood, and having kind of a shitty day, but here is a poem that makes me feel just a little less like killing everyone in the world.

Some day, when trees have shed their leaves
   And against the morning's white
The shivering birds beneath the eaves
    Have sheltered for the night,
We'll turn our faces southward, love,
   Toward the summer isle
Where bamboos spire the shafted grove
   And wide-mouthed orchids smile.

And we will seek the quiet hill
   Where towers the cotton tree,
And leaps the laughing crystal rill,
   And works the droning bee.
And we will build a cottage there
   Beside an open glade,
With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,
   And ferns that never fade.

—Claude McKay (1889-1948), "After the Winter" in this case from Claude McKay: Complete Poems (University of Illinois Press, 2004).

to the flashing water

I did say we were having a sonnet shortage. Time to remedy that, don't you think?

Stiller Freund der vielen Fernen, fühle,
wie dein Atem noch den Raum vermehrt.
Im Gebälk der finstern Glockenstühle
laß dich läuten. Das, was an dir zehrt,

wird ein Starkes über dieser Nahrung.
Geh in der Verwandlung aus und ein.
Was ist deine leidendste Erfahrung?
Ist dir Trinken bitter, werde Wein.

Sei in dieser Nacht aus Übermaß
Zauberkraft am Kreuzweg deiner Sinne,
ihrer seltsamen Begegnung Sinn.

Und wenn dich das Irdische vergaß,
zu der stillen Erde sag: Ich rinne.
Zu dem raschen Wasser sprich: Ich bin.


Silent friend of many distances, feel
how your breath enlarges all of space.
Let your presence ring out like a bell
into the night. What feeds upon your face

grows mighty from the nourishment thus offered.
Move through transformation, out and in.
What is the deepest loss that you have suffered?
If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

In this immeasurable darkness, be the power
that rounds your senses in their magic ring,
the sense of their mysterious encounter.

And if the earthly no longer knows your name,
whisper to the silent earth: I'm flowing.
To the flashing water say: I am.

—Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), II, 29 from The Sonnets to Orpheus, 1923, translated by Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage International, 1989). I like Rilke a whole lot, even though sometimes I am not at all sure what he is talking about. That's okay, though; sometimes, that's poetry. It is even remotely possible that some day I may post a Rilke poem that has nothing to do with his Orpheus obsession.