where the restless oceans pound

I was really going back and forth on whether I wanted to post sexy Audre Lorde or activist Audre Lorde or punch-you-in-the-face Audre Lorde, so I kind of went for sexy-activist-with-a-little-punching Audre Lorde. Which maybe is most Audre Lorde, now that I am thinking about it.

Moon marked and touched by sun
my magic is unwritten
but when the sea turns back
it will leave my shape behind.
I seek no favor
untouched by blood
unrelenting as the curse of love
permanent as my errors
or my pride
I do not mix
love with pity
nor hate with scorn
and if you would know me
look into the entrails of Uranus
where the restless oceans pound.

I do not dwell
within my birth nor my divinities
who am ageless and half-grown
and still seeking
my sisters
witches in Dahomey
wear me inside their coiled cloths
as our mother did
mourning.

I have been woman
for a long time
beware my smile
I am treacherous with old magic
and the noon's new fury
with all your wide futures
promised
I am
woman
and not white.

—Audre Lorde (1934-1992), "A Woman Speaks," from The Black Unicorn, 1978.

my good knife

Sometimes I read incredible poems and think, "this poem is too heavy-hitting for me today, I need to save it for later," and then later comes along and I'm like, "you know what? Yeah." Warnings for themes of abuse and violence, and also this poem fucking slays.

I know better than to leave the house
            without my good dress, my good knife

like Excalibur between my stone breasts.
            Mother would have me whipped,

would have me kneeling on rice until
            I shrilled so loud I rang the church

bells. Didn’t I tell you that elegance is our revenge,
            that there are neither victims nor victors

but the bitch we envy in the end? I am that bitch.
            I am dogged. I am so damned

not even Death wanted me. He sent me back
            after you sacked my body

the way your armies sacked my village, stacked
            our headless idols in the river

where our children impaled themselves
            on rocks. I exit night and enter your tent

gilded in a bolt of stubborn sunlight. My sleeves
            already rolled up. I know they will say

I am a slut for showing this much skin, this
            irreverence for what is seen

when I ask to be seen. Look at me now: my thighs
            lift from your thighs, my mouth

spits poison into your mouth. You nasty beauty.
            I am no beast, but my blade

sliding clean through your thick neck
            while my maid keeps your blood off

me and my good dress will be a song
        the parish sings for centuries. Tell Mary.

Tell Eve. Tell Salome and David about me.
        Watch their faces, like yours, turn green.

—Paul Tran, "Like Judith Slaying Holofernes," Poetry, 2018.

disappear

I've missed the last couple of days because of migraines (not uncommon, although I would be grateful if this super shitty migraine cycle I've been in for the last few weeks would break), and usually when something like this happens, I like to post long poems or multiple poems on a theme to make up for the missed days. I did not actually have a plan for this, but then my terrible friend Clare sent me a poem that was published today as part of the New York Public Library's Pocket Poems, and I thought, "I know what we need: a suite of devastating Orpheus and Eurydice poems!" Thanks, Clare. Since I collect Orpheus and Eurydice poems, this was less challenging than one might imagine. Here are three.

He lies on the grass. One hippogriff
of cloud becomes another: expanding,
contracting. It’s all unreal, the same
sky and river, the scent of living
things. The last of the ice floes passes
on the water, shears in two
pieces against the bridge. He studies
his hands, bitten fingernails. Every
time he turns he feels the stamping hooves,

the great herd. A man can get used
to anything, grow accustomed to
a change of seasons, each snap
of the moon. Even when he’s stretched
out on this slope he hears a steady
thrumming. It’s a long way off,
but he lies still, pretending. Once
he put candles in each window
of her body: a thousand wavering
lights. Back then he knew about fire.

—Anne Simpson (b. 1956), "Orpheus Afterwards," originally published in TLS, 2004.

Where would I be without my sorrow,
sorrow of my beloved's making,
without some sign of him, this song
of all gifts the most lasting?

How would you like to die
while Orpheus was singing?
A long death; all the way to Dis
I heard him.

Torment of earth
Torment of mortal passion—

I think sometimes
too much is asked of us;
I think sometimes
our consolations are the costliest thing.

All the way to Dis
I heard my husband singing
much as you now hear me.

Perhaps it was better that way,
my love fresh in my head
even at the moment of death.

Not the first response—
that was terror—
but the last.

—Louise Glück, "Relic," from Vita Nova, 1999.

she calls to ask if my dead father
has called me on the phone / no, I say

while a tiny flicker of electricity fireflies
up my spine / did he call you?

yes, she says, and then she looked for him -
under the covers, behind the mirror -

she looked and looked, and he wasn't there
he disappear, she says / (he disappear)

—Lee Ann Roripaugh, "my Japanese mother as Orpheus, with dementia," originally published in the NYPL's Pocket Poems, April 22 2020.

this is a torch song

And, on the third poetry-and-theatre night of this week, a poem at least somewhat in keeping with the show I saw tonight—Norma Jeane Baker of Troy at The Shed—about which...I have some mixed feelings. Content warning for discussion of rape in this poem. 

The world is full of women

who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself

if they had the chance. Quit dancing.

Get some self-respect

and a day job.

Right. And minimum wage,

and varicose veins, just standing

in one place for eight hours

behind a glass counter

bundled up to the neck, instead of 

naked as a meat sandwich.

Selling gloves, or something.

Instead of what I do sell.

You have to have talent 

to peddle a thing so nebulous

and without material form.

Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way

you cut it, but I've a choice

of how, and I'll take the money.

I do give value.

Like preachers, I sell vision,

like perfume ads, desire

or its facsimile. Like jokes

or war, it's all in the timing.

I sell men back their worse suspicions:

that everything's for sale,

and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see

a chain-saw murder just before it happens,

when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple

are still connected.

Such hatred leaps in them,

my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary

hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads 

and upturned eyes, imploring

but ready to snap at my ankles,

I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge 

to step on ants. I keep the beat,

and dance for them because

they can't. The music smells like foxes,

crisp as heated metal

searing the nostrils

or humid as August, hazy and languorous

as a looted city the day after,

when all the rape's been done

already, and the killing,

and the survivors wander around

looking for garbage

to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion.

Speaking of which, it's the smiling

tires me out the most. 

This, and the pretence

that I can't hear them.

And I can't, because I'm after all

a foreigner to them.

The speech here is all warty gutturals,

obvious as a slab of ham,

but I come from the province of the gods

where meanings are lilting and oblique.

I don't let on to everyone,

but lean close, and I'll whisper:

My mother was raped by a holy swan.

You believe that? You can take me out to dinner. 

That's what we tell all the husbands.

There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.

Not that anyone here

but you would understand.

The rest of them would like to watch me

and feel nothing. Reduce me to components

as in a clock factory or abattoir.

Crush out the mystery.

Wall me up alive

in my own body. 

They'd like to see through me, 

but nothing is more opaque

than absolute transparency.

Look—my feet don't hit the marble!

Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising,

I hover six inches in the air

in my blazing swan-egg of light.

You think I’m not a goddess?

Try me.

This is a torch song.

Touch me and you'll burn.

—Margaret Atwood, "Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing," from Morning in the Burned House, 1995.

a deathless, inexhaustible wine

I didn't post a poem yesterday because it has been a hell of a week and I was too exhausted; but yesterday I watched the season finale of The Magicians, and today I went to see Hadestown on Broadway, and you know what that means? That means it's time for Rilke. Here are two sonnets from Sonnets to Orpheus, one for yesterday and one for today; normally I post the German as well as the translation, but I'm tired and I don't want to type it up, so I'm going straight to the excellent Stephen Mitchell translations. (I recommend his editions—they're usually bilingual and very good.) 

A god can do it. But will you tell me how

a man can penetrate through the lyre's strings? 

Our mind is split. And at the shadowed crossing

of heart-roads, there is no temple for Apollo. 

Song, as you have taught it, is not desire, 

not wooing any grace that can be achieved; 

song is reality. Simple, for a god. 

But when can we be real? When does he pour

the earth, the stars, into us? Young man, 

it is not your loving, even if your mouth 

was forced wide open by your own voice—learn

to forget that passionate music. It will end. 

True singing is a different breath, about

nothing. A gust inside the god. A wind. 

*

Praising is what matters! He was summoned for that, 

and came to us like the ore from a stone's 

silence. His mortal heart presses out 

a deathless, inexhaustible wine. 

Whenever he feels the god's paradigm grip

his throat, the voice does not die in his mouth. 

All becomes vineyard, all becomes grape, 

ripened on the hills of his sensuous South. 

Neither decay in the sepulchre of kings

nor any shadow that has fallen from the gods

can ever detract from his glorious praising. 

For he is a herald who is with us always, 

holding far into the doors of the dead

a bowl with ripe fruit worthy of praise. 

—Rainer Maria Rilke, I, 3 and I, 7 from The Sonnets to Orpheus, 1922; translated by Stephen Mitchell.

some days it rains

Today—or rather, yesterday, since it's after midnight—was the eighth anniversary of my brother's memorial service. His yahrzeit was a couple of weeks ago, but I always do a kind of celebration on April 5th, so here is a poem about death (and, tangentially, grief) that I really love. 

Death comes to me again, a girl

in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.

It’s not so terrible she tells me, 

not like you think, all darkness

and silence. There are windchimes

and the smell of lemons, some days

it rains, but more often the air is dry

and sweet. I sit beneath the staircase 

built from hair and bone and listen 

to the voices of the living. I like it, 

she says, shaking the dust from her hair, 

especially when they fight, and when they sing.

—Dorianne Laux, "Death Comes to Me Again, A Girl," from Smoke, 2000. 

This is for Pete, today, who I love and miss.

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).

a monster in the shape of a woman

I had dinner with a couple of awesome astronomers tonight, so this is sort of for them—though also because I love it, and because it's been on my to-post list for a long time, and because it's not really poetry month with Adrienne Rich.

                 Thinking of Caroline Herschel (1750-1848)
                     astronomer, sister of William; and others.

A woman in the shape of a monster   

a monster in the shape of a woman   

the skies are full of them

a woman      'in the snow

among the Clocks and instruments   

or measuring the ground with poles' 

in her 98 years to discover   

8 comets

she whom the moon ruled   

like us

levitating into the night sky   

riding the polished lenses

Galaxies of women, there

doing penance for impetuousness   

ribs chilled   

in those spaces    of the mind

An eye,

          'virile, precise and absolutely certain'

          from the mad webs of Uranusborg

                                                            encountering the NOVA   

every impulse of light exploding 

from the core 

as life flies out of us

             Tycho whispering at last

             'Let me not seem to have lived in vain' 

What we see, we see   

and seeing is changing

the light that shrivels a mountain   

and leaves a man alive

Heartbeat of the pulsar

heart sweating through my body

The radio impulse   

pouring in from Taurus

         I am bombarded yet         I stand

I have been standing all my life in the   

direct path of a battery of signals

the most accurately transmitted most   

untranslatable language in the universe

I am a galactic cloud so deep      so invo-

luted that a light wave could take 15   

years to travel through me       And has   

taken      I am an instrument in the shape   

of a woman trying to translate pulsations   

into images    for the relief of the body   

and the reconstruction of the mind.

—Adrienne Rich (1929-2012), "Planetarium," 1968, from The Will to Change (1971), though in this case from The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems 1950-2001 (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2002). 

time and the world

This is probably asking for it on May Eve, but it wouldn't be poetry month without Yeats, even if I can't post "Sailing to Byzantium" again. And this is, I think, a good poem on which to conclude. Maybe next year I'll be more versatile -- or at least, as organized as I was last year.

Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh heart again in the gray twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight gray;
Though hope fall from you and love decay,
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;

And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the gray twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.

~William Butler Yeats, "Into the Twilight," The Wind Among the Reeds, 1899.

the singing-masters of my soul

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
--Those dying generations--at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or foul, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And by the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

~William Butler Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium, from The Tower, 1928

Speaking of William Butler Yeats, I just barely managed to prevent myself from writing "Philaster lacks all conviction and Arethusa is full of passionate intensity," in my Philaster chapter this afternoon. I am drowning, but eventually, I expect, I will find a boat or a raft or a very large fish or something.

it's the wrong time of year for this poem

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
So haggard, and so woe-begone?
The squirrel's granary is full,
And the harvest's done.

I see a lily on they brow,
With anguish moist and fever dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful - a fancy's child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She look'd at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

I set her on her pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long,
For a sidelong would she bend and sing
A faery's song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said
"I love thee true."

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she wept and sigh'd full sore,
And there I shut her wild wild eyes
With kisses four.

And there she lulled me asleep,
And there I dream'd - Ah! woe betide!
The latest dream I ever dream'd
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried, "La Belle Dame sans Merci
Hath thee in thrall!"

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill's side.

And this is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is wither'd from the lake,
And no birds sing.

~John Keats, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, original version, 1819

Do we have sedge in Massachusetts?