the flame is your dominion

Eleven years, and very slowly working my way through Neruda, one love sonnet at a time. I mean, there are a hundred of them, and in eleven years I've only posted two, so I may be here for a while. I fucking adore One Hundred Love Sonnets—in my opinion, they are some of the sexiest and most romantic poems every written.

Cuántas veces, amor, te amé sin verte y tal vez sin recuerdo,
sin reconocer tu miranda, sin mirarte, centaura,
en regiones contrarias, en un mediodía quemante:
eras sólo el aroma de los cereales que amo.

Tal vez te vi, te supuse al pasar levantando una copa
en Angol, a la luz de la luna de junio,
o eras tú la cintura de aquella guitarra
que toqué en las tinieblas y sonó como el mar desmedido.

Te amé sin que yo lo supiera, y busqué tu memoria.
En las casas vacías entré con linterna a robar tu retrato.
Pero yo ya sabía cómo eras. De pronto

mientras ibas conmigo te toqué y se detuvo mi vida:
frente a mis ojos estabas, reinándome, y reinas.
Como hoguera en los bosques el fuego es tu reino.


Love, how often I loved you without seeing—without remembering you—
not recognizing your glance, not knowing you, a gentian
in the wrong place, scorching in the hot noon,
but I loved only the smell of wheat.

Or maybe I saw you, imagined you lifting a wineglass
in Angol, by the light of the summer’s moon;
or were you the waist of that guitar I strummed
in the shadows, the one that rang like an impetuous sea?

I loved you without knowing I did; I searched to remember you.
I broke into houses to steal your likeness,
though I already knew what you were like. And, suddenly,

when you were there with me I touched you, and my life
stopped: you stood before me, you took dominion like a queen:
like a wildfire in the forest, and the flame is your dominion.

—Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), XXII from Cien sonetos de amor or One Hundred Love Sonnets, 1959, translated by Stephen Tapscott (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986).

that nothing can tear or mend

My body is really mad at me today, but I still love poetry.

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

—Jane Hirshfield (b. 1953), "For What Binds Us" from Of Gravity & Angels, 1988.

a new knowledge of reality

A little bit of Wallace Stevens, on this Tuesday night:

At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.

He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.

The sun was rising at six,
No longer a battered panache above snow . . .
It would have been outside.

It was not from the vast ventriloquism
Of sleep’s faded papier-mâché . . .
The sun was coming from outside.

That scrawny cry—it was
A chorister whose c preceded the choir.
It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings,
Still far away. It was like
A new knowledge of reality.

—Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), "Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself" in this case from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 1954.

the universe is made of distance and of dust

I need to get back in the habit of posting poems in the morning, because I keep forgetting until late in the day, or forgetting completely—although in my defense, I have had houseguests (wonderful houseguests, but houseguests nonetheless) for pretty much two straight weeks. Anyway, my awesome friend ashpags, herself a badass lady astronomer, directed me to this wonderful poem inspired by Henrietta Leavitt.

      After Henrietta Leavitt, astronomer

The difference between luminosity and brightness
is the difference between being

and being perceived, between the energy emitted
and the apparent magnitude. O, to be

significant! To have some scope and scale!
Size and heat. Why not make that obvious,

ostensible, stretch it out for all the world to see?
Distance makes a world of difference.

The universe is made of distance and of dust.
More dust than star out there,

more crimson than cobalt from here, looking,
our eyes telling the truth slant

through the almost-nothing
of the universe’s finely grained mattering.

—Anna Leahy (b. 1965), "The Habits of Light" from Aperture (2017). You can read more about the poem, and Henrietta Leavitt, and watch Anna Leahy read the poem aloud (if that's your thing) at brainpickings.

hope's fairy-colors

The day has pass'd in storms, though not unmix'd
With transitory calm. The western clouds,
Dissolving slow, unveil the glorious sun,
Majestic in decline. The wat'ry east
Glows with the many-tinted arch of Heav'n.
We hail it as a pledge that brighter skies
Shall bless the coming morn. Thus rolls the day,
The short dark day of life; with tempests thus,
And fleeting sun-shine chequer'd. At its close,
When the dread hour draws near, that bursts all ties,
All commerce with the world, Religion pours
Hope's fairy-colors on the virtuous mind,
And, like the rain-bow on the ev'ning clouds,
Gives the bright promise that a happier dawn
Shall chase the night and silence of the grave.

—Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866), "The Rain-bow."

carve into me with knives of light

I have been saying for years that one day, someday, I would post Anne Carson's "The Glass Essay," which is a truly exceptional and extraordinary poem. I haven't done so before because it's also a very long poem, but I think today is the day. "The Glass Essay" is a poem about loss and heartbreak and recovery, sex and poetry and family and Emily Brontë, and although it's not quite about grief in the way my April 5th grief poems usually are, I am posting it for both yesterday and today. I think it's long enough, and special enough, to count for two days.

each day is fulminant

Today was both Maya Angelou's birthday—she would have been 90—and the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination. I was booked solid all day and am completely exhausted and haven't really had any energy to think about any of that, but: Angelou, right?

     FOR DAVID P—B    

The eye follows, the land
Slips upward, creases down, forms 
The gentle buttocks of a young 
Giant. In the nestle,
Old adobe bricks, washed of 
Whiteness, paled to umber,
Await another century.

Star Jasmine and old vines
Lay claim upon the ghosted land, 
Then quiet pools whisper 
Private childhood secrets.

Flush on inner cottage walls 
Antiquitous faces,
Used to the gelid breath
Of old manors, glare disdainfully 
Over breached time.

Around and through these 
Cold phantasmatalities, 
He walks, insisting
To the languid air,
Activity, music,
A generosity of graces.

His lupin fields spurn old
Deceit and agile poppies dance
In golden riot.   Each day is
Fulminant, exploding brightly 
Under the gaze of his exquisite 
Sires, frozen in the famed paint 
Of dead masters. Audacious 
Sunlight casts defiance
At their feet.

—Maya Angelou (1928-2014), "California Prodigal" from And Still I Rise, 1978.

rhythm & spores

If I am not Ulysses, I am
his dear, ruthless half brother.
Strap me to the mast
so I may endure night sirens
singing my birth when water
broke into a thousand blossoms
in a landlocked town of the South,
before my name was heard
in the womb-shaped world
of deep sonorous waters.
Storms ran my ship to the brink,
& I wasn't myself in a kingdom
of unnamed animals & totem trees,
but never wished to unsay my vows.
From the salt-crusted timbers
I could only raise a battering ram
or cross, where I learned God
is rhythm & spores. If I am
Ulysses, made of his words
& deeds, I swam with sea cows
& mermaids in a lost season,
ate oysters & poison berries
to approach the idea of death
tangled in the lifeline's slack
on that rolling barrel of a ship,
then come home to more than just
the smell of apples, the heavy oars
creaking the same music as our bed.

—Yusef Komunyakaa (b. 1947), "Latitudes" from The Emperor of Water Clocks, 2015.

It rained all day, and I'm making Cat watch the beginning of Black Sails, and I never can get enough of Odysseus.

the life principle

It snowed this morning (gross, slushy snow, now almost entirely melted), which gives me—on some level, anyway—the opportunity to post out-of-season poetry. I went looking for winter poems and found this one, and, well. Yeah. Margaret Atwood has a way with turning prosaic things into poetry that is rivaled by almost nobody. Also, fairestcat is visiting me from Canada, so, you know, here's to Margaret Atwood.

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

—Margaret Atwood, “February” from Morning in the Burned House, 1995.

the descending blue

Good morning and welcome to National Poetry Month! It's 2018, which is honestly pretty weird, and I am WOEFULLY under-prepared for National Poetry Month. However, do not be deterred: under-prepared just means that things will probably be a little wacky and spontaneous.

In addition to being April 1, today is Easter, and the second day of Passover, and while spring remains elusive, I am optimistic. So here is my favorite queer Jesuit priest on spring:

Nothing is so beautiful as spring—
    When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
    Thrush's eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
    The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
    The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.
What is all this juice and all this joy?
    A strain of the earth's sweet being in the beginning
In Eden garden.—Have, get, before it cloy,
    Before it cloud, Christ, lord, and sour with sinning,
Innocent mind and Mayday in girl and boy,
    Most, O maid's child, thy choice and worthy the winning.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), "Spring," May 1877.