Poetry Month Retrospetive

Friday, May 5, 2006

Editor’s Note: In honor of National Poetry Month, actually in April, we offer this collection of works for your consideration.

Corner

The cop slumps alertly on his motorcycle,

Supported by one leg like a leather stork.

His glance accuses me of loitering.

I can see his eyes moving like a fish

In the green depths of his green goggles.

His ease is fake. I can tell.

My ease is fake. And he can tell.

The fingers armored by his gloves

Splay and clench, itching to change something.

As if he were my enemy or my death,

I just stand there watching.

I spit out my gum which has gone stale.

I knock out a new cigarette—

Which is my bravery.

It is all imperceptible:

The way I shift my weight,

The way he creeks in the saddle.

The traffic is specific though constant.

The sun surrounds me, divides the street between us.

His crash helmet is whiter in the shade.

It is like a bull ring as they say it is just before the fighting.

I cannot back down. I am there.

Everything holds me back.

I am in danger of disappearing in the sunny dust.

My levis bake and my T shirt sweats.

My cigarette makes my eyes burn.

But I don’t dare drop it.

Who made him my enemy?

Prince of coolness. King of fear.

Why do I lean here waiting?

Why does he lounge there watching?

I am becoming sunlight.

My hair is on fire. My boots run like tar.

I am hung-up by the bright air.

Something breaks through all of a sudden,

And he blasts off, quick as craver,

Smug in his power; watching me watch.

-Ralph Pomeroy

from Quatrains

You don’t have “bad” days and “good” days.

You don’t sometimes feel brilliant and sometimes dumb.

There’s no studying, no scholarly thinking having to do with love,

but there is a great deal of plotting, and secret touching,

and nights you can’t remember at all.

-Rumi (Translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks)

Restatement of Romance

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.

It is what is as I am what I am:

And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you. Only we two may interchange

each in the other what each has to give.

Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,

So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,

So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves,

Supremely true each to its separate self,

In the pale light that each upon the other throws

-Wallace Stevens

Death by Water, from The Waste Land

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea well

And the profit and loss.

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and

tall as you.

-T.S Eliot

from At the Fishhouses

It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:

dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,

drawn from the cold hard mouth

of the world, derived from the rocky breasts

forever, flowing and drawn, and since

our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.

-Elizabeth Bishop

The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends

upon

the red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

-William Carlos Williams

A Prayer For My Daughter

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid

Under this cradle-hood and coverlid

My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle

But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill

Whereby the haystack- and roof-leveling wind.

Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;

And for an hour I have walked and prayed

Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour

And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,

And-under the arches of the bridge, and scream

In the elms above the flooded stream;

Imagining in excited reverie

That the future years had come,

Dancing to a frenzied drum,

Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not

Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,

Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,

Being made beautiful overmuch,

Consider beauty a sufficient end,

Lose natural kindness and maybe

The heart-revealing intimacy

That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull

And later had much trouble from a fool,

While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,

Being fatherless could have her way

Yet chose a bandy-legged smith for man.

It’s certain that fine women eat

A crazy salad with their meat

Whereby the Horn of plenty is undone.

In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;

Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned

By those that are not entirely beautiful;

Yet many, that have played the fool

For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise.

And many a poor man that has roved,

Loved and thought himself beloved,

From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

-William Butler Yeats

from Saddening

Coleridge in fact was rarely out of some intimate situation

for five minutes in his life, sharing his friends’ houses

and tables, and there’s the scene, saddening, too, worse,

of the poet imploring the captain of the ship ferrying him

home from Malta to administer an enema to unclog

the impacted feces of his laudanum-induced constipation.

Daily stuff for Coleridge—he hardly remarks it, poor man, poor giant—

excruciating for us, spoiled as we are, sanitized, tamed…

But what does life—dope, shit, neurosis, fathers, or sons—

have to do with anything anyway? Think of innocent Clare,

twenty-eight years in insane asylums, and isn’t there some fairness,

you might think, some justice, but letting yourself think that,

there’s nowhere to go but bitterness, and how regret

that deluge of masterpieces to rejoice in? Coleridge, anyway,

at the end found fulfillment, and Clare, too, if not fulfillment,

then something, perhaps acceptance; even Hartley, too, something.

-C.K Williams

The Man Watching

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after

so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes

that a storm is coming,

and I hear the far-off fields say things

I can’t bear without a friend,

I can’t love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on

across the woods and across time,

and the world looks as if it had no age:

the landscape like a line in the psalm book,

is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!

What fights us is so great!

If only we would let ourselves be dominated

as things do by some immense storm,we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,

and the triumph itself makes us small.

What is extraordinary and eternal

does not want to be bent by us.

I mean the Angel who appeared

to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:

when the wrestler’s sinews

grew long like metal strings,

he felt them under his fingers

like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel

(who often simply declined the fight)

went away proud and strengthened

and great from that harsh hand,

that kneaded him as if to change his shape.

Winning does not tempt that man.

This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,

by constantly greater beings.

-Rainer Marie Rilke

from Mending Walls

He is all pine and I am apple-orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

“Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

-Robert Frost

Poetry Month Retrospetive

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