You’re alone. Then there’s a knock
On the door. It’s a word. You
Bring it in. Things go
OK for a while. But this word
Has relatives. Soon
They turn up. None of them work.
They sleep on the floor, and they steal
Your tennis shoes.
You started it; you weren’t
Content to leave things alone.
Now the den is a mess, and the
Remote is gone.
That’s what writing a poem
Is like! You never receive your
Wife only . . . but the
Madness of her family.
It’s good. Otherwise
We could get what
We want in a poem
And the world would end.
DoubleTake 5:3, Summer 1999
Robert Bly
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
Read more…
Wallace Stevens
Secret memories
not on the road
of our other memories!
Memories, that one night,
suddenly, come alive,
like a rose in the desert,
like a star at noon
—the stronger burning in this cold nothingness—
landmarks of the best
life a man has,
which is hardly lived at all!
Path dry
day after day;
then the miracle, suddenly,
an amazing springtime,
memories returned from the past!
Read more…
Juan Ramón Jiménez
The New York dawn has
four columns of filth
and a hurricane of black doves
that putter in the putrid waters.
The New York dawn groans
up the immense stairways,
searching along the sharp edges
for spice-plants of fine-drawn anguish.
The dawn comes and no one receives it in his mouth,
for there neither tomorrow nor hope is possible.
Only now and then mad swarms of furious coins
sting and devour the abandoned children.
The first to leave their houses know in their bones
there’ll be no paradise nor amours stripped of leaves:
they know they are going to the filth of figures and laws,
to artless games, to fruitless work.
The light is buried under chains and noises
in the ugly threat of rootless science.
Through the suburbs people stagger without sleep,
as though recently rescued from a shipwreck of blood.
Read more…
Federico García Lorca
Do you remember the night Abraham first saw
The stars? He cried to Saturn: “You are my Lord!”
How happy he was! When he saw the Dawn Star,
He cried, “”You are my Lord!” How destroyed he was
When he watched them set. Friends, he is like us:
We take as our Lord the stars that go down.
We are faithful companions to the unfaithful stars.
We are diggers, like badgers; we love to feel
The dirt flying out from behind our back claws.
And no one can convince us that mud is not
Beautiful. It is our badger soul that thinks so.
We are ready to spend the rest of our life
Walking with muddy shoes in the wet fields.
We resemble exiles in the kingdom of the serpent.
We stand in the onion fields looking up at the night.
My heart is a calm potato by day, and a weeping
Abandoned woman by night. Friend, tell me what to do,
Since I am a man in love with the setting stars.
The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, 2001
www.robertbly.com/r_p_abraham.html
Robert Bly
Mara Mori brought me
a pair of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder’s hands,
two socks as soft as rabbits.
I slipped my feet into them
as if they were two cases
knitted with threads of twilight and goatskin,
Violent socks,
my feet were two fish made of wool,
two long sharks
sea blue, shot through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons,
my feet were honored in this way
by these heavenly socks.
They were so handsome for the first time
my feet seemed to me unacceptable
like two decrepit firemen,
firemen unworthy of that woven fire,
of those glowing socks.
Read more…
Pablo Neruda
I am waiting for my case to come up
and I am waiting
for a rebirth of wonder
and I am waiting for someone
to really discover America
and wail
and I am waiting
for the discovery
Of a new symbolic western frontier
and I am waiting
for the American Eagle
to really spread its wings
and straighten up and fly right
and I am waiting for the Age of Anxiety
to drop dead
and I am waiting
for the war to be fought
which will make the world safe
for anarchy
and I am waiting for the final withering away
of all governments
and I am perpetually awaiting
a rebirth of wonder
Read more…
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and, yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through rages of fog
where we stood, saying I
(Dark Fields of the Republic, 1994, p. 4)
www.poemhunter.com/poem/in-those-years/
Adrienne Rich
At the head of this poem I have laid out
a boning knife a paring knife a wooden spoon a pair of tongs.
Oaken grain beneath them olive and rusty light
around them.
And you looming: This is not your scene
this is the first frame of a film
I have in mind to make: move on, get out.
And you here telling me: What will be done
with these four objects will be done
through my lens not your words.
The poet shrugs: I was only in the kitchen
looking at the chopping board. (Not the whole story.)
And you telling me: Awful is the scope
of what I have in mind, awful the music I shall deploy, most
awful the witness of the camera moving
out from the chopping board to the grains of snow
whirling against the windowglass to the rotating
searchlights of the tower. The humped snow-shrouded
tanks
laboring toward the border. This is not your bookish art.
Read more…
Adrienne Rich
There are several dozen poetry books on my shelves,
Many with sticky notes, turned-down pages, or
citations jotted in the endpapers.
So I thought it would be useful
to gather - over time - a certain number
of those poems in one place
where they can be easily found
and read together.
Poets and publishers: don’t sue me—
this is homage, and good publicity besides.
—Fred Murphy
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there
—from “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower” by William Carlos Williams
Fred Murphy, William Carlos Williams