Wednesday Poetry: "Baseball and Writing," by Marianne Moore

Over the next few days, I'll be attending three baseball games in the company of my brother. So, with no further ado, today's poem is Marianne Moore's "Baseball and Writing." You can find today's poem in Moore's Complete Poems. Although... I disagree with her assertion that baseball is exciting. I, for one, can't wait for it to get jazzed up a bit--Futurama's Blernsball would be an acceptable upgrade.

"Baseball and Writing"
by Marianne Moore

(Suggested by post-game broadcasts)

Fanaticism?  No.  Writing is exciting and baseball is like writing.    You can never tell with either       how it will go       or what you will do;    generating excitement--    a fever in the victim--    pitcher, catcher, fielder, batter.  Victim in what category? Owlman watching from the press box?  To whom does it apply?  Who is excited?  Might it be I?  It's a pitcher's battle all the way--a duel-- a catcher's, as, with cruel    puma paw, Elston Howard lumbers lightly       back to plate.  (His spring        de-winged a bat swing.)    They have that killer instinct;    yet Elston--whose catching    arm has hurt them all with the bat--  when questioned, says, unenviously,    "I'm very satisfied.  We won."  Shorn of the batting crown, says, "We";  robbed by a technicality.  When three players on a side play three positions and modify conditions,    the massive run need not be everything.       "Going, going . . . "  Is       it?  Roger Maris    has it, running fast.  You will    never see a finer catch.  Well . . .    "Mickey, leaping like the devil"--why  gild it, although deer sounds better-- snares what was speeding towards its treetop nest,  one-handing the souvenir-to-be  meant to be caught by you or me.  Assign Yogi Berra to Cape Canaveral; he could handle any missile.    He is no feather.  "Strike! . . . Strike two!"       Fouled back.  A blur.       It's gone.  You would infer    that the bat had eyes.    He put the wood to that one. Praised, Skowron says, "Thanks, Mel.    I think I helped a little bit."  All business, each, and modesty.         Blanchard, Richardson, Kubek, Boyer.  In that galaxy of nine, say which  won the pennant?  Each.  It was he.  Those two magnificent saves from the knee-throws by Boyer, finesses in twos--    like Whitey's three kinds of pitch and pre-       diagnosis       with pick-off psychosis.    Pitching is a large subject.    Your arm, too true at first, can learn to    catch your corners--even trouble  Mickey Mantle.  ("Grazed a Yankee! My baby pitcher, Montejo!"  With some pedagogy,  you'll be tough, premature prodigy.)  They crowd him and curve him and aim for the knees.  Trying indeed!  The secret implying:    "I can stand here, bat held steady."       One may suit him;        none has hit him.    Imponderables smite him.    Muscle kinks, infections, spike wounds    require food, rest, respite from ruffians.  (Drat it!  Celebrity costs privacy!) Cow's milk, "tiger's milk," soy milk, carrot juice,  brewer's yeast (high-potency--  concentrates presage victory  sped by Luis Arroyo, Hector Lopez-- deadly in a pinch.  And "Yes,    it's work; I want you to bear down,       but enjoy it       while you're doing it."    Mr. Houk and Mr. Sain,    if you have a rummage sale,    don't sell Roland Sheldon or Tom Tresh.  Studded with stars in belt and crown, the Stadium is an adastrium.  O flashing Orion,  your stars are muscled like the lion. 

Wednesday Poetry: "Harvest," by Louise Glück

So: I've recently returned to Newark, New Jersey, after a month spent in Pennsylvania. It was a difficult period of time, with emotional highs and lows--but that's hardly the topic for today's post, which I hope marks a return to the normalcy of these jottings that I had [once again] achieved at the start of June.

We'll start off slow, with a poem that explores the relationships between the living and the dead, between lessons and practicing that knowledge. In "Harvest," Louise Glück juxtaposes gathering food to sustain oneself against the inevitable death of the plants, spurring one life while uprooting another. But it's neither entirely good nor entirely bad; this poem suggests that the strength we draw from harvests (either the literal kind or the metaphorical reaping of wisdom from the fields of our forebears' experiences and tales) is at once a gift and a curse. We are cursed, in that we have lost that source; we are fortunate, in that we carry those fruits within. Yet, we exist precisely because of this conundrum.

"Harvest," by Louise Glück

It grieves me to think of you in the past--


Look at you, blindly clinging to earth
as though it were the vineyards of heaven
while the fields go up in flames around you--

Ah, little ones, how unsubtle you are:
it is at once the gift and the torment.


If what you fear in death
is punishment beyond this, you need not
fear death:


how many times must I destroy my own creation
to teach you
this is your punishment:


with one gesture I established you
in time and in paradise.

(You can find "Harvest" and many other poems in Glück's collection The Wild Iris.)

Wednesday Poetry: "The Mute Cat," by Les Murray

Consider today's entry a follow-up to Monday's post, a glance at a bit of what Les Murray can do as a poet, when not writing about mental illness. This poem comes from his 2010 collection Taller When Prone.

I'll admit that this selection may or may not have something to do with my long-ago conversion to the loyal ranks of cat-adorers everywhere. As a bibliophile and ailurophile (fancyshmancy term for cat-lover), I must say that my favorite stanza is the final one.

"The Mute Cat," by Les Murray

Clean water in the house
but the cat laps up clay water
outside. Drinking the earth.

His pile, being perfect,
ignores the misting rain.

A charcoal Russian
he opens his mouth like other cats
and mimes a greeting mew.

At one bound top-speed across
the lawn and halfway up
the zippy pear tree. Why? Branches?
Stopping puzzles him.

Eloquent of purr
or indignant tail
he politely hates to be picked up.
His human friend never does it.

He finds a voice
in the flyscreen, rattling it,
hanging cruciform on it,
all to be let in
to walk on his man.

He can fish food pellets
out of the dispenser, but waits,
preferring to be served.

A mouse he was playing
on the grass ran in under him.
Disconsolate, at last he wandered
off -- and drew and fired
himself in one motion.

He is often above you
and appears where you will go.

He swallows his scent, and
discreet with his few stained birds
he carries them off to read.

Wednesday Poetry: "The Makers," by Howard Nemerov

We can never find that initial thing that got us going, that initial inspiration that transcends generations. That's something that Howard Nemerov explores in his poem "The Makers," which attempts to look back at poetry's genealogy with the ultimate conclusion that what really matters is this: that all of those physical, tangible sensations get passed down throughout history via poetic tropes and images. It doesn't matter who those first poets were, nor does it matter what precise tree or rock or star was originally described. The fact that we can share these descriptions and bond over them--that's what matters most. The repetition of these sensory details tells us something essential about the human experience.

(I could into a long tangent about how we can read this poem through the lens of Jacques Derrida's idea of différance, how we have these words that pay homage to an original that we can never actually observe, but I won't do that to all of you.)

"The Makers"
Who can remember back to the first poets,
The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus?
No one has remembered that far back
Or now considers, among the artifacts,
And bones and cantilevered inference
The past is made of, those first and greatest poets,
So lofty and disdainful of renown
They left us not a name to know them by.

They were the ones that in whatever tongue
Worded the world, that were the first to say
Star, water, stone, that said the visible
And made it bring invisibles to view
In wind and time and change, and in the mind
Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world
And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers
Of the city into the astonished sky.

They were the first great listeners, attuned
To interval, relationship, and scale,
The first to say above, beneath, beyond,
Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine,
Who having uttered vanished from the world
Leaving no memory but the marvelous
Magical elements, the breathing shapes
And stops of breath we build our Babels of.

For an added treat, listen to Hillary Rodham Clinton reading "The Makers" when she was First Lady! The video is part of the Favorite Poem Project, and HRC follows it with a brief explanation of why she picked this poem.

Wednesday Poetry: "The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls," by e.e. cummings

Been a while since a Wednesday poetry entry. Though it's the cruelest month, I won't give you all T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. I will, though, give you a poem from e.e. cummings, who often gets lumped into American modernism. "The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls" does not have the formal play that often appears in cummings's poems, but it does tell us something about those who compartmentalize and refuse to move outside of their philosophical/ideological comfort zones. These sorts of people, who live in their own mental boxes, fail to understand the hugeness of the world beyond. So--here's some e.e. cummings.

"The Cambridge Ladies Who Live in Furnished Souls"

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls

are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds

(also, with the church's protestant blessings

daughters,unscented shapeless spirited)

they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,

are invariably interested in so many things--

at the present writing one still finds

delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?

perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy

scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D

.... the Cambridge ladies do not care, above

Cambridge if sometimes in its box of

sky lavender and cornerless, the

moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

Wednesday Poetry: "A Postcard from the Volcano," by Wallace Stevens

I've recently started getting into Wallace Stevens's poetry. The interest stems, partially, from the fact that Stevens was a Pennsylvanian who departed from that state (I'm learning that PA has some serious issues with retaining its artists), but I'm more interested in the philosophy of his poems.

"A Postcard from the Volcano" builds together a variety of images that open us up to a wide range of readings. We can see, from the "[c]hildren picking up our bones," a reading that focuses on the older generation lamenting its death and what little it has left to its successors, but there are also intimations that the development of culture is beyond our control: Stevens places spring clouds above a shuttered mansion house in the middle of the poem, which suggests that even new seasons arrive over our closed-off institutions. There are lots of different ways to read this poem.

This poem contains lots of complicated imagery, so don't rely on my gloss alone.

"A Postcard from the Volcano" (1936)
Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow
Above the shuttered mansion-house,
Beyond our gate and the windy sky

Cries out a literate despair.
We knew for long the mansion's look
And what we said of it became

A part of what it is...Children,
Still weaving budded aureoles,
Will speak our speech and never know,

Will say of the mansion that it seems
As if he that lived there left behind
A spirit storming in blank walls,

A dirty house in a gutted world,
A tatter of shadows peaked to white,
Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

Wednesday Poetry: "The Fool," by Hugh MacDiarmid

I found myself thinking about MacDiarmid's poetry recently, in part because of a book I blogged about recently--Irvine Welsh's The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs. At several points throughout the novel, Welsh's protagonist, Danny Skinner, thinks about a collection of MacDiarmid's poetry that he has been intending to read. Skinner thinks to himself, though, that it's a bit difficult to trust somebody who has changed his name.

Hugh MacDiarmid is the pseudonym for the Scottish, modernist poet Christopher Murray Grieve (1892-1978). In this short poem, "The Fool," MacDiarmid forces us to reconsider delusions. There's a "fool" who believes he's God, and the narrator possess a similar touch of insanity, which we see in the poem's final lines--a suggestion that the narrator believes himself capable of killing God.

So at the poem's end, who is the fool? The man who believes he's God, or the narrator hoping to be a God-killer, who leaves a body in a pool?

"The Fool"

He said that he was God.
'We are well met,' I cried.
'I've always hoped I should
Meet God before I died.'

I slew him then and cast
His corpse into a pool,
--But how I wish he had
Indeed been God, the fool!

Wednesday Poetry: "ohio," by m loncar

First of all, what's with poets deciding that they're too cool for capitalization? Dear poets--you are not all e.e. cummings. And sure, it looks cool when he did it, but what's your reason?

I digress. Today's "Wednesday Poetry" offering comes from the collection 66 galaxie by m loncar, one of those lower-cased poets, and he is a graduate of Michigan's MFA program. The "narrative" of the book, if you will, is a trip across the country, and this poem--"ohio"--exemplifies what we remember from most long trips. It is not the landscapes that we remember when in transit, or necessarily the conversations, but those things that frustrate, harry, or harrow us. These are the things that make the journey drag or aggravate us to drive at 90 mph, just to get it over. These experiences include, but are certainly not limited to, spilling coffee on your lap. loncar's Ohio is a total spill, a place where the coffee is bad, a place where good things slip out of your hand and dissipate on your lap. Some might say it sounds freakishly like the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Some might say that.

(And next to DFW's "Great Ohio Desert," complete with black sand, in The Broom of the System, I find this to be a fair rendering of that state.)

"ohio"

besides spilling the better half, as well as the steamier half,
of mcdonald's best try at a cup of coffee on my crotch,
the ride out of ohio passed without incident

Wednesday Poetry: "Histories," by Eavan Boland

Today's poem comes from Eavan Boland's 2007 collection Domestic Violence, and the poem itself comes from the title sequence.

"Histories"

That was the year the news was always bad
(statistics on the radio)
the sad
truth no less so for being constantly repeated.

That was the year my mother was outside
in the shed
in her apron with the strings tied
twice behind her back and the door left wide.

Wednesday Poetry: "Summer Storm in the Animal Graveyard," by Irene McKinney

Irene McKinney, a Professor Emerita at West Virginia Wesleyan College, is the author of five books of poetry. As a West Virginia native, McKinney often uses her poems to engage life in rural America, specifically in Appalachia. Her poems range in subject matter from the connections between people and the animals they raise to sexuality and womanhood.

The below poem is anthologized in Irene McKinney's collection Unthinkable: Selected Poems, 1976-2004, published by Red Hen Press. The poem first appeared in McKinney's 1976 poetry collection The Girl with the Stone in Her Lap.

"Summer Storm in the Animal Graveyard"

A shiver of violets runs over the ground,
the low branches of the Sour Russet dip and scrape.
Cows who died in labor, late apples pounding
the ground in the fall, piglets rolled on
in a wallowing grunt by the sow.

A wild rearing of the wind: it stands up and walks.
Dark scuds the sky, the quick touch of rain
over the bright level stretch of grass flattening.
A rumbling ache in the earth as
the storm breaks out, galloping.

The horse who died at the plow
fell to his knees after twenty years--
his legs must be cut off to fit him in the grave.
The limestone vein in the hill, loosened by rain,
replaced each cell and made him stone.

Flying home, hundreds of starlings killed
in the attic (their fluttering kept us awake at night)
bundled in a lumpy blanket into one large hole.
Now in the high wind, they speck the sky
like flecks of ash, twirling and rising.

Falling, the cool rain veers toward
the green line of the bitter hickories.
The sad sheep walk to death, so quiet,
like nothing was happening, and lie down.
The trees shift and settle after the storm.

Wednesday Poetry: "Genesis," by K.A. Hays

"Genesis" appears in K.A. Hays's collection Dear Apocalypse, released by Carnegie Mellon Press in 2009. From 2008-2010, she was the Emerging Writer Fellow at Bucknell University. As always, read! Check it out from a library or buy--the link above takes you to the B&N page.

"Genesis"

The ocean chafed and slashed when I was four,
of course. The sand smoldered and the rocks
bladed pools that filled and drained. The hub

of all this wonder, I hunched over the coquinas--mollusks
the size of a toenail--digging and laying them out
along the bruise of sea. I made them sun-glossed, perfect.

They fought my will, shone nakedly, snaked down.
It thrilled me, their insistence--that a being with only a foot
could want and believe in someplace after here,

choosing to leave the whip of sun and churn of breakers,
headed somewhere freer, darker.
I took up my shovel. I idled away.

Wednesday Poetry: "Falling," by James Dickey

"Falling," by James Dickey

A 29-year-old stewardess fell ... to her
death tonight when she was swept
through an emergency door that sud-
denly sprang open ... The body ...
was found ... three hours after the
accident.

—New York Times

The states when they black out and lie there rolling when they turn

To something transcontinental move by drawing moonlight out of the great

One-sided stone hung off the starboard wingtip some sleeper next to

An engine is groaning for coffee and there is faintly coming in

Somewhere the vast beast-whistle of space. In the galley with its racks

Of trays she rummages for a blanket and moves in her slim tailored

Uniform to pin it over the cry at the top of the door. As though she blew

The door down with a silent blast from her lungs frozen she is black

Out finding herself with the plane nowhere and her body taking by the throat

The undying cry of the void falling living beginning to be something

That no one has ever been and lived through screaming without enough air

Still neat lipsticked stockinged girdled by regulation her hat

Still on her arms and legs in no world and yet spaced also strangely

With utter placid rightness on thin air taking her time she holds it

In many places and now, still thousands of feet from her death she seems

To slow she develops interest she turns in her maneuverable body

To watch it. She is hung high up in the overwhelming middle of things in her

Self in low body-whistling wrapped intensely in all her dark dance-weight

Coming down from a marvellous leap with the delaying, dumfounding ease

Of a dream of being drawn like endless moonlight to the harvest soil

Of a central state of one’s country with a great gradual warmth coming

Over her floating finding more and more breath in what she has been using

For breath as the levels become more human seeing clouds placed honestly

Below her left and right riding slowly toward them she clasps it all

To her and can hang her hands and feet in it in peculiar ways and

Her eyes opened wide by wind, can open her mouth as wide wider and suck

All the heat from the cornfields can go down on her back with a feeling

Of stupendous pillows stacked under her and can turn turn as to someone

In bed smile, understood in darkness can go away slant slide

Off tumbling into the emblem of a bird with its wings half-spread

Or whirl madly on herself in endless gymnastics in the growing warmth

Of wheatfields rising toward the harvest moon. There is time to live

In superhuman health seeing mortal unreachable lights far down seeing

An ultimate highway with one late priceless car probing it arriving

In a square town and off her starboard arm the glitter of water catches

The moon by its one shaken side scaled, roaming silver My God it is good

And evil lying in one after another of all the positions for love

Making dancing sleeping and now cloud wisps at her no

Raincoat no matter all small towns brokenly brighter from inside

Cloud she walks over them like rain bursts out to behold a Greyhound

Bus shooting light through its sides it is the signal to go straight

Down like a glorious diver then feet first her skirt stripped beautifully

Up her face in fear-scented cloths her legs deliriously bare then

Arms out she slow-rolls over steadies out waits for something great

To take control of her trembles near feathers planes head-down

The quick movements of bird-necks turning her head gold eyes the insight-

eyesight of owls blazing into the hencoops a taste for chicken overwhelming

Her the long-range vision of hawks enlarging all human lights of cars

Freight trains looped bridges enlarging the moon racing slowly

Through all the curves of a river all the darks of the midwest blazing

From above. A rabbit in a bush turns white the smothering chickens

Huddle for over them there is still time for something to live

With the streaming half-idea of a long stoop a hurtling a fall

That is controlled that plummets as it wills turns gravity

Into a new condition, showing its other side like a moon shining

New Powers there is still time to live on a breath made of nothing

But the whole night time for her to remember to arrange her skirt

Like a diagram of a bat tightly it guides her she has this flying-skin

Made of garments and there are also those sky-divers on tv sailing

In sunlight smiling under their goggles swapping batons back and forth

And He who jumped without a chute and was handed one by a diving

Buddy. She looks for her grinning companion white teeth nowhere

She is screaming singing hymns her thin human wings spread out

From her neat shoulders the air beast-crooning to her warbling

And she can no longer behold the huge partial form of the world now

She is watching her country lose its evoked master shape watching it lose

And gain get back its houses and peoples watching it bring up

Its local lights single homes lamps on barn roofs if she fell

Into water she might live like a diver cleaving perfect plunge

Into another heavy silver unbreathable slowing saving

Element: there is water there is time to perfect all the fine

Points of diving feet together toes pointed hands shaped right

To insert her into water like a needle to come out healthily dripping

And be handed a Coca-Cola there they are there are the waters

Of life the moon packed and coiled in a reservoir so let me begin

To plane across the night air of Kansas opening my eyes superhumanly

Bright to the damned moon opening the natural wings of my jacket

By Don Loper moving like a hunting owl toward the glitter of water

One cannot just fall just tumble screaming all that time one must use

It she is now through with all through all clouds damp hair

Straightened the last wisp of fog pulled apart on her face like wool revealing

New darks new progressions of headlights along dirt roads from chaos

And night a gradual warming a new-made, inevitable world of one’s own

Country a great stone of light in its waiting waters hold hold out

For water: who knows when what correct young woman must take up her body

And fly and head for the moon-crazed inner eye of midwest imprisoned

Water stored up for her for years the arms of her jacket slipping

Air up her sleeves to go all over her? What final things can be said

Of one who starts her sheerly in her body in the high middle of night

Air to track down water like a rabbit where it lies like life itself

Off to the right in Kansas? She goes toward the blazing-bare lake

Her skirts neat her hands and face warmed more and more by the air

Rising from pastures of beans and under her under chenille bedspreads

The farm girls are feeling the goddess in them struggle and rise brooding

On the scratch-shining posts of the bed dreaming of female signs

Of the moon male blood like iron of what is really said by the moan

Of airliners passing over them at dead of midwest midnight passing

Over brush fires burning out in silence on little hills and will wake

To see the woman they should be struggling on the rooftree to become

Stars: for her the ground is closer water is nearer she passes

It then banks turns her sleeves fluttering differently as she rolls

Out to face the east, where the sun shall come up from wheatfields she must

Do something with water fly to it fall in it drink it rise

From it but there is none left upon earth the clouds have drunk it back

The plants have sucked it down there are standing toward her only

The common fields of death she comes back from flying to falling

Returns to a powerful cry the silent scream with which she blew down

The coupled door of the airliner nearly nearly losing hold

Of what she has done remembers remembers the shape at the heart

Of cloud fashionably swirling remembers she still has time to die

Beyond explanation. Let her now take off her hat in summer air the contour

Of cornfields and have enough time to kick off her one remaining

Shoe with the toes of the other foot to unhook her stockings

With calm fingers, noting how fatally easy it is to undress in midair

Near death when the body will assume without effort any position

Except the one that will sustain it enable it to rise live

Not die nine farms hover close widen eight of them separate, leaving

One in the middle then the fields of that farm do the same there is no

Way to back off from her chosen ground but she sheds the jacket

With its silver sad impotent wings sheds the bat’s guiding tailpiece

Of her skirt the lightning-charged clinging of her blouse the intimate

Inner flying-garment of her slip in which she rides like the holy ghost

Of a virgin sheds the long windsocks of her stockings absurd

Brassiere then feels the girdle required by regulations squirming

Off her: no longer monobuttocked she feels the girdle flutter shake

In her hand and float upward her clothes rising off her ascending

Into cloud and fights away from her head the last sharp dangerous shoe

Like a dumb bird and now will drop in soon now will drop

In like this the greatest thing that ever came to Kansas down from all

Heights all levels of American breath layered in the lungs from the frail

Chill of space to the loam where extinction slumbers in corn tassels thickly

And breathes like rich farmers counting: will come along them after

Her last superhuman act the last slow careful passing of her hands

All over her unharmed body desired by every sleeper in his dream:

Boys finding for the first time their loins filled with heart’s blood

Widowed farmers whose hands float under light covers to find themselves

Arisen at sunrise the splendid position of blood unearthly drawn

Toward clouds all feel something pass over them as she passes

Her palms over her long legs her small breasts and deeply between

Her thighs her hair shot loose from all pins streaming in the wind

Of her body let her come openly trying at the last second to land

On her back This is it this

All those who find her impressed

In the soft loam gone down driven well into the image of her body

The furrows for miles flowing in upon her where she lies very deep

In her mortal outline in the earth as it is in cloud can tell nothing

But that she is there inexplicable unquestionable and remember

That something broke in them as well and began to live and die more

When they walked for no reason into their fields to where the whole earth

Caught her interrupted her maiden flight told her how to lie she cannot

Turn go away cannot move cannot slide off it and assume another

Position no sky-diver with any grin could save her hold her in his arms

Plummet with her unfold above her his wedding silks she can no longer

Mark the rain with whirling women that take the place of a dead wife

Or the goddess in Norwegian farm girls or all the back-breaking whores

Of Wichita. All the known air above her is not giving up quite one

Breath it is all gone and yet not dead not anywhere else

Quite lying still in the field on her back sensing the smells

Of incessant growth try to lift her a little sight left in the corner

Of one eye fading seeing something wave lies believing

That she could have made it at the best part of her brief goddess

State to water gone in headfirst come out smiling invulnerable

Girl in a bathing-suit ad but she is lying like a sunbather at the last

Of moonlight half-buried in her impact on the earth not far

From a railroad trestle a water tank she could see if she could

Raise her head from her modest hole with her clothes beginning

To come down all over Kansas into bushes on the dewy sixth green

Of a golf course one shoe her girdle coming down fantastically

On a clothesline, where it belongs her blouse on a lightning rod:

Lies in the fields in this field on her broken back as though on

A cloud she cannot drop through while farmers sleepwalk without

Their women from houses a walk like falling toward the far waters

Of life in moonlight toward the dreamed eternal meaning of their farms

Toward the flowering of the harvest in their hands that tragic cost

Feels herself go go toward go outward breathes at last fully

Not and tries less once tries tries ah, god—

Wednesday Poetry: "Author's Prayer," by Ilya Kaminsky

"Author's Prayer," from Dancing in Odessa, by Ilya Kaminsky

If I speak for the dead, I must leave
this animal of my body,

I must write the same poem over and over,
for an empty page is the white flag of their surrender.

If I speak for them, I must walk on edge
of myself, I must live as a blind man

who runs through rooms without
touching the furniture.

Yes, I live. I can cross the streets asking "What ear is it?"
I can dance in my sleep and laugh

in front of the mirror.
Even sleep is a prayer, Lord,

I will praise your madness, and
in a language not mine, speak

of music that wakes us, music
in which we move. For whatever I say

is a kind of petition, and the darkest
days must I praise.

Wednesday Poetry: "Of Nicolette," by e.e. cummings

I've been gone from this far too long...but I'm finally "settled" (mostly) into Newark, and I've got the books all shelved and made plenty of places for my cat to hide and scurry! Upcoming posts--which will happen, I promise--include a glance at the American short story and whatever else happens that I find of interest.

But let's ease things back in with a bit of Wednesday Poetry...

"Of Nicolette," by e.e. cummings

dreaming in marble all the castle lay
like some gigantic ghost-flower born of night
blossoming in white towers to the moon,
soft sighed the passionate darkness to the tune
of tiny troubadours, and (phantom-white)
dumb-blooming boughs let fall their glorious snows,
and the unearthly sweetness of a rose
swam upward from the troubled heart of May;

a Winged Passion woke and one by one
there fell upon the night, like angel's tears,
the syllables of that mysterious prayer,
and as an opening lily drowsy-fair
(when from her couch of poppy petals peers
the sleepy morning) gently draws apart
her curtains, and lays bare her trembling heart
with beads of dew made jewels by the sun,

so one high shining tower (which as a glass
turned light to flame and blazed with snowy fire)
unfolding, gave the moon a nymphlike face,
a form whose snowy symmetry of grace
haunted the limbs as music haunts the lyre,
a creature of white hands, who letting fall
a thread of lustre from the castle wall
glided, a drop of radiance, to the grass--

shunning the sudden moonbeam's treacherous snare
she sought the harbouring dark, and (catching up
her delicate silk) all white, with shining feet,
went forth into the dew: right wildly beat
her heart at every kiss of daisy-cup,
and from her cheek the beauteous colour went
with every bough that reverently bent
to touch the yellow wonder of her hair.

Wednesday Poetry: "An Apprehension," by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"An Apprehension," by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

IF all the gentlest-hearted friends I know
Concentred in one heart their gentleness,
That still grew gentler till its pulse was less
For life than pity,--I should yet be slow
To bring my own heart nakedly below
The palm of such a friend, that he should press
Motive, condition, means, appliances,

My false ideal joy and fickle woe,
Out full to light and knowledge; I should fear
Some plait between the brows, some rougher chime
In the free voice. O angels, let your flood
Of bitter scorn dash on me ! do ye hear
What I say who hear calmly all the time
This everlasting face to face with GOD ?

Wednesday Poetry: "The Plaster," by W.S. Merwin

"The Plaster," from The Lice, by W.S. Merwin

How unlike you
To have left the best of your writings here
Behind the plaster where they were never to be found
These stanzas of long lines into which the Welsh words
Had been flung like planks from a rough sea
How will I

Ever know now how much was not like you
And what else was committed to paper here
On the dark burst sofa where you would later die
Its back has left a white mark on the white wall and above that
Five and a half indistinct squares of daylight
Like pages in water
Slide across the blind plaster

Into which you slipped the creased writings as into a mail slot
In a shroud

This is now the house of the rain that falls from death
The sky is moving its things in from under the trees
In silence
As it must have started to do even then
There is still a pile of dirty toys and rags
In the corner where they found the children
Rolled in sleep

Other writings
Must be dissolving in the roof
Twitching black edges in cracks of the wet fireplaces
Stuck to shelves in the filthy pantry
Never to be found
What is like you now

Who were haunted all your life by the best of you
Hiding in your death

Wednesday Poetry: "Conversation Among the Ruins," by Sylvia Plath

Striking some new ground in Wednesday poetry with Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), who along with Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and W.D. Snodgrass is known for advancing the genre of so-called "confessional" poetry. In these poems, it's assumed that the speaker is the poet and that what we're hearing is the poet's actual sentiments and perspectives. (IMHO, I think confessional poetry has ruined many later poems written in the first person, because now students of literature are trained to say "The poet says..." instead of recognizing that a narrator doesn't have to be the poet her-/himself.)

But this poem, "Conversation Among Ruins," has a blip of the first person in the opening line and then moves into a more lyrical mode. Afterwards, the first person is mostly communal--an "our," for instance--so instead of self-centered whining we get Plath trying to negotiate a relationship; the title intimates as much, in informing the reader that this poem is a conversation, a dialogue of sorts, on a ruined property. Plath takes us from the steps of the narrator's "elegant house" and then, through appropriating the imagery of a dilapidated estate, reveals the crumbling of any structure or system--actual or imagined--over time.

"Conversation Among Ruins"

Through portico of my elegant house you stalk
With your wild furies, disturbing garlands of fruit
And the fabulous lutes and peacocks, rending the net
Of all decorum which holds the whirlwind back.
Now, rich order of walls is fallen; rooks croak
Above the appalling ruin; in bleak light
Of your stormy eye, magic takes flight
Like a daunted witch, quitting castle when real days break.

Fractured pillars frame prospects of rock;
While you stand heroic in coat and tie, I sit
Composed in Grecian tunic and psyche-knot,
Rooted to your black look, the play turned tragic:
Which such blight wrought on our bankrupt estate,
What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?

Wednesday Poetry: "Grief Thief of Time," by Dylan Thomas

Today's bit of Wednesday poetry comes from Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, most famous for "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night." Enjoy!

"Grief Thief of Time"
Grief thief of time crawls off,
The moon-drawn grave, with the seafaring years,
The knave of pain steals off
The sea-halved faith that blew time to his knees,
The old forget the cries,
Lean time on tide and times the wind stood rough,
Call back the castaways
Riding the sea light on a sunken path,
The old forget the grief,
Hack of the cough, the hanging albatross,
Cast back the bone of youth
And salt-eyed stumble bedward where she lies
Who tossed the high tide in a time of stories
And timelessly lies loving with the thief.

Now Jack my fathers let the time-faced crook,
Death flashing from his sleeve,
With swag of bubbles in a seedy sack
Sneak down the stallion grave,
Bull's-eye the outlaw through a eunuch crack
And free the twin-boxed grief,
No silver whistles chase him down the weeks'
Dayed peaks to day to death,
These stolen bubbles have the bites of snakes
And the undead eye-teeth,
No third eye probe into a rainbow's sex
That bridged the human halves,
All shall remain and on the graveward gulf
Shape with my fathers' thieves.

Wednesday Poetry: "The Peddler," by Charlotte Mew

Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) is one of those interesting late Victorian poetesses whose life was torn between her family's attempt to keep a genteel front and the reality of financial hardship. She's an interesting figure who during her own time was seen as a pitiable, pathetic figure, but the rhythm of her lines--as well as her willingness to use long lines and break with traditional forms--adds a radical element to her poetry that has not until relatively recently been recognized.

So look her up, have a read, and enjoy the poem.

"The Peddler," by Charlotte Mew

Lend me a while the key
That locks your heavy heart, and I'll give you back--
Rarer than books and ribbons and beads bright to see
This Key of Dreams out of my pack.

The road, the road, beyond men's bolted doors,
There shall I walk and you go free of me,
For yours lies North across the moors,
And mine South. To what seas?

How if we stopped and let our solemn selves go by,
While my gay ghost caught and kissed yours, as ghosts don't do,
And by the wayside, this forgotten you and I
Sat, and were twenty-two?

Give me the key that locks your tired eyes,
And I will lend you this one from my pack,
Brighter than coloured beads and painted books that make men wise:
Take it. No, give it back!

Wednesday Poetry: "To Sleep," by Henri Cole

Recently, I had poet Henri Cole's sixth book, Blackbird and Wolf, recommended to me, so I've been giving that a read over the past few days. Cole's poetry uses an interesting mix of imagery, sensation, and autobiography, and his poems tend to investigate the human experience while trying to understand the lives of other people and animals.

"To Sleep"
Then out of the darkness leapt a bare hand
that stroked my brow, "Come a long, child:
stretch out your feet under the blanket.
Darkness will give you back, unremembering.
Do not be afraid." So I put down my book
and pushed like a finger through sheer silk,
the autobiographical part of me, the am,
snatched up to a different place, where I was
no longer my body but something more--
the compulsive, disorderly parts of me
in a state of equalization, everything sliding off:
war, suicide, love, poverty--as the rebellious,
mortal I, I, I lay, like a beetle irrigating a rose,
my red thoughts in a red shade all I was.

Blackbird and Wolf available from Barnes & Noble in hardcover and paperback.