Friday, April 30, 2010

The Shopping-Bag Lady


The Shopping-Bag Lady


You told people I would know easily
what the murdered lady had in her sack
which could prove she was happy
more or less.
As if they were a game,
the old women who carry all they own
in bags, maybe proudly, without homes
we think except the streets.
But if I could guess
(nothing in sets for example),
I would not. They are like those men
who lay their few things on the ground
in a park at the end of Hester.
For sale perhaps, but who can tell?
Like her way of getting money.
Never asking.
Sideways and disconcerting.
With no thanks, only judgment.
“You are a nice girl,”
one said as she moved away
and then stopped in front of a bum
sitting on the bench who yelled
that he would kill her
if she did not get away from him.
She walked at an angle
not exactly away
but until she was the same
distance from each of us.
Stood still, looking down.
Standing in our attention
as if it were a palpable thing.
Like the city itself
or the cold winter.
Holding her hands.
And if there was disgrace,
it was God’s.
The failure was ours as she remained
quiet near the concrete wall
with cars coming
and the sound of the subway
filling and fading
in the most important place
we have yet devised.


Linda Gregg

Posted over on Poetry Foundation

The Container For the Thing Contained


"Picasso Painting Dora Maar" by Antonio Pessoa.


THE CONTAINER FOR THE THING CONTAINED

What is the man searching for
inside her blouse?
He has been with her body
for seven years
and still is surprised
by the arches of her
slender feet.
He still traces her spine
with careful attention,
feeling for the bones
of her pelvic girdle
when he arrives there.
Her flesh is bright in sunlight
and then not
as he leans forward and back.
Picasso in his later prints shows
himself as a grotesque painter
watching closely a young Spanish woman
on the bed with her legs open
and the old duenna in black
to the side.
He had known nakedness every day
for sixty years. What could there be
in it still to find?
But he was happy even then to get
close to the distant,
distant intermittency.
Like a piano playing faintly
on a second floor in a back room.
The music seems familiar, but is not.

Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Jeremy's MySpace

There She Is


Painting by Diane Trembley


There She Is


When I go into the garden,
there she is.
The specter holds up her arms
to show that her hands are eaten off.
She is silent because of the agony.
There is blood on her face.
I can see she has done this to herself.
So she would not feel the other pain.
And it is true, she does not feel it.
She does not even see me.
It is not she anymore,
but the pain itself
that moves her.
I look and think how to forget.
How can I live while she
stands there? And if I take her life
what will that make of me?
I cannot touch her,
make her conscious.
It would hurt her too much.
I hear the sound all through the air
that was her eating,
but it is on its own now,
completely separate from her.
I think I am supposed to look.
I am not supposed to turn away.
I am supposed to see each detail
and all expression gone.
My God, I think,
if paradise is to be here
it will have to include her.

Linda Gregg

Posted over on Poetry Foundation

Highlights and Interstices


HIGHLIGHTS AND INTERSTICES


We think of lifetimes as mostly
the exceptional and sorrows.
Marriage we remember as the children,
vacations, and emergencies.
The uncommon parts.
But the best is often
when nothing is happening.
The way a mother picks up the child
almost without noticing
and carries her across Waller Street
while talking with the other woman.
What if she could keep all of that?
Our lives happen between the memorable.
I have lost two thousand habitual
breakfasts with Michiko.
What I miss most about her
is that commonplace
I can no longer remember.

Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Jeremy's MySpace

Lewis Carroll's Syllogisms


Once master the machinery of Symbolic Logic, and you have a mental occupation always at hand, of absorbing interest, and one that will be of real use to you in any subject you may take up. It will give you clearness of thought - the ability to see your way through a puzzle - the habit of arranging your ideas in an orderly and get-at-able form - and, more valuable than all, the power to detect fallacies, and to tear to pieces the flimsy illogical arguments, which you will so continually encounter in books, in newspapers, in speeches, and even in sermons, and which so easily delude those who have never taken the trouble to master this fascinating Art.
-- Lewis Carroll

1
All babies are illogical.
Nobody is despised
who can manage a crocodile
Illogical persons are despised.

2
None of the unnoticed things,
met with at sea, are mermaids.
Things entered in the log,
as met with at sea,
are sure to be worth remembering
I have never met with anything
worth remembering, when on a voyage.
Things met with at sea,
that are noticed,
are sure to be recorded in the log

3
No interesting poems are unpopular
among people of real taste.
No modern poetry is free
from affectation.
All your poems are
on the subject of soap-bubbles.
No affected poetry is popular
among people of real taste
No ancient poem is
on the subject of soap-bubbles.

4
My saucepans are the only things
I have that are made of tin.
I find all your presents very useful.
None of my saucepans
are of the slightest use.

5
No potatoes of mine, that are new,
have been boiled.
All my potatoes in this dish
are fit to eat.
No unboiled potatoes of mine
are fit to eat.

6
No ducks waltz.
No officers ever decline to waltz.
All my poultry are ducks.

7
Every one who is sane can do Logic.
No lunatics are fit to serve on a jury.
None of your sons can do logic.

8
No experienced person is incompetent.
Jenkins is always blundering.
No competent person is always blundering.

9
All puddings are nice.
This dish is a pudding.
No nice things are wholesome.

10
No one takes in the Times,
unless he is well educated.
No hedgehogs can read.
Those who cannot read
are not well educated.

11
All the old articles in this cupboard
are cracked.
No jug in this cupboard is new.
Nothing in this cupboard,
that is cracked, will hold water.

12
All unripe fruit is unwholesome.
All these apples are wholesome.
No fruit, grown in the shade, is ripe

13
All hummingbirds are richly colored.
No large birds live on honey.
Birds that do not live on honey
are dull in color.

14
Colored flowers are always scented.
I dislike flowers that are not grown
in the open air.
No flowers grown in the open air
are colorless.

15
All my sons are slim.
No child of mine is healthy
who takes no exercise.
All gluttons,
who are children of mine,
are fat.
No daughter of mine
takes any exercise.

16
Things sold in the street are
of no great value.
Nothing but rubbish can be
had for a song.
Eggs of the Great Auk
are very valuable.
It is only what is sold in the street
that is really rubbish.

17
No birds, except ostriches,
are 9 feet high.
There are no birds in this aviary
that belong to anyone but me.
No ostrich lives on mince pies.
I have no birds less than 9 feet high.

18
No boys under 12 are admitted
to this school as boarders.
All the industrious boys have red hair.
None of the dayboys learn Greek.
None but those under 12 are idle.

19
The only articles of food,
that my doctor allows me,
are such as are not very rich.
Nothing that agrees with me
is unsuitable for supper.
Wedding cake is always very rich.
My doctor allows me
all articles of food
that are suitable for supper.

20
The only books in this library,
that I do not recommend for reading,
are unhealthy in tone.
The bound books are all well written.
All the romances are healthy in tone.
I do not recommend you
to read any of the unbound books.

21
All writers,
who understand human nature,
are clever.
No one is a true poet unless
he can stir the hearts of men.
Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet”.
No writer, who does not understand
human nature, can stir the hearts of men.
None but a true poet
could have written “Hamlet”.

22
Promise breakers are untrustworthy.
Wine drinkers are very communicative.
A man who keeps his promises is honest.
No teetotalers are pawnbrokers.
One can always trust
a very communicative person.

23
I despise anything that cannot be used
as a bridge.
Everything, that is worth
writing an ode to,
would be a welcome gift to me.
A rainbow will not bear the weight
of a wheelbarrow.
Whatever can be used as a bridge
will bear the weight of a wheelbarrow.
I would not take, as a gift,
a thing that I despise.

24
No kitten, that loves fish, is unteachable.
No kitten without a tail
will play with a gorilla.
Kittens with whiskers always love fish.
No teachable kitten has green eyes.
No kittens have tails
unless they have whiskers.

25
Animals, that do not kick,
are always unexcitable.
Donkeys have no horns.
A buffalo can always
toss one over a gate.
No animals that kick
are easy to swallow.
No hornless animal
can toss one over a gate.
All animals are excitable,
except buffaloes.

26
No shark ever doubts
that he is well fitted out.
A fish, that cannot dance a minuet,
is contemptible.
No fish is quite certain
that it is well fitted out,
unless it has three rows of teeth.
All fishes, except sharks,
are kind to children.
No heavy fish can dance a minuet.
A fish with three rows of teeth
is not to be despised

27
No one, who is going to a party,
ever fails to brush his hair.
No one looks fascinating,
if he is untidy.
Opium eaters have no self-command.
Everyone, who has brushed his hair,
looks fascinating.
No one wears white kid gloves,
unless he is going to a party.
A man is always untidy,
if he has no self-command.

28
The only animals in this house are cats.
Every animal is suitable for a pet,
that loves to gaze at the moon.
When I detest an animal, I avoid it.
No animals are carnivorous,
unless they prowl at night.
No cat fails to kill mice.
No animals ever take to me,
except what are in this house.
Kangaroos are not suitable for pets.
None but carnivora kill mice.
I detest animals that do not take to me.
Animals, that prowl at night,
always love to gaze at the moon.

NOTE. Carroll, “surrealist in nonsense” (thus: André Breton), was also a professor of mathematics & logic at Oxford University. In the foregoing, a series of faux-syllogisms, he draws on & distorts source examples found in standard textbooks of logic. The resemblance in both method & result to David Antin’s “Stanzas,” 150 years later, is serendipitous but may still be worth noting. E.g.: “no one who can manage a crocodile is despised / children are illogical / illogical persons are despised / illogical persons cannot manage a crocodile.” (D. Antin, from Meditations, Black Sparrow Press, 1971) In a recent reading for Poems for the Millennium, volume 3, Antin was confident enough to take credit for his belated influence on Carroll.

Posted over on Jerome Rothenberg's Poems & Poetics

The Noodles Are Hanging Onto


the noodles are hanging onto

the noodles are hanging onto
each other for dear life, like
lovers being pulled
apart by an unseen
force, slowly – until
they are barely
touching, then touching
no more.

a simple bowl
of ramen seems
like love
at long last
lost. the mystery lies
in the way we can
still dance helices
around each other
.

Yi Ching Lin

Posted over on her site Yi's Bits on "Healthy Doses"

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Keep Back 200 Feet, or When I Started Counting


Image by Yi Ching Lin


keep back 200 feet, or when i started counting
.
i am eleven
impromptu shots away from
a full calendar
.

Yi-Ching Lin

Posted over on her site Yi's Bits on "Healthy Doses"

Elegance


Elegance


All that is uncared for.
Left alone in the stillness
in that pure silence married
to the stillness of nature.
A door off its hinges,
shade and shadows in an empty room.
Leaks for light. Raw where
the tin roof rusted through.
The rustle of weeds in their
different kinds of air in the mornings,
year after year.
A pecan tree, and the house
made out of mud bricks. Accurate
and unexpected beauty, rattling
and singing. If not to the sun,
then to nothing and to no one.

Linda Gregg

Posted over on Poetry Foundation

Ovid in Tears


Ovid in Tears

Love is like a garden in the heart,
he said.
They asked him what he meant by garden.
He explained about gardens.
“In the cities,” he said,
“there are places walled off
where color and decorum are magnified
into a civilization.
Like a beautiful woman,” he said.
How like a woman, they asked.
He remembered their wives and said
garden was just a figure of speech,
then called for drinks all around.
Two rounds later he was crying.
Talking about how Charlemagne
couldn’t read but still made a world.
About Hagia Sophia
and putting a round dome
on a square base after
nine hundred years of failure.
The hand holding him slipped
and he fell.
“White stone in the white sunlight,”
he said as they picked him up.
“Not the great fires built on the edge
of the world.” His voice grew
fainter as they carried him away.
“Both the melody and the symphony.
The imperfect dancing
in the beautiful dance.
The dance most of all.”


Jack Gilbert

Posted over on The Paris Review

Refusing Heaven



More than a decade after Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires, this highly anticipated new collection shows the continued development of a poet who has remained fierce in his avoidance of the beaten path. In Refusing Heaven, Gilbert writes compellingly about the commingled passion, loneliness, and sometimes surprising happiness of a life spent in luminous understanding of his own blessings and shortcomings: “The days and nights wasted . . . Long hot afternoons / watching ants while the cicadas railed / in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life.” Time slows down in these poems, as Gilbert creates an aura of curiosity and wonder at the fact of existence itself. Despite powerful intermittent griefs–over the women he has parted from or the one lost to cancer (an experience he captures with intimate precision)–Gilbert’s choice in this volume is to “refuse heaven.” He prefers this life, with its struggle and alienation and delight, to any paradise. His work is both a rebellious assertion of the call to clarity and a profound affirmation of the world in all its aspects. It braces the reader in its humanity and heart.

Jack Gilbert By Wittgenstein's watch, our eldest poets circle back to the theme of homecoming as inevitably as they age. Artists, the old fools, can only retire into the cult of yesteryear. The theory would have us believe what Philip Larkin wrote: those who dwell in memory's "lighted rooms" must be hoping to screen out signs of the blank last "days of thin, continuous dreaming." Jack Gilbert, often retrospective in his slim fifth book Refusing Heaven (Knopf), may play into this proposition, but the work remains - provocatively - just beyond its ambit. A master among us at seventy nine years old, Gilbert locates much of his new work in old haunts - Italy, the Greek islands, the lost hotels of Paris. With that in mind, we scan the subject matter - bridges made by memory, gazes held and broken, lives lived, loves lost, the incantatory effect of hard-won solitude - as just the airy nostalgia that might have raised the philosopher's hackles. "But it's the having / not the keeping that is the treasure," counters Gilbert. The close attention Gilbert lavishes on his slow, simple life resets the pace at which most of us might otherwise read, in effect doubling our return on his remembrance. Memory and the present state of mind work inextricably, the poems insist. Gilbert is chary of underestimating this link; he takes pain to trace it...

Linda Gregg


Linda Gregg

Born in New York, poet Linda Gregg was raised in Marin County, California. She received both a BA and an MA from San Francisco State University.

She was married for a time to poet Jack Gilbert.

Gregg has published several collections of poetry, including Too Bright to See (1981); Alma (1985); Things and Flesh (1999), finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award for Poetry; and All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems, a Los Angeles Times Favorite Book of 2008 and winner of the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. Gregg’s lyrical poetry is often admired for its ability to discuss grief, desire, and longing with electrifying craftsmanship and poise. Poet W.S. Merwin has praised Gregg’s poems, observing, “They are original in the way that really matters: they speak clearly of their source. They are inseparable from the surprising, unrolling, eventful, pure current of their language, and they convey at once the pain of individual loss, a steady and utterly personal radiance.”

Gregg has won a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Sara Teasdale Award, the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize, and numerous Pushcart Prizes. She has also been awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lannan Literary Foundation.

Marriage and Midsummer's Night


Painting by Mark Chagall


Marriage and Midsummer’s Night


It has been a long time now
since I stood in our dark room looking
across the court at my husband
in her apartment.
Watched them make love.
She was perhaps more beautiful
from where I stood than to him.
I can say it now:
She was like a vase
lit the way milky glass is lighted.
He looked more beautiful there
than I remember him the times
he entered my bed
with the light behind.
It has been ten years since I sat
at the open window,
my legs over the edge
and the knife close
like a discarded idea.
Looked up at the Danish night,
that pale, pale sky
where the birds that fly at dawn
flew on those days all night long,
black with the light behind.
They were caught by their instincts,
unable to end their flight.

Linda Gregg

Posted over on Poetry Foundation

Alone


Alone


I never thought Michiko would come back
after she died. But if she did, I knew
it would be as a lady in a long white dress.
It is strange that she has returned
as somebody’s dalmatian. I meet
the man walking her on a leash
almost every week. He says good morning
and I stoop down to calm her. He said
once that she was never like that with
other people. Sometimes she is tethered
on the lawn when I go by. If nobody
is around, I sit on the grass. When she
finally quiets, she puts her head in my lap
and we watch each other’s eyes as I whisper
in her soft ears. She cares nothing about
the mystery. She likes it best when
I touch her head and tell her small
things about my days and our friends.
That makes her happy the way it always did.


Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Alice Under Skies

Alone With the Goddess


Painting by Jonathon Bowser


Alone with the Goddess

The young men ride their horses fast
on the wet sand of Parangtritis.
Back and forth, with the water sliding
up to them and away.
This is the sea where the goddess lives,
angry, her lover taken away.
Don’t wear red, don’t wear green here,
the people say. Do not swim in the sea.
Give her an offering.
I give a coconut to protect
the man I love. The water pushes it back.
I wade out and throw it farther.
“The goddess does not accept your gift,”
an old woman says.
I say perhaps she likes me
and we are playing a game.
The old woman is silent,
the horses wear blinders of cloth,
the young men exalt in their bodies,
not seeing right or left, pretending
to be brave. Sliding on and off
their beautiful horses
on the wet beach at Parangtritis.


Linda Gregg

Posted over on Poetry Foundation

Perfected


Image by Dan Heller


Perfected


In the outskirts of the town
the street-sweeper puts down
his broom of faggots and angrily
begins to shake the young ginkgo.
The leaves fall faster.
He shakes it even harder
and the leaves fall by ones and twos.
He rests to calm himself.
A passing boy speeds up
and leaps in the air,
slamming the trunk with both feet.
The yellow leaves spurt out.
The three of them stand looking up.
One leaf falls, then more.

Jack Gilbert

Posted over on The Cortland Review

Getting Value


Painting by Jonathan Campo


GETTING VALUE


My elderly friend of many years arrived
last winter at my door with his nose
dripping onto the floor, and shaking
so hard you could hear his teeth clatter.
It was hard to get his clothes off
and him onto the sofa bed in my living room.
Filling me with memories of what
he used to be. What the French call
“monsters.” (Like Rodin.) His poetry is
deeper now. Bigger, and more tender
than ever. We wonder about the newness
of the old. And how much is missing.
He forgets names and directions.
Surely there is a hollowing out,
but how much that is left is more than
the past was? Shakespeare who stopped
writing. And the crippled Leonardo.
What about our very old god who is
now making his problematical children?

Linda Gregg

Posted over on Poet Island Press

Enter With Caution


ENTER WITH CAUTION


There will be the smell
of Greek sunlight with her
when she walks
from the train to the tram
that goes to Monastiraki Square.
She will walk to the brothel-
turned-hotel from there.
The next day there will be
the smell of crude oil
on the freighter from Piraeus
to an island.
She will be watching almond trees on
the mountain for the most
of the next seven years after that.
A goat bleating near its mother
by the stone house.
The well-cover bangs shut in October.
The sea is too strong all winter,
roaring even when it’s silent.
Covering her head completely
when she walks to town
along the edge of the shore.
The shepherd-boy sitting on a table
at the back of the taverna,
surrounded by happy farmers
giving him wine to drink.
Buying fresh donuts from the man
carrying them through the village
on his head every Monday.
Swimming in the sea all afternoon,
then eating the melon.
Twelve-year-old Stephanie
in only the bottom
of her bathing suit, standing
with great bunches of grapes,
laughing and jumping up and down
in the aqua water.
Walking to the mountain
where gods have been honored,
the brightness of the sun stunning.
Seeing broken libation cups in the weeds.
Living alone with the magnitude.
So close to the laws of its nature.

Linda Gregg

Posted over on Poet Island Press

The Friendship Inside Us


"the kiss" by Rik Lina


THE FRIENDSHIP INSIDE US


Why the mouth? Why is it the mouth
we put to mouth at the final moments?
Why not the famous groin?
Because the groin is far away.
The mouth is close up against the spirit.
We couple desperately all night
before setting out for years in prison.
But that is the body’s goodbye.
We kiss the person we love last thing
before the coffin is shut,
because it is our being
touching the unknown.
A kiss is the frontier in us.
It is where the courting
becomes the courtship,
where the dancing ends
and the dance begins.
The mouth is our chief access
to the intimacy in which she made reside.
Her mouth is the porch
of the brain.
The forecourt of the heart.
The way to the mystery enthroned.
Where we meet momentarily
amid the seraphim and the powers.


Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Poet Island Press

Parian Marble


PARIAN MARBLE


I was walking in the fields
with a friend and asked
what the farmers do when they plow up
something extraordinary.
He said it depends on what its worth.
They take it to a middleman.
“Look at that,” I said, and picked up
a five-pound marble head of Eros.
The cheeks protected the smile
but otherwise it was beaten up.
A crack down the forehead
and under one eye
made it seem to be frowning.
Behind us were four bushes:
sage, thyme, oregano, mirtia.
The sun was going down.
I would like to hold something
up against the ruin.
To show how the heart and spirit
pass the test. The look on the face
was understanding and blissful.
The light changed
and I hid it inside a bush
for another two thousand years.

Linda Gregg

Posted over on Poet Island Press

Infidelity


deviant art by gtako


INFIDELITY


She is never dead when he meets her.
They eat noodles for breakfast as usual.
For eleven years he thought
it was the river at the bottom
of his mind dreaming.
Now he knows she is living inside him,
as the wind is sometimes visible
in the trees. As the roses and rhubarb
are in the garden and then not.
Her ashes are by the sea in Kamakura.
Her face and hair and sweet body still
in the old villa on a mountain where
she lived the whole summer. They slept
on the floor for eleven years.
But now she comes less and less.

Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Poet Island Press

Flying Into Winter


Flying Into Winter

Jack Gilbert, now entering his mid-80s, is one of American poetry's most impassioned, singular and noteworthy voices. Although he has published infrequently and has spent much of his life living abroad in poverty and isolation, his reputation has grown steadily over the decades and he is now unquestionably among the most admired of living American poets. The title of his new collection, “Refusing Heaven” (Knopf, 92 pages, $16, paperback), is meant to imply that despite the unavoidable suffering of our ordinary lives, we have already lived in the real paradise. Consistent with that faith, he writes with a fierce, insistent joy even about his poverty, loneliness and the loss of those whom he has passionately loved, and seems daunted by neither illness nor aging, insisting in one poem that We make a harvest of loneliness / ... in the blank wasteland of the cosmos. He claims, in that same poem, that we are exalted by being temporary.

A master of the brief personal lyric whose work celebrates our gladness in the ruthless furnace of the world, Gilbert is a mystical sensualist, a love poet obsessed with the mystery of the female body and the miracle of erotic love, with the sweetness / of brief love and the perfection of loves / that might have been. But for him the erotic matters Not as / pleasure but a way to get to something darker. The present volume – it won the National Book Critics Circle Award – is dedicated to both the American poet Linda Gregg, his companion of several decades earlier in his life, and to the woman to whom he was married for 11 years, Michiko Nogami – both of them essential figures in the turbulent mythology of his earthly paradise.

Now and again Gilbert sabotages the austere grandeur of his vision by a failure of empathy, an adamant refusal to feel for the suffering of a hurt goat or butchered bird bleeding to death in a Greek kitchen, but on the other hand he does not pretend to be a man free of failings or at peace with himself. When a goddess in one of his poems remarks that he sounds like a man at peace, he joyfully demurs: I am not at peace ... I want to fail. I am hungry / for what I am becoming. What will you do? She asks. I will / continue north, carrying the past in my arms, flying into winter.

What is perhaps the volume's most stunning moment is, in fact, a confession of a haunting failure and regret. At Michiko's deathbed, the author tells us that he did not do what he had wished to do, as I sat there those / four hours watching her die. I wanted to crawl in among the machinery / and hold her in my arms, knowing / the elementary, leftover bit of her / mind would dimly recognize it was me / carrying her to where she was going.

Steve Kowit

Posted over on the San Diego Union-Tribune

What Songs Shall We Sing?


Image by Harold E. McCray


What Song Should We Sing


The massive overhead crane comes
when we wave to it, lets down
its heavy claws and waits tamely
within its power while we hook up
the slabs of three-quarter-inch
steel. Take away the ponderous
reality when we wave again.
What name do we have for that?
What song is there for its voice?
What is the other face of Yahweh?
The god who made the slug and ferret,
the maggot and shark in his image.
What is the carol for that?
Is it the song of nevertheless,
or of the empire of our heart? We carry
language as our mind, but are we
the dead whale that sinks grandly
for years to reach the bottom of us?


Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Pittsburgh City Paper

Harm and Boon in the Meetings


HARM AND BOON IN THE MEETINGS


We think the fire eats the wood.
We are wrong. The wood reaches out
to the flame. The fire licks at
what the wood harbors, and the wood
gives itself away to that intimacy,
the manner in which we and the world
meet each new day. Harm and boon
in the meetings. As heart meets what
is not heart, the way the spirit
encounters the flesh and the mouth meets
the foreignness in another mouth. We stand
looking at the ruin of our garden
in the early dark of November, hearing crows
go over while the first snow shines coldly
everywhere. Grief makes the heart
apparent as much as sudden happiness can.

Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Chamber of Secrets

When Push Comes to Shove


when push comes to shove

when push comes to shove
at the very least
strangers, red and blue, can
still come together
loyally uncoiling
a cornered intuition
beyond reasonable
suspicion
.

Yi-Ching Lin

Posted over on her site Yi's Bits on "Healthy Doses"

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

You Are a Weekend


Image by Christopher Clements


you are a weekend

you are a weekend
that never arrives, i count
and recount these days
.

Yi-Ching Lin

Posted on her site Yi's Bits on "Healthy Doses"

Hosanna


Textile Art by Elina Lusis-Grinberga


Hosanna

Many spend their lives prostrate
praising their prophet of choice,
or those politicians who straddle
our civilization like towering statues,
like stone-faced colossus’ wearing
our blessings to gird their loins.

Others merely praise the first
foul breath of consciousness
shifting from dream to cityscape,
pleased to greet the grind
of the gray hours
awaiting them trussed in
their harness, their yoke, their chains—
finding joy in coffee, in the blues
that a slide guitar vibe
can burst from eight speakers
inside the beer can transport
they pilot perilously through
the melee of the morning.

I praise the end of servitude,
the frayed colorful yarn knots
on the tail of the rope of indenture,
soon to be seven day weekends,
ten sweet hours of sleep,
soon to fill my days
with writing, reading, watching, walking
and smiling;
soon to refill
the dangerously low levels
of love and creativity within
the vessel of my Self.

Glenn Buttkus April 2010

It's a Justice League


it's a Justice League

it’s a Justice League
moment, sifting
through the catalogue
of adventures, ill at ease
with the way things are
shaping up. the grim
faces of the original
seven stare back
before i bound them
in a box, sharpied
Armageddon Sale,
a limited series
.

Yi-Ching Lin

Posted on her site Yi's Bits on "Healthy Doses"

It's So Seventeenth


Tapestry by Bracha Lavee


it's so seventeenth

it is so seventeenth
century the way we still
shuttle memories back
and forth by hand so that
we have reason
to touch.

i let you hold
down the strongest
memories, stretched
tautly by time, while
i maintain the fill, following
each spun horizon.

the longer we do this,
the richer our threads.
the longer we do this,
the finer our patterns
the longer we do this,
the more alive our beloved
.

Yi-Ching Lin

Posted over on her site Yi's Bits on "Healthy Doses"

Friday, April 23, 2010

In the Recurrent Key of


in the recurrent key of

in the recurrent key of
loss, we pick up dumb
instruments, focus
all peripherals on the faint
rhythmic blur of one another’s
hearts

the tendency to
outrun today
in search of tomorrow starts
as a tremolo hidden
in the pit of anger

there are no notes
to rival the scale of
morphine it will take
to pinch off this sadness
.

Yi-Ching Lin

Posted over on her site Yi's Bits on "Healthy Doses"

The Manger of Incidentals


Painting of Salvador Dali by Doug Auld


The Manger of Incidentals

We are surrounded by the absurd excess
of the universe.
By meaningless bulk,
vastness without size,
power without consequence.
The stubborn iteration
that is present without being felt.
Nothing the spirit can marry.
Merely phenomenon and its physics.
An endless, endless of going on.
No habitat where the brain can
recognize itself.
No pertinence for the heart.
Helpless duplication.
The horror of none of it being alive.
No red squirrels, no flowers,
not even weed.
Nothing that knows what season it is.
The stars uninflected by awareness.
Miming without implication.
We alone see the iris
in front of the cabin reach its perfection
and quickly perish.
The lamb is born into happiness
and is eaten for Easter.
We are blessed with powerful love
and it goes away. We can mourn.
We live the strangeness of being momentary,
and still we are exalted by being temporary.
The grand Italy of meanwhile.
It is the fact of being brief,
being small and slight
that is the source of our beauty.
We are a singularity that makes music
out of noise
because we must hurry.
We make a harvest of loneliness
and desiring in the blank wasteland
of the cosmos.


Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Poi-tre

I Prefer to Remain


Painting by Salvador Dali


i prefer to remain

i prefer to remain
untrained, free to
shuffle around these
memories like they
were pieces of an
unsolvable puzzle
with no links
no blueprints
no reason not to
have a handful of
industrial scissors
all sharpened
on a stone crowded
with dreams
.

Yi-Ching Lin

Posted over on her site Yi's Bits on "Healthy Doses"

The New Bride Almost Visible in Latin


The New Bride Almost Visible in Latin


We want to believe that what happens
in the dark bedroom is normal.
Pretending that being alive
is reasonable keeps the door shut
against whether maggots, nematodes,
and rot are also created in God’s image.
Our excess is measured, our passion
almost deliberate. As we grow up,
we more and more love appropriately.
When Alicia got married, the priest
conducted the Mass in English because
it was understandable. He faced us
as though we were friends. Had us
gather around the altar afterwards.
She hugged and kissed each one until me.
The bride, fresh from Communion,
kissed me deeply with her tongue,
her husband three feet away.
The great portals of our knowing
each other closed forever.
I was flooded
by the size of what had ended.
But it was the mystery of marriage
and its hugeness that shocked me,
fell on me like an ox. I felt
mortality mixing with the fragrance
of my intimacy with her.
The difference between
the garden of her body
and the presence of her being
was the same distance as
the clear English of the Mass
from the blank Latin
which held the immensities.

Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Granta

Yesterday, I Used the Deleted Hour


Painting by Thomas Ackermann


yesterday, i used the deleted hour

yesterday, i used the deleted hour
as wisely as though i had scaled to the top
of a slippery cliff and consulted
a master yogi, as if i had shuffled the stars
and mapped out a new constellation
that spoke to me only in clear harmonic tones,
as though i had found out you just
left this world and i could rub out this hour
as if no one delivered the news
.

Yi-Ching Lin

Posted over on her site Yi's Bits on "Healthy Doses"

Meanwhile


deviant art by keribang


Meanwhile

It waits. While I am walking
through the pine trees
along the river, it is waiting.
It has waited a long time.
In southern France, in Belgium,
and even Alabama.
Now it waits in New England
while I say grace over
almost everything:
for a possum dead on someone’s lawn,
the single light on a levee
while Northampton sleeps,
and because the lanes between houses
in Greek hamlets are exactly the width
of a donkey loaded on each side
with barley.
Loneliness is the mother’s milk of America.
The heart is a foreign country
whose language none of us is good at.
Winter lingers on in the woods,
but already it looks discarded
as the birds return and sing carelessly;
as though there never was the power
or size of December.
For nine years in me it has waited.
My life is pleasant, as usual.
My body is a blessing
and my spirit clear.
But the waiting does not let up.


Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Granta

The First Time They Give You


the first time they give you

the first time they give you
a real pen – not the eraser pens
that manage to breed bigger
messes – but a real pen…the first time
they give you one of those
they tell you to draw
only one line through the future
mistakes, that there is no more
going back for you.

the first time they give you
a real pen, they ask for 250-words-
or-less essays to calculate
a moment, describe a point-of-view,
a favorite childhood memory
in blue or black, cursive,
double-spaced, because there is
no more going back for you.

by the time they give you
your first real pen, they will have
forgotten how you graduated into
sharpened pencils – by letting go
of 72 durable markers, 24
melting crayons, and 12 pods
of permanent paint
.

Yi-Ching Lin

Posted over on her site Yi's Bits on "Healthy Doses"

Michiko Nogami


Michiko Nogami (1946-1982)

Is she more apparent because
she is not anymore forever?
Is her whiteness more white
because she was the color of pale honey?
A smokestack making the sky more visible.
A dead woman filling the whole world.
Michiko said,
“The roses you gave me kept me awake
With the sound of their petals falling.”

Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Tweetspeak Poetry

Every Morning, Before the Break


Watercolor by Leo Gordon


every morning, before the break

every morning, before the break
of dawn, after he gets up or she
gets up to use the toilet and returns,
they refresh each other like math
rounding to the nearest integer
legs, into one
arms, into two
then multiply each sleeping
heartbeat within the safety
of matrices, adding and
subtracting each other until
they are lulled back
into hushed reciprocals
.

Yi-Ching Lin

Posted over on her site Yi's Bits on "Healthy Doses"

Betrothed


Image by Jan Doerffel


“Betrothed”

You hear yourself walking on snow.
You hear the absence of birds.
A stillness so complete, you hear
the whispering inside of you. Alone
morning after morning, and even more
at night. They say we are born alone,
to live and die alone.
But they are wrong.
We get to be alone by time, by luck,
or by misadventure.
When I hit the log frozen in the woodpile
to break it free,
it makes a sound of perfect inhumanity,
which goes pure all through the valley,
like a crow calling unexpectedly
at the darker end of the twilight
that awakens me in the middle of a life.
The black and white of me mated
with this indifferent winter landscape.
I think of the moon coming in a little while
to find the white
among these colorless pines.

Jack Gilbert

Posted over on RP Meditations

Not Letting Go of Daylight Savings


not letting go of daylight savings

not letting go of daylight savings
.
sparing the moment’s defining details
we can conceivably wiggle out
from underneath the universe’s
sudden heaviness
if we turn the clock
one whole hour forward just one minute
before your mother wakes us up
to share the grave news

time travel is often complicated like that

we are not equipped
and never prepared
to leave anyone behind
.

Yi-Ching Lin

Posted over on her site Yi's Bits on "Healthy Doses"

Horses At Midnight Without a Moon


Horses At Midnight Without a Moon

Our heart wanders lost
in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles
in the castle of doubt.
But there's music in us.
Hope is pushed down

but the angel flies up
again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch

while we sleep,
and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through

the dirty streets.
It is no surprise
that danger
and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there
in the dark
meadow
because we can smell them,

can hear them breathing.

Our spirit persists
like a man struggling

through the frozen valley

who suddenly smells flowers

and realizes the snow is melting

out of sight on top of the mountain,

knows that spring has begun.

Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Poetics & Ruminations

I Am Listening To "Wisconsin Bound"


i am listening to "wisconsin bound"

i am listening to “wisconsin bound”
because i know that you are in there
somewhere, tucked into recovery.
and these lids are heavy
with the weight of you and these
toes are cramping, wedged
alone into the empty space
where your toes are not.
it’s nearing midnight, but each
second stretches luxuriously
like muscle groups trying
to manufacture memories
.

Yi-Ching Lin

Posted over on her site Yi's Bits on "Healthy Doses"

Married


Painting by Nakamura Daizaburo

Married

I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.


Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Poetry 365

A Brief For the Defense


A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere.
Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace,
they are starving somewhere else.
With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives
because that's what God wants.
Otherwise
the mornings before summer dawn
would not be made so fine.
The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well.
The poor women at the fountain
are laughing together between
the suffering they have known
and the awfulness in their future,
smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick.
There is laughter every day
in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh
in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness,
resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance
of their deprivation.
We must risk delight.
We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment.
We must have the stubbornness
to accept our gladness
in the ruthless furnace of this world.
To make injustice the only measure
of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord
runs us down,
we should give thanks
that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music
despite everything.
We stand at the prow again
of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island:
the waterfront is three shuttered cafés
and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars
in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back
is truly worth all the years
of sorrow that are to come.

Jack Gilbert

Posted over on The Poetry Center

Jesse Says We Are Heading Into


jesse says we are heading into

jesse says we are heading into
spring, but it is only one hour
closer to nearing
spring

yes, the vertical
blinds are
brushing up against
each other, with
flirtatiously
forgiving whispers

but we are
brushing against
each other like metallic
rings – closed,
unyielding and still
so cold
.

Yi-Ching Lin

Posted over on her site Yi's Bits on "Healthy Doses"

Scheming in the Snow


Scheming in the Snow

There is a time after
what comes after
being young,
and a time after that, he thinks
happily as he walks
through the winter woods,
hearing in silence a woodpecker far off.
Remembering his Chinese friend
whose brother gave her a jade ring from
the Han Dynasty when she turned eighteen.
Two weeks later, when she was hurrying up
the steps of a Hong Kong bridge, she fell,
and the thousand-year-old ring shattered
on the concrete. When she told him, stunned
and tears running down her face, he said,
"Don't cry. I'll get you something better."


Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Borzoi Reader

The Affairs of the Very Rich and the Very


the affairs of the very rich and the very

the affairs of the very rich and the very
poor and some in between are bound to
make headlines

because an unforgettable scandal
is bound to be a forgettable
footnote if we don’t stop to remember
and cash-in on them today

because there are wars that cannot be
undone so we might as well concentrate
on those who will live to see another
day instead of those who are dying
on page four
.

Yi-Ching Lin

Posted over on her site Yi's Bits on "Healthy Doses"

To See if Something Comes Next


To See If Something Comes Next

There is nothing here
at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence
and the dry smell of heavy sunlight
on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally,
and the sound of roosters
in the bright heat
where he lives
with the dead woman and purity.
Trying to see if something comes next.
Wondering whether he has stalled.
Maybe, he thinks, it is like the Noh:
whenever the script says dances,
whatever the actor does next
is a dance.
If he stands still, he is dancing.

Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Borzoi Reader

It Has Not Been the First Time Lhasa


it has not been the first time Lhasa

it has not been the first time Lhasa
was strewn with sick and powerless
khatas. just as from a thousand
miles away, Rangoon carried
abandoned sandals like a lost
mother, with tear gas in her
autumn eyes –
the square here today lies
pallid underneath a sea of
cotton and silk
at once meaningless
in their untimely sacrifice
.

Yi-Ching Lin

Posted over on her site Yi's Bits on "Healthy Doses"

On Stone


On Stone


The monks petition to live the harder way,
in pits dug farther up the mountain,
but only the favored ones are permitted
that scraped life.
The syrup-water and cakes
the abbot served me were far too sweet.
A simple misunderstanding of pleasure
because of inexperience.
I pull water up hand over hand
from thirty feet of stone.
My kerosene lamp burns a mineral light.
The mind and its fierceness lives
here in silence.
I dream of women and hunger in my valley
for what can be made of granite.
Like the sun hammering this earth
into pomegranates and grapes.
Dryness giving way to the smell
of basil at night. Otherwise,
the stone feeds on stone,
is reborn as rock,
and the heart wanes.
Athena's owl calling
into the barrenness,
and nothing answering.


Jack Gilbert

Posted over on Slate