Lumpy pudding

Adrienne Rich: What Kind of Times Are These

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

Lucian Blaga: Lovely Hands

My prediction:
Lovely hands, which now enfold within
your warmth my head full of dreams,
you shall also in time enfold
the urn holding my ashes.

My dream:
Lovely hands, when warm lips shall blow
my ashes into the wind
from the chalice of your palms,
you shall be like flowers
whose pollen are swept away on the breeze.

And my sorrow:
You shall be as youthful as you are now, lovely hands.

Robert Gibbons: Where the Fragment Ended

There’s a chip on the rim of the waterglass, I could start there, wondering just where the fragment ended. Under the upturned tree, the most interesting stones circle round, frown, smile, dance, rebloom against cliff ledge after a hard winter. Earth turned past mid-April, adding days & hours toward a full month of spring. Where she walked in the afternoon, I’d already been, so holed up in that warm thicket where the tree fell, waiting her return. Across the way Atlantic Jupiter remained docked for the sixth straight day, evidence something’s wrong with her engine, let alone billows of smoke, black & white at intervals, filling the sky. No oil yet unloaded. From the cup of the thicket under the lip of ledge, I thought of the Souls of two poets, who wrote from their own desperate solitudes, digging down further than these uprooted roots. No need to mention names. They may not want them mentioned here. One, I met, reminded me of a rusty nail, straight talk over kitchen table in Vermont so long ago. One of those long nails from the middle of the last century, still sturdy as hell now out there in the garage holding up some heavy implement or other. The second, equally as strong, mastered the laconic language of silence, the dead, a lost fragment of glass.

Rilke: From An April

Again the woods smell sweet.
The soaring larks lift up with them
the sky, which weighed so heavily on our shoulders;
through bare branches one still saw the day standing empty —
but after long rain-filled afternoons
come the golden sun-drenched
newer hours,
before which, on distant housefronts,
all the wounded
windows flee fearful with beating wings.

Then it goes still. Even the rain runs softer
over the stones’ quietly darkening glow.
All noises slip entirely away
into the brushwood’s glimmering buds.

Another gorgeous Frank O’Hara poem…

Frank O’Hara: Adieu To Norman, Bon Jour To Jean And Jean-Paul

It is 12:10 in New York and I am wondering
if I will finish this in time to meet Norman for lunch
ah lunch! I think I am going crazy
what with my terrible hangover and the weekend coming up

at excitement-prone Kenneth Koch’s
I wish I were staying in town and working on my poems
at Joan’s studio for a new book by Grove Press
which they will probably not print
but it is good to be several floors up in the dead of the night
wondering whether you are any good or not
and the only decision you can make is that you did it

yesterday I looked up the rue Fremicourt on a map
and was happy to find it like a bird
flying over Paris et ses environs
which unfortunately did not include Seine-et-Oise which I don’t know

as well as a number of other things
and Allen is back talking about god a lot
and Peter is back not talking very much
and Joe has a cold and is not coming to Kenneth’s
although he is coming to lunch with Norman
I suspect he is making a distinction
well, who isn’t

I wish I were reeling around Paris
instead of reeling around New York
I wish I weren’t reeling at all
it is Spring the ice has melted the Ricard is being poured

we are all happy and young and toothless
it is the same as old age
the only thing to do is simply continue
is that simple
yes, it is simple because it is the only thing to do
can you do it
yes, you can because it is the only thing to do
blue light over the Bois de Boulogne it continues
the Seine continues
the Louvre stays open it continues it hardly closes at all
the Bar Americain continues to be French
de Gaulle continues to be Algerian as does Camus
Shirley Goldfarb continues to be Shirley Goldfarb
and Jane Hazan continues to be Jane Freilicher (I think!)
and Irving Sandler continues to be the balayeur des artistes
and so do I (sometimes I think I’m “in love” with painting)
and surely the Piscine Deligny continues to have water in it
and the Flore continues to have tables and newspapers and people
under them
and surely we shall not continue to be unhappy
we shall be happy
but we shall continue to be ourselves everything continues to be possible
Rene Char, Pierre Reverdy, Samuel Beckett it is possible isn’t it
I love Reverdy for saying yes, though I don’t believe it

- from Lunch Poems, 1959

Conclusion of Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra” - marking the anniversary of the March 25, 1957 US Customs seizing of 520 copies of the book Howl and Other Poems, published by City Lights Books, as they were being imported from the printer in London.

James Wright: Beginning

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the moon’s young, trying
Their wings.
Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow
Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone
Wholly, into the air.
I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe
Or move.
I listen.
The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,
And I lean toward mine.

—from Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose, 1990

Lawrence Ferlinghetti: Underwear

I didn’t get much sleep last night
thinking about underwear
Have you ever stopped to consider
underwear in the abstract
When you really dig into it
some shocking problems are raised
Underwear is something
we all have to deal with
Everyone wears
some kind of underwear
The Pope wears underwear I hope
The Governor of Louisiana
wears underwear
I saw him on TV
He must have had tight underwear
He squirmed a lot
Underwear can really get you in a bind
You have seen the underwear ads
for men and women
so alike but so different
Women’s underwear holds things up
Men’s underwear holds things down
Underwear is one thing
men and women have in common
Underwear is all we have between us
You have seen the three-color pictures
with crotches encircled
to show the areas of extra strength
and three-way stretch
promising full freedom of action
Don’t be deceived
It’s all based on the two-party system
which doesn’t allow much freedom of choice
the way things are set up
America in its Underwear
struggles thru the night
Underwear controls everything in the end
Take foundation garments for instance
They are really fascist forms
of underground government
making people believe
something but the truth
telling you what you can or can’t do
Did you ever try to get around a girdle
Perhaps Non-Violent Action
is the only answer
Did Gandhi wear a girdle?
Did Lady Macbeth wear a girdle?
Was that why Macbeth murdered sleep?
And that spot she was always rubbing—
Was it really in her underwear?
Modern anglosaxon ladies
must have huge guilt complexes
always washing and washing and washing
Out damned spot
Underwear with spots very suspicious
Underwear with bulges very shocking
Underwear on clothesline a great flag of freedom
Someone has escaped his Underwear
May be naked somewhere
Help!
But don’t worry
Everybody’s still hung up in it
There won’t be no real revolution
And poetry still the underwear of the soul
And underwear still covering
a multitude of faults
in the geological sense—
strange sedimentary stones, inscrutable cracks!
If I were you I’d keep aside
an oversize pair of winter underwear
Do not go naked into that good night
And in the meantime
keep calm and warm and dry
No use stirring ourselves up prematurely
‘over Nothing’
Move forward with dignity
hand in vest
Don’t get emotional
And death shall have no dominion
There’s plenty of time my darling
Are we not still young and easy
Don’t shout

— from Starting from San Francisco, 1961

(Source: i12bent)

Lucien Stryk, American poet, translator of Buddhist literature and Zen poetry, d. Jan. 24, 2013 (poetry news does not travel fast…)

Anne Carson: On Major and Minor

Major things are wind, evil, a good fighting horse, prepositions, inexhaustible love, the way people choose their king. Minor things include dirt, the name of schools of philosophy, mood and not having a mood, the correct …time. There are more major things than minor things over all, yet there are more minor things than I have written here, but it is disheartening to list them. When I think of you reading this, I do not want you to be taken captive, separated by a wire mesh lined with glass from your life itself, like some Elektra.

Photograph by Graeme Mitchell, c. 2010

César Vallejo: Weary Rings

There are desires to return, to love, to not disappear,
and there are desires to die, fought by two
opposing waters that have never isthmused.

There are desires for a great kiss that would shroud Life,
one that ends in the Africa of a fiery agony,
a suicide!

There are desires to…have no desires, Lord;
I point my deicidal finger at you:
there are desires to not have had a heart.

Spring returns, returns and will depart. And God,
bent in time, repeats himself, and passes,
passes with the spinal column of the Universe on his back.

When my temples beat their lugubrious drum,
when the dream engraved on a dagger aches me,
there are desires to be left standing in this verse!

—

Photo by Juan Domingo Córdoba, 1929

Lynn Emanuel: Very Rilke

Like that time in Paris
in the 15th & here
& naked on mon ba
lcon in full view of my landlady

on her fleurs blooming in a jardiniere
I’m answering nature’s call
& can’t remember why
when just below me is the WC

I’m not going down there
even though the greves &
half of Paris are looking—
I mean I was guilty