Lumpy pudding

Joseph Brodsky: A Season

The time of the hawk counting chickens, of haystacks in
fog, of small change in the pocket that burns the skin;
of the northern rivers whose ripples, freezing in a far-off mouth,
recall their sources, their god-forsaken south,
and warm up for a second. The time of the daylight’s ups
and downs; of the raincoat hanging, swollen boots, mishaps
in the stomach due to the soft-boiled, fallow
turnip; of winds tearing apart gonfalons
of sod-fearing warriors. The season of card-built kremlins;
days resemble each other like “when” and “where,”
and the bark is stripped by fire’s shameless, trembling
fingers that grope for more than damp underwear.

Robert Creeley: The Tunnel

Tonight, nothing is long enough—
time isn’t.
Were there a fire,
it would burn now.

Were there a heaven,
I would have gone long ago.
I think that light
is the final image.

But time reoccurs,
love—and an echo.
A time passes
love in the dark.

—

Photo: Elsa Dorfman’s Polaroid captures Creeley at his most Shamanic

Adrienne Rich: At Willard Brook

Spirit like water
moulded by unseen stone
and sandbar, pleats and funnels
according to its own
submerged necessity —
to the indolent eye
pure wilfulness, to the stray
pine-needle boiling
in that cascade-bent pool
a random fury: Law,
if that’s what’s wanted, lies
asking to be read
in the dried brook-bed.

(Published in The Nation, November 18, 1961)

Lucian Blaga: The Light

The light I feel
streaming in my breast when I see you,
is that not a drop of the light
created on the first day,
that light which thirsts for life?

Nothingness lay dying,
as the impenetrable one, hovering alone in the dark,
gave a sign:
Let there be light!

An ocean
and a raging storm of light
arose in an instant:
a thirst for sins, desires, longings, passions
a thirst for light and sun.

But where did it go, that blinding
first light – who knows?
The light I feel
streaming in my breast when I see you – wondrous one,
may be the last drop
of the light made on that first day.

Gary Snyder: A spring night in Shokoku-ji

Eight years ago this May
We walked under cherry blossoms
At night in an orchard in Oregon.
All that I wanted then
Is forgotten now, but you.
Here in the night
In a garden of the old capital
I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao
I remember your cool body
Naked under a summer cotton dress.

Randall Jarrell: The Woman at the Washington Zoo

The saris go by me from the embassies.

Cloth from the moon. Cloth from another planet.
They look back at the leopard like the leopard.

And I… .
this print of mine, that has kept its color
Alive through so many cleanings; this dull null
Navy I wear to work, and wear from work, and so
To my bed, so to my grave, with no
Complaints, no comment: neither from my chief,
The Deputy Chief Assistant, nor his chief—
Only I complain… . this serviceable
Body that no sunlight dyes, no hand suffuses
But, dome-shadowed, withering among columns,
Wavy beneath fountains—small, far-off, shining
In the eyes of animals, these beings trapped
As I am trapped but not, themselves, the trap,
Aging, but without knowledge of their age,
Kept safe here, knowing not of death, for death—
Oh, bars of my own body, open, open!

The world goes by my cage and never sees me.
And there come not to me, as come to these,
The wild beasts, sparrows pecking the llamas’ grain,
Pigeons settling on the bears’ bread, buzzards
Tearing the meat the flies have clouded… .
Vulture,
When you come for the white rat that the foxes left,
Take off the red helmet of your head, the black
Wings that have shadowed me, and step to me as man:
The wild brother at whose feet the white wolves fawn,
To whose hand of power the great lioness
Stalks, purring… .
You know what I was,
You see what I am: change me, change me!

— from The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Poems and Translations. New York: Atheneum, 1960

Photo: Philippe Halsman, 1958

“A writer should never install himself before a panorama, however grandiose it may be. Like Saint Jerome, a writer should work in his cell. Turn the back. Writing is a view of the spirit. “The world is my representation.” Humanity lives in its fiction. This is why a conqueror always wants to transform the face of the world into his image. Today, I even veil the mirrors.” — Blaise Cendrars (Paris Review, The Art of Fiction No. 38)

Robert Gibbons: Within Hard Times

Prefer to remain within hard times, difficulties, after all that’s our default mode. Till it’s over, & then, when is it ever, over? No easy lines. Even in old age. Wake from a dream where I’m trying to find my way around campus, what Berkeley, where Ann Arbor, how NYU? Teeming crowds outside all smoking, anonymously disinterested, those inside almost private in their residencies. It’s not that I’m reading there, don’t fully care about that, although would like just a few readers to open a page of mine, randomly, fall deep within rhythmic spell. No, this is the recurring nightmare of looking around for compulsory classroom I forgot to attend, way back then in the 60’s before release into the real world. Presidential motor cavalcade interrupts my attempt to get across one crossroad, only momentarily, before entering another greenspace, then more hallowed halls. It’s not fun. Almost like being caught in the audience at yet another bad poetry reading during April, where to walk out is to turn envious heads of prisoners of convention. (Or, what some have come to call “experimentation”). End up on the roof of one of the oldest buildings, clinging to chimney, wondering which leg to bend to move up from the peak & get back to ground level. People who belong there, according to nametags, seem quite facile in their ability to navigate even at this steep pitch. Smile, but offer no help. Diamond-hard times: only stars above lend a hand.

— Written in observation of Poetry Month…

Mark Strand: Seven Poems

For Antonia

1
At the edge
of the body’s night
ten moons are rising.

2
A scar remembers the wound.
The wound remembers the pain.
Once more you are crying.

3
When we walk in the sun
our shadows are like barges of silence.

4
My body lies down
and I hear my own
voice lying next to me.

5
The rock is pleasure
and it opens
and we enter it
as we enter ourselves
each night.

6
When I talk to the window
I say everything
is everything

7
I have a key
so I open the door and walk in.
It is dark and I walk in.
It is darker and I walk in.

(Poetry, 1970)

Maya Angelou: Awaking in New York

Curtains forcing their will
against the wind,
children sleep,
exchanging dreams with
seraphim. The city
drags itself awake on
subway straps; and
I, an alarm, awake as a
rumor of war,
lie stretching into dawn,
unasked and unheeded.

— from Shaker, Why Don’t You Sing?, 1983

Octavio Paz: Proem
(transl. Eliot Weinberger)

At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death;
the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens;
the laughter that sets on fire the rules and the holy commandments;
the descent of parachuting words onto the sands of the page;
the despair that boards a paper boat and crosses,
for forty nights and forty days, the night-sorrow sea and the day-sorrow desert;
the idolatry of the self and the desecration of the self and the dissipation of the self;
the beheading of epithets, the burial of mirrors; the recollection of pronouns freshly cut in the garden of Epicurus, and the garden of Netzahualcoyotl;
the flute solo on the terrace of memory and the dance of flames in the cave of thought;
the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands;
the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language;
the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in love.

Syllables seeds.

Gregory Corso: Spirit

Spirit
is Life
It flows thru
the death of me
endlessly
like a river
unafraid
of becoming
the sea

[Gregory Corso, Boulder Colorado, 1974. Photo - Rachel Homer]

James Wright: A Lazy Poem on Saturday Evening (Poetry, March 1961)

Works on a Sunday morning, too…

James Wright: Beginning

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.
The dark wheat listens.
Be still.
Now.
There they are, the moons 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.

In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see
                                     the people of the world
         exactly at the moment when
            they first attained the title of
                                                            ‘suffering humanity’
         They writhe upon the page
                                in a veritable rage
                                        of adversity
         Heaped up
               groaning with babies and bayonets
                                           under cement skies
           in an abstract landscape of blasted trees
                bent statues bats wings and beaks
                               slippery gibbets
                cadavers and carnivorous cocks
           and all the final hollering monsters
              of the
                     ‘imagination of disaster’
           they are so bloody real
                                 it is as if they really still existed
    And they do

                 Only the landscape is changed

They still are ranged along the roads
         plagued by legionnaires
                false windmills and demented roosters
They are the same people
                                only further from home
      on freeways fifty lanes wide
                          on a concrete continent
                               spaced with bland billboards
             illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness


            The scene shows fewer tumbrils
                                but more strung-out citizens
                                                    in painted cars
                       and they have strange license plates
            and engines
                            that devour America

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti, [“In Goya’s greatest scenes we seem to see …”] from Coney Island of the Mind, 1958

—

Photo: Lawrence Ferlinghetti at City Lights Bookstore editorial office, North Beach, San Francisco, May 22, 1988 - by Allen Ginsberg