Poem of the Day

You know that saying, “You’re only as old as you feel”? Today I feel like I’m about 80 years old…

When I was one-and twenty
By A.E. Housman

When I was one-and-twenty
   I heard a wise man say,
“Give crowns and pounds and guineas
   But not your heart away;
Give pearls away and rubies
   But keep your fancy free.”
But I was one-and-twenty,
   No use to talk to me.

When I was one-and-twenty
   I heard him say again,
“The heart out of the bosom
   Was never given in vain;
‘Tis paid with sighs a plenty
   And sold for endless rue.”
And I am two-and-twenty,
   And oh, ’tis true, ’tis true.

This is from the Texas Poetry Calendar 2008. I was lucky enough to hear the author read it, which was great! It’s definitely best read aloud.

Breakfast at Denny’s in Pasadena
By Mary Gomez Parham

I’m at Denny’s and I’ve just ordered
the Senior French Slam, my maiden Slam:
I’m now 55 and legal.

But in this hot-flash-hot room,
I’m the bride, the kindergartner on her first day of school.
My fellow diners think I’m young
on my first day of being old at Denny’s.
Old guys ogle me,
and the older old women—the ones
who’ve stopped considering face-lifts—
glance sideways at my less droopy turkey wattles,
my just-dyed hair with its perky perm
and my last-all-day lipstick and dieting hips.
I am driven to push my Slam aside and clamber
up onto my table and shout:
Good morning!
I’m announcing today to you all
that I’m still keeping up this lawn, by God!
I’ll never let moss grow on me, or weeds,
like that gray woman plunging into pancakes at table 3.
When I have my fatal coronary,
I want to stumble over in high-heeled boots.
As I sink to the floor, I’ll regret dirtying
my red velvet jeans, dry-clean-only.

So don’t just sit there and stare, mouths
agape, syrupy forks poised in mid-air.
Rather, raise your coffee cups in a toast, for
I do solemnly swear this morning at Denny’s in Pasadena:
I shall not go gentle or unmade-up into that good night.

While perusing a Civil War music site, I realized we hadn’t heard from Longfellow in ages. I cannot think what this possibly has to do with the Civil War, other than that the citizenry had probably heard it, but that’s beside the point.

Excelsior
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The shades of night were falling fast,
As through an Alpine village passed
A youth, who bore, ‘mid snow and ice,
A banner with the strange device,
   Excelsior!

His brow was sad; his eye beneath,
Flashed like a falchion from its sheath,
And like a silver clarion rung
The accents of that unknown tongue,
   Excelsior!

In happy homes he saw the light
Of household fires gleam warm and bright;
Above, the spectral glaciers shone,
And from his lips escaped a groan,
   Excelsior!

“Try not the Pass!” the old man said:
“Dark lowers the tempest overhead,
The roaring torrent is deep and wide!
And loud that clarion voice replied,
   Excelsior!

“Oh stay,” the maiden said, “and rest
Thy weary head upon this breast!”
A tear stood in his bright blue eye,
But still he answered, with a sigh,
   Excelsior!

“Beware the pine-tree’s withered branch!
Beware the awful avalanche!”
This was the peasant’s last Good-night,
A voice replied, far up the height,
   Excelsior!

At break of day, as heavenward
The pious monks of Saint Bernard
Uttered the oft-repeated prayer,
A voice cried through the startled air,
   Excelsior!

A traveller, by the faithful hound,
Half-buried in the snow was found,
Still grasping in his hand of ice
That banner with the strange device,
   Excelsior!

There in the twilight cold and gray,
Lifeless, but beautiful, he lay,
And from the sky, serene and far,
A voice fell, like a falling star,
   Excelsior!

I got this one from (of course) the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry. I love how the ruins are tied up in the past and are physical symbols for what we cannot retrieve or relive.

Beware of Ruins
By A.D. Hope

Beware of ruins: they have a treacherous charm;
Insidious echoes lurk among their stones;
That scummy pool was where the fountain soared;
     The seated figure, whose white arm
Beckons you, is a mock-up of dry bones
And not, as you believe, your love restored.

The moonlight lends her grace, but have a care:
Behind her waits the fairy Melusine.
The sun those beams refract died years ago.
     The moat has a romantic air
But it is choked with nettles and obscene
And phallic fungi rot there as they grow.

Beware of ruins; the heart is apt to make
Monstrous assumptions on the unburied past;
Though cleverly restored, the Tudor tower
     Is spurious, the facade a fake
Whose new face is a death-mask of the last
Despairing effort before it all went sour.

There are ruins, too, of a less obvious kind;
I go back; cannot believe my eyes; the place
Is just as I recall: the fire is lit,
     The table laid, bed warmed; I find
My former world intact, but not, alas,
The man I was when I was part of it.

I just finished listening to the audiobook of The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd. I thought it was excellent! This poem is quoted therein.

The Sick Rose
By William Blake

O Rose, thou art sick!
The invisible worm
That flies in the night,
In the howling storm,

Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.

It’s definitely time for another one from Amy Lowell!

New Heavens for Old
By Amy Lowell

I am useless.
What I do is nothing.
What I think has no savour.
There is an almanac between the windows:
It is of the year when I was born.

My fellows call to me to join them,
They shout for me,
passing the house in a great wind of vermilion banners.
They are fresh and fulminant,
They are indecent and strut with the thought of it,
They laugh, and curse, and brawl,
And cheer a holocaust of “Who comes firsts!” at the iron fronts of the houses at the two edges of the street.
Young men with naked hearts jeering between iron house-fronts,
Young men with naked bodies beneath their clothes
Passionately conscious of them,
Ready to strip off their clothes,
Ready to strip off their customs, their usual routine,
Clamouring for the rawness of life,
In love with appetite,
Proclaiming it as a creed,
Worshipping youth,
Worshipping themselves.
They call for women and the women come,
They bare the whiteness of their lusts to the dead gaze of the old house-fronts,
They roar down the street like flame,
They explode upon the dead houses like new, sharp fire.

But I—
I arrange three roses in a Chinese vase:
A pink one,
A red one,
A yellow one.
I fuss over their arrangement.
Then I sit in a South window
And sip pale wine with a touch of hemlock in it,
And think of Winter nights,
And field-mice crossing and re-crossing
The spot which will be my grave.

Here’s another one from Piercy. I love her descriptions in this poem and I was astounded when I got to the end and realized how incredibly true her observation was. This poem was also in The Moon is Always Female.

The doughty oaks
By Marge Piercy

Oaks don’t drop their leaves
as elms and lindens do.
They evolved no corky layer,
no special tricks.
They shut off the water.
Leaves hang on withering
tougher than leather.
Wind tears them loose.

Slowly they grow, white oaks
under the pitch pines,
tap roots plunging
deep, enormous carrots.
By the marsh they turn
twisting, writhing
aging into lichens, contorted
like the wind solidified.

In the spring how stubborn
how cautious
clutching their wallets tight.
Long after the maples,
the beeches have leafed out
they sleep in their ragged leaves.
Reluctantly in the buzz and hum
they raise velvet
antlers flushed red,
then flash silvery tassels.
At last vaulted
green chambers of summer.

Ponderous, when mature, as elephants,
in the storm they slam castle doors.
They all prepare to be great
grandfathers, in the meantime
dealing in cup and saucer acorns.

When frost crispens the morning,
they give up nothing willingly.
Always fighting the season,
conservative, mulish.
I find it easy to admire in trees
what depresses me in people.

Current Tea: margarita (black tea with flavors of lime and salt)

Rounding out the MacSpaunday quartet, here’s one from Day-Lewis.

The Ecstatic
By Cecil Day-Lewis

Lark, skylark, spilling your rubbed and round
Pebbles of sound in air’s still lake,
Whose widening circles fill the noon; yet none
Is known so small beside the sun:

Be strong your fervent soaring, your skyward air!
Tremble there, a nerve of song!
Float up there where voice and wing are one,
A singing star, a note of light!

Buoyed, embayed in heaven’s noon-wide reaches—
For soon light’s tide will turn—Oh stay!
Cease not till day streams to the west, then down
That estuary drop down to peace.

Oh, how I love Auden. Here’s part three of the MacSpaunday quartet of poems.

This Lunar Beauty
By W.H. Auden

This lunar beauty
Has no history
Is complete and early,
If beauty later
Bear any feature
It had a lover
And is another.

This like a dream
Keeps other time
And daytime is
The loss of this,
For time is inches
And the heart’s changes
Where ghost has haunted
Lost and wanted.

But this was never
A ghost’s endeavor
Nor finished this,
Was ghost at ease,
And till it pass
Love shall not near
The sweetness here
Nor sorrow take
His endless look.

Continuing with MacSpaunday, here’s one from Spender. There aren’t many of his poems available online. I may have to take a trip to the library.

An Elementary School Classroom in a Slum
By Stephen Spender

Far far from gusty waves these children’s faces.
Like rootless weeds, the hair torn around their pallor.
The tall girl with her weighed-down head. The paper-
seeming boy, with rat’s eyes. The stunted, unlucky heir
Of twisted bones, reciting a father’s gnarled disease,
His lesson from his desk. At back of the dim class
One unnoted, sweet and young. His eyes live in a dream,
Of squirrel’s game, in the tree room, other than this.

On sour cream walls, donations. Shakespeare’s head,
Cloudless at dawn, civilized dome riding all cities.
Belled, flowery, Tyrolese valley. Open-handed map
Awarding the world its world. And yet, for these
Children, these windows, not this world, are world,
Where all their future’s painted with a fog,
A narrow street sealed in with a lead sky,
Far far from rivers, capes, and stars of words.

Surely, Shakespeare is wicked, and the map a bad example
With ships and sun and love tempting them to steal—
For lives that slyly turn in their cramped holes
From fog to endless night? On their slag heap, these children
Wear skins peeped through by bones and spectacles of steel
With mended glass, like bottle bits on stones.
All of their time and space are foggy slum.
So blot their maps with slums as big as doom.

Unless, governor, teacher, inspector, visitor,
This map becomes their window and these windows
That shut upon their lives like catacombs,
Break O break open ’till they break the town
And show the children green fields and make their world
Run azure on gold sands, and let their tongues
Run naked into books, the white and green leaves open
History is theirs whose language is the sun.

I’m going to attempt another MacSpaunday quartet of poems.

Charon
By Louis MacNeice

The conductor’s hands were black with money:
Hold on to your ticket, he said, the inspector’s
Mind is black with suspicion, and hold on to
That dissolving map. We moved through London,
We could see the pigeons through the glass but failed
To hear their rumours of wars, we could see
The lost dog barking but never knew
That his bark was as shrill as a cock crowing,
We just jogged on, at each request
Stop there was a crowd of aggressively vacant
Faces, we just jogged on, eternity
Gave itself airs in revolving lights
And then we came to the Thames and all
The bridges were down, the further shore
Was lost in fog, so we asked the conductor
What we should do. He said: Take the ferry
Faute de mieux. We flicked the flashlight
And there was the ferryman just as Virgil
And Dante had seen him. He looked at us coldly
And his eyes were dead and his hands on the oar
Were black with obols and varicose veins
Marbled his calves and he said to us coldly:
If you want to die you will have to pay for it.

Current Tea: Bavarian chocolate creme (black tea with flavoring of creamy German chocolate)

Let’s have another about dear Oscar, to go with yesterday’s.

Oscar Wilde
By Dorothy Parker

If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to try an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.

Current Tea: Clarksville cordial (Indian Korakundah Estate black tea with ginger, orange, & peach)

Poor Oscar…

The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel
By John Betjeman

He sipped at a weak hock and seltzer
   As he gazed at the London skies
Through the Nottingham lace of the curtains
   Or was it his bees-winged eyes?

To the right and before him Pont Street
   Did tower in her new built red,
As hard as the morning gaslight
   That shone on his unmade bed,

“I want some more hock in my seltzer,
   And Robbie, please give me your hand—
Is this the end or beginning?
   How can I understand?

“So you’ve brought me the latest Yellow Book:
   And Buchan has got in it now:
Approval of what is approved of
   Is as false as a well-kept vow.

“More hock, Robbie—where is the seltzer?
   Dear boy, pull again at the bell!
They are all little better than cretins,
   Though this is the Cadogan Hotel.

“One astrakhan coat is at Willis’s—
   Another one’s at the Savoy:
Do fetch my morocco portmanteau,
   And bring them on later, dear boy.”

A thump, and a murmur of voices—
    (”Oh why must they make such a din?”)
As the door of the bedroom swung open
   And TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in:

“Mr. Woilde, we ‘ave come for tew take yew
   Where felons and criminals dwell:
We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly
   For this is the Cadogan Hotel.”

He rose, and he put down The Yellow Book.
   He staggered—and, terrible-eyed,
He brushed past the plants on the staircase
   And was helped to a hansom outside.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!!!

On a Poet Patriot
Thomas MacDonagh

His songs were a little phrase
Of eternal song,
Drowned in the harping of lays
More loud and long.

His deed was a single word,
Called out alone
In a night when no echo stirred
To laughter or moan.

But his songs new souls shall thrill,
The loud harps dumb,
And his deed the echoes fill
When the dawn is come.

Current Tea: margarita (black tea with flavors of lime and salt)

Here’s another depressing war poem, not because I’m in a sad mood, but because it’s in my file and I’m in a rush at the moment.

Futility
By Wilfred Owen

Move him into the sun—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields half-sown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—
Woke once the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear achieved, are sides
Full-nerved; still warm, too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth’s sleep at all?

Here’s another “cheerful” one from Robinson. (That was sarcasm, in case it didn’t translate.)

Miniver Cheevy
By Edwin Arlington Robinson

Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
   Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
   And he had reasons.

Miniver loved the days of old
   When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
   Would set him dancing.

Miniver sighed for what was not,
   And dreamed, and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
   And Priam’s neighbors.

Miniver mourned the ripe renown
   That made so many a name so fragrant;
He mourned Romance, now on the town,
   And Art, a vagrant.

Miniver loved the Medici,
   Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
   Could he have been one.

Miniver cursed the commonplace
   And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the mediæval grace
   Of iron clothing.

Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
   But sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
   And thought about it.

Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
   Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
   And kept on drinking.

   When the army marched through Frederick City it was fine weather, and the poet Whittier has told of Barbara Fritchie and Stonewall Jackson—a stirring poem in winning lines, but quite without fact at bottom. But that matters not in the least. The lines are good and we can well afford to throw in with all the hard words and abuse of those days, the poet’s ideas about our Stonewall.
   The country through which we marched was beautiful, rich, and fertile, but we were constantly hungry. There were two lines of Whittier’s unquestionably true:
         ”Fair as a garden of the Lord,
          To the eyes of the famished rebel horde.”
—G. Moxley Sorrel in Reflections of a Confederate Staff Officer, Chapter XI “The Sharpsburg (Antietam) Campaign”

Barbara Frietchie
By John Greenleaf Whittier

Up from the meadows rich with corn,
Clear in the cool September morn,

The clustered spires of Frederick stand
Green-walled by the hills of Maryland.

Round about them orchards sweep,
Apple and peach trees fruited deep,

Fair as the garden of the Lord
To the eyes of the famished rebel horde,

On that pleasant morn of the early fall
When Lee marched o’er the mountain-wall;

Over the mountains winding down,
Horse and foot, into Frederick town.

Forty flags with their silver stars,
Forty flags with their crimson bars,

Flapped in the morning wind: the sun
Of noon looked down, and saw not one.

Up rose old Barbara Frietchie then,
Bowed with her fourscore years and ten;

Bravest of all in Frederick town,
She took up the flag the men hauled down;

In her attic window the staff she set,
To show that one heart was loyal yet.

Up the street came the rebel tread,
Stonewall Jackson riding ahead.

Under his slouched hat left and right
He glanced; the old flag met his sight.

“Halt!”—the dust-brown ranks stood fast.
“Fire!”—out blazed the rifle-blast.

It shivered the window, pane and sash;
It rent the banner with seam and gash.

Quick, as it fell, from the broken staff
Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf.

She leaned far out on the window-sill,
And shook it forth with a royal will.

“Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,
But spare your country’s flag,” she said.

A shade of sadness, a blush of shame,
Over the face of the leader came;

The nobler nature within him stirred
To life at that woman’s deed and word;

“Who touches a hair of yon gray head
Dies like a dog! March on!” he said.

All day long through Frederick street
Sounded the tread of marching feet:

All day long that free flag tost
Over the heads of the rebel host.

Ever its torn folds rose and fell
On the loyal winds that loved it well;

And through the hillgaps sunset light
Shone over it with a warm good-night.

Barbara Frietchie’s work is o’er,
And the Rebel rides on his raids no more.

Honor to her! and let a tear
Fall, for her sake, on Stonewall’s bier.

Over Barbara Frietchie’s grave,
Flag of Freedom and Union, wave!

Peace and order and beauty draw
Round thy symbol of light and law;

And ever the stars above look down
On thy stars below in Frederick town!

I do love Adrienne Rich’s poetry… My grandfather came to the U.S. from Greece (to attend Princeton) in 1924 and went through Ellis Island. He wrote letters to his teachers/benefactors in Greece and said he had a pleasant experience. I wrote a paper my freshman year in high school on misconceptions about Ellis Island. I imagine if I repeated the endeavor I’d be more thorough. (ha ha ha)

Prospective Immigrants Please Note
By Adrienne Rich

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.

Current Tea: captivating caramel (black tea with caramel flavoring)

This is another selection from the Texas Poetry Calendar 2008. You may read a bit more about Aliene Pylant here.

Iron Works
By Aliene Pylant

My mother’s father was a Llano blacksmith,
a steel percussionist whose hammer slapped
a beat which threatened to explode his shop

the day another daughter came along—the fifth.
No sons! His wounded German pride grew chapped
to think a legacy of metalwork would stop.

His artistry with iron was almost myth—
a man of steel who forged the brands and tapped
the shoes on skittish horses other blacksmiths dropped.

My mother’s mother, who forgave his tizzy,
sang Brahms while laundering small dresses
with sashes, bows, and ruffled pinafores.

Five daughters kept her Monday washdays busy,
scrubbing, bleaching, bluing all the messes.
Then Tuesday’s ironing by the stove indoors,

with heated implements that made her dizzy—
crimping, pleating, fluting to perfection. Her finesse
with iron considered just another household chore.

Current Tea: Bavarian chocolate creme (black tea with flavoring of creamy German chocolate)

We’ve gone in the opposite direction from this due to daylight savings time, but it’s totally messed up my schedule. I’m sleeping way later than I would if I set my alarm, and I usually wake up before my alarm. It’s still dark at 7:30am!

It had long been dark, though still an hour before supper-time
By Charles Reznikoff

It had long been dark, though still an hour before supper-time.
The boy stood at the window behind the curtain.
The street under the black sky was bluish white with snow.
Across the street, where the lot sloped to the pavement,
boys and girls were going down on sleds.
The boys were after him because he was a Jew.

At last his father and mother slept. He got up and dressed.
In the hall he took his sled and went out on tiptoe.
No one was in the street. The slide was worn smooth and slippery—just right.
He laid himself on the sled and shot away. He went down only twice.
He stood knee-deep in snow:
no one was in the street, the windows were darkened;
those near the street-lamps were ashine, but the rooms inside were dark;
on the street were long shadows of clods of snow.
He took his sled and went back into the house.

I haven’t posted a long poem in a while. I snagged this one from the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.

Voyages
By Hart Crane

I

Above the fresh ruffles of the surf
Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.
They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,
And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed
Gaily digging and scattering.

And in answer to their treble interjections
The sun beats lightning on the waves,
The waves fold thunder on the sand;
And could they hear me I would tell them:

O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,
Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached
By time and the elements; but there is a line
You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it
Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses
Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.
The bottom of the sea is cruel.

II

—And yet this great wink of eternity,
Of rimless floods, unfettered leewardings,
Samite sheeted and processioned where
Her undinal vast belly moonward bends,
Laughing the wrapt inflections of our love;

Take this Sea, whose diapason knells
On scrolls of silver snowy sentences,
The sceptred terror of whose sessions rends
As her demeanors motion well or ill,
All but the pieties of lovers’ hands.

And onward, as bells off San Salvador
Salute the crocus lustres of the stars,
In these poinsettia meadows of her tides,—
Adagios of islands, O my Prodigal,
Complete the dark confessions her veins spell.

Mark how her turning shoulders wind the hours,
And hasten while her penniless rich palms
Pass superscription of bent foam and wave,—
Hasten, while they are true,—sleep, death, desire,
Close round one instant in one floating flower.

Bind us in time, O Seasons clear, and awe.
O minstrel galleons of Carib fire,
Bequeath us to no earthly shore until
Is answered in the vortex of our grave
The seal’s wide spindrift gaze toward paradise.

III

Infinite consanguinity it bears—
This tendered theme of you that light
Retrieves from sea plains where the sky
Resigns a breast that every wave enthrones;
While ribboned water lanes I wind
Are laved and scattered with no stroke
Wide from your side, whereto this hour
The sea lifts, also, reliquary hands.

And so, admitted through black swollen gates
That must arrest all distance otherwise,—
Past whirling pillars and lithe pediments,
Light wrestling there incessantly with light,
Star kissing star through wave on wave unto
Your body rocking!
                  and where death, if shed,
Presumes no carnage, but this single change,—
Upon the steep floor flung from dawn to dawn
The silken skilled transmemberment of song;

Permit me voyage, love, into your hands…

IV

Whose counted smile of hours and days, suppose
I know as spectrum of the sea and pledge
Vastly now parting gulf on gulf of wings
Whose circles bridge, I know, (from palms to the severe
Chilled albatross’s white immutability)
No stream of greater love advancing now
Than, singing, this mortality alone
Through clay aflow immortally to you.

All fragrance irrefragably, and claim
Madly meeting logically in this hour
And region that is ours to wreathe again,
Portending eyes and lips and making told
The chancel port and portion of our June—

Shall they not stem and close in our own steps
Bright staves of flowers and quills today as I
Must first be lost in fatal tides to tell?

In signature of the incarnate word
The harbor shoulders to resign in mingling
Mutual blood, transpiring as foreknown
And widening noon within your breast for gathering
All bright insinuations that my years have caught
For islands where must lead inviolably
Blue latitudes and levels of your eyes,—

In this expectant, still exclaim receive
The secret oar and petals of all love.

V

Meticulous, past midnight in clear rime,
Infrangible and lonely, smooth as though cast
Together in one merciless white blade—
The bay estuaries fleck the hard sky limits.

—As if too brittle or too clear to touch!
The cables of our sleep so swiftly filed,
Already hang, shred ends from remembered stars.
One frozen trackless smile… What words
Can strangle this deaf moonlight? For we

Are overtaken. Now no cry, no sword
Can fasten or deflect this tidal wedge,
Slow tyranny of moonlight, moonlight loved
And changed… “There’s

Nothing like this in the world,” you say,
Knowing I cannot touch your hand and look
Too, into that godless cleft of sky
Where nothing turns but dead sands flashing.

“—And never to quite understand!” No,
In all the argosy of your bright hair I dreamed
Nothing so flagless as this piracy.

                                    But now
Draw in your head, alone and too tall here.
Your eyes already in the slant of drifting foam;
Your breath sealed by the ghosts I do not know:
Draw in your head and sleep the long way home.

VI

Where icy and bright dungeons lift
Of swimmers their lost morning eyes,
And ocean rivers, churning, shift
Green borders under stranger skies,

Steadily as a shell secretes
Its beating leagues of monotone,
Or as many waters trough the sun’s
Red kelson past the cape’s wet stone;

O rivers mingling toward the sky
And harbor of the phoenix’ breast—
My eyes pressed black against the prow,
—Thy derelict and blinded guest

Waiting, afire, what name, unspoke,
I cannot claim: let thy waves rear
More savage than the death of kings,
Some splintered garland for the seer.

Beyond siroccos harvesting
The solstice thunders, crept away,
Like a cliff swinging or a sail
Flung into April’s inmost day—

Creation’s blithe and petalled word
To the lounged goddess when she rose
Conceding dialogue with eyes
That smile unsearchable repose—

Still fervid covenant, Belle Isle,
—Unfolded floating dais before
Which rainbows twine continual hair—
Belle Isle, white echo of the oar!

The imaged Word, it is, that holds
Hushed willows anchored in its glow.
It is the unbetrayable reply
Whose accent no farewell can know.

Here’s another one by Wallace Stevens I found in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, aptly named.

Of Modern Poetry
By Wallace Stevens

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set; it repeated what
Was in the script.
               Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir.

It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place.
It has to face the men of the time and to meet
The women of the time. It has to think about war
And it has to find what will suffice. It has
To construct a new stage. It has to be on that stage,
And, like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With meditation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear, at the sound
Of which, an invisible audience listens,
Not to the play, but to itself, expressed
In an emotion as of two people, as of two
Emotions becoming one. The actor is
A metaphysician in the dark, twanging
An instrument, twanging a wiry string that gives
Sounds passing through sudden rightnesses, wholly
Containing the mind, below which it cannot descend,
Beyond which it has no will to rise.
                              It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

I’ve been reading some of Margaret Atwood’s poetry lately. I wanted to share this one that a PotD reader sent me, though. Here’s a link to the painting described, which I’ve posted below for posterity, as well.

Manet’s Olympia
By Margaret Atwood

She reclines, more or less,
Try that posture, it’s hardly languor.
Her right arm sharp angles.
With her left she conceals her ambush.
Shoes but not stockings,
how sinister. the flower
behind her ear is naturally
not real, of a piece
with the sofa’s drapery.
The windows (if any) are shut.
This is indoor sin.
Above the head of the (clothed) maid
is an invisible voice balloon: Slut.

But. Consider the body,
unfragile, defiant, the pale nipples
staring you right in the bull’s eye.
Consider also the black ribbon
around the neck. What’s under it?
A fine red threadline, where the head
was taken off and glued back on.
The body’s on offer,
but the neck’s as afar as it goes.

This is no morsel.
Put clothes on her and you’d have a schoolteacher,
the kind with the brittle whiphand.

There’s someone else in this room.
You, Monsieur Voyeur.
As for that object of yours
she’s seen those before, and better.

I, the head, am the only subject
of this picture.
You, Sir, are furniture.
Get stuffed.

Since I was lucky enough to see the Dropkick Murphys in concert tonight, here’s a poem by an Irishman. (Could one ever really get enough Yeats?)

The Cold Heaven
By William Butler Yeats

Suddenly I saw the cold and rook-delighting Heaven
That seemed as though ice burned and was but the more ice,
And thereupon imagination and heart were driven
So wild that every casual thought of that and this
Vanished, and left but memories, that should be out of season
With the hot blood of youth, of love crossed long ago;
And I took all the blame out of all sense and reason,
Until I cried and trembled and rocked to and fro,
Riddled with light. Ah! when the ghost begins to quicken,
Confusion of the death-bed over, is it sent
Out naked on the roads, as the books say, and stricken
By the injustice of the skies for punishment?

It’s been nothing but election election election here in Texas, and I’m a little tired of it, to be honest. I thought I’d post a poem about the good old U.S. of A., where I’m grateful to live, despite its many flaws.

America
By Claude McKay

Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth!
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate.
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.

Miss Emily’s a great one for metaphor.

I dwell in Possibility—
By Emily Dickinson

I dwell in Possibility—
A fairer House than Prose—
More numerous of Windows—
Superior—for Doors—

Of Chambers as the Cedars—
Impregnable of Eye—
And for an Everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky—

Of Visitors—the fairest—
For Occupation—This—
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise—

I’d kind of been saving this for summer, but I’m going to post it ironically. The temperature dropped over 20F yesterday from the time I checked the temp online to when I arrived at school. I had not dressed appropriately for the day, but at least my gloves were crammed into the bottom of my backpack so my poor fingers didn’t freeze. This is another one from the Texas Poetry Calendar 2008 and I was lucky enough to hear the author (who won the first place prize for the 2007 calendar) read it. You can check out some of his other endeavors here.

Heat of August
By Joe Blanda

i.
Is it hot or is it hot?
The heat needles me into making vague statements
about the weather. And the cost of keeping cool:
everybody sweats it, even fools
for the withering heat, which is seasonal, at least,
and far less traumatic than the withering away of love.

ii.
There’s something sacred and redeeming
about the clothes-bleaching heat.
The scorched glare of pristine streets
badgers a body into sweating for what it needs,
like a glass of lemonade or a parking place in the shade.
But loss of love is loss of life.

iii.
We take turns standing in each other’s shadows
for a degree of relief from the paint-peeling heat.
We take turns standing on each other’s shoulders
to see beyond the haze of our immediate grief.
We take turns sacrificing time, money, love—
to restore what the heat burns away.

Current Tea: spicy chai (apparently the spicy components are proprietary)

One of the PotD readers sent me this poem. It’s actually in Words Under the Words, a poetry collection I consider essential to my library, but I hadn’t posted it before. I love rediscovering poems or reading them in a totally different light.

So Much Happiness
By Naomi Shihab Nye

for Michael

It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn’t need you to hold it down.
It doesn’t need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records…

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.

Current Tea: margarita (black tea with flavors of lime and salt)

Today is my parents’ 40th wedding anniversary and my aunt and uncle’s 26th. The latter live in town and the former are visiting. I didn’t have a suitably mushy love poem in my file, but I really liked this one and thought it at least a little à propos.

The Round
By Stanley Kunitz

Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees;
this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me.

So I have shut the doors of my house,
so I have trudged downstairs to my cell,
so I am sitting in semi-dark
hunched over my desk
with nothing for a view
to tempt me
but a bloated compost heap,
steamy old stinkpile,
under my window;
and I pick my notebook up
and I start to read aloud
the still-wet words I scribbled
on the blotted page:
“Light splashed . . .”

I can scarcely wait till tomorrow
when a new life begins for me,
as it does each day,
as it does each day.

I am not really all that familiar with Gertrude Stein’s work, but Marie Curie is one of my heroes.

Gertrude Stein
By Mina Loy

Curie
of the laboratory
of vocabulary
     she crushed
the tonnage
of consciousness
congealed to phrases
     to extract
a radium of the word