poetry
All posts tagged poetry
Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drown’d,
Let darkness keep her raven gloss:
Ah, sweeter to be drunk with loss,
To dance with death, to beat the ground,Than that the victor Hours should scorn
The long result of love, and boast,
`Behold the man that loved and lost,
But all he was is overworn.’
discovered walking under a dark tree procession
with intermittence of wavering censers, spinning off streetlight.
their color is nothing but cold horror; make me know what
dreamt:
Nightmares In Backwave From A Knife Still-To-Bloom
How broad the blacktop: fringed by fearful city lights, like
aghast and smartly spectators come for last. this is framed—look.
playing in the sky, prerepeated lilt of clouds as coal on
jasmine sky. why they are blaming, blaming with irons
til sentence-weight tears stretchmarks into the soul.
no mistake but we are descending by the black teeth of the Cold Tall
who wants nothing but all meat into cold fishbodys. To lay fingers into
love and render her a stolen beaten glove. hear his hymn in the left eye
where we were struck as children by a ball. this none other than the
very last flutter of trust before sunk;
no less than thirty seven levels of hell’s
arrowing.
“I tell him getting stuck is the commonest trouble of all. Usually, I say, your mind gets stuck when you’re trying to do too many things at once. What you have to do is try not to force words to come. That just gets you more stuck. What you have to do now is separate out the things and do them one at a time. You’re trying to think of what to say and what to say first at the same time and that’s too hard. So separate them out. Just make a list of all the things you want to say in any old order. Then later we’ll figure out the right order.”
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
I usually read before I sleep to get to the drowsy sweet-spot, and poetry’s the perfect nonsense to make my head completely give up and give in to oblivion. The Poetry Foundation app is prett-ay great for that, and I found this little gem a few nights ago and was pretty taken with it:
Catalogue of Ephemera
I adapted these from earlier versions for the FYF Zine Contest. It was fun to mess with them graphically. I was thinking a lot of William Blake when I did them, I guess I was going for vaguely that relationship between the words and the doodles. enjoi:
There is no
home ear but
speaking is always a
dialogue if not between
the head and the throat
or breath and air
tongue sparking on the teeth
then between selves
at the very least.
The Secret in the Cat
I took my cat apart
to see what made him purr.
Like an electric clock
or like the snore
of a warming kettle,
something fizzed and sizzled in him.
Was he a soft car,
the engine bubbling sound?
Was there a wire beneath his fur,
or humming throttle?
I undid his throat.
Within was no stir.
I opened up his chest
as though it were a door:
no whisk or rattle there.
I lifted off his skull:
no hiss or murmur.
I halved his little belly
but found no gear,
no cause for static.
So I replaced his lid,
laced up his little gut.
His heart into his vest I slid
and buttoned up his throat.
His tail rose to a rod
and beckoned to the air.
Some voltage made him vibrate
warmer than before.
Whiskers and a tail:
perhaps they caught
some radar code
emitted as a pip, a dot-and-dash
of woolen sound.
My cat a kind of tuning fork?—
amplifier?—telegraph?—
doing secret signal work?
His eyes elliptic tubes:
there’s a message in his stare.
I stroke him
but cannot find the dial.
May Swenson – “The Secret in the Cat”
Found it in the illustrated The Literary Cat, edited by Jean-Claude Suares and Seymmour Chwast. This is one of the better pieces.