flahute » imagination

Poetry Friday

flahute — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 12:26:59 +0000

HEROIC SIMILE

When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai
in the gray rain,
in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty,
he fell straight as a pine, he fell
as Ajax fell in Homer
in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge
the woodsman returned for two days
to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing
and on the third day he brought his uncle.

They stacked logs in the resinous air,
hacking the small limbs off,
tying those bundles separately.
The slabs near the root
were quartered and still they were awkwardly large;
the logs from midtree they halved:
ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood,
moons and quarter moons and half moons
ridged by the saw’s tooth.

The woodsman and the old man his uncle
are standing in midforest
on a floor of pine silt and spring mud.
They have stopped working
because they are tired and because
I have imagined no pack animal
or primitive wagon. They are too canny
to call in neighbors and come home
with a few logs after three days’ work.
They are waiting for me to do something
or for the overseer of the Great Lord
to come and arrest them.

How patient they are!
The old man smokes a pipe and spits.
The young man is thinking he would be rich
if he were already rich and had a mule.
Ten days of hauling
and on the seventh day they’ll probably
be caught, go home empty-handed
or worse. I don’t know
whether they’re Japanese or Mycenaean
and there’s nothing I can do.
The path from here to that village
is not translated. A hero, dying,
gives off stillness to the air.
A man and a woman walk from the movies
to the house in the silence of separate fidelities.
There are limits to imagination.

— Robert Hass (b. 1941), American Poet Laureate [1995-1997].

Poetry Friday

flahute — Fri, 27 Aug 2010 11:25:29 +0000

FINAL SOLILOQUY OF THE INTERIOR PARAMOUR

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one…
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

ANECDOTE OF THE JAR

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

— Wallace Stevens (1879 – 1955), American Modernist poet

Poetry Friday

flahute — Fri, 14 May 2010 11:47:25 +0000

IMAGINING STARRY

The place of language is the place between me
and the world of presences I have lost
—complex country, not flat. Its elements free-
float, coherent for luck to come across;
its lines curve as in a mental orrery
implicit with stars in active orbit,
only their slowness or swiftness lost to sense.

The will dissolves here. It becomes the infinite
air of imagination that stirs immense
among losses and leaves me less desolate.

Breathing it I spot a sentence or a name,
a rescuer, charted for recovery,
to speak against the daily sinking flame
& the shrinking waters of the mortal sea.

— Marie Ponsot (b. 1921), Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets

Poetry Friday

flahute — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 11:20:04 +0000

SONNET 100

In night when colors all to black are cast,
Distinction lost, or gone down with the light;
The eye a watch to inward senses placed,
Not seeing, yet still having powers of sight,

Gives vain alarums to the inward sense,
Where fear stirred up with witty tyranny,
Confounds all powers, and thorough self-offense,
Doth forge and raise impossibility:

Such as in thick depriving darknesses,
Proper reflections of the error be,
And images of self-confusednesses,
Which hurt imaginations only see;

And from this nothing seen, tells news of devils,
Which but expressions be of inward evils.

— by Lord Brooke Fulke Greville

THE HAG

     The Hag is astride,
     This night for to ride;
The Devill and shee together:
     Through thick, and through thin,
     Now out, and then in,
Though ne’r so foule be the weather.

     A Thorn or a Burr
     She takes for a Spurre:
With a lash of a Bramble she rides now,
     Through Brakes and through Bryars,
     O’re Ditches, and Mires,
She followes the Spirit that guides now.

     No Beast, for his food,
     Dares now range the wood;
But husht in his laire he lies lurking:
     While mischiefs, by these,
     On Land and on Seas,
At noone of Night are working,

     The storme will arise,
     And trouble the skies;
This night, and more for the wonder,
     The ghost from the Tomb
     Affrighted shall come,
Cal’d out by the clap of the Thunder.

— Robert Herrick (1591 – 1674), English Poet.

Poetry Friday

flahute — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 05:12:24 +0000

MERCY RETURNS ME

A woman I want —
An honour I covet —
A place where I want my mind to dwell —
Then Mercy returns me
To the triad
And the crisis of the song.

SWEET TIME

How sweet time feels
when it’s too late

and you don’t have to follow
her swinging hips

all the way into
your dying imagination

THE FLOOD

The flood it is gathering
Soon it will move
Across every valley
Against every roof
The body will drown
And the soul will break loose
I write all this down
But I don’t have the proof

Sinai, 1973

— Leonard Cohen (b. 1934), Canadian poet, novelist and singer-songwriter.

Quote of the Day

flahute — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 05:19:38 +0000

Yeah, yeah, yeah … quotes of the day, two days in a row. Deal with it.

SWEET TIME

How sweet time feels
when it’s too late

and you don’t have to follow
her swinging hips

all the way into
your dying imagination.

— Leonard Cohen (b. 1934), Canadian poet, novelist and singer-songwriter.