flahute » light

Poetry Friday

flahute — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 13:19:38 +0000

FISHING ON THE SUSQUEHANNA IN JULY

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna
or on any river for that matter
to be perfectly honest.

Not in July or any month
have I had the pleasure–if it is a pleasure–
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

I am more likely to be found
in a quiet room like this one–
a painting of a woman on the wall,

a bowl of tangerines on the table–
trying to manufacture the sensation
of fishing on the Susquehanna.

There is little doubt
that others have been fishing
on the Susquehanna,

rowing upstream in a wooden boat,
sliding the oars under the water
then raising them to drip in the light.

But the nearest I have ever come to
fishing on the Susquehanna
was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia

when I balanced a little egg of time
in front of a painting
in which that river curled around a bend

under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,
dense trees along the banks,
and a fellow with a red bandanna

sitting in a small, green
flat-bottom boat
holding the thin whip of a pole.

That is something I am unlikely
ever to do, I remember
saying to myself and the person next to me.

Then I blinked and moved on
to other American scenes
of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,

even one of a brown hare
who seemed so wired with alertness
I imagined him springing right out of the frame.

— Billy Collins (b. 1941), former American Poet Laureate

Poetry Friday

flahute — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 13:38:54 +0000

THE ARMY OF TRUTH

Words? Those sounds the world despises.
Words in poems?
Even more to be disdained!
Ah, how feeble are your powers
to defend
all the truth that man denies!

Thunder crack and lightning flash
      at its presence!
Hosts of angels should come swooping
down from heaven to the rescue
      far and wide
spread the knowledge of its glory.

Oh, why can it not come winging
      from on high?
Truth, that with a starry birth
wears a helmet brightly gleaming
      wielding swords
fiercely sharp instead of feathers.

Oh, why then does it not pitch camp
      tent on tent
white on every mountainside?
Oh, why then are not its heroes
      strongly ranged
to keep mastery over life?

The fort of darkness is well guarded.
      Superstition
rests secure on stony columns.
Numerous as Egypt’s serpents
      round truth’s temple
range the black-clad guards of error.

Forward, though, you feeble lines!
      Words are armies!
On this earth your victory
was promised by the Lord, Light’s father,
      when you serve
Truth itself, his child, alone.

Onward, words, you sons of truth!
      En avant!
In the end the hearts of men
will be your victorious home.
      Then your light
will with courage bear them on.

Forward, with your boldest faces
      Words of truth!
For the greatest power on Earth
has been granted you by God:
      Because never
Could you die in Truth’s pure mouth!

Courage take then, all you small ones!
Truth’s great cause
Only triumphs in defeat.
Storm the bitter heights of lies!
Raze them to the ground with Truth!

— Henrik Wergeland (1808 – 1845)

Poetry Friday

flahute — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 12:43:47 +0000

A LOVE SONG

What have I to say to you
When we shall meet?
Yet—
I lie here thinking of you.

The stain of love
Is upon the world.
Yellow, yellow, yellow,
It eats into the leaves,
Smears with saffron
The horned branches that lean
Heavily
Against a smooth purple sky.

There is no light—
Only a honey-thick stain
That drips from leaf to leaf
And limb to limb
Spoiling the colours
Of the whole world.

I am alone.
The weight of love
Has buoyed me up
Till my head
Knocks against the sky.

See me!
My hair is dripping with nectar—
Starlings carry it
On their black wings.
See, at last
My arms and my hands
Are lying idle.

How can I tell
If I shall ever love you again
As I do now?

— William Carlos Williams (1883 – 1963), American Poet.

Poetry Friday

flahute — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 10:46:04 +0000

ON SNOW

A Riddle

From Heaven I fall, though from earth I begin.
No lady alive can show such a skin.
I’m bright as an angel, and light as a feather,
But heavy and dark, when you squeeze me together.
Though candor and truth in my aspect I bear,
Yet many poor creatures I help to insnare.
Though so much of Heaven appears in my make,
The foulest impressions I easily take.
My parent and I produce one another,
The mother the daughter, the daughter the mother.

— James Parton

Poetry Friday

flahute — Fri, 24 Sep 2010 11:32:41 +0000

QUIETLY

Lying here quietly beside you,
My cheek against your firm, quiet thighs,
The calm music of Boccherini
Washing over us in the quiet,
As the sun leaves the housetops and goes
Out over the Pacific, quiet—
So quiet the sun moves beyond us,
So quiet as the sun always goes,
So quiet, our bodies, worn with the
Times and the penances of love, our
Brains curled, quiet in their shells, dormant,
Our hearts slow, quiet, reliable
In their interlocked rhythms, the pulse
In your thigh caressing my cheek. Quiet.

— Kenneth Rexroth (1905 – 1982), American Beat poet and translator

LIGHT LISTENED

O what could be more nice
Than her ways with a man?
She kissed me more than twice
Once we were left alone.
Who’d look when he could feel?
She’d more sides than a seal.

The close air faintly stirred.
Light deepened to a bell,
The love-beat of a bird.
She kept her body still
And watched the weather flow.
We live by what we do.

All’s known, all, all around:
The shape of things to be;
A green thing loves the green
And loves the living ground.
The deep shade gathers night;
She changed with changing light.

We met to leave again
The time we broke from time;
A cold air brought its rain,
The singing of a stem.
She sang a final song;
Light listened when she sang.

— Theodore Roethke (1908 – 1963), American poet.

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, 19 Feb 2010 11:59:01 +0000

TO PURITY

I have heard so much about you

if you claim to be you
I will know it’s not true

if you say nothing I will listen
as I do
with my own
old mixed feelings
of hope and reservation

hearing through them
whatever might be you

the way I see
the white light from
the beginning
through the colors of the garden
through a face an eye

— W.S. Merwin (b. 1927), American poet and translator.

DEBT

That ‘part
Of consciousness
That works’:

A virtue, then, a skill
Of benches and the shock

Of the press where an instant on the steel bed
The manufactured part——

New!
And imperfect. Not as perfect
As the die they made
Which was imperfect. Checked

To tolerance

Among the pin ups, notices, conversion charts,
And skills, so little said of it

— George Oppen (1908 – 1984), Pulitzer Prize winning American poet.

Poetry Friday

flahute — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 14:00:30 +0000

FOG

A vagueness comes over everything,
as though proving color and contour
alike dispensable: the lighthouse
extinct, the islands’ spruce-tips
drunk up like milk in the
universal emulsion; houses
reverting into the lost
and forgotten; granite
subsumed, a rumor
in a mumble of ocean.
Tactile
definition, however, has not been
totally banished: hanging
tassel by tassel, panicled
foxtail and needlegrass,
dropseed, furred hawkweed,
and last season’s rose-hips
are vested in silenced
chimes of the finest,
clearest sea-crystal.
Opacity
opens up rooms, a showcase
for the hueless moonflower
corolla, as Georgia
O’Keefe might have seen it,
of foghorns; the nodding
campanula of bell buoys;
the ticking, linear
filigree of bird voices.

— Amy Clampitt (1920 – 1994), American poet.

Poetry Friday

flahute — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 11:03:15 +0000

NOW WINTER NIGHTS ENLARGE

Now winter nights enlarge
         This number of their hours;
And clouds their storms discharge
         Upon the airy towers.
Let now the chimneys blaze
         And cups o’erflow with wine,
Let well-tuned words amaze
         With harmony divine.
Now yellow waxen lights
         Shall wait on honey love
While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights
         Sleep’s leaden spells remove.

This time doth well dispense
         With lovers’ long discourse;
Much speech hath some defense,
         Though beauty no remorse.
All do not all things well:
         Some measures comely tread,
Some knotted riddles tell,
         Some poems smoothly read.
The summer hath his joys,
         And winter his delights;
Though love and all his pleasures are but toys
         They shorten tedious nights.

— Thomas Campion (1567 – 1620), English physician, writer, and lyricist.

Poetry Friday

flahute — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 10:56:11 +0000

COLD MORNING

Through an accidental crack in the curtain
I can see the eight o’clock light change from
charcoal to a faint gassy blue, inventing things

in the morning that has a thick skin of ice on it
as the water tank has, so nothing flows, all is bone,
telling its tale of how hard the night had to be

for any heart caught out in it, just flesh and blood
no match for the mindless chill that’s settled in,
a great stone bird, its wings stretched stiff

from the tip of Letter Hill to the cobbled bay, its gaze
glacial, its hook-and-scrabble claws fast clamped
on every window, its petrifying breath a cage

in which all the warmth we were is shivering.

— Eamon Grennan (b. 1941), Irish poet.