poetry: selving

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;
As tumbled over rim in roundy wells
Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's
Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;
Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves--goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace; that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is--
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men's faces.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins, "As kingfishers catch fire"

poetry: in praise of the plain and pleasant

For Sally Amis

Tightly-folded bud,
I have wished you something
None of the others would:
Not the usual stuff
About being beautiful,
Or running off a spring
Of innocence and love—
They will all wish you that,
And should it prove possible,
Well, you’re a lucky girl.

But if it shouldn’t, then
May you be ordinary;
Have, like other women,
An average of talents:
Not ugly, not good-looking,
Nothing uncustomary
To pull you off your balance,
That, unworkable itself,
Stops all the rest from working.
In fact, may you be dull—
If that is what a skilled,
Vigilant, flexible,
Unemphasised, enthralled
Catching of happiness is called.

- Philip Larkin, Born Yesterday (20 January 1954)

Poetry: Cruel Ironies

Why did I dream of you last night?
Now morning is pushing back hair with grey light
Memories strike home, like slaps in the face:
Raised on elbow, I stare at the pale fog
beyond the window.

So many things I had thought forgotten
Return to my mind with stranger pain:
- Like letters that arrive addressed to someone
Who left the house so many years ago.

- Philip Larkin, ‘Why did I dream of you last night?’ (1939)

Poetry: The end of virginity

‘Of course I was drugged, and so heavily I did not regain my consciousness till the next morning. I was horrified to discover that I had been ruined, and for some days I was inconsolable, and cried like a child to be killed or sent back to my aunt.’ Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor
Even so distant, I can taste the grief,
Bitter and sharp with stalks, he made you gulp.
The sun’s occasional print, the brisk brief
Worry of wheels along the street outside
Where bridal London bows the other way,
And light, unanswerable and tall and wide,
Forbids the scar to heal, and drives
Shame out of hiding. All the unhurried day
Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.

Slums, years, have buried you. I would not dare
Console you if I could. What can be said,
Except that suffering is exact, but where
Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic?
For you would hardly care
That you were less deceived, out on that bed,
Than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair
To burst into fulfillment’s desolate attic.

- Philip Larkin, Deceptions (20 February 1950)

Poetry: dull duties

Some must employ the scythe
Upon the grasses,
That the walks be smooth
For the feet of the angel.
Some keep in repair
The locks, that the visitor
Unhindered passes
To the innermost chamber.

Some have for endeavour
To sign away life
As lover to lover,
Or a bird using its wings
To fly to the fowler’s compass,
Not out of willingness,
But being aware of
Eternal requirings.

And if they have leave
To pray, it is for contentment
If the feet of the dove
Perch on the scythe’s handle,
Perch once, and then depart
Their knowledge. After, they wait
Only the cold advent,
The quenching of candles.
- Philip Larkin, The Dedicated (18 September 1946)

Poetry: fatuous fate

No, I have never found
The place where I could say
This is my proper ground,
Here I shall stay;
Nor met that special one
Who has an instant claim
On everything I own
Down to my name;

To find such seems to prove
You want no choice in where
To build, or whom to love;
You ask them to bear
You off irrevocably,
So that it’s not your fault
Should the town turn dreary,
The girl a dolt.

Yet, having missed them, you’re
Bound, none the less, to act
As if what you settled for
Mashed you, in fact;
And wiser to keep away
From thinking you still might trace
Uncalled-for to this day
Your person, your place.

- Philip Larkin, Places, Loved Ones (10 October 1954)

Poetry: against your better judgment

Since the majority of me
Rejects the majority of you,
Debating ends forthwith, and we
Divide. And sure of what to do

We disinfect new blocks of days
For our majorities to rent
With unshared friends and unwalked ways.
But silence too is eloquent:

A silence of majorities
That, unopposed at last, return
Each night with cancelled promises
They want renewed. They never learn.

- Philip Larkin, ‘Since the majority of me’ (6 December 1950)

Poetry: for the sullen

No one gives you a thought, as day by day
You drag your feet, clay-thick with misery.
None think how stalemate in you grinds away,
Holding your spinning wheels an inch too high
To bite on earth. The mind, it’s said, is free;
But not your minds. They, rusty stiff, admit
Only what will accuse or horrify,
Like slot-machines only bent pennies fit.

So year by year your tense unfinished faces
Sink further from the light. No one pretends
To want to help you now. For interest passes
Always towards the young and more insistent,
And skirts locked rooms where a hired darkness ends
Your long defense against the non-existent.
- Philip Larkin, Neurotics (March-April? 1949)

poetry: the manipulation of christ "A Distance From the Sea"

To Ernest Brace

"And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was
about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto
me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and
write them not." --REVELATIONS, x, 4.

That raft we rigged up, under the water,
Was just the item: when he walked,
With his robes blowing, dark against the sky,
It was as though the unsubstantial waves held up
His slender and inviolate feet. The gulls flew over,
Dropping, crying alone; thin ragged lengths of cloud
Drifted in bars across the sun. There on the shore
The crowd's response was instantaneous. He
Handled it well, I thought--the gait, the tilt of the head, just right.
Long streaks of light were blinding on the waves.
And then we knew our work well worth the time:
The days of sawing, fitting, all those nails,
The tiresome rehearsals, considerations of execution.
But if you want a miracle, you have to work for it,
Lay your plans carefully and keep one jump
Ahead of the crowd. To report a miracle
Is a pleasure unalloyed; but staging one requires
Tact, imagination, a special knack for the job
Not everyone possesses. A miracle, in fact, means work.
--And now there are those who have come saying
That miracles were not what we were after. But what else
Is there? What other hope does life hold out
But the miraculous, the skilled and patient
Execution, the teamwork, all the pain and worry every miracle involves?

Visionaries tossing in their beds, haunted and racked
By questions of Messiahship and eschatology,
Are like the mist rising at nightfall, and come,
Perhaps to even less. Grave supernaturalists, devoted worshippers
Experience the ecstasy (such as it is), but not
Our ecstasy. It was our making. Yet sometimes
When the torrent of that time
Comes pouring back, I wonder at our courage
And our enterprise. It was as though the world
Had been one darkening, abandoned hall
Where rows of unlit candles stood; and we
Not out of love, so much, or hope, or even worship, but
Out of the fear of death, came with our lights
And watched the candles, one by one, take fire, flames
Against the long night of our fear. We thought
That we could never die. Now I am less convinced.
--The traveller on the plain makes out the mountains
At a distance; then he loses sight. His way
Winds through the valleys; then, at a sudden turning of a path,
The peaks stand nakedly before him: they are something else
Than what he saw below. I think now of the raft
(For me, somehow, the summit of the whole experience)
And all the expectations of that day, but also of the cave
We stocked with bread, the secret meetings
In the hills, the fake assassins hired for the last pursuit,
The careful staging of the cures, the bribed officials,
The angels' garments, tailored faultlessly,
The medicines administered behind the stone,
That ultimate cloud, so perfect, and so opportune.
Who managed all that blood I never knew.

The days get longer. It was a long time ago.
And I have come to that point in the turning of the path
Where peaks are infinite--horn-shaped and scaly, choked with

thorns.
But even here, I know our work was worth the cost.
What we have brought to pass, no one can take away.
Life offers up no miracles, unfortunately, and needs assistance.
Nothing will be the same as once it was,
I tell myself.--It's dark here on the peak, and keeps on getting
darker.
It seems I am experiencing a kind of ecstasy.
Was it sunlight on the waves that day? The night comes down.
And now the water seems remote, unreal, and perhaps it is.

-- Weldon Kees, "A Distance from the Sea"

poetry: Melissa Kirsch - King Lear Considers What He's Wrought

Everyone worships the daughters,
skirts the shade of cake frostings, Teflon
idolettes, pedicured, hemophiliac
overpretties, laughing on the inside.

The boys are corn-fed and prep-schooled,
mirror-stuck, the milksops! Woe
unto the boldest of them, for who-so-
ever shall venture to pen a verse
for a Lear girl's hand let him

wither, unaided, in locker rooms,
let him be caught with his hand down his trousers.

The king is aware that parenting is a loose science,
performed by foglight, and so forgives himself.
He too was barely tended to, was made and then undone.

Who's Lear's daddy? He was a bastard, a salty dog.

Dear Cordelia. The boys would still like to press
a peony behind her ear, pack up her petticoats,
and take her away to somewhere-upon-somewhere.

Even penniless, there's something so irresistible
about a girl with nothing to prove.

- Melissa Kirsch - King Lear Considers What He's Wrought

poetry: Two Weeks On The Island by Erin Belieu

You're angry that I can't love the ocean, but

I came to the world land-locked and some bodies
are permanently strange. Like languages,
if you study them too late, they'll never stick.

Anyway, we're here, aren't we?—
trudging up the sand, the water churning
its constant horny noise, an open-mouthed heavy

breathing made more unnerving
by the presence of all these families, the toddlers

with their chapped bottoms, the fathers
in gigantic trunks spreading out their dopey
circus-colored gear.

How can anyone relax
near something so worked up all the time?

I know the ocean is glamorous,
but the hypnosis, the dilated narcotic pull of it,
feels impossible to resist. And what better

reason to resist? I'm most comfortable in a field,
a yellow-eared patch of cereal, whose quiet

rustling argues only for the underrated
valor of discretion. And above this, I admire
a certain quality of sky, like an older woman

who wears her jewels with an air of distance, that is
lightly, with the right attitude.

Unlike the ocean, there's nothing sneaky about
a field. I like its ugly-girl frankness. I like that,
sitting in the dirt, I can hear what's moving

between the stalks.

- Erin Belieu - Two Weeks On The Island

poetry: subtitled by Marie Lecrivain

When I am with you,
I feel like we are in a subtitled movie
driving down a remote European highway
in a Ferrari,
or maybe
in something small, deadly and German.

The shape of your mouth is not
rounding in synch
with the sounds of your emotions.
"A" is "W,"
or sometimes "Y."
"U" comes out as
two "K's" and a silent "B."
My smile
foreshadows an
an international
assassination plot,
and our kiss is the signal
for hordes of Mongols to
leave the hills
shop haute couture in Paris.

The confusion
is charming,
but still confusing.

What are we saying?

What I am saying?

I know
when I take the gun
from the hands of the dead fashionista,
and shoot you in the left eye,

when I spit on your favorite.
picture of your last stepmother.

when I count backward from ten,
in decimal points.

Do you know what I am saying?

The words are at the bottom of the screen in
dirty, yellow print,
but no one is paying attention.
The audience is too busy trying not to
grab each other's hands in the popcorn bucket,
fearful of falling in love.

Marie Lecrivain - Subtitled

poetry: anticipation of love

Neither the intimacy of your look, your brow fair as a feast day,
not the favor of your body, still mysterious, reserved, and childlike,
nor what comes to me of your life, settling in words or silence,
will be so mysterious a gift
as the sight of your sleep, enfolded
in the vigil of my arms.
Virgin again, miraculously, by the absolving power of sleep,
quiet and luminous like some happy thing recovered by memory,
you will give me that shore of your life that you yourself do not own.
Cast up into silence
I shall discern that ultimate beach of your being
and see you for the first time, perhaps,
as God must see you --
the fiction of Time destroyed,
free from love, from me.

- Jorge Luis Borges (trans. Robert Fitzgerald), "Anticipation of Love"

Poetry: Tired Sex

Trying to strike a match in a matchbook
that has lain all winter under the woodpile:
damp sulfur
on sodden cardboard.
I catch myself yawning. Through the window
I watch that sparrow the cat
keeps batting around.

Like turning the pages of a book the teacher assigned --

You ought to read it, she said.
It's great literature.

- Chana Bloch, "Tired Sex"

poetry: The things they don't tell you about heaven

Apples still taste like apples. Funny thing,
serpents taste like apples too, and kisses

and bread. In fact, it is all about apples,
this place. Everything you touch is smooth and red.

Your skin is comfortably heavy on your bones,
like that sleepy moment between being awake and falling

into a dream. The moon is a pendulum clock,
and light from the sun comes down in drops, as rain. And,

as any child will tell you, what we call rain is really tears,
the soul of God weeping over something great or small,

as anything with a soul will do from time to time.
Mostly, it is the apples, and a longing kind of sad.

They are firm as musculature. They smell like the flesh
and juice of unrequited love.

- Jill Alexander Essbaum, "The things they don't tell you about heaven"

poetry: the hermit

In a small house under a long bridge lived a hermit with purple teeth and wild yellow hair.

At night he howled at the moon and in the morning he drank coffee.

Afternoons were spent in green grass with a thick book.

He liked to eat toads and fuzzy chicks, stole potatoes from the farmer and drank gasoline from a neighbor's tractor.

His breath smelled of rotten dill pickles and under all his nails lived crumbly villages of dirt. In some of these villages were ants. He was crawling with lice too, and spiders made webs in his hair.

His girlfriend was called Charlie and she was made of stone. He fashioned her from lime rock and kept her in a box in the bathroom.

One day he took her to the grass where he read aloud from a letter he'd written.

"I love you more than cake," it said, "more than thunder and more than snow."

She stared at him with a face like pavement.

"More than a hundred bees," he said, "more than all the crabs in Maryland."

He kissed her and pushed so hard his lip split open onto hers.

He loved her more than air but his house was in need of repairs, so with active hands he hacked her to gravel, took her home, and fashioned her to the walls.

At night he ran his fingers over the doorjambs and thought he felt them shiver.

- Tara Wray, "The Hermit"

on hurt, personification

He's about 300 pounds and knows martial arts, boxing and wrestling-- both the real and the fake kind. So I never know when I'm thrown to the ground or hurled against the roopes of a boxing ring fence (who can guess when he'll surprise me with a punch next?) if the ache in my back is real or cartoon, if my bruises will stay or wash off like kiddie tattoos.

Pain is a sneak and a cheat. He loves to eat unhealthy foods (scrapple, greasy gravy, Little Debbie Snacks). Not only that-- I think he smokes. I can smell it on his breath, all fire and ash, when he pins me to my bed without asking. He's hefty and invisible and likes to strike in the dark so that even my magnifying glass and double locks are useless. Sometimes I call him Sumo, the Devil, or any member of my family. He's a changeling and a scam. His footprints are the ones that make cracks in the sidewalk.

Pain first introduced himself as a sadist. I was confused at the time. He said he was seduced by the blue of my wrist, the soft hollow at the center of my throat. He squeezed my heart like a Nerf ball until it was all lumps and fingernail marks. I nursed Pain like a mother. I tried to cheer him up like a sister, but everyone knows how that story goes.

Pain and I did have a few good times, if you can call them that. Eating ice cream under the covers, our tears drying on our cheeks so they chapped. We liked to go to movies alone. Pain, being invisible, snuck in without paying, then he'd leave the seat next to mine and feel up another girl in the theater. I could always tell which one. I'd hear her crying the way I did or crunching her popcorn as though each kernel was a small bone in Pain's neck or foot. He still comes around, though I tell him it's over, though I spit into his round hairy face.

He just laughs that sexy laugh. You know, the kind that gets in your head and you can't tell if it's making you nauseous or turning you on. There's no restraining order that works on Pain, the outlaw who loves to chase and embrace us, the outlaw we sometimes love to chase and embrace.

- Denise Duhamel, "I'm Dealing With My Pain"

poetry: an accomplished adult

I bought a paper shredder. Eight sheet maximum.
I wear a tie when I use it
because I'm like that,
on the edge.

I parallel park like a genius
and I don't lick my thumb
when I turn the page.

- Jace Mortensen, "Adulthood"

poetry: rose red

She never wanted the troll,

though, when freeing his beard
trapped in the bill of a circling bird,
when sliding her scissors through the soft
hairs at the nub of his chin, she did
think the shadow dropping from the gull's
wings lent his face a certain ugly interest.

She never wanted the prince's brother,

second prize to the elder, but just as vain,
with a woman's soft hips and hands,
surrounding himself with mirrors and liking
her sister better anyway, her indiscriminate
sweetness: an ordinary fruit ripening
in a bowl displayed on a public table.

And she did not want the bear

their mother invited next to the fire,
though his stinking fur could make
her eyes and mouth water. Once, she devised
a way to lie beside him, innocently
at first, then not so, curled behind him,
running her thumbnail down his spine.

What she wanted, of course, was her own place in the forest,

where she would take the flowering trees
that grew outside her mother's bedroom window -
one white, buxom with albino blossoms,

one red, smaller, with delicate, hooked thorns -
and plant them on opposite sides of her cottage,
watching each bloom fall as summer spoiled them.

- Erin Belieu, "Rose Red"

poetry: “Names You Can’t Pronounce”

I
Another summer in a town you know
like the backs of your knees and just
as sweaty. Nights aren’t much cooler.

Sometimes, when you walk out late to think
or just stare at your hands swinging
next to you, the green smells

of the Russian olive surrounding
the synagogue push at the back of your throat. Too big a mouthful,

so you stare at your hands which are
swinging soft and pale at the end
of your wrists and listen to cicadas
chorus their unknown tragedy.

II

You have two lovers. One knows you best
but his hands are soft, pale, female
like your own. The other tastes the back

of your knees, but won’t make love
to you. You stare at his knuckles
when he works, square and browned

from summer jobs. With the first
you take long walks past the synagogue
to a park with a war memorial.

The names there are thin, tragedy
chipped into black marble: Cassavettes,
Beacom, a Russian name you can’t pronounce,
all of these men, to you, unknown.

III

You can see the synagogue from
the window of your bedroom, wake
to the sign: FREEDOM FOR SOVIET JEWS.

The women downstairs have made love
and now they fight. It’s a tragedy,
they were friends before

they were lovers. The man living in
the basement is old, a veteran. Says
he hates Krauts, likes Russians.

The summer mornings are soft and pale
and when you wake from sleep
your hands flutter against the sheet;
the backs of your knees ache.

- Erin Belieu, "Names You Can't Pronounce"