Ezra Pound

Portrait D'Une Femme

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.


Great minds have sought you—lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
One average mind—with one thought less, each year.


Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
And takes strange gain away:


Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion:
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale or two,
Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
That might prove useful and yet never proves,
That never fits a corner or shows use,


Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
These are your riches, your great store; and yet
For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,


Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep,
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that's quite your own.
                     Yet this is you.

Courtesy another 'S'.

Billy Collins

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

Must read

Everyone should read this. Again and again and again.


The Totality of Causes: Li-Young Lee and Tina Chang in Conversation


An excerpt from the conversation:

"I've been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech—if not all human speech—is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breath in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder—they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we're breathing in. The problem is, that when we're breathing in, we can't speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other. 

 

The minute we start breathing out, we can talk; speech is made with the outgoing, exhaled breath. The problem that is poses, though, is that as we exhale, nutrients are leaving our bodies; our bones get softer, our muscles get flaccid, our skin starts to loosen. You could think of that as the dying breath. So as we breath out, we have less and less presence.

When we make verbal meaning, we use the dying breath. In fact, the more I say, the more my meaning is disclosed. Meaning grows in opposite ratio to presence or vitality. That's a weird thing. I don't know why God made us that way. 

It's a kind of paradigm for life, right? As we die, the meaning of our life gets disclosed. Maybe the paradigm for living is encoded or embedded in speech itself, and every time we speak we're enacting on a small-scale, microcosmic level the bigger scale of our lives. So that the less vitality we have, the more the meaning of our lives get disclosed."

Li-Young Lee

Black Petal

I never claimed night fathered me.
that was my dead brother talking in his sleep. 
I keep him under my pillow, a dear wish

that colors my laughing and crying.

I never said the wind, remembering nothing,
leaves so many rooms unaccounted for, 
continual farewell must ransom
the unmistakable fragrance
our human days afford.

It was my brother, little candle in the pulpit,
reading out loud to all of earth
from the book of night.

He died too young to learn his name.
Now he answers to Vacant Boat,
Burning Wing, My Black Petal.


Ask him who his mother is. He'll declare the birds
have eaten the path home, but each of us
joins night's ongoing story
wherever night overtakes him,
the heart astonished to find belonging
and thanks answering thanks. 


Ask if he's hungry or thirsty,
he'll say he's the bread come to pass
and draw you a map
to the twelve secret hips of honey.

Does someone want to know the way to spring?
He'll remind you

the flower was never meant to survive
the fruit's triumph.

He says an apple's most secret cargo
is the enduring odor of a human childhood,
our mother's linen pressed and stored, our father's voice

walking through the rooms.

He says he's forgiven our sister
for playing dead and making him cry
those afternoons we were left alone in the house.

And when clocks frighten me with their long hair,

and when I spy the wind's numerous hands
in the orchard unfastening
first the petals from the buds,
then the perfume from the flesh,

my dead brother ministers to me. His voice
weighs nothing
but the far years between

stars in their massive dying,

and I grow quiet hearing
how many of both of our tomorrows
lie waiting inside it to be born.

e. e. cummings

 I carry your heart

I carry your heart with me(I carry it in
my heart)I am never without it(anywhere
I go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
I fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)I want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

I carry your heart(I carry it in my heart)

Edwin Morgan

Strawberries

There were never strawberries
like the ones we had
that sultry afternoon
sitting on the step
of the open french window
facing each other
your knees held in mine
the blue plates in our laps
the strawberries glistening
in the hot sunlight
we dipped them in sugar
looking at each other
not hurrying the feast
for one to come
the empty plates
laid on the stone together
with the two forks crossed
and I bent towards you
sweet in that air

in my arms
abandoned like a child
from your eager mouth
the taste of strawberries
in my memory
lean back again
let me love you

let the sun beat
on our forgetfulness
one hour of all
the heat intense
and summer lightning
on the Kilpatrick hills

let the storm wash the plates

Ely Shipley

Boy with Flowers
My aunt loved me, asked me:
will you be the flower
girl at my wedding? But I’m not
a girl, I argued, and she persuaded me:
you’ll get to throw rose petals
onto the aisle, walk before me, both of us
crushing them beneath our feet, my gown
dragging over them. I agreed. I wanted
nothing but chivalry.
At the church, my mother and I
waited in the small room. She brushed
my aunt’s hair until the dress arrived.
Isn’t it beautiful? And I agreed until they tried
to put me in it. I’d seen my father
and uncle earlier, standing in a circle
of other men, smoke hovering over their heads, a halo
and their voices kind, quiet, and deep. I told my aunt—
I want to wear a suit like them! She promised
if I wore the dress I could wear anything
I wanted after: army pants, a sheriff
badge, cowboy hat, and pistols. My mother shot her
a look in the mirror where we posed, both of them
angelic in white, and me not yet
dressed. Today I wake from another dream
in which I have a beard, no breasts,
and am about to go skinny-dipping
on a foreign beach with four other men.
I’m afraid to undress, won’t take off my shorts,
so they gab me, one at each ankle, the other two
by each wrist. I am a starfish hardening.
The sun hovers above, a hot
mirror where I search for my reflection.
I close my eyes. It’s too intense. The light
where my lover is tracing fingertips
around two long incisions in my chest. Each sewn tight
with stitches, each naked stem, flaring with thorns.

Georgia O'Keefe

Playlist IV

I'm not going to say much. I'll let the music and the videos speak for themselves. I would like to add that the Angus and Julia Stone video is my favourite. And that Skinny Love has no official video but I am obsessed with this song so I had to put it up.

Okay that's all!

Kabir

"There is dew
on these poems in the morning,
and at night a cool breeze may rise from them.

In the winter they are blankets, in the summer a place to swim.

I like talking to you like this. Have you moved
a step closer?

Soon we may be
kissing."

Mayda Del Valle

I Love this woman:

To All The Boys I have Loved Before

I love her passion. There's like this incredible drive that propels her into your head and her words resonate like a drum long after she finishes talking. And when she takes that final breath after she says "And I will wait for a man to come along that can give me the truth of how much he can really love me" you realise that the world had been still, for a moment.

The Gift

And this one is just beautiful. Is it her words? Or something she puts into it that moves it beyond ordinary language? And, does she ever take a breath?

"Some days I feel geometric so my poems go off on tangents"- brilliant.

And how beautiful is she??

The Shins

THE PAST AND PENDING
As someone sets light to the first fire of autumn
We settle down to cut ourselves apart.
Cough and twitch from the news on your face
And some foreign candle burning in your eyes

Held to the past too aware of the pending
Chill as the dawn breaks and finds us up for sale.
Enter the fog another low road descending
Away from the cold lust, you house and summertime.

Blind to the last cursed affair pistols and countless eyes
A trail of white blood betrays the reckless route your craft is running
Feed till the sun turns into wood dousing an ancient torch
Loiter the whole day through and lose yourself in lines dissecting love.

Your name on my cast and my notes on your stay
Offer me little but doting on a crime.
We've turned every stone and for all our inventions
In matters of love loss, we've no recourse at all.

Blind to the last cursed affair pistols and countless eyes
A trail of white blood betrays the reckless route your craft is running
Feed till the sun turns into wood dousing an ancient torch
Loiter the whole day through and lose yourself in lines dissecting love.

********************************

I couldn't resist.

J.V. Cunningham

TO MY WIFE

And does the heart grow old? You know
In the indiscriminate green
Of summer or in earliest snow
A landscape is another scene,


Inchoate and anonymous,
And every rock and bush and drift
As our affections alter us
Will alter with the season’s shift.


So love by love we come at last,
As through the exclusions of a rhyme,
Or the exactions of a past,
To the simplicity of time,


The antiquity of grace, where yet
We live in terror and delight
With love as quiet as regret
And love like anger in the night

******
Poems like this make me believe that something of love can be captured.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

If I should learn, in some quite casual way,
That you were gone, not to return again --
Read from the back-page of a paper, say,
Held by a neighbor in a subway train,
How at the corner of this avenue
And such a street (so are the papers filled)
A hurrying man -- who happened to be you --
At noon to-day had happened to be killed,
I should not cry aloud -- I could not cry
Aloud, or wring my hands in such a place --
I should but watch the station lights rush by
With a more careful interest on my face,
Or raise my eyes and read with greater care
Where to store furs and how to treat the hair.

Graham Greene

my breath is folded up

like sheets in lavender

the end for me

arrives like nursery tea

Rainer Maria Rilke

For the sake of a single verse, one must see many cities, men,
and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how
the birds fly and know the gesture with which the little
flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back
to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to
partings one had long seen coming; to days of childhood that
are still unexplained, to parents whom one had to hurt when
they brought one some joy and did not grasp it (it was a joy
for someone else); to childhood illnesses that so strangely
begin with such a number of profound and grave
transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and
to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of
travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the
stars—and it is not yet enough if one may think of all this.
One must have memories of many nights of love, none of
which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor,
and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again.
But one must also have been beside the dying, must have sat
beside the dead in the room with the open window and the
fitful noises. And still it is not enough to have memories. One
must be able to forget them when they are many, and one
must have the great patience to wait until they come again.
For it is not yet the memories themselves. Not till they have
turned to blood within us, to glance, and gesture, nameless,
and no longer to be distinguished from ourselves—not till
then can it happen that in a most rare hour the first word of
a verse arises in their midst and goes forth from them.
—From “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

Firefly Under the Tongue

by Coral Bracho

I love you from the sharp tang of the fermentation;
in the blissful pulp. Newborn insects, blue.
In the unsullied juice, glazed and ductile.
Cry that distills the light:
through the fissures in fruit trees;
under mossy water clinging to the shadows. The
papillae, the grottos.
In herbaceous dyes, instilled. From the flustered touch.
Luster
oozing, bittersweet: of feracious pleasures,
of play splayed in pulses.
Hinge
(Wrapped in the night's aura, in violaceous clamor,
refined, the boy, with the softened root of his tongue
expectant, touches,
with that smooth, unsustainable, lubricity—sensitive lily
folding into the rocks
if it senses the stigma, the ardor of light—the substance, the arris
fine and vibrant—in its ecstatic petal, distended—[jewel
pulsing half-open; teats], the acid
juice bland [ice], the salt marsh,
the delicate sap [Kabbalah], the nectar
of the firefly.)


Any attempt at explaining how I feel about this poem will fail miserably. Still,I will bumble my way through that soon. For now, I'm just happy to have it around me, here.