The Crossing
The old man stands at the crossing. His destination is a mere road away. Yet, he
hesitates. The traffic light turns red and green, red and green. Still, he
stands at the crossing, hesitating.Are there things on this side that he might miss? Green. The cars are coming. He steps out, welcoming his death.
Showing posts with label Karen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Karen. Show all posts
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
Lucy Gray - William Wordsworth
Lucy Gray (or, Solitude)
By William Wordsworth
Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray:
And, when I crossed the wild,
I chanced to see at break of day
The solitary child.
No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
She dwelt on a wide moor,
-- The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door!
You yet may spy the fawn at play,
The hare upon the green;
But the sweet face of Lucy Gray
Will never more be seen.
"To-night will be a stormy night --
You to the town must go;
And take a lantern, Child, to light
Your mother through the snow."
"That, Father! will I gladly do:
'T is scarcely afternoon --
The minster-clock has just struck two,
And yonder is the moon!"
At this the Father raised his hook,
And snapped a fagot-band;
He plied his work; -- and Lucy took
The lantern in her hand.
Not blither is the mountain roe:
With many a wanton stroke
Her feet disperse the powdery snow,
That rises up like smoke.
The storm came on before its time:
She wandered up and down;
And many a hill did Lucy climb:
But never reached the town.
The wretched parents all that night
Went shouting far and wide;
But there was neither sound nor sight
To serve them for a guide.
At day-break on a hill they stood
That overlooked the moor;
And thence they saw the bridge of wood,
A furlong from their door.
They wept -- and, turning homeward, cried,
"In Heaven we all shall meet;"
-- When in the snow the mother spied
The print of Lucy's feet.
Then downwards from the steep hill's edge
They tracked the footmarks small;
And through the broken hawthorn hedge,
And by the long stone-wall;
And then an open field they crossed:
The marks were still the same;
They tracked them on, nor ever lost;
And to the bridge they came.
They followed from the snowy bank
Those footmarks, one by one,
Into the middle of the plank;
And further there were none!
-- Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.
O'er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.
By William Wordsworth
Oft I had heard of Lucy Gray:
And, when I crossed the wild,
I chanced to see at break of day
The solitary child.
No mate, no comrade Lucy knew;
She dwelt on a wide moor,
-- The sweetest thing that ever grew
Beside a human door!
You yet may spy the fawn at play,
The hare upon the green;
But the sweet face of Lucy Gray
Will never more be seen.
"To-night will be a stormy night --
You to the town must go;
And take a lantern, Child, to light
Your mother through the snow."
"That, Father! will I gladly do:
'T is scarcely afternoon --
The minster-clock has just struck two,
And yonder is the moon!"
At this the Father raised his hook,
And snapped a fagot-band;
He plied his work; -- and Lucy took
The lantern in her hand.
Not blither is the mountain roe:
With many a wanton stroke
Her feet disperse the powdery snow,
That rises up like smoke.
The storm came on before its time:
She wandered up and down;
And many a hill did Lucy climb:
But never reached the town.
The wretched parents all that night
Went shouting far and wide;
But there was neither sound nor sight
To serve them for a guide.
At day-break on a hill they stood
That overlooked the moor;
And thence they saw the bridge of wood,
A furlong from their door.
They wept -- and, turning homeward, cried,
"In Heaven we all shall meet;"
-- When in the snow the mother spied
The print of Lucy's feet.
Then downwards from the steep hill's edge
They tracked the footmarks small;
And through the broken hawthorn hedge,
And by the long stone-wall;
And then an open field they crossed:
The marks were still the same;
They tracked them on, nor ever lost;
And to the bridge they came.
They followed from the snowy bank
Those footmarks, one by one,
Into the middle of the plank;
And further there were none!
-- Yet some maintain that to this day
She is a living child;
That you may see sweet Lucy Gray
Upon the lonesome wild.
O'er rough and smooth she trips along,
And never looks behind;
And sings a solitary song
That whistles in the wind.
When the Towers Fell - Galway Kinnell
WHEN THE TOWERS FELL by Galway Kinnell
From our high window we saw the towers
with their bands and blocks of light
brighten against a fading sunset,
saw them at any hour glitter and live
as if the spirits inside them sat up all night
calculating profit and loss, saw them reach up
to steep their tops in the until then invisible
yellow of sunrise, grew so used to them
often we didn’t see them, and now,
not seeing them, we see them.
The banker is talking to London.
Humberto is delivering breakfast sandwiches.
The trader is already working the phone.
The mail sorter has started sorting the mail.
...povres et riches [...poor and rich]
Sages et folz, prestres et laiz [Wise and foolish, priests and laymen]
Nobles, villains, larges et chiches [Noblemen, serfs, generous and m]
Petiz et grans et beaulx et laiz [Short and tall and handsome and homely]
The plane screamed low down lower Fifth Avenue
lifted at the Arch, someone said, shaking the dog walkers
in Washington Square Park, drove for the north tower,
struck with a heavy thud, releasing a huge bright gush
of blackened fire, and vanished, leaving a hole
the size and shape a cartoon plane might make
if it had passed harmlessly through and were flying away now,
on the far side, back into the realm of the imaginary.
Some with torn clothing, some bloodied,
some limping at top speed like children
in a three-legged race, some half dragged,
some intact in neat suits and dresses,
they straggle out of step up the avenues,
each dusted to a ghostly whiteness,
their eyes rubbed red as the eyes of a Zahoris,
who can see the dead under the ground.
Some died while calling home to say they were O.K.
Some died after over an hour spent learning they would die.
Some died so abruptly they may have seen death from within it.
Some broke windows and leaned out and waited for rescue.
Some were asphyxiated.
Some burned, their very faces caught fire.
Some fell, letting gravity speed them through their long moment.
Some leapt hand in hand, the elasticity in last bits of love-time letting — I wish
I could say — their vertical streaks down the sky happen more lightly.
At the high window, where I’ve often stood
to escape a nightmare, I meet
the single, unblinking eye
lighting the all-night sniffing and lifting
and sifting for bodies, pieces of bodies, anything that is not nothing,
in a search that always goes on
somewhere, now in New York and Kabul.
She stands on a corner holding up a picture
of her husband. He is smiling. In today’s
wind shift few pass. Sorry sorry sorry.
She startles. Suppose, down the street, that headlong lope...
or, over there, that hair so black it’s purple...
And yet, suppose some evening I forgot
The fare and transfer, yet got by that way
Without recall — lost yet poised in traffic.
Then I might find your eyes...
It could happen. Sorry sorry good luck thank you.
On this side it is “amnesia,” or forgetting the way home,
on the other, “invisibleness,” or never in body returning.
Hard to see clearly in the metallic mist,
or through the sheet of mock reality
cast over our world, bourne that no creature ever born
pokes its way back through, and no love can tear.
The towers burn and fall, burn and fall —
in a distant, shot, smokestacks spewing oily earth remnants out of the past.
Schwarze Milch der Fruhe wir trinken sie abends [Black milk of daybreak we drink it at nightfall]
wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts[we drink it at midday at morning we drink it at night]
wir trinken und trinken[We drink it and drink it]
This is not a comparison but a corollary,
not a likeness but a lineage
in the twentieth-century history of violent death —
black men in the South castrated and strung up from trees,
soldiers advancing through mud at ninety thousand dead per mile,
train upon train headed eastward made up of boxcars shoved full to the
corners with Jews and Gypsies to be enslaved or gassed,
state murder of twenty, thirty, forty million of its own,
atomic blasts wiping cities off the earth, firebombings the same,
death marches, starvations, assassinations, disappearances,
entire countries turned into rubble, minefields, mass graves.
Seeing the towers vomit these black omens, that the last century dumped into
this one, for us to dispose of, we know
they are our futures, that is our own black milk crossing the sky: wir shaufeln
ein Grab in den Luften da liegt man nicht eng [we’re digging
a grave in the sky there’ll be plenty of room to lie down there]
Burst jet fuel, incinerated aluminum, steel fume, crushed marble, exploded
granite, pulverized drywall, mashed concrete, berserked plastic,
gasified mercury, cracked chemicals, scoria, vapor
of the vaporized — wafted here
from the burnings of the past, draped over
our island up to streets regimented
into numbers and letters, breathed across
the great bridges to Brooklyn and the waiting sea:
astringent, miasmic, empyreumatic, slick,
freighted air too foul to take in but we take it in,
too gruesome for seekers of the amnesiac beloved
to breathe but they breathe it and you breathe it.
A photograph of a woman hangs from a string
at his neck. He doesn’t look up.
He stares down at the sidewalk of flagstone
slabs laid down in Whitman’s century, gutter edges
rasped by iron wheels to a melted roundedness:
a conscious intelligence envying the stones.
Nie staja sie, sa. [They do not become, they are.]
Nie nad to, myslalem. [Nothing but that, I thought,]
zbrzydziwszy sobie [now loathing within myself]
wszystko co staje sie [everything that becomes.]
And I sat down by the waters of the Hudson,
by the North Cove Yacht Harbor, and thought
how those on the high floors must have suffered: knowing
they would burn alive, and then, burning alive.
and I wondered, Is there a mechanism of death
that so mutilates existence no one
gets over it not even the dead?
Before me I saw, in steel letters welded
to the steel railing posts, Whitman’s words
written as America plunged into war with itself: City of the world!...
Proud and passionate city — mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!
words of a time of illusions. Then I remembered
what he wrote after the war was over and Lincoln dead:
I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought.
They themselves were fully at rest — they suffer’d not,
The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d...
In our minds the glassy blocks
succumb over and over into themselves,
slam down floor by floor into themselves.
They blow up as if in reverse, exploding
downward and outward, billowing
through the streets, engulfing the fleeing.
As each tower goes down, it concentrates
into itself, transforms itself
infinitely slowly into a black hole
infinitesimally small: mass
without space, where each light,
each life, put out, lies down within us.
------------------
There are probably issues with copyright to post this here, but this is for education purposes right?
From our high window we saw the towers
with their bands and blocks of light
brighten against a fading sunset,
saw them at any hour glitter and live
as if the spirits inside them sat up all night
calculating profit and loss, saw them reach up
to steep their tops in the until then invisible
yellow of sunrise, grew so used to them
often we didn’t see them, and now,
not seeing them, we see them.
The banker is talking to London.
Humberto is delivering breakfast sandwiches.
The trader is already working the phone.
The mail sorter has started sorting the mail.
...povres et riches [...poor and rich]
Sages et folz, prestres et laiz [Wise and foolish, priests and laymen]
Nobles, villains, larges et chiches [Noblemen, serfs, generous and m]
Petiz et grans et beaulx et laiz [Short and tall and handsome and homely]
The plane screamed low down lower Fifth Avenue
lifted at the Arch, someone said, shaking the dog walkers
in Washington Square Park, drove for the north tower,
struck with a heavy thud, releasing a huge bright gush
of blackened fire, and vanished, leaving a hole
the size and shape a cartoon plane might make
if it had passed harmlessly through and were flying away now,
on the far side, back into the realm of the imaginary.
Some with torn clothing, some bloodied,
some limping at top speed like children
in a three-legged race, some half dragged,
some intact in neat suits and dresses,
they straggle out of step up the avenues,
each dusted to a ghostly whiteness,
their eyes rubbed red as the eyes of a Zahoris,
who can see the dead under the ground.
Some died while calling home to say they were O.K.
Some died after over an hour spent learning they would die.
Some died so abruptly they may have seen death from within it.
Some broke windows and leaned out and waited for rescue.
Some were asphyxiated.
Some burned, their very faces caught fire.
Some fell, letting gravity speed them through their long moment.
Some leapt hand in hand, the elasticity in last bits of love-time letting — I wish
I could say — their vertical streaks down the sky happen more lightly.
At the high window, where I’ve often stood
to escape a nightmare, I meet
the single, unblinking eye
lighting the all-night sniffing and lifting
and sifting for bodies, pieces of bodies, anything that is not nothing,
in a search that always goes on
somewhere, now in New York and Kabul.
She stands on a corner holding up a picture
of her husband. He is smiling. In today’s
wind shift few pass. Sorry sorry sorry.
She startles. Suppose, down the street, that headlong lope...
or, over there, that hair so black it’s purple...
And yet, suppose some evening I forgot
The fare and transfer, yet got by that way
Without recall — lost yet poised in traffic.
Then I might find your eyes...
It could happen. Sorry sorry good luck thank you.
On this side it is “amnesia,” or forgetting the way home,
on the other, “invisibleness,” or never in body returning.
Hard to see clearly in the metallic mist,
or through the sheet of mock reality
cast over our world, bourne that no creature ever born
pokes its way back through, and no love can tear.
The towers burn and fall, burn and fall —
in a distant, shot, smokestacks spewing oily earth remnants out of the past.
Schwarze Milch der Fruhe wir trinken sie abends [Black milk of daybreak we drink it at nightfall]
wir trinken sie mittags und morgens wir trinken sie nachts[we drink it at midday at morning we drink it at night]
wir trinken und trinken[We drink it and drink it]
This is not a comparison but a corollary,
not a likeness but a lineage
in the twentieth-century history of violent death —
black men in the South castrated and strung up from trees,
soldiers advancing through mud at ninety thousand dead per mile,
train upon train headed eastward made up of boxcars shoved full to the
corners with Jews and Gypsies to be enslaved or gassed,
state murder of twenty, thirty, forty million of its own,
atomic blasts wiping cities off the earth, firebombings the same,
death marches, starvations, assassinations, disappearances,
entire countries turned into rubble, minefields, mass graves.
Seeing the towers vomit these black omens, that the last century dumped into
this one, for us to dispose of, we know
they are our futures, that is our own black milk crossing the sky: wir shaufeln
ein Grab in den Luften da liegt man nicht eng [we’re digging
a grave in the sky there’ll be plenty of room to lie down there]
Burst jet fuel, incinerated aluminum, steel fume, crushed marble, exploded
granite, pulverized drywall, mashed concrete, berserked plastic,
gasified mercury, cracked chemicals, scoria, vapor
of the vaporized — wafted here
from the burnings of the past, draped over
our island up to streets regimented
into numbers and letters, breathed across
the great bridges to Brooklyn and the waiting sea:
astringent, miasmic, empyreumatic, slick,
freighted air too foul to take in but we take it in,
too gruesome for seekers of the amnesiac beloved
to breathe but they breathe it and you breathe it.
A photograph of a woman hangs from a string
at his neck. He doesn’t look up.
He stares down at the sidewalk of flagstone
slabs laid down in Whitman’s century, gutter edges
rasped by iron wheels to a melted roundedness:
a conscious intelligence envying the stones.
Nie staja sie, sa. [They do not become, they are.]
Nie nad to, myslalem. [Nothing but that, I thought,]
zbrzydziwszy sobie [now loathing within myself]
wszystko co staje sie [everything that becomes.]
And I sat down by the waters of the Hudson,
by the North Cove Yacht Harbor, and thought
how those on the high floors must have suffered: knowing
they would burn alive, and then, burning alive.
and I wondered, Is there a mechanism of death
that so mutilates existence no one
gets over it not even the dead?
Before me I saw, in steel letters welded
to the steel railing posts, Whitman’s words
written as America plunged into war with itself: City of the world!...
Proud and passionate city — mettlesome, mad, extravagant city!
words of a time of illusions. Then I remembered
what he wrote after the war was over and Lincoln dead:
I saw the debris and debris of all the dead soldiers of the war,
But I saw they were not as was thought.
They themselves were fully at rest — they suffer’d not,
The living remain’d and suffer’d, the mother suffer’d
And the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffer’d...
In our minds the glassy blocks
succumb over and over into themselves,
slam down floor by floor into themselves.
They blow up as if in reverse, exploding
downward and outward, billowing
through the streets, engulfing the fleeing.
As each tower goes down, it concentrates
into itself, transforms itself
infinitely slowly into a black hole
infinitesimally small: mass
without space, where each light,
each life, put out, lies down within us.
------------------
There are probably issues with copyright to post this here, but this is for education purposes right?
Crow's Fall - Ted Hughes
When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white.
He decided it glared much too whitely.
He decided to attack it and defeat it.
He got his strength up flush and in full glitter.
He clawed and fluffed his rage up.
He aimed his beak direct at the sun's centre.
He laughed himself to the centre of himself
And attacked.
At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old,
Shadows flattened.
But the sun brightened—
It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.
He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.
"Up there," he managed,
"Where white is black and black is white, I won."
-----------------
It can be done as a stand alone poem for lower secondary, and perhaps as a collection with the other Crow poems for Upper Sec/JC level.
He decided it glared much too whitely.
He decided to attack it and defeat it.
He got his strength up flush and in full glitter.
He clawed and fluffed his rage up.
He aimed his beak direct at the sun's centre.
He laughed himself to the centre of himself
And attacked.
At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old,
Shadows flattened.
But the sun brightened—
It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.
He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.
"Up there," he managed,
"Where white is black and black is white, I won."
-----------------
It can be done as a stand alone poem for lower secondary, and perhaps as a collection with the other Crow poems for Upper Sec/JC level.
The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy - Tim Burton
He proposed in the dunes,
they were wed by the sea,
Their nine-day-long honeymoon
was on the isle of Capri.
For their supper they had one specatular dish-
a simmering stew of mollusks and fish.
And while he savored the broth,
her bride's heart made a wish.
That wish came true-she gave birth to a baby.
But was this little one human
Well, maybe.
Ten fingers, ten toes,
he had plumbing and sight.
He could hear, he could feel,
but normal?
Not quite.
This unnatural birth, this canker, this blight,
was the start and the end and the sum of their plight.
She railed at the doctor:
"He cannot be mine.
He smells of the ocean, of seaweed and brine."
"You should count yourself lucky, for only last week,
I treated a girl with three ears and a beak.
That your son is half oyster
you cannot blame me.
... have you ever considered, by chance,
a small home by the sea?"
Not knowing what to name him,
they just called him Sam,
or sometimes,
"that thing that looks like a clam"
Everyone wondered, but no one could tell,
When would young Oyster Boy come out of his shell?
When the Thompson quadruplets espied him one day,
they called him a bivalve and ran quickly away.
One spring afternoon,
Sam was left in the rain.
At the southwestern corner of Seaview and Main,
he watched the rain water as it swirled
down the drain.
His mom on the freeway
in the breakdown lane
was pouding the dashboard-
she couldn't contain
the ever-rising grief,
frustration,
and pain.
"Really, sweetheart," she said
"I don't mean to make fun,
but something smells fishy
and I think it's our son.
I don't like to say this, but it must be said,
you're blaming our son for your problems in bed."
He tried salves, he tried ointments
that turned everything red.
He tried potions and lotions
and tincture of lead.
He ached and he itched and he twitched and he bled.
The doctor diagnosed,
"I can't quite be sure,
but the cause of the problem may also be the cure.
They say oysters improve your sexual powers.
Perhaps eating your son
would help you do it for hours!"
He came on tiptoe,
he came on the sly,
sweat on his forehead,
and on his lips-a lie.
"Son, are you happy? I don't mean to pry,
but do you dream of Heaven?
Have you ever wanted to die?
Sam blinked his eye twice.
but made no reply.
Dad fingered his knife and loosened his tie.
As he picked up his son,
Sam dripped on his coat.
With the shell to his lips,
Sam slipped down his throat.
They burried him quickly in the sand by the sea
-sighed a prayer, wept a tear-
and they were back home by three.
A cross of greay driftwood marked Oyster Boy's grave.
Words writ in the sand
promised Jesus would save.
But his memory was lost with one high-tide wave.
--------
The poem comes with illustrations. There're mini versions of the images on this website if anyone's interested: http://homepage.eircom.net/~sebulbac/burton/oysterboy.html
they were wed by the sea,
Their nine-day-long honeymoon
was on the isle of Capri.
For their supper they had one specatular dish-
a simmering stew of mollusks and fish.
And while he savored the broth,
her bride's heart made a wish.
That wish came true-she gave birth to a baby.
But was this little one human
Well, maybe.
Ten fingers, ten toes,
he had plumbing and sight.
He could hear, he could feel,
but normal?
Not quite.
This unnatural birth, this canker, this blight,
was the start and the end and the sum of their plight.
She railed at the doctor:
"He cannot be mine.
He smells of the ocean, of seaweed and brine."
"You should count yourself lucky, for only last week,
I treated a girl with three ears and a beak.
That your son is half oyster
you cannot blame me.
... have you ever considered, by chance,
a small home by the sea?"
Not knowing what to name him,
they just called him Sam,
or sometimes,
"that thing that looks like a clam"
Everyone wondered, but no one could tell,
When would young Oyster Boy come out of his shell?
When the Thompson quadruplets espied him one day,
they called him a bivalve and ran quickly away.
One spring afternoon,
Sam was left in the rain.
At the southwestern corner of Seaview and Main,
he watched the rain water as it swirled
down the drain.
His mom on the freeway
in the breakdown lane
was pouding the dashboard-
she couldn't contain
the ever-rising grief,
frustration,
and pain.
"Really, sweetheart," she said
"I don't mean to make fun,
but something smells fishy
and I think it's our son.
I don't like to say this, but it must be said,
you're blaming our son for your problems in bed."
He tried salves, he tried ointments
that turned everything red.
He tried potions and lotions
and tincture of lead.
He ached and he itched and he twitched and he bled.
The doctor diagnosed,
"I can't quite be sure,
but the cause of the problem may also be the cure.
They say oysters improve your sexual powers.
Perhaps eating your son
would help you do it for hours!"
He came on tiptoe,
he came on the sly,
sweat on his forehead,
and on his lips-a lie.
"Son, are you happy? I don't mean to pry,
but do you dream of Heaven?
Have you ever wanted to die?
Sam blinked his eye twice.
but made no reply.
Dad fingered his knife and loosened his tie.
As he picked up his son,
Sam dripped on his coat.
With the shell to his lips,
Sam slipped down his throat.
They burried him quickly in the sand by the sea
-sighed a prayer, wept a tear-
and they were back home by three.
A cross of greay driftwood marked Oyster Boy's grave.
Words writ in the sand
promised Jesus would save.
But his memory was lost with one high-tide wave.
--------
The poem comes with illustrations. There're mini versions of the images on this website if anyone's interested: http://homepage.eircom.net/~sebulbac/burton/oysterboy.html
Why Regret? - Galway Kinnell
Why Regret?
Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating off the glue?
Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn't it a revelation to swim all the way
from the estuary, to the river, the kill,
the stream, the run, the brook, the beck,
the sike gone dry, to the shock of a spring?
Didn't you almost shiver to hear the book lice
ticking their sexual dissonance inside the old
Webster's New International, perhaps having
just eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lay in store anyway
at the end of a world where the sub-substance is
muck, birdlime, slime, mucus, gleet, ooze?
What could the joke have been that night when even
at the tables out of earshot the people were laughing?
Don't worry about becoming emaciated--think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
split open and the imago, the true adult,
slowly somersaulted out backwards and
took flight toward the swarm, mouth parts vestigial,
alimentary canal unfit to digest food,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova threw the linguine in squid ink
out the window, telling his startled companion,
"The perfected lover does not eat"?
As a child didn't you find it calming to think
of the pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn't you once glimpse what seemed your own
inner blazonry in the monarchs, veering
and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren't you reassured at the thought that these
hinged beings might navigate their way to Mexico
by the flair of the dead bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?
- Galway Kinnell
Didn't you like the way the ants help
the peony globes open by eating off the glue?
Weren't you cheered to see the ironworkers
sitting on an I-beam dangling from a cable,
in a row, like starlings, eating lunch, maybe
baloney on white with fluorescent mustard?
Wasn't it a revelation to swim all the way
from the estuary, to the river, the kill,
the stream, the run, the brook, the beck,
the sike gone dry, to the shock of a spring?
Didn't you almost shiver to hear the book lice
ticking their sexual dissonance inside the old
Webster's New International, perhaps having
just eaten out of it izle, xyster, and thalassacon?
What did you imagine lay in store anyway
at the end of a world where the sub-substance is
muck, birdlime, slime, mucus, gleet, ooze?
What could the joke have been that night when even
at the tables out of earshot the people were laughing?
Don't worry about becoming emaciated--think of the wren
and how little flesh is needed to make a song.
Didn't it seem somehow familiar when the nymph
split open and the mayfly struggled free
and flew and perched and then its own back
split open and the imago, the true adult,
slowly somersaulted out backwards and
took flight toward the swarm, mouth parts vestigial,
alimentary canal unfit to digest food,
a day or hour left to find the desired one?
Or when Casanova threw the linguine in squid ink
out the window, telling his startled companion,
"The perfected lover does not eat"?
As a child didn't you find it calming to think
of the pinworms as some kind of tiny batons
giving cadence to the squeezes and releases
around the downward march of debris?
Didn't you once glimpse what seemed your own
inner blazonry in the monarchs, veering
and gliding, in desire, in the middle air?
Weren't you reassured at the thought that these
hinged beings might navigate their way to Mexico
by the flair of the dead bodies of ancestors
who fell in this same migration a year ago?
Doesn't it outdo the pleasures of the brilliant concert
to wake in the night and find ourselves
holding hands in our sleep?
- Galway Kinnell
A Dialogue between the Soul and Body - Andrew Marvell
A DIALOGUE BETWEEN THE SOUL AND BODY
Soul.
O, WHO shall from this dungeon raise
A soul enslaved so many ways ?
With bolts of bones, that fettered stands
In feet, and manacled in hands ;
Here blinded with an eye, and there
Deaf with the drumming of an ear ;
A soul hung up, as 'twere, in chains
Of nerves, and arteries, and veins ;
Tortured, besides each other part,
In a vain head, and double heart ?
Body.
O, who shall me deliver whole,
From bonds of this tyrannic soul ?
Which, stretched upright, impales me so
That mine own precipice I go ;
And warms and moves this needless frame,
(A fever could but do the same),
And, wanting where its spite to try,
Has made me live to let me die
A body that could never rest,
Since this ill spirit it possessed.
Soul.
What magic could me thus confine
Within another's grief to pine ?
Where, whatsoever it complain,
I feel, that cannot feel, the pain ;
And all my care itself employs,
That to preserve which me destroys ;
Constrained not only to endure
Diseases, but, what's worse, the cure ;
And, ready oft the port to gain,
Am shipwrecked into health again.
Body.
But Physic yet could never reach
The maladies thou me dost teach ;
Whom first the cramp of hope does tear,
And then the palsy shakes of fear ;
The pestilence of love does heat,
Or hatred's hidden ulcer eat ;
Joy's cheerful madness does perplex,
Or sorrow's other madness vex ;
Which knowledge forces me to know,
And memory will not forego ;
What but a soul could have the wit
To build me up for sin so fit ?
So architects do square and hew
Green trees that in the forest grew.
Soul.
O, WHO shall from this dungeon raise
A soul enslaved so many ways ?
With bolts of bones, that fettered stands
In feet, and manacled in hands ;
Here blinded with an eye, and there
Deaf with the drumming of an ear ;
A soul hung up, as 'twere, in chains
Of nerves, and arteries, and veins ;
Tortured, besides each other part,
In a vain head, and double heart ?
Body.
O, who shall me deliver whole,
From bonds of this tyrannic soul ?
Which, stretched upright, impales me so
That mine own precipice I go ;
And warms and moves this needless frame,
(A fever could but do the same),
And, wanting where its spite to try,
Has made me live to let me die
A body that could never rest,
Since this ill spirit it possessed.
Soul.
What magic could me thus confine
Within another's grief to pine ?
Where, whatsoever it complain,
I feel, that cannot feel, the pain ;
And all my care itself employs,
That to preserve which me destroys ;
Constrained not only to endure
Diseases, but, what's worse, the cure ;
And, ready oft the port to gain,
Am shipwrecked into health again.
Body.
But Physic yet could never reach
The maladies thou me dost teach ;
Whom first the cramp of hope does tear,
And then the palsy shakes of fear ;
The pestilence of love does heat,
Or hatred's hidden ulcer eat ;
Joy's cheerful madness does perplex,
Or sorrow's other madness vex ;
Which knowledge forces me to know,
And memory will not forego ;
What but a soul could have the wit
To build me up for sin so fit ?
So architects do square and hew
Green trees that in the forest grew.
Shakespeare Sonnet 130 "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"
"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun"
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak,--yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress when she walks, treads on the ground;
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
------
I think this sonnet can be studied in comparison to other courtship/love poems about mistresses. It'll offer a good contrast.
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips' red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask'd, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak,--yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress when she walks, treads on the ground;
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.
------
I think this sonnet can be studied in comparison to other courtship/love poems about mistresses. It'll offer a good contrast.
Digging- Seamus Heaney
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.
Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.
My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
Seamus Heaney
- from Death of a Naturalist (1966)
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.
Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.
My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.
Seamus Heaney
- from Death of a Naturalist (1966)
A Valediction: forbidding mourning
A VALEDICTION FORBIDDING MOURNING.
by John Donne
AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
by John Donne
AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."
So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.
The Jaguar - Ted Hughes
The Jaguar
The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion
Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil
Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or
Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.
It might be painted on a nursery wall.
But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes
On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—
He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him
More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.
Ted Hughes
The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion
Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil
Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or
Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.
It might be painted on a nursery wall.
But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes
On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—
He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him
More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.
Ted Hughes
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