text, images, poetry, miscellany, marginalia
Late
The cormorant still screams
Over cave and promontory.
Stony wings and bleak glory
Battle in your dreams.
Now sullen and deranged,
Not simply, as a child,
You look upon the earth
And find it harrowed and wild.
Now, only to mock
At the sterile cliff laid bare,
At the cold pure sky unchanged,
You look upon the rock,
You look upon the air.
A pure lyric — austere and precise — perfection.
After Reading Yeats
I am at Loblolly Cove washing his rhythms out of my Ear
the salt drying my hair and lips
The wind has given me its clothes
fitting me back into my bones
My fire drives me
the world has my flesh on
Vincent Ferrini
In my twenties I was introduced to Vincent Ferrini by a friend who was living in Gloucester, Massachusetts. We became instant lovers — not of the flesh (though anyone who knew Vincent knows that Vincent tried!) but of the spirit. For several years we corresponded and exchanged poems and thoughts. He addressed me as “Lady of the Camelias” (no doubt he addressed others thusly!) and took me under his giant and passionate poetic wing, never once giving up on trying to get me into his bed and yet staying on as a steady and profusely generous friend and champion despite my refusals. One night at a dinner party we danced an hour-long tango-esque beatnik improvisation in our black clothes and silver buckles and bangles. We were both completely entranced. It was our defining moment together.
Thanks Vincent. You poured a fire into my life that still warms me and I am grateful.
Sadly, the world recently lost the poet Lucille Clifton. Her poems live on.
Plaque outside New York Public Library
From Next (Boa Editions, 1987)
From the book Not Vanishing by Chrystos
DANCE A GHOST
Thump I leap you     shake
down memories   hoarse   You die, are buried
your name closes the door
youreappearatnight  eyes wide  Iseetheuncaught
white man his shoes polished his hand gun
last pulse   the heart contracts   dreams our knees crumple
red neon flickers over your redman hands
black moccasins on white ground
curl unseen without frame
No bells on our feet   feather still   soles
worn through
I dance you
for Mani, murdered with his friend Marcus outside a Phoenix bar
Chrystos is a two-spirit activist poet artist amazing human being. Buy her books. Listen to her read another poem, Song for a Lakota Woman, at a National Gay and Lesbian Task Force event on February 5, 2011, where she said ” “Everything you need to learn can be found for free, in close observation of your relationships with the earth, with each other and with yourselves.”
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
With swÃft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dÃm;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:
Práise hÃm.
First published in 1918, the year WWI ended.
| Tell Me a Story | ||
| by Robert Penn Warren | ||
[ A ]
Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard The great geese hoot northward. I could not see them, there being no moon And the stars sparse. I heard them. I did not know what was happening in my heart. It was the season before the elderberry blooms, Therefore they were going north. The sound was passing northward.
[ B ] Tell me a story. In this century, and moment, of mania, Tell me a story. Make it a story of great distances, and starlight. The name of the story will be Time, But you must not pronounce its name. Tell me a story of deep delight. |
||
Though I’m getting a late start jumping on the April-is-National-Poetry-Month wagon, my plan is to post poetry for the rest of the month of April.
OK. Here goes!
A well-worn much-thumbed-through book in my library is Greek Lyrics translated by Richmond Lattimore. Lattimore is best known for his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
Here’s one of my favorite lyrics (with an appearance by Aphrodite) from that collection by Ibycus:
In spring time the Kydonian
quinces, watered by running streams,
there where the maiden nymphs have
their secret garden, and grapes that grow
round in shade of the tendriled vine,
ripen.
Now in this season for me
there is no rest from love.
Out of the hard bright sky,
A Thracian north wind blowing
with searing rages and hurt – – dark,
pitiliess, sent by Aphrodite – – Love
rocks and tosses my heart.
from my ex-mother-in-law's sewing basket... looks to be circa 1960s
Found in an old sketchbook. I clearly remember that when I finished this drawing I stood back and said “Yikes! It’s Smegma Man!” But today, all I’m seeing are those green bills floating around him and I hereby rename him The Money Genie. Go ahead: Make a wish!
–noun
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