blather
favorite_poems
edwin arlington robinson Eros Turannos

She fears him and will always ask what fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reasons to refuse him;
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him.

Between a blurred sagacity
That once had power to sound him,
And Love, that will not let him be
The Judas that she found him,
Her pride assuages her almost,
As if it were alone the cost--
He sees that he will not be lost,
And waits and looks around him.

A sense of ocean and old trees
Envelops and allures him;
Tradition touching all he sees,
Beguiles and reassures him;
And all her doubts of what he says
Are dimmed with what she knows of days--
Till even prejiduce delays
And fades, and she secures him.

The falling leaf inaugurates
The reign of her confusion:
The pounding wave reverberates
The dirge of her illusion;
And home, where passion lived and died,
Becomes a place where she can hide,
While all the town and harborside
Vibrate with her seclusion.

We tell you, tapping on our brows,
The story as it should be--
As if the story of a house
Were told or ever could be;
We'll have no kindly veil between
Her visions and those we have seen--
As if we guessed what hers have been,
Or what they are or would be.

Meanwhile we do no harm; for they
That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
Where down the blidn are driven 		020815
...
arthur rimbaud translated from the french by Paul Romance

I

Nobody's serious when they're seventeen.
One a nice night, the hell with beer and lemonade
And the cafe and the noisy atmosphere!
You walk beneath the linden trees on the promenade.

The lindens smell so lovely on a night in June!
The air is so sweet that your eyelids close.
The breeze is full of sounds--they come from the town--
And the scent of beer, and the vine, and the rose. . .

II

You look up and see a little scrap of sky,
Dark blue and far off in the night,
Stuck with a lopsided star that drifts by
With little shivers, very small and white. . .

A night in June! Seventeen! Getting drunk is fun.
Sap like champagne knocks your head awry. . .
Your mind drifts; a kiss rises to your lips
And flutters like a little butterfly. . .

III

Your heart Crusoes madly through novels, anywhere,
When through the pale pool beneath a street light,
A girl goes by with the most charming air,
In the grim shadow of her father's dark coat.

And since she finds you marvelously naieve,
While her little heels keep tapping along
She turns, with a quick bright look. . .
And on your lips, despairing, dies your song.

IV

You are in love. Rented out till fall.
You are in love. Poetic fires ignite you.
Your friends laugh; they won't talk to you at all.
Then one night, the goddess deigns to write you!

That night. . .you got back to the cafe, to the noisy atmospherel
You sit and order beer, or
lemonade. . .
Nobody's serious when they're seventeen,
And there are linden trees on the promenade. 		020815
...
margaret atwood I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary. 		020815
...
robert hass Meditation at Lagunitas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this worl no one thing
to which the bramble of "blackberry" corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while i understood that,
talkign this way, everything dissolves:
justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire
is full of distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry blackberry blackberry. 		020815
...
william carlos williams Danse Russe

If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees --
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades--

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household? 		020815
...
lycanthrope okay...sorry...the atwood one should've been titled variations on the word sleep. someone share your own favorites. or is this all about creativity here? must we play the game by the rules without their history? how modernist...pah! i'm just curious to know what you have to say through others, to see what struck you. 020815
...
lycanthrope if no one shares, i've got plenty more 020815
...
Craig Raine A Martian Sends a Postcard Home


Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings--

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside--
a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or keept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost criees, theey carry it
to thier lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet, they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.

At night, when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves--
in colour, with their eyelids shut. 		020815
...
shel silverstein Poor Angus

Oh what do you do, poor Angus
when hunger makes you cry?
"I fix myself an omelet, sir,
of fluffy clouds and sky."

Oh what do you wear, poor Angus
when winds blow down the hills?
"I sew myself a warm cloak, sir,
of hope and daffodils."

Oh who do you love, poor Angus,
When Catherine's left the moor?
"Ah, then, sir, then's the only time
I feel I'm really poor." 		020815
...
Robert Hass Summoned by conscious recollection, she
would be smiling, they might be in a kitchen talking,
before or after dinner. But they are in this other room,
the window has many small panes, and they are on a couch
embracing. He holds her as tightly
as he can, she buries herself in his body.
Morning, maybe it is evening, light
is flowing through the room. Outside,
the day is slowly succeeded by night,
succeeded by day. The process wobbles wildly
and accelerates: weeks, months, years. The light in the room
does not change, so it is plain what is happening.
They are trying to become one creature,
and something will not have it. They are tender
with each other, afraid
their brief, sharp cries will reconcile them to the moment
when they fall away again. So they rub against each other,
their mouths dry, then wet, then dry.
They feel themselves at the center of a powerful
and baffled will. They feel
they are an almost animal,
washed up on the shore of a world--
or huddled against the gate of a garden--
to which they can't admit they can never be admitted. 		020815
...
Robert Hass (above title) Misery and Splendor 020815
...
Ezra Pound In a Station of the Metro


The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough. 		020815
...
Max Jacob (trans. John Ashbery) The Beggar Woman Of Naples

When I lived in Naples there was always a beggar woman at the gate of my palace, to whom I would toss some coins before climbing into my carriage. One day, surprised at never being thanked, I looked at the beggar woman. Now, as I looked at her, I saw that what I had taken for a beggar woman was a wooden case painted green which contained some red earth and a few half-rotten bananas... 		020815
...
Mei Mei Berssenbrugge Texas


I used the table as a reference and just did things from there
in register, to play a form of feeling out to the end, which is
an air of truth living objects and persons you use take on,
when you set them together in a certain order, conferring privilege
on the individual, who will tend to dissolve if his visual presence
is maintained, into a sensation of meaning, going off by itself.
First the table is the table. In blue light
or in electric light, it has no pathos. Then light separates
from the human content, a violet-colored net or immaterial haze, echoing
the violet iceplant on the windowsill, where he is the trace of a desire.

Such emotions are interruptions in landscape and in logic
brought on by a longing for direct experience, as if her memory of experience
were the trace of herself. Especially now, when things have been flying apart in all directions,
she will consider the hotel lobby the inert state of a form. It is the location
of her appointment. And gray enamel elevator doors are the relational state,
the place behind them being a ground of water or the figure of water. Now,
she turns her camera on them to change her thinking about them into a thought

in Mexico, as the horizon when you are moving can oppose the horizon inside
the elevator via a blue Cadillac into a long tracking shot. You linger
over your hand at the table. The light becomes a gold wing on the table. She sees
it opening, with an environment inside that is plastic and infinite,
but is a style that has got the future wrong. 		020815
...
anne sexton The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator

The end of the affair is always death.
She's my workshop. Slippery eye,
out of the tribe of myself my breath
finds you gone. I horrify
those who stand by. I am fed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Finger to finger, now she's mine.
She's not too far. She's my encounter.
I beat her like a bell. I recline
in the bower where you used to mount her.
You borrowed me on the flowered spread.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Take for instance this night, my love,
that every single couple puts together
with a joint overturning, beneath, above,
the abundant two on sponge and feather,
kneeling and pushing, head to head.
At night, alone, i marry the bed.

I break out of my body this way,
an annoying miracle. Could I
put the dream market on display?
I am spread out. I crucify.
My "little plum" is what you said.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

Then my black eyed rival came.
The lady of water, rising on the beach,
a piano at her fingertips, shame
on her lips and a flute's speech.
And I was the knock-kneed broom
instead.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

She took you the way a woman takes
a bargain dress off the rack
and I broke the way a stone breaks.
I give back your books and fishing tack.
Today's paper says that you are wed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.

The boys and girls are one tonight.
They unbutton blouses. They unzip flies.
They take off shoes. They turn off the light.
The glimmering creatures are full of lies.
They are eating each other. They are overfed.
At night, alone, I marry the bed. 		020815
...
Mei Mei oh how blather ruins the lineation!

(Whitman would be pissed) 		020815
...
unhinged jim_carroll

plath

saying_saying_away 		020816
...
frank ohara Poem

"Two communities outside Birmingham, Alabama, are still searching for their dead." - News Telecast

And tomorrow morning at 8 o'clock in Springfield, Massachusetts,
my oldest aunt will be buried from a convent.
Spring is here and I am staying here, I'm not going.
Do birds fly? I am thinking my own thoughts, who else's?

When I die, don't come, I wouldn't want a leaf
to turn away from the sun - it loves it there.
There's nothing so spiritual about being happy
but you can't miss a day of it, because it doesn't last.

So this is the devil's dance? Well I was born to dance.
It's a sacred duty, like being in love with an ape,
and eventually I'll reach some great conclusion, like assumption,
when at last I meet exhaustion in these flowers, go straight up. 		021125
...
Insat Yours ...

Restricted, feeling fear,
lies passion and desire.
Left alone in the darkness,
the strong smell of leather.

Breathing hard in anticipation,
no sight only sound,
the sighs of hard breathing,
lets her know you are around.

The fine light hairs awoken on the skin,
the trace of your fingertips,
reaching pleasures within.

A woman in chains,
her life in your hands.
Loving words spoken,
she obeys your commands.

The pleasure from the pain,
she submits to you her all.
The fear, lust and passion within,
her mind body and soul. 		030202
...
falling_alone Please share more? 110504
...
Kahlil Gibran Amd as the weaver said, Speak to of us of Clothes,
And he answered:
Your clothes conceal mcuh of of your beauty,
Yet they hide not the unbeautiful.
And though you seek in garments the freedom of privacy you may find in them a harness and a chain.
Would that you could meet the suna nd the wind with more of your skin and less of your raiment,
For the breath of life is in the sunlight and the hand of is in the wind.

Some of you say, "It is the north wind who has woven the clothes we wear."
And I say, Ay, it was the north wind,
But shame was his loom, and the softening of the sinews was his thread.
And when his work was done he laughed in the forest.
Forget not that modesty is for a shield against the eye of the unclean.

. 		110505
...
poppy the_love_song_of_j_alfred_prufrock 110506
what's it to you? blather
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