the tongue is a fire
"One 'superfluous human being' . . . in the midst of all and everything - humankind, history, literature, the infinite universe - is attempting to talk back in a dozen or so lines of poetry. No wonder people say the poets are nuts! The world so big and the poem so teeny."
- Charles Simic
Sometimes the words are so close I am
more who I am when I'm down on paper
than anywhere else as if my life were
practicing for the real me I become
unbuttoned from the anecdotal and
unnecessary and undressed down
to the figure of the poem, line by line,
the real text a child could understand.
Why do I get confused living it through?
Those of you, lost and yearning to be free,
who hear these words, take heart from me.
I once was in as many drafts as you.
But briefly, essentially, here I am.
Who touches this poem touches a woman.
- Julia Alvarez
the last sonnet in the 33 sequence
"One purpose of poetry is to give us words to articulate our joys and sorrows without revealing them."
- Dana Gioia
What is
a
voyage
?
up
upup: go
ing
downdowndown
com; ing won
der
ful sun
moon stars the all, & a
(big
ger than
big
gest could even
begin to be) dream
of; a thing: of
a creature who's
O
cean
(everywhere
nothing
but light and dark: but
never forever
& when) un
til one strict
here of amazing most
now, with what
thousands of (hundreds
of) millions of
CriesWhichAreWings
- e. e. cummings
The door is half open,
The sweet smell of limes . . .
On the table, forgotten,
A whip and a glove.
The lamp's yellow glow . . .
Things rustle all round.
Why did you go?
I don't understand.
More clearly I'll see
Tomorrow with fresh eyes
That life is beautiful.
Heart, just be wise.
You're completely worn out -
Beating sluggishly . . .
You know, I read somewhere
That souls do not die.
- Anna Akhmatova
There are wonderful shapes in rising smoke that imagination loves to watch
But it's a mistake to leave the fire for that filmy sight
Stay here at the flame's core
- Rumi
For Genevieve
(Five Years Old)
You clasp the little ball so tightly
One would have to break your hand
to wrest it,
As one breaks off the branch
To get the fruit . . .
And one waits . . .
A time comes
When the fruit just drops,
The time of ripeness.
And a time comes
When the world just falls,
The time of sleep.
- Simeon Dumdum, Jr.
What is a master? Not one whom
one imitates, emulates even;
but rather, a powerful presence
acknowledged, looked up to in
all weathers. A mountain . . .
The mountain is master of the
landscape in which it is a presence.
One does not emulate such a
master, except by being more one -
self. The early work of a master
poet is like the entwined, scratchy,
capillary undergrowth at the moun -
tain's base. Here are bitter fungi
full of worms, sweet wild rasp -
berries dripping from the stem at
a touch, blackberries shining but
not yet darkened to ripeness.
All is fragrant, all is of the enticing
substance of the forest, first
threads of the tapestry, outgrowing
the mountain itself, into whose
life we enter as we begin to climb.
- Denise Levertov
The Worm of Conscience
Nightcrawler, is it time?
My head stuffed with yellow pages
As if there were a courtroom nearby
And these its stacked-up documents.
Did you crawl out of the black heart of the prosecuting attorney?
Tunneling through the ornate signature of the judgment
On a special errand
Over the morgue reports and orphans' petitions.
Maker of labyrinths, is that it?
. . . . . Contorting myself to overtake you.
. . . . . . . . . . Little white lies in a cage -
. . . . . . . . . . I intend to feed you to.
- Charles Simic
Letter written on the Long Island Ferry
I am surprised to see
that the ocean is still going on.
Now I am going back
and I have ripped my hand
from your hand as I said I would
and I have made it this far
as I said I would
and I am on the top deck now
holding my wallet, my cigarettes
and my car keys
at 2 o'clock on a tuesday
in August of 1960.
Dearest,
although everything has happened,
nothing has happened.
The sea is very old.
The sea is the face of Mary,
without miracles or rage
or unusual hope,
grown rough and wrinkled
with incurable age.
Still,
I have eyes.
These are my eyes:
the orange letters that spell
ORIENT on the life preserver
that hangs by my knees;
the cement life boat that wears
its dirty canvas coat;
the faded sign that sits on its shelf
saying KEEP OFF.
Oh, all right, I say,
I'll save myself.
Over my right shoulder
I see four nuns
who sit like a bridge club,
their faces poked out
from under their habits,
as good as good babies who
have sunk into their carriages.
Without discrimination
the wind pulls the skirts
of their arms.
Almost undressed,
I see what remains:
that holy wrist,
that ankle,
that chain.
- Anne Sexton
All My Pretty Ones
"It is the nature of things, which is speaking with the voice of a man -
the Zen of Zen
when the words and the ideas are undivided and indivisible (though a word has its own intrinsic value); when you just can't explain why it is poetry, why it is Zen (but you do).
mountainously of mountains
to mountains."
- R. H. Blyth
In another time, we will want to know how the earth looked
Then, and were people the way we are now. In another time,
The records they left will convince us that we are unchanged
And could be at ease in the past, and not alone in the present.
And we shall be pleased. But beyond all that, what cannot
Be seen or explained will always be elsewhere, always supposed,
Invisible even beneath the signs - the beautiful surface,
The uncommon knowledge - that point its way. In another time,
What cannot be seen will define us, and we shall be prompted
To say that language is error, and all things are wronged
By representation. The self, we shall say, can never be
Seen with a disguise, and never be seen without one.
- Mark Strand
A Suite of Appearances
The Meaning of Simplicity
I hide behind simple things so you'll find me;
if you don't find me, you'll find the things,
you'll touch what my hand has touched,
our hand-prints will merge.
The August moon glitters in the kitchen
like a tin-plated pot (it gets that way
. . . . . because of what I'm saying to you),
it lights up the empty house and
. . . . . the house's kneeling silence -
always the silence remains kneeling.
Every word is a doorway
to a meeting, one often cancelled,
and that's when a word is true:
. . . . . when it insists on the meeting.
- Yannis Ritsos
There are times when I can't move.
I feel roots of mine everywhere,
as though all things were born of me,
or as though I were born of all things.
All I can do then is to stay still
with eyes open like two faces
at the moment of birth,
with a small amount of love in one hand
and something cold in the other.
And all I can give someone passing by me
is that motionless absence
that has roots in him too.
- Roberto Juarroz
translated by W. S. Merwin
The Pulse
Sealed inside the anemone
in the dark, I knock my head
on steel petals
curving inward around me.
Somewhere the edict is given:
petals, relax.
Delicately they arch over backward.
All is opened to me -
the air they call water,
saline, dawn green over its sands
resplendent with fishes.
All day it is morning,
all night the glitter
of all that shines out of itself
crisps the vast swathes of the current.
But my feet are weighted:
only my seafern arms
my human hands
my fingers tipped with fire
sway out into the world.
Fair is the world.
I sing. The ache
up from heel to knee
of the weights
gives to the song its
ground bass.
And before the song
attains even a first refrain
the petals creak and
begin to rise.
They rise and recurl
to a bud's form
and clamp shut.
I wait in the dark.
- Denise Levertov
The Sorrow Dance
For Fear
For fear I want
to make myself again
under the thumb
of old love, old time
subservience
and pain, bent
into a nail that will
not come out.
Why, love, does it
make such a difference
not to be heard
in spite of self
or what we may feel,
one for the other,
but as a hammer
to drive again
bent nail
into old hurt?
- Robert Creeley
Before The Game
Shut one eye then the other
Peek into every corner of yourself
See that there are no nails no thieves
See that there are no cuckoo's eggs
Shut then the other eye
Squat and jump
Jump high high high
On top of yourself
Fall then with all your weight
Fall for days on end deep deep deep
To the bottom of your abyss
Who doesn't break into pieces
Who remains whole who gets up whole
Plays
- Vasko Popa
"Poetry was born from magic; it grew up with religion; it survived the age of reason; how is it to continue to be heard in the pandemonium of slogans, loud speakers, madhouse slanders, high explosive fears that seem to diffuse man in complexities of environment outrunning his capacity to grasp? The poet's magical interpretation of the universe is confronted by the vast impersonal rationalization of science, and once more, it is the poet, as I think Goethe says somewhere, who must take the risks. A poem is far more than a self expression. It is a strange compromise between the demands of self, the world, and Poetry. Rilke in his Archaic Torso of Apollo ends by saying, "You must change your life" and this, we know from many experiences, is what art does. It challenges the surface platitudes of existence. When complexities become dense, the poet may be said to snatch from memory, from sensation, the very seed of the future, by giving perceptions that might otherwise never be known."
- Jean Garrigue
1953
Love
I believed:
a tree when kissed
would not lose its leaves -
leaves fall
from kissed
trees.
A river hugged
by a hand in love
would not flow away -
it flows away
into fog.
There are in my landscape
errors of colors and scents
yet always
always I love
what incessantly
changes.
As a golden ball
she runs before me:
approached again and again,
my beloved,
Earth.
- Tymoteusz Karpowicz
A Tree Within
A tree grew inside my head.
A tree grew in.
Its roots are veins,
its branches nerves,
thoughts its tangled foliage.
Your glance sets it on fire,
and its fruits of shade
are blood oranges
and pomegranates of flame.
. . . . . Day breaks
in the body's night.
There, within, inside my head,
the tree speaks.
. . . . . Come closer - can you hear it?
- Octavio Paz
Advice to the Old (Including Myself)
Do not speak of yourself (for God's sake) even when asked.
Do not dwell on other times as different from the time
Whose air we breathe; or recall books with broken spines
Whose titles died with the old dreams. Do not resort to
An alphabet of gnarled pain, but speak of the lark's wing
Unbroken, still fluent as the tongue. Call out the names of stars
Until their metal clangs in the enormous dark. Yodel your way
Through fields where the dew weeps, but not you, not you.
Have no communion with despair; and, at the end,
Take the old fury in your empty arms, sever its veins,
And bear it fiercely, fiercely to the wild beast's lair.
- Kay Boyle
The Ars Poetica Machine
A poem should be palpable and mute
as a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
- Ted Berrigan
Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish
Take a pen in your uncertain fingers.
Trust, and be assured
That the whole world is a sky-blue butterfly
And words are the nets to capture it.
- Muhammad al-Ghuzzi
The blood jet is poetry
There is no stopping it.
- Sylvia Plath
And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!
- Frank O'Hara
House of Spring
Hundreds of open flowers
. . . . . all come from
. . . . . . . . . . the one branch
Look
. . . . . all their colors
. . . . . . . . . . appear in my garden
I open the clattering gate
. . . . . and in the wind
. . . . . . . . . . I see
the spring sunlight
. . . . . already it has reached
. . . . . . . . . . worlds without number
- Muso Soseki
. . . . . Today the Western Mountain is crowded;
They are cutting up the bones of the patriarchs
. . . . . . . . . . and masters for fuel.
. . . . . I have no idea what weight
. . . . . . . . . . their burdens may have,
But anyway the great thing is that
. . . . . the eternal spring is once more new.
- Sosan
Gathering Firewood
"And the tongue is a fire: the world of iniquity among our members is the tongue, which defileth the whole body and setteth on fire the wheel of nature, and is set on fire by hell."
- Amban
<< Home