You are currently browsing the daily archive for February 6th, 2008.
A line I liked by Louise Gluck: “it seemed an honor to have a mouth.”
From Sam Beckett’s “bon bon il est un pays”:
“spiral dust of instants what is this the same
the calm the love the hate the calm the calm”
Jorie Graham has an excellent poem Full Fathom, not available online but included in her forthcoming “Sea Change” (available April 1st).
George Szirtes has a series of poems inspired by pictures two of which stand out. The first is “Ross: Children of the Ghetto” and the other is “Kolar: Housing Estate”.
Children of the Ghetto: Rhyme’s whimsy is worked to perfection in this piece. There’s something so ominous in using an immature diction for someone of a much more somber age, particularly when we get to the “dismal spaces”. The detail of the “shiny shoes” in the first stanza kills and the line in the third stanza when the children determine “the most rudimentary graces” is one of those truths that is made true in the speaking of it. I never would have thought of it in those terms. The gut-wrench is hidden in the final stanza, the last two lines acting as its cushion, but the “as if” is so gentle, slipped in so innocuously that if we aren’t on our toes we might gloss over it and read the poem as nostalgic, when there be barbs there.
Housing Estate: The picture is of a three to four year old girl in underwear standing on a mottled hill and in the distance two large housing apartments, the sky stretched out above them all. The girl fills the gap between the two buildings and looks off to the side. The “vague gesture” (in line 5) and the act of the twelve year old boy (in line 9) are brilliant.
This is why we read. Go read them.
Ash Wednesday
I repent of pansies planted last year
in the crumbling maze of winter. In
winter’s clean mirror I saw my face everywhere.
It seemed a good idea, obscure with color
the dead claws of my eyes, hide
the shame of empty hands with green
and a fruited stem, but now that flowers
raise their heads, their bruised
purple lips define my path and
defy –with black throats– the wilderness,
revealing the yellow of their uvula,
screaming, it is finished, though winter
rained the ice of indignation on their graves,
which became wombs and later cradles.
They rise. Everyday is their third day.
And now these flowers own everything,
drowning in their royal robes,
they tell me I will rise with them,
though last night I dreamt
I was oaken wood, rotten through,
floating in the sea. My wife held onto me,
as mountains broke across my breast,
splintering back into the sea.
Die together, I said. My tongue of almond wood
and she drank my words like wine.
Nail my promise into my eyes,
wind twine around each nail and trail it to your hands,
so I can follow where you place them. She put them
to my side where I was rotted out the most,
where sea and salt had bit the worst. The sea tossed,
a fiercesome rage had bent the waves
into a fist of rusted nails emblazoned red. After dusk
the yellow sea went black, calmed, and we were gone,
swallowed like a seed in the ash of its old fire.
[2002]
