from the center of the earth.

The Hollow Men

pinkfist — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 23:47:56 GMT

Mistah Kurtz -- he dead A penny for the Old Guy I We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats' feet over broken glass In our dry cellar Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion; Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men. II Eyes I dare not meet in dreams In death's dream kingdom These do not appear: There, the eyes are Sunlight on a broken column There, is a tree swinging And voices are In the wind's singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star. Let me be no nearer In death's dream kingdom Let me also wear Such deliberate disguises Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves In a field Behaving as the wind behaves No nearer -- Not that final meeting In the twilight kingdom III This is the dead land This is cactus land Here the stone images Are raised, here they receive The supplication of a dead man's hand Under the twinkle of a fading star. Is it like this In death's other kingdom Waking alone At the hour when we are Trembling with tenderness Lips that would kiss Form prayers to broken stone. IV The eyes are not here There are no eyes here In this valley of dying stars In this hollow valley This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms In this last of meeting places We grope together And avoid speech Gathered on this beach of the tumid river Sightless, unless The eyes reappear As the perpetual star Multifoliate rose Of death's twilight kingdom The hope only Of empty men. V Here we go round the prickly pear Prickly pear prickly pear Here we go round the prickly pear At five o'clock in the morning. Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the Shadow Life is very long Between the desire And the spasm Between the potency And the existence Between the essence And the descent Falls the Shadow For Thine is the Kingdom For Thine is Life is For Thine is the This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper. - T.S. Eliot

Nic Dwa Razy (Nothing Twice)

pinkfist — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 07:00:06 GMT

Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice. Even if there is no one dumber, if you're the planet's biggest dunce, you can't repeat the class in summer: this course is only offered once. No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses. One day, perhaps some idle tongue mentions your name by accident: I feel as if a rose were flung into the room, all hue and scent. The next day, though you're here with me, I can't help looking at the clock: A rose? A rose? What could that be? Is that a flower of a rock? Why do we treat the fleeting day with so much needless fear and sorrow? It's in its nature not to say Today is always gone tomorrow With smiles and kisses, we prefer to seek accord beneath our star, although we're different (we concur) just as two drops of water are. - Wislawa Szymborska Translated by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak

from The Edge of the World

pinkfist — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 04:37:46 GMT

I release the earth and I imprison the skies. I fall down in order to stay faithful to the light, in order to make the world ambiguous, fascinating, changeable, dangerous, in order to announce the steps beyond. The blood of the gods is still fresh on my clothes. A seagull's scream echoes through my pages. Let me just pack up my words and leave. - Adonis

Me gustas cuando callas ... (Poema XV)

pinkfist — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 04:11:02 GMT

Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente, y me oyes desde lejos, y mi voz no te toca. Parece que los ojos se te hubieran volado y parece que un beso te cerrara la boca. Como todas las cosas están llenas de mi alma emerges de las cosas, llena del alma mía. Mariposa de sueño, te pareces a mi alma, y te pareces a la palabra melancolía. Me gustas cuando callas y estás como distante. Y estás como quejándote, mariposa en arrullo. Y me oyes desde lejos, y mi voz no te alcanza: Déjame que me calle con el silencio tuyo. Déjame que te hable también con tu silencio claro como una lámpara, simple como un anillo. Eres como la noche, callada y constelada. Tu silencio es de estrella, tan lejano y sencillo. Me gustas cuando callas porque estás como ausente. Distante y dolorosa como si hubieras muerto. Una palabra entonces, una sonrisa bastan. Y estoy alegre, alegre de que no sea cierto. - Pablo Neruda

Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802

pinkfist — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 03:17:08 GMT

Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This City now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent, bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. Never did sun more beautifully steep In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill; Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep! The river glideth at his own sweet will: Dear God! the very houses seem asleep; And all that mighty heart is lying still! - William Wordsworth

The Look

pinkfist — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 21:48:42 GMT

Strephon kissed me in the spring, Robin in the fall, But Colin only looked at me And never kissed at all. Strephon's kiss was lost in jest, Robin's lost in play, But the kiss in Colin's eyes Haunts me night and day. - Sara Teasdale

Question

pinkfist — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 07:04:06 GMT

Body my house my horse my hound what will I do when you are fallen Where will I sleep How will I ride What will I hunt Where can I go without my mount all eager and quick How will I know in thicket ahead is danger or treasure when Body my good bright dog is dead How will it be to lie in the sky without roof or door and wind for an eye With cloud for shift how will I hide? - May Swenson (for Otto, a dear light that left us only recently; his memory burns in my heart.)

Remembrances of Marie A.

pinkfist — Mon, 26 May 2008 18:53:46 GMT

1 On a certain day in the blue-moon month of September Beneath a young plum tree, quietly I held her there, my quiet, pale beloved In my arms just like a graceful dream. And over us in the beautiful summer sky There was a cloud on which my gaze rested It was very white and so immensely high And when I looked up, it had disappeared. 2 Since that day many, many months Have quietly floated down and past. No doubt the plum trees were chopped down And you ask me: what's happened to my love? So I answer you: I can't remember. And still, of course, I know what you mean But I honestly can't recollect her face I just know: there was a time I kissed it. 3 And that kiss too I would have long forgotten Had not the cloud been present there That I still know and always will remember It was so white and came from on high. Perhaps those plum trees still bloom And that woman now may have had her seventh child But that cloud blossomed just a few minutes And when I looked up, it had disappeared in the wind. -Bertolt Brecht

Chance

pinkfist — Sat, 24 May 2008 21:17:40 GMT

may favor obscure brainy aptitudes in you and a love of the past so blind you would venture, always securing permission, into the back library stacks, without food or water because you have a mission: to find yourself, in the regulated light, holding a volume in your hands as you yourself might like to be held. Mostly your life will be voices and images. Information. You may go a long way alone, and travel much to open a book to renew your touch. - Molly Peacock

Shake Ridge Road

pinkfist — Fri, 16 May 2008 23:21:25 GMT

On an ordinary afternoon, of an ordinary day, two imaginations are on the hunt, aching for the amble, seduced by wander lust. A sigh escapes, a righthand turn redirects the season. Before they know why was why, the where is upon them. They are on Shake Ridge Road. “Oh lonely soul I know it’s a hard road.” The asphalt takes a stance difficult, dividing winter/spring, solid/liquid, crystals/shoots. The drifters hold their breath a moment in reverie for the liminal blacktop. It shivers, quakes, sum(mon)s the blessed. It dances between ice and eager lupine, ever-warming, ever-creeping and squiggling, ever-inviting the promise of mandala vines arching over. So maybe this is holy. Maybe this—sunset dreamers honest and golden and ineffable, content to release blushing solitudes to opposite directions—is sacred. Maybe this—lingering off the snow line in a slow exhale, through silent elevations of dream and thought—will lead them safely home through the daffodils and intermittent traffic. - Nevada (to Alex, happy birthday.)

Epithalamium

pinkfist — Thu, 15 May 2008 17:20:07 GMT

In the middle garden is the secret wedding, that hides always under the other one and under the shiny things of the other one. Under a tree one hand reaches through the grainy dusk toward another. Two right hands. The ring is a weed that will surely die. There is no one else for miles, and even those people far away are deaf and blind. There is no one to bless this. There are the dark trees, and just beyond the trees. -Matthew Rohrer (for Amos & Emily and Marc & Chloe)

Jasmine

pinkfist — Tue, 13 May 2008 22:00:45 GMT

I sit beside two women, kitty-corner to the stage, as Elvin's sticks blur the club into a blue fantasia. I thought my body had forgotten the Deep South, how I'd cross the street if a woman like these two walked towards me, as if a cat traversed my path beneath the evening star. Which one is wearing jasmine? If my grandmothers saw me now they'd say, Boy, the devil never sleeps. My mind is lost among November cotton flowers, a soft rain on my face as Richard Davis plucks the fat notes of chance on his upright leaning into the future. The blonde, the brunette— which one is scented with jasmine? I can hear Duke in the right hand & Basie in the left as the young piano player nudges us into the past. The trumpet's almost kissed by enough pain. Give him a few more years, a few more ghosts to embrace—Clifford's shadow on the edge of the stage. The sign says, No Talking. Elvin's guardian angel lingers at the top of the stairs, counting each drop of sweat paid in tribute. The blonde has her eyes closed, & the brunette is looking at me. Our bodies sway to each riff, the jasmine rising from a valley somewhere in Egypt, a white moon opening countless false mouths of laughter. The midnight gatherers are boys & girls with the headlights of trucks aimed at their backs, because their small hands refuse to wound the knowing scent hidden in each bloom. - Yusef Komunyakaa

Nothing Stays Put

pinkfist — Sun, 11 May 2008 18:53:24 GMT

In memory of Father Flye, 1884-1985 The strange and wonderful are too much with us. The protea of the antipodes--a great, globed, blazing honeybee of a bloom-- for sale in the supermarket! We are in our decadence, we are not entitled. What have we done to deserve all the produce of the tropics-- this fiery trove, the largesse of it heaped up like cannonballs, these pineapples, bossed and crested, standing like troops at attention, these tiers, these balconies of green, festoons grown sumptuous with stoop labor? The exotic is everywhere, it comes to us before there is a yen or a need for it. The green- grocers, uptown and down, are from South Korea. Orchids, opulence by the pailful, just slightly fatigued by the plane trip from Hawaii, are disposed on the sidewalks; alstroemerias, freesias fattened a bit in translation from overseas; gladioli likewise estranged from their piercing ancestral crimson; as well as, less altered from the original blue cornflower of the roadsides and railway embankments of Europe, these bachelor's buttons. But it isn't the railway embankments their featherweight wheels of cobalt remind me of, it's a row of them among prim colonnades of cosmos, snapdragon, nasturtium, bloodsilk red poppies, in my grandmother's garden: a prairie childhood, the grassland shorn, overlaid with a grid, unsealed, furrowed, harrowed and sown with immigrant grasses, their massive corduroy, their wavering feltings embroidered here and there by the scarlet shoulder patch of cannas on a courthouse lawn, by a love knot, a cross stitch of living matter, sown and tended by women, nurturers everywhere of the strange and wonderful, beneath whose hands what had been alien begins, as it alters, to grow as though it were indigenous. But at this remove what I think of as strange and wonderful, strolling the side streets of Manhattan on an April afternoon, seeing hybrid pear trees in blossom, a tossing, vertiginous colonnade of foam, up above-- is the white petalfall, the warm snowdrift of the indigenous wild plum of my childhood. Nothing stays put. The world is a wheel. All that we know, that we're made of, is motion. - Amy Clampitt

After John Donne's "To His Mistress Going to Bed"

pinkfist — Wed, 07 May 2008 05:37:11 GMT

What might she send — a wet sleeve, or platter of brine-latticed bluefish dusky with capers, lemons, wine; a briar for your thumb, a mouth, lunatic, to suck the blood: a signal that one too often inside & now beside herself with thoughts of you wonders how she might woo and through dew-whetted keyhole pursue & sing & win? She is marvelous with waiting. Come. Hunt here. Relieve with hands and tongue her heavy hour. - Lisa Russ Spaar __________________________________________ Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going to Bed Come, Madam, come, all rest my powers defy, Until I labour, I in labour lie. The foe oft-times having the foe in sight, Is tired with standing though he never fight. Off with that girdle, like heaven's zone glistering, But a far fairer world encompassing. Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear, That th'eyes of busy fools may be stopped there. Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime Tells me from you that now it is bed time. Off with that happy busk, which I envy, That still can be, and still can stand so nigh. Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals, As when from flowery meads th'hills shadow steals. Off with your wiry coronet and show The hairy diadem which on you doth grow: Now off with those shoes: and then safely tread In this love's hallowed temple, this soft bed. In such white robes heaven's angels used to be Received by men; thou, Angel, bring'st with thee A heaven like Mahomet's Paradise; and though Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know By this these Angels from an evil sprite: Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright. License my roving hands, and let them go Before, behind, between, above, below. O my America! my new-found-land, My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned, My mine of precious stones, my empery, How blest am I in this discovering thee! To enter in these bonds is to be free; Then where my hand is set, my seal shall be. Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee, As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be, To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use Are as Atlanta's balls, cast in men's views, That when a fool's eye lighteth on a gem, His earthly soul may covet theirs, not them: Like pictures, or like books' gay coverings made For lay-men, are all women thus arrayed. Themselves are mystic books, which only we (Whom their imputed grace will dignify) Must see revealed. Then, since that I may know, As liberally as to a midwife, show Thyself: cast all, yea, this white linen hence, There is no penance due to innocence: To teach thee, I am naked first; why than, What need'st thou have more covering than a man? - John Donne

Spring is like a perhaps hand

pinkfist — Mon, 05 May 2008 16:02:40 GMT

Spring is like a perhaps hand (which comes carefully out of Nowhere)arranging a window,into which people look(while people stare arranging and changing placing carefully there a strange thing and a known thing here)and changing everything carefully - E. E. Cummings

beltane

pinkfist — Thu, 01 May 2008 07:09:02 GMT

green spilt out into the meadows running into every being filling us up with spirit tumbling the pulsing red life of the earth in the smoke of the firecircle i saw my demons scatter to the skies dissolving into the midnight air there is nothing but the sun the moon in perfect equilibrium unreal yet grounded alone in body, full in spirit love - Lady Lissar

Blessing to Diyala

pinkfist — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 04:08:55 GMT

"Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind. Because your lover threw wild hands towards the sky" There was a summer long ago in quiet McGregor Bay where you were my unlikely oasis. You, in the company of softly crying loons and jumping pike, poured yourself over my brittle loneliness restoring in me space to love unafraid, restoring me. I can just barely grasp that you (still boyish and swaggering to me) reside amidst insurgency persistent, exist alongside explosives, combat and crossfire, act in the deadliest of theaters. I can just barely grasp that you (still tenderly receiving me in polar light) outline the squiggly human terrain and bring the Phantom Thunder - an inadmissible and quarrelsome suitor to an alluvial maiden teeming with sweet oranges and date palm groves. Oh, I wish to spare you the turbulent tour, capture you in cool northern waters. O Canada. - Nevada

After the Movie

pinkfist — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 17:43:30 GMT

My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie. He says that he believes a person can love someone and still be able to murder that person. I say, No, that's not love. That's attachment. Michael says, No, that's love. You can love someone, then come to a day when you're forced to think "it's him or me" think "me" and kill him. I say, Then it's not love anymore. Michael says, It was love up to then though. I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word. Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist even in the murderous heart. I say that what he might mean by love is desire. Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what is it? We're walking along West 16th Street—a clear unclouded night—and I hear my voice repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action, I used to say to him. Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to look at someone you want to eat and not eat them. Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby. Meister Eckhardt says that as long as we love images we are doomed to live in purgatory. Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue saying goodnight. I can't drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I've just bought— again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and suck the stuff from the hole the flip top made. What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says. But what I think he's saying is "You are too strict. You are a nun." Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him to think these things of me even if he's not thinking them? Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns clearer and colder. Although the days, after the solstice, have started to lengthen, we both know the winter has only begun. - Marie Howe

The River Replaces

pinkfist — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 21:03:22 GMT

The river replaces, the willow drags a horseless rider caparisoned in red glides over the gravestones. Velvet is the integument I’d hope for for night. Our doors are unlonelied in the most diaristic indulgence, Death comes unexpectedly and so you sure better knock, and in a magnitude of scales. The most full-flooded four-color process awaits there when I have time “for myself” and cannot render it. I had to guess “this was happening” said one self to the other who self same said as the original broke through the dream hole of the second, and hurled its relapse into a momentary aquaintance who ground significance with a tired pestle until my sleepy lover woke. I had to shade the place just so. Heaven it’s heaven said it’s heaven pure heaven the self hands heaven’s print-out across a warm booth to another: Heaven: Example The heaven is without description. Put them in one and the old will rage in a canoe. Heaven was splashes of color casually tossed from ecstacy to mania so seeing had to become habitual, seeing was certain films we could not look at, films of commingstance. Might as well bury me ’neath the blurry white oleander crowding the pear tree near the family house in its unassailable wedlock: personlock: what alchemy of emotions to accompany speech and bit o’ pain. A grave is goodbye last ditch so long see you again, adieu. Always within earshot, actuality becomes you. We needed the rain. Indoors I worked like the crow, the phone rang. I worked at it, and the whole time I could hear you, you didn’t have to scream. Here is a dark suit and tie. Appearance illumines. Please write to me on a bed of ease. Appearance forgets it like an egotist. Fathom thee. - Gillian Conoley

Cherry Tomatoes

pinkfist — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 21:49:05 GMT

Little bastards of vine. Little demons by the pint. Red eggs that never hatch, just collapse and rot. When my mom told me to gather their grubby bodies into my skirt, I'd cry. You and your father, she'd chide— the way, each time I kicked and wailed against sailing, my dad shook his head, said You and your mother. Now, a city girl, I ease one loose from its siblings, from its clear plastic coffin, place it on my tongue. Just to try. The smooth surface resists, resists, and erupts in my mouth: seeds, juice, acid, blood of a perfect household. The way, when I finally went sailing, my stomach was rocked from inside out. Little boat, big sea. Handful of skinned sunsets. - Sandra Beasley

The Origin

pinkfist — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 02:04:08 GMT

of what happened is not in language— of this much I am certain. Six degrees south, six east— and you have it: the bird with the blue feathers, the brown bird— same white breasts, same scaly ankles. The waves between us— house light and transform motion into the harboring of sounds in language.— Where there is newsprint the fact of desire is turned from again— and again. Just the sense that what remains might well be held up— later, as an ending. Twice I have walked through this life— once for nothing, once for facts: fairy-shrimp in the vernal pool— glassy-winged sharp-shooter on the failing vines. Count me— among the animals, their small committed calls.— Count me among the living. My greatest desire— to exist in a physical world. - Jane Mead

Below the Water Line

pinkfist — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 18:59:01 GMT

The brief and inconceivable conversations of Mr. Shine graced and amused mermaid Raven An. To say the harmonious exchange of last week was anticipated would belie, understate. Rap(id fire) sessions exposed a turbid scape, lucid, urgent eyes and a gleaming filament. Those silken utterances unraveled, stretched wide across a horizon of lips and ears and back again. The sly, scaly thief floats in an undreamed of moment, indulges in an imaginary kiss, a fleeting, moist whisper of air to be shared. - Nevada

From Concordance [Working backward in sleep]

pinkfist — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 07:03:22 GMT

Working backward in sleep, the last thing you numbed to is what wakes you. What if that image were Eros as words? What would it be like if you contemplated my words and I felt you? Animals, an owl, frog, open their eyes, and a mirror forms on the ground. When insight comes in a dream, and events the next day illuminate it, this begins your streaming consciousness, synchronicity, asymptotic lines of the flights of concordances. An owl opens its eyes in deep woods. For the first time, I write and you don't know me. Milkweed I touch floats. - Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, image by Kiki Smith.

The Second Coming

pinkfist — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 15:06:01 GMT

Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert A shape with lion body and the head of a man, A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. The darkness drops again; but now I know That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? - William Butler Yeats

The Tiger

pinkfist — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:11:14 GMT

TIGER, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? In what distant deeps or skies Burnt the fire of thine eyes? On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand dare seize the fire? And what shoulder and what art Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And, when thy heart began to beat, What dread hand and what dread feet? What the hammer? What the chain? In what furnace was thy brain? What the anvil? What dread grasp Dare its deadly terrors clasp? When the stars threw down their spears, And water'd heaven with their tears, Did He smile His work to see? Did He who made the lamb make thee? Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forests of the night, What immortal hand or eye Dare frame thy fearful symmetry? - William Blake