Pied Beauty

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;         5 And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:         10                   Praise him. ~Gerard Manley Hopkins

A Token

A Token

My lady

fair with

soft

arms, what

can I say to

you—words, words

as if all

worlds were there.

~Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley, “A Token” from The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975. Copyright © 1992 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted with the permission of the University of California Press, www.ucpress.edu.

Source: The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley, 1945-1975 (2006).

For Love

For Love

 

for Bobbie

Yesterday I wanted to

speak of it, that sense above

the others to me

important because all

that I know derives

from what it teaches me.

Today, what is it that

is finally so helpless,

different, despairs of its own

statement, wants to

turn away, endlessly

to turn away.

If the moon did not …

no, if you did not

I wouldn’t either, but

what would I not

do, what prevention, what

thing so quickly stopped.

That is love yesterday

or tomorrow, not

now. Can I eat

what you give me. I

have not earned it. Must

I think of everything

as earned. Now love also

becomes a reward so

remote from me I have

only made it with my mind.

Here is tedium,

despair, a painful

sense of isolation and

whimsical if pompous

self-regard. But that image

is only of the mind’s

vague structure, vague to me

because it is my own.

Love, what do I think

to say. I cannot say it.

What have you become to ask,

what have I made you into,

companion, good company,

crossed legs with skirt, or

soft body under

the bones of the bed.

Nothing says anything

but that which it wishes

would come true, fears

what else might happen in

some other place, some

other time not this one.

A voice in my place, an

echo of that only in yours.

Let me stumble into

not the confession but

the obsession I begin with

now. For you

also (also)

some time beyond place, or

place beyond time, no

mind left to

say anything at all,

that face gone, now.

Into the company of love

it all returns.

~ Robert Creeley

Robert Creeley, “For Love” from Selected Poems of Robert Creeley. Copyright © 1991 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted with the permission of the University of California Press, www.ucpress.edu.

Source: Poetry (May 1961).

What’s Wrong

What’s Wrong

“What you are struggling with,” said

the psychologist, “is

a continuous song, something like

a telephone’s tone. Nebulous, noncommittal,

unrelenting, pretending

to give you messages it can’t deliver.

Because the body is unattached. It is,”

he said, “like a valentine sent

out cold, beautiful, brittle as tomorrow’s

deja-vu, but distortedly misaddressed.

These pills will help you

find yourself

somewhere where the lace ends up loose

and the paste is still humming

all about you.

~Landis Everson

Landis Everson, “What’s Wrong,” from Poetry (October 2006). Copyright �© 2006 by Poetry Foundation. Reprinted with permission from Poetry Foundation.

Source: Poetry (October 2006).

The Rain

The Rain

When my older brother

came back from war

he had on his forehead a little silver star

and under the star

an abyss

a splinter of shrapnel

hit him at Verdun

or perhaps at Grünwald

(he’d forgotten the details)

he used to talk much

in many languages

but he liked most of all

the language of history

until losing breath

he commanded his dead pals to run

Roland Kowaski Hannibal

he shouted

that this was the last crusade

that Carthage soon would fall

and then sobbing confessed

that Napoleon did not like him

we looked at him

getting paler and paler

abandoned by his senses

he turned slowly into a monument

into musical shells of ears

entered a stone forest

and the skin of his face

was secured

with the blind dry

buttons of eyes

nothing was left him

but touch

what stories

he told with his hands

in the right he had romances

in the left soldier’s memories

they took my brother

and carried him out of town

he returns every fall

slim and very quiet

he does not want to come in

he knocks at the window for me

we walk together in the streets

and he recites to me

improbable tales

touching my face

with blind fingers of rain

~by Zbigniew Herbert

Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott

“The Rain” by Zbigniew Herbert from Selected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert, Edited and Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott. English translation copyright �© 1968 by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Scott. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, www.harpercollins.com

Source: Selected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert (The Ecco Press, 1985).

Chaplinesque

We make our meek adjustments,

Contented with such random consolations

As the wind deposits

In slithered and too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find

A famished kitten on the step, and know

Recesses for it from the fury of the street,

Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, and to the final smirk

Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb

That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,

Facing the dull squint with what innocence

And what surprise!

And yet these fine collapses are not lies

More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;

Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.

We can evade you, and all else but the heart:

What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen

The moon in lonely alleys make

A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,

And through all sound of gaiety and quest

Have heard a kitten in the wilderness.

~ Hart Crane

Source: The Complete Poems of Hart Crane (2001).

Unknown Bird

Unknown Bird

Out of the dry days
through the dusty leaves
far across the valley
those few notes never
heard here before

one fluted phrase
floating over its
wandering secret
all at once wells up
somewhere else

and is gone before it
goes on fallen into
its own echo leaving
a hollow through the air
that is dry as before

where is it from
hardly anyone
seems to have noticed it
so far but who now
would have been listening

it is not native here
that may be the one
thing we are sure of
it came from somewhere
else perhaps alone

so keeps on calling for
no one who is here
hoping to be heard
by another of its own
unlikely origin

trying once more the same few
notes that began the song
of an oriole last heard
years ago in another
existence there

it goes again tell
no one it is here
foreign as we are
who are filling the days
with a sound of our own

~W.S. Merwin

As We Are So Wonderfully Done With Each Other

As We Are So Wonderfully Done With Each Other

 

As we are so wonderfully done with each other

We can walk into our separate sleep

on floors of music where the milkwhite cloak of childhood

lies

 

oh my love, my golden lark, my soft long doll

Your lips have splashed my dull house with print of flowers

My hands are crooked where the spilled over your dear

curving

 

It is good to be weary from that brilliant work

It is being God to feel your breathing under me

 

A water glass on the bureau fills with morning…

Don’t let anyone in to wake us

 

~Kenneth Patchen

Good People

Good People

 

From the kindness of my parents

I suppose it was that I held

that belief about suffering

 

imagining that if only

it could come to the attention

of any person with normal

feelings certainly anyone

literate who might have gone

 

to college they would comprehend

pain when it went on before them

and would do something about it

whenever they saw it happen

in the time of pain the present

they would try to stop the bleeding

for example with their own hands

 

but it escapes their attention

or there may be reasons for it

the victims under the blankets

the meat counters the maimed children

the animals the animals

staring from the end of the world

 

~ W.S. Merwin

 

This poem originally appeared in the December 1999 issue of Poetry.

Beggars and Kings

Beggars and Kings

In the evening

all the hours that weren’t used

are emptied out

and  the beggars are waiting  to gather them up

to open them

to find the sun in each one

and teach it its beggar’s name

and sing to it it is well

through the night

 

but each of us

has his own kingdom of pains

and has not yet found them all

and is sailing in search of them day and night

infallible undisputing unresting

filled with a dumb use

and its time

like a finger in a world without hands

 

~W.S. Merwin