VAGUE POEM

Vague Poem

The trip west.
—I think I dreamed that trip.
They talked a lot of “rose rocks”
or maybe “rock roses”
—I’m not sure now, but someone tried to get me some.
(And two or three students had.)

She said she had some at her house.
They were by the back door, she said.
—A ramshackle house.
An Army house? No, “a Navy house.” Yes,
that far inland.
There was nothing by the back door but dirt
or that same dry, monochrome, sepia straw I’d seen everywhere.
Oh, she said, the dog has carried them off.
(A big black dog, female, was dancing around us.)

Later, as we drank tea from mugs, she found one
“a sort of one.” “This one is just beginning. See—
you can see here, it’s beginning to look like a rose.
It’s—well, a crystal, crystals form—
I don’t know any geology myself …”
(Neither did I.)
Faintly, I could make out—perhaps—in the dull,
rose-red lump of (apparently) soil
a rose-like shape; faint glitters … Yes, perhaps
there was a secret, powerful crystal at work inside.

I almost saw it: turning into a rose
without any of the intervening
roots, stem, buds, and so on; just
earth to rose and back again.
Crystallography and its laws:
something I once wanted badly to study,
until I learned that it would involve a lot of arithmetic,
that is, mathematics.

Just now, when I saw you naked again,
I thought the same words: rose-rock, rock-rose …
Rose, trying, working, to show itself,
forming, folding over,
unimaginable connections, unseen, shining edges.
Rose-rock, unformed, flesh beginning, crystal by crystal,
clear pink breasts and darker, crystalline nipples,
rose-rock, rose-quartz, roses, roses, roses,
exacting roses from the body,
and the even darker, accurate, rose of sex—

Elizabeth Bishop, from The New Yorker

THE BIGHT

The Bight
by Elizabeth Bishop

[On my birthday]

At low tide like this how sheer the water is.
White, crumbling ribs of marl protrude and glare
and the boats are dry, the pilings dry as matches.
Absorbing, rather than being absorbed,
the water in the bight doesn’t wet anything,
the color of the gas flame turned as low as possible.
One can smell it turning to gas; if one were Baudelaire
one could probably hear it turning to marimba music.
The little ocher dredge at work off the end of the dock
already plays the dry perfectly off-beat claves.
The birds are outsize. Pelicans crash
into this peculiar gas unnecessarily hard,
it seems to me, like pickaxes,
rarely coming up with anything to show for it,
and going off with humorous elbowings.
Black-and-white man-of-war birds soar
on impalpable drafts
and open their tails like scissors on the curves
or tense them like wishbones, till they tremble.
The frowsy sponge boats keep coming in
with the obliging air of retrievers,
bristling with jackstraw gaffs and hooks
and decorated with bobbles of sponges.
There is a fence of chicken wire along the dock
where, glinting like little plowshares,
the blue-gray shark tails are hung up to dry
for the Chinese-restaurant trade.
Some of the little white boats are still piled up
against each other, or lie on their sides, stove in,
and not yet salvaged, if they ever will be, from the last bad storm,
like torn-open, unanswered letters.
The bight is littered with old correspondences.
Click. Click. Goes the dredge,
and brings up a dripping jawful of marl.
All the untidy activity continues,
awful but cheerful.

--Elizabeth Bishop

DAILY PARDONS

Daily Pardons

I wrangle for this bit
daily. The unfooled
bread of the body
yields to a regimented nap,
a bribe in a cup of drink.
It folds its offended petals.
Digits calm.
Then the long phrase of me
is spoken. Silence drools
over it, a lusty
and unmanaged child,
between two loaves rising,
dividing without end,
without a true middle:
what should have been done,
that which won't be. A Lord
presides over them, needing no sleep.
He worries about my anger
for the man hovering over
my seat on the train,
the implacable blade of being
unhappy in the present,
a blade as thin as the present's
sheath�

I speak to the Lord of things.
I ask him to pull in
his wake a night,
its incorrigible
repetitions
and make out of it a rule
to follow in the dawn
alongside birds that open and close�

--Ana Božičević, THE CORTLAND REVIEW

Like a Photograph

Like a Photograph

You might like to live in one of these smallish
houses that start to climb a hill, then fumble
back to the beginning as though nothing had happened.

You might enjoy a dinner of sandwiches
with the neighbor who makes concessions.
It will be all over in a minute, you said. We both
believed that, and the clock’s ticking: flame on, flame on.

John Ashbery

[from NO: A Journal of the Arts]

SPOIL SONG

SPOIL SONG

The man poses in the trees as a lion with a crooked tail. He looks
on the two girls with animal regret, if only he could play, if they
might want him. The upturned willow was commissioned
by the river. All afternoon he watches. The girls leap from
the willow. They hang their suits in the branches. Girls, girls
the world tells him. Girls should not sleep in the woods.
Their dinner, their fire, he watches. Pretend bear. Pretend
gun. In the air, a coal perfume. They wake twice, in the trash,
raccoons. Inside the tent they might want him. Not the raccoons,
not the bear. Girls should not sleep. Never animals
that bother you. One girl tears out the other's hair
to wake her. Again, the raccoons. A deer then. The lake. No.
What teaches them not to sleep. The man crouched over them.
Without light what teaches them. Soured air. Car keys. He mentions
the gun, crouched over them. Bear sighting, there is a bear.
They might want him with no light. Black bears don’t bother you.
What teaches one to play along. Over there. Stand guard. Thank god
you’ll help us. A little actress in a fake play. What teaches her
what to say. What teaches her to quiet the other. To unlock
the car. Thank him. To drive away.

Sara Michas-Martin

[from DIAGRAM]

NEW STREET

NEW STREET

The final light is the last fur and no animals left.
Listen to me as if you’ll be on earth forever.
Some lamps of the rehabilitated enriched neighborhood
Like six approaching mocking bodies in space
Are ochre, white, sorrel, sulphur blue-white,
Imitation suns of the sun letting go of us
In late winter under a big blue steel bridge
Where the warehouses and their repulsive sidewalks
Have been washed and dried as if they fit in a dishwasher.
Would you listen as if I were gone,
A time from now, but gone,
A time from now, but gone,
And you were around, not to pass on my impression
Of the lamps gathering in a darkening space
Like a round-up of suns in a solar-system prairie
Between the bridge and our building,
Not to pass on my impression
As an immortal impression (pitiful desire),
But I think it would not be too like hell
For you to travel alone by foot through the rare light
Under the obnoxious domineering bridge
Between the phonied buildings where the jobs will never come back.
Listen, I don’t know if everything’s an accident,
A continuing explosion in which the myths of eating and love are beside the point.

–Arthur Vogelsang

ADVICE FOR EXCELLENT ACHIEVEMENT AND EXEMPLARY BEHAVIOR

ADVICE FOR EXCELLENT ACHIEVEMENT AND EXEMPLARY BEHAVIOR

The Newscaster entered the history of her people,
the children study her for a grade, and they know her
from the advertising billboards in all the suburbs.
Who knows if she’s going to have her photo taken for “Playboy?”
Mommy, why does this lady have such a big ass?
So that the daily “Nova Makedonija” will not perish or else your father
will hang us. And why did you get an F in history?
The teacher asked who wrote our anthem,
and I said Ataturk, because I had melted into the palms
that the Turkish girl sitting next to me on the school bench
was warming between my legs, and drawing
bridal veils in my notebooks.
Shame on you son.
Is that why I sit at home, patching dead languages,
starching sonnets, is that why my back’s killing me
from washing Byzantine hymnographers’ manuscripts,
Havel’s letters and all sorts of other cult mystifications?
And every night my cheeks defecate,
and I have to tell you, not even Cleopatra went through
so much toilet paper. It is for nothing that
I press Delete, nothing can erase them,
and even less stop them from ejecting
feces–worms in a game of mirrors.
Oh son, son, it’s not the wind beating against the shutters that wakes you at night,
it’s the pores of my outer skin flushing themselves with water from the toilet,
and whoever arrives first in the dream
on the other side of the cable TV goes to pee. Look at her,
she’s all dressed up as if she was talking about Osiris,
not about the rice that caught diarrhea at dawn,
and do not ask shy she has such red eyes,
or why her nails are all gnarled, and her cheeks transparent.
Study son, repeat, not battles and peace summits,
but: why doesn’t a dead person’s hairdo stay in place
for more than ten minutes, why didn’t Isis
catch it from Osiris,
(and your father once told your uncle:
the more I beat her, the more she loves me),
because you have to know everything so as not to know anything
and be photocopied on freshly painted walls,
white walls for all those wonderful people.
Study son. Study will not harm the head underwritten
by the Lethe Insurance Company.

–Lidija Dimkovska, DO NOT AWAKEN THEM WITH HAMMERS

HYMN

HYMN

As complicated as a nightingale,
as tinny as,
kind-hearted as,
as crease-proof, as traditional,
as green grave sour, as streaky,
as symmetrical,
as hairy,
as near the water, true to the wind,
as fireproof, frequently turned over,
as childishly easy, well-thumbed as,
as new and creaking, expensive as,
as deeply cellared, domestic as,
as easily lost, shiny with use,
as thinly blown, as snow-chilled as,
as independent, as mature,
as heartless as,
as mortal as,
as simple as my soul.

–Günter Grass, from IN THE EGG AND OTHER POEMS

My More Merely

My More Merely

by Morgan Lucas Schuldt

In this surround, above the downs,
are my kind of live.

An mmhmm her
fever-few-&-far-between.

Cherry get, if gotten you be.
Otherhow unhindered by the things

of me. Things like: junk-hold lungs,
bouts with be, the umm-hush & long static of kinda can.

Are twenty-six flavors of -elicious
& what-if’s head-fuck nagging blood-back for more

cream & rush, heave & shush––
dirt-back glares having some pull over the percentages.

No tut-tut strut, no lapse in gush. Just holier than wow –
an old-fashioned dumb-lovely ahh yes! suitable for basking.

Sheer towardness, raredear, I’d sky-write
a surrender for.

Little red likelihooded
I lust so much.

~~

[From THIS RECORDING]

ROUGH GUIDE by Mark Haddon

ROUGH GUIDE

Be polite at the reception desk.
Not all the knives are in the museum.
The waitresses know that a nice boy
is formed in the same way as a deckchair.
Pay for the beer and send flowers.
Introduce yourself as Richard.
Do not refer to what somebody did
at a particular time in the past.
Remember, every Friday we used to go
for a walk. I walked. You walked.
Everything in the past is irregular.
This steak is very good. Sit down.
There is no wine, but there is ice cream.
Eat slowly. I have many matches.

–Mark Haddon, THE TALKING HORSE AND THE SAD GIRL AND THE VILLIAGE UNDER THE SEA