Saturday, November 21, 2015
Friday, November 20, 2015
RENE CHAR ~
Gala & René Char
(1935)
TO M.H.
11 September, 1966
Back and forth goes Autumn, swifter than the gardener's rake.
Autumn does not overwhelm the heart, which needs the
branch and the branch's shadow.
translated by Mark Hutchinson
Seagull Books, 2015
Thursday, November 19, 2015
Wednesday, November 18, 2015
Tuesday, November 17, 2015
Monday, November 16, 2015
SOUTH COAST ~
R O B I N S O N J E F F E R S S T O N E W O R K I N G
T O R H O U S E 1930s
Eagle Valor, Chicken Mind
Unhappy country, what wings you have! Even here,
Nothing important to protect, and ocean-far from the nearest
enemy, what a cloud
Of bombers amazes the coast mountain, what a hornet-swarm
of fighters,
And day and night the guns practicing.
Unhappy, eagle wings and beak, chicken brain.
Weep (it is frequent in human affairs), weep for the terrible
magnificence of the means,
The ridiculous incompetence of the reasons, the bloody and
shabby
Pathos of the result.
__________________
R O B I N S O N J E F F E R S
Although born in Pittsburgh on January 10, 1887, Robinson Jeffers was really born, raised, lived, worked, died and endured on his rocky Pacific coast sanctuary of Carmel, California. You can go there today and still feel his poetry. Go find his books. Yes, make a bookstore order them.
Sunday, November 15, 2015
Saturday, November 14, 2015
ROBIN COSTE LEWIS ~
Beauty's Nest
JIM CROW WELCOMES YOU HOME
AFTER THE WAR, JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT
GRAND CANYON: 1951
Beauty's nest
renders the body
mute. An elegance
so inconceivable,
it's violent. Extreme. It hurts
the heart to see
something so vast and deep
can also be made of dirt.
And if it can be
of the earth, the body
ponders, might
such a landscape
exist also within me?
The four of you stand
silent, uniformed on its rim,
while the imagination tries
to conceive all the things
it is still too dark
to see.
You jump back
into your wide tan Ford
and begin to drive
again — again — past
all the motels, and their signs,
which, were it not just
after midnight, you know —
and could see — say
WHITES ONLY
Red All Over
The politics of frogs
The musth of butterflies
Elegies of cotton
The whiteness of flies
Interruptions by snails
A lie's guarantee
The hope of succotash
A chorus of hominy
Permission of the persimmon
Observations by the spine
The pincushion's reassurance
The propaganda of a line
Cackling from the Bible
Orations by the dog
The mirror's steady rifle
The fig tree's scarlet log
Ands and their derision
Lending library in the eyes
Patois' agnosticism
The tongue's chain mail of whys?
Lady calling from the ocean
Invisible Man on the moon
Lindy-Hopping dead upon
The ceiling in the living room
Girl asleep in the avocado
The minstrelsy of the floor
Bickering Birds-of-Paradise
Picketing the fickle front door
Dog Talk
We-be bo-broke e-bev-ry-by
sy-byl-la-ba-ble-ble
O-bour mo-bouths bo-broke the-bem
a-band o-bo-pe-bened the-bem
fo-bor ai-bair o-bor wa-ba-ter-ber
o-bor see-beed o-bor foo-bood.
A-banse-se-bers, que-bues-tio-bens,
na-bames, se-be-cre-bets. We-be
be-bent E-ben-gli-bish,
em-bem-bra-baced i-bit
the-ben e-be-ra-based i-bit
a-bat the-be sa-bame ti-bime.
___________________
R O B I N C O S T E L E W I S
Voyage of the Sable Venus
Knopf 2015
Friday, November 13, 2015
Thursday, November 12, 2015
Wednesday, November 11, 2015
TOMAS TRANSTROMER ~
THE FORGOTTEN CAPTAIN
We have many shadows. I was on my way home
one September night when Y
climbed out of his grave after forty years
and kept me company.
At first he was completely blank, just a name
but his thoughts swam
faster than time ran
and caught up to us.
I put his eyes into my eyes
and saw the war's sea.
The last boat he commanded
rose up from under us.
Ahead and behind the Atlantic convoy crept,
those who would survive
and those who'd been given The Mark
(invisible to all).
While the sleepless hours relieved each other
but never him —
the life vest snug under his oilskin coat.
He never came home.
It was internal crying that bled him to death
in a Cardiff hospital.
He finally got to lie down
and turn into the horizon.
Farewell eleven-knot convoys! Farewell 1940!
Here's where world history ends.
Bombers hung in the air.
Heather bloomed in the moors.
A photo from early in the century shows a beach.
Six well-dressed boys standing there.
They have sailboats in their arms.
What serious expressions!
The boats that became life and death for some of them.
And to write about the dead
is also a game, made heavy
by what is yet to come.
___________________________
T O M A S T R A N S T R O M E R
translated by Patty Crane
Bright Scythe
Sarabande Books 2015
Tuesday, November 10, 2015
WE GOTTA GET OUT OF THIS PLACE ~
U N I V E R S I T Y O F M A S S A C H U S E T T S P R E S S
2015
the beat goes on. . .
Monday, November 9, 2015
MIROSLAV HOLUB ~
The Last Night Bus
The last night bus echoes away
into the depth
of the night's
spinal cord.
Stars shiver
unless they explode.
There are no other civilizations.
Only the gentle
galactic fear
based on methane.
Teaching About Arthropods
The male mite Adactylidium
hatches in his mother's body,
gobbles her up from the inside,
while mating
with all his seven
little sisters.
So, when he's born,
it's as if he were dead:
he's been through it all
and he's freelance,
in the bull's-eye,
in the focus
of extracurricular existence:
an absolute poet,
non-segmented,
non-antennated,
eightlegged.
Distant Howling
In Alsace,
on July 6, 1885,
a rabid dog knocked Joseph Meister down
and bit him fourteen times.
Meister was the first patient
saved by Pasteur's
vaccine, in thirteen
gradually increased doses
of weakened virus.
Pasteur died of ictus
ten years later.
Fifty years later
the watchman Meister
committed suicide
when the Germans
occupied Pasteur's institute
including the poor dogs.
Only the virus
never got involved.
When the Bees Grew Silent
An old man
suddenly died
alone in his garden
under an elderberry bush.
He lay there until dark
when the bees
grew silent.
It was a beautiful death, wasn't it,
Doctor, says
the woman in black
who comes to the garden
as always
every Sunday,
and in her bag brings
lunch for two.
The Dead
After the third operation, his heart
pierced like an old carnival target,
he woke in his bed and said:
Now I'll be fine,
like a sunflower. And have you ever
seen horses make love?
He died that night.
And another one plodded on for eight
milk-and-water-years
like a long-haired water plant
in a sour creek,
as if he stuck his pale face out
on a skewer from behind
the graveyard wall.
Finally the face disappeared.
In both cases the angel of death
stamped his hobnailed boot
on their medulla oblongata.
I know they died the same death.
But I don't believe they're dead
in the same way.
_____________________
MIROSLAV HOLUB
Interferon, or On Theater
translated from the Czech by
David Young and Dana Habova
Field, 1982
Sunday, November 8, 2015
Saturday, November 7, 2015
Friday, November 6, 2015
MILTOS SACHTOURIS ~
M I L T O S S A C H T O U R I S
Wind Blew
Wind blew
flowers from another world
like a church
with black stigmata of evil
here and there
burning the skin red
in sleep
her hair
smelled tragically
sweet
Hour-Hand
From a high mountain I saw the sea
in its arms I saw
birds living and dying
and I shone high like a star
with tears and with nails
and around me fish and ladders
ladders they could climb up to push out
my heart
ladders I could climb down
to shred the heart of the sea
For Spring
The sun is green
the trees are burning
awaiting the swallows
our iron swallows' nests
no longer fool us with their flowers
they cost us our arms and legs
now our arms and legs are hanging
from the trees
The Poet's Head
I cut off my head
I put it on a plate
and took it to my doctor
— There's nothing wrong, he said,
it's just overheated
throw it in the river and we'll see
I threw it in the river with the frogs
and it raised a dreadful racket
it started shrieking and howling
all kinds of strange songs
I picked it up and put it back on my neck
and roamed the streets in a rage
with a poet's green hexagonometric head
__________________
Miltos Sachtouris
Poems
(1945-1971)
translated from the Greek by
Karen Emmerich
Archipelago books, 2006
Thursday, November 5, 2015
Wednesday, November 4, 2015
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