Tag: words

He manages like somebody carrying a box  
that is too heavy, first with his arms
underneath. When their strength gives out,  
he moves the hands forward, hooking them  
on the corners, pulling the weight against  
his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly  
when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes  
different muscles take over. Afterward,
he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood  
drains out of the arm that is stretched up
to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now  
the man can hold underneath again, so that  
he can go on without ever putting the box down.

-Jack Gilbert, “Michiko Dead” from The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992

Spring, I remembered you all these months.
I spoke of the green yard under the snow
To my slumped visitors.
I sobered the giddy neighbors.
“You may think you’re still happy,”
I cautioned, “but recall the tea roses,
The lost leaves of the dogwood tree.”

But now you have fallen upon us, Spring,
Without warning,
So much greener than I remembered.
Friends I kept from forgetting
Laugh at me as they run outside
For falling so short in your praise.

“Ingratitude” by Carl Dennis, from New and Selected Poems 1974-2004. © Penguin Books, 2004

The little sparrows
Hop ingenuously
About the pavement
Quarreling
With sharp voices
Over those things
That interest them.
But we who are wiser
Shut ourselves in
On either hand
And no one knows
Whether we think good
Or evil.
                   Then again,
The old man who goes about
Gathering dog lime
Walks in the gutter
Without looking up
And his tread
Is more majestic than
That of the Episcopal minister
Approaching the pulpit
Of a Sunday.
These things
Astonish me beyond words.

– William Carlos Williams, “Pastoral”

JUST NOW

lunchboxpoems:

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away
the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me
that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe
simpler than I could have begun to find words for
not patient not even waiting no more hidden
than the air itself that became part of me for a while
with every breath and remained with me unnoticed
something that was here unnamed unknown in the days
and the nights not separate from them
not separate from them as they came and were gone
it must have been here neither early nor late then
by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks

W.S. MERWIN

But I no longer think of myself. I think of the man out there who wrote this tune, one day in July, in the black heat of his room. I try to think of him through the melody, through the white, acidulated sounds of the saxophone. He made it… . It would interest me to find out the type of troubles he had… . I don’t suppose it would make the slightest difference to him if he were told that in the seventh largest city of France, in the neighbourhood of a station, someone is thinking about him. But I’d be happy if I were in his place; I envy him. I have to go. I get up, but I hesitate an instant, I’d like to hear the Negress sing. For the last time. She sings. So two of them are saved: the Jew and the Negress. Saved. Maybe they thought they were lost irrevocably, drowned in existence. Yet no one could think of me as I think of them, with such gentleness… . [T]hey have washed themselves of the sin of existing. Not completely, of course, but as much as any man can.

Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea  

‘One can only say that those who experience it [the aesthetic emotion] feel it to have a peculiar quality of “reality” which makes it a matter of infinite importance in their lives. Any attempt I might make to explain this would probably land me in the depths of mysticism. On the edge of that gulf I stop’.

Roger Fry, “Retrospect”, in Vision and Design, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1981 (1920), 211

frank o’hara



POEM 

I watched an armory combing its bronze bricks 
and in the sky there were glistening rails of milk. 
Where had the swan gone, the one with the lame back ? 

Now mounting the steps 
I enter my new home full 
of grey radiators and glass 
ashtrays full of wool. 

Against the winter I must get a samovar 
embroidered with basil leaves and Ukranian mottos 
to the distant sound of wings, painfully anti-wind, 

a little bit of the blue 
summer air will come back 
as the steam chuckles in 
the monster's steamy attack 

and I'll be happy here and happy there, full 
of tea and tears. I don't suppose I'll ever get 
to Italy, but I have the terrible tundra at least. 

My new home will be full 
of wood, roots and the like, 
while I pace in a turtleneck 
sweater, repairing my bike. 

I watched the palisades shivering in the snow 

of my face, which had grown preternaturally pure. 

Once I destroyed a man's idea of himself to have him.