peering into the valley of the shadows

                         THE VALLEY OF THE SHADOW




















There were faces to remember in the Valley of the Shadow,
There were faces un-regarded, there were faces to forget;
There were fires of grief and fear that are a few forgotten ashes,
There were sparks of recognition that are not forgotten yet.
For at first, with an amazed and overwhelming indignation
At a measureless malfeasance that obscurely willed it thus,
They were lost and unacquainted—till they found themselves in others,
Who had groped as they were groping where dim ways were perilous.


There were lives that were as dark as are the fears and intuitions
Of a child who knows himself and is alone with what he knows;
There were pensioners of dreams and there were debtors of illusions,
All to fail before the triumph of a weed that only grows.
There were thirsting heirs of golden sieves that held not wine or water,
And had no names in traffic or more value there than toys:
There were blighted sons of wonder in the Valley of the Shadow,
Where they suffered and still wondered why their wonder made no noise.


There were slaves who dragged the shackles of a precedent unbroken,
Demonstrating the fulfillment of unalterable schemes,
Which had been, before the cradle, Time’s inexorable tenants
Of what were now the dusty ruins of their father’s dreams.
There were these, and there were many who had stumbled up to manhood,
Where they saw too late the road they should have taken long ago:
There were thwarted clerks and fiddlers in the Valley of the Shadow,
The commemorative wreckage of what others did not know.


And there were daughters older than the mothers who had borne them,
Being older in their wisdom, which is older than the earth;
And they were going forward only farther into darkness,
Unrelieved as were the blasting obligations of their birth;
And among them, giving always what was not for their possession,
There were maidens, very quiet, with no quiet in their eyes;
There were daughters of the silence in the Valley of the Shadow,
Each an isolated item in the family sacrifice.


There were creepers among catacombs where dull regrets were torches,
Giving light enough to show them what was there upon the shelves—
Where there was more for them to see than pleasure would remember
Of something that had been alive and once had been themselves.
There were some who stirred the ruins with a solid imprecation,
While as many fled repentance for the promise of despair:
There were drinkers of wrong waters in the Valley of the Shadow,
And all the sparkling ways were dust that once had led them there.


There were some who knew the steps of Age incredibly beside them,
And his fingers upon shoulders that had never felt the wheel;
And their last of empty trophies was a gilded cup of nothing,
Which a contemplating vagabond would not have come to steal.
Long and often had they figured for a larger valuation,
But the size of their addition was the balance of a doubt:
There were gentlemen of leisure in the Valley of the Shadow,
Not allured by retrospection, disenchanted, and played out.


And among the dark endurances of unavowed reprisals
There were silent eyes of envy that saw little but saw well;
And over beauty’s aftermath of hazardous ambitions
There were tears for what had vanished as they vanished where they fell.
Not assured of what was theirs, and always hungry for the nameless,
There were some whose only passion was for Time who made them cold:
There were numerous fair women in the Valley of the Shadow,
Dreaming rather less of heaven than of hell when they were old.

Now and then, as if to scorn the common touch of common sorrow,
There were some who gave a few the distant pity of a smile;
And another cloaked a soul as with an ash of human embers,
Having covered thus a treasure that would last him for a while.
There were many by the presence of the many disaffected,
Whose exemption was included in the weight that others bore:
There were seekers after darkness in the Valley of the Shadow,
And they alone were there to find what they were looking for.


So they were, and so they are; and as they came are coming others,
And among them are the fearless and the meek and the unborn;
And a question that has held us heretofore without an answer
May abide without an answer until all have ceased to mourn.
For the children of the dark are more to name than are the wretched,
Or the broken, or the weary, or the baffled, or the shamed:
There are builders of new mansions in the Valley of the Shadow,
And among them are the dying and the blinded and the maimed.






                                                              Edwin Arlington Robinson














































...                            

on ontological dilutions

       








           CONFRONTING THE JEW








My mother never spoke a phrase as true.
Recalling their blind date, she said she thought
My father "was an Arab or a Jew."
Politely vicious aunts and uncles fought
Suggestions of this sort for generations,
But lost. There were no other explanations.
Spanish ancestors crossed the Pyrenees,
And found in France the safety that they sought.
Though they survived, the Torah was not taught
For long; in far and fractured colonies,
>Their baptized children wear their butchered name.
I cannot guess the onslaughts they withstood,
Or things they loved. With nothing to reclaim,
I still would say a kaddish if I could.










                                            Mike Juster














......

gimp vers

heat

 

                        past sunshine

 

                            vibrations of air

                                    spiders, then birds, settle

 

                        reflexive

                                          man

                            bringing what he can

 

                        interest

 

                                          in

 

                            the quickening run-though

 

                                    one thing at a time

 

                                        tides, a large motion

 

                                          small waves give boats (air 25)










                                                                   ....Larry Eigner










...suffered from cerebral palsy all his life managed to type out some words

yuletide truths a la advent

Talk to all who need talking to
those who came before you
those still with you now
Those who fly between, carry the word

Talk to eagles, talk to crows,
talk to wind, talk to lightning,
talk to mountains, talk to trees,
talk to rivers, talk to rain

Under & over & all around
This is where it all begins

Give gifts to all who should have them
give gifts to keep things as they are
give gifts to make things change
Give gifts because you want to

Give gifts for the sun, gifts for the moon,
gifts for lightning, gifts for thunder
gifts for the moist mother
gifts for the ancients burning fires

Under & over & all around
This is where it all begins.






           James Koller
                                        +  12-10-2014

Open Ghazal

Kiss the hand and cheek, kiss the lips that open.
Kiss the eyes and tears, kiss the wounds that open.

The nuclei of our atoms are so small, we are mostly nothing.
Whoever did this made our stone walls out of windows always open.

In a thicket: A bag too dark to see, too big to lift, too familiar to walk away from. 
God grant me strength to drag it into the open.

6:10, stuck on the freeway again.
Love is singing with window and throat wide open.

My friend refused to greet the stranger in black,
was brought to the surgeon, who cut his heart open.

Go ahead, I dare you, take another breath.  Each one is full
of what 14 billion years ago blew this world open.

We safecracker poets sand fingertips, pass long nights on our knees.
All to feel those clicks that mean the door will spring open.

Len says, I love the night sky, but I adore the Milky Way:
It is the edge of Her robe.  See how gently it opens.








                                        Len Anderson












......

a little visit to maximus

   














John Burke did not rise




when Councilman Smith, nor had he signed


the complimentary scroll....


Staring into the torsion

Of his own face Burke


sat solid in

refusal (as,


in matters of the soul a private man


lives torn


by inspection


and judicium, the judge


or mischievous woman


who make hob


of us) sweat, Burke




sweat, indubitoubly,


in his aloneness-or he'd not have said,


"I am no hypocrite"


Against the greased ways


of the city now (of the nation) this politician


himself a twisted animal


swelling of mouth, followed


by squirrels as pilot fish


himself a shark will not


tolerate
the suave / the insolence


of agreement


     








               Charles Olson

Dreaming Winter

             

Don't ask me if these knives are real.
I could paint a king or show a map
the way home—to go like this:
Wobble me back to a tiger's dream
a dream of knives and bones too common
to be exposed. My secrets are ignored.


Here comes the man I love. His coat is wet
and his face is falling like the leaves,
tobacco stains on his Polish teeth.
I could tell jokes about him—one up
for the man who brags a lot, laughs
a little and hangs his name on the nearest knob.

Don't ask me. I know it's only hunger.
I saw that king—the one my sister knew
but was allergic to. Her face ran until
his eyes became the white of several winters.
Snow on his bed told him that the silky tears
were uniformly mad and all the money in the world
couldn't bring him to a tragic end. Shame
or fortune tricked me to his table, shattered
my one standing lie with new kinds of fame.


Have mercy on me, Lord. Really. If I should die
before I wake, take me to that place I just heard
banging in my ears. Don't ask me. Let me join
the other kings, the ones who trade their knives
for a sack of keys. Let me open any door,
stand winter still and drown in a common dream












                                    James Welch










.....

matt says

An opposing earth

What kind of mere essence

is this?

That ivory boy has

 no retrospection for anyone

Opposing smile beside you

on an earth

A trifle is slow,

their hand little with disgrace

They are too mighty;

 the trivial heat

recollects their wealth












                                    forgodot.com










....still waiting












....

veiled catholic allusions

                      








              


                    




                        ARTIFACT   




















 For three years you lived in your house
just as it was before she died: your wedding
portrait on the mantel, her clothes hanging
in the closet, her hair still in the brush.
You have told me you gave it all away
then, sold the house, keeping the confirmation
cross she wore, her name in cursive chased
on the gold underside, your ring in the same

box, those photographs you still avoid,
and the quilt you spread on your borrowed bed —
small things. Months after we met, you told me she had
made it, after we had slept already beneath its loft
and thinning, raveled pattern, as though beneath
her shadow, moving with us, that dark, that soft.






                                             Claudia Emerson     -     died  late  autumn 2014

Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.



The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.



The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.



Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.



She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.



I am a new man,
I snarl at her and bark,
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.  










                                 Mark Strand      +December 2014       






















......                  

Psalm

No-man kneads us again out of Earth and Loam,
no-man spirits our Dust.
No-man.





Praise to you, No-man.
For love of you
we will flower.
Moving
towards you.



A Nothing
we were, we are, we shall
be still, flowering:
the Nothing-, the
No-man’s-rose.



With
our Pistil soul-bright,
our Stamen heaven-torn,
our Corolla red
with the Violet-Word that we sang
over, O over
the thorn.














       Paul Celan




               -I'm afraid I don't know who translated this from the german
















......










.                            

to an iron lady standing in a windy portal

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles.  From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command 
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame,
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips.  "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

                                               Emma Lazarus
















.....

Song for the Last Act

     

Now that I have your face by heart, I look   

Less at its features than its darkening frame   

Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame,   

Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd’s crook.   

Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease

The lead and marble figures watch the show   

Of yet another summer loath to go

Although the scythes hang in the apple trees.

Now that I have your face by heart, I look.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read   

In the black chords upon a dulling page   

Music that is not meant for music’s cage,

Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed.   

The staves are shuttled over with a stark   

Unprinted silence. In a double dream   

I must spell out the storm, the running stream.   

The beat’s too swift. The notes shift in the dark.

Now that I have your voice by heart, I read.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see

The wharves with their great ships and architraves;   

The rigging and the cargo and the slaves

On a strange beach under a broken sky.

O not departure, but a voyage done!

The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps

Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps   

Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun.

Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

                                     Louise Bogan


















 

and then a mere moment in the world

For a Stone Girl at ___Sanchi

half asleep on the cold grass

night rain flicking the maples

under a black bowl upside-down

on a flat land on a wobbling speck

smaller than stars, space, the size of a seed,

       hollow as bird skulls.

light flies across it –never is seen.

a big rock weatherd funny,

old tree trunks turnd stone,

split rocks and find clams.

all that time loving; two flesh persons changing,

       clung to, doorframes notions,

spear-hafts in a rubble of years.

                touching, this dream pops.

it was real:

and it lasted forever.

                                                                                  Gary Snyder
















.....

found voice recognition poem

Hey John Mr. frank Saturday.


 One being the way from kickoff
I'm just in your birthday so I think --
so I was -- hi up anyway sorry haven't been
 -- home or home --
phone such as they all.

Talk to you later bye.






.....as eloquence increases
















....

words tend to sound like the things they represent

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;
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:
Praise him.                                         ...some deranged Jesuit seems to have written this ....

might as well face reality

            

                

              ALL THINGS DESIRE

All things desire to be like God,
   and infinite space is a mirror
    that tries to reflect His  body.

But it can’t.

All that infinite existence can show us of Him
              is only an atom of God’s being.

God stood behind Himself one night

   and cast a  brilliant shadow

       from which creation came.

Even this shadow is such a flame

  that  moths consume their selves in it every second -
   with their sacred passion to possess beautiful forms.

Existence mirrors God the best it can,
     though how arrogant for any image in that mirror,
      for any human being, to think they know His will;

       for His will has never been spoken,

His voice would ignite the earth’s wings

     and all upon  it.

We invent truths about God to protect ourselves
             from the wolf’s cries we hear and make.

All things desire to be like God,
           all things desire to love.

                             Thomas Aquinas

                                      ....Daniel Ladinsky,  trans.

.....

a hopelessly near perfect sonnet

you've never written a perfect sonnet
nor a quatrain which made any good sense
your diction is spare your concepts too dense
would you know verse if you stepped upon it?

verse requires' a dancer's lithe light skill
and makes fools of those who want to try it
it's senseless for sure, who can deny it
he toys with vain odds who there casts his will

in the way of poignant verse...something else
might suffice ...leave poems to word fools
those who regard breath and mind as tools
to waylay the pain of man's chosen hells

what with smart phones and infinite info
no telling where the benighted might go






      jh






.....thanks to Curtis Faville for inspiration












...

of matters porcine

              Saint Francis and the Sow









The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch


blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and
blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.







       Galway Kinnell           + ten twentynine twenty fourteen














.....

plumage

"Hope" is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I've heard it in the chilliest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.












        Emily Dickinson - the bardess of Amherst












....

Hippopotamus

The big-bellied hippopotamus

Inhabits the jungles of Java,

Where in the depths of each lair, cuss

More monsters than haunt the dreamer.

 

The boa uncoils and hisses,

The tiger gives out its roars,

The angry buffalo whistles;

He grazes at peace or snores.

 

He fears nor kris nor assegai,

He gazes at man, with no cares at all,

And smiles at the sepoy’s musket-ball,

That merely rebounds from his hide.

 

I’m like the hippopotamus;

Clothed with my convictions’ weight,

Strong armour none can penetrate,

I tread, secure, the wilderness.

                                     Theophile Gautier

 

                                          tr.. A.S.  Kline

......

...and all of natural things

A NAP BY THE KICKAPOO




What a face
on that barred owl
dead beside the road --

Rolled it over to see.
Round, jolly, cowled. Lightly
concentrically ringed.

The calm cosmonautical
with the simian fey.
Fox sparrows
sing. "We hated to be apart.

Even for five minutes."
The dreams come down --
Extra! Extra! --

from the cedared hills
across scant pasture
and April brambles

to the leaky
treehouse on the knoll
beyond the stream.






                   Merrill  Gilfillan












....

The Solitary Reaper

Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.


     No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.


     Will no one tell me what she sings?--
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?


     Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;--
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more. 






















                               William Wordsworth  
























........                       

   

     Carmel Point

I watched a sea anemone
The colour of green jade
Shadowed under water.

I saw a daring crab,
Unafraid and young
Touch the velvet petals
Of the princess underwater.
Softly she took him in,
Softly she sighed and closed.
The little crab was hushed and still -
Never would he swim again
Under crevice, under weed,
Under green and coloured water.

Softly she opened -
That princess of rare jade.
Softly she gave him back
Sucked of all his pearly flesh
Sucked of all his salty blood.

I ran away to tell my dad,
"let's go home,"    I said,
"I am sorry to be born,
I am afraid of many things."

      -Margaret Phyllis McSweeney




























       ----this poem  was   recited at the most recent  circle of song

the great bukowski

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB6IyLTvB7M










https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QB6IyLTvB7M
























.

          














       






                    The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner                                    








 From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.














                                      Randall Jarrell

being mostly water

     






















        Deluge




Seas invade valleys
       invading seas
these isles once the peaks
        of the Pyrenees
wend across the continents
       their trees
 rooted in watery beds
       waving ever so slow
       as though
       in a surfaced breeze
Great highways
       become a crab's walk
Long tunnels
       in which long congers electrify
roofs of skyscrapers and towers
upon where sleeping sharks sweep by
inundated and fathomed
       in their pented bowers
Only the sea touches the sky
and it is fish not fowl that fly
As though unsinkable
the bottom of the sun
like the hull of a ship
       on a horizon
A veritable ark
embarked from its Himalayan shore
cargoing its very light
down the vast drown of the night
with the moon as anchor








                                   Gregory Corso
































.....

superfluities compound themselves

                         


















                                  Reprobate Silver









 Freighted with allusion "of the sort to which we are
   accustomed,"
Hand wrought slang — in the spirit of Cellini and after the
   manner of Thor —

Like Panshin's horse, not permitted to be willful,
Trembling incessantly and champing at the bit —
It is worthy of examination.
It is quite as much a matter of art as the careful
And a kind of Carthage by Flaubert.
It is like the castles in the air that manufacture themselves

Out of clouds before our eyes
When we are listening to a scientific explanation of things
   in which we are not interested.
The fact that there is no justification for its existence
And that perhaps it had to be written
About what ought never to have been written at all.












                                                 Marianne Moore

Preguntas de la hora del te'

..









This pale gentleman seems like
A figure in the wax museum;
He looks through the torn curtains:
What is worth more, gold or beauty?
Is the moving stream worth more
Or the immobile grass on the bank?
In the distance a bell is heard
That opens one more wound, or closes it:
Is the water in the fountain more real
Or the girl who looks at herself in it?
No one knows, people pass him by
Building castles in the sand.
Is the transparent glass superior
To the hand of the man who creates it?

One breathes a tired air
Of ashes, of smoke, of sadness:
What was once seen is not seen again
The same way, say the dry leaves.
Time for tea, toast, margarine,
Everything enveloped in a kind of fog.





                           Nicanor Parra



                                                              trans.  Edith Grossman








...

of all the visual ironies

"Estados Unidos: el país donde
la libertad es una estatua."


 

                     – Nicanor Parra, Artefactos



   - the chilean   "anti"-poet is still alive -- he is  100 yrs old

LET ME LIVE OUT MY YEARS...

. LET me live out my years in heat of blood!
Let me die drunken with the dreamer's wine!
Let me not see this soul-house built of mud
Go toppling to the dusk—a vacant shrine.
Let me go quickly, like a candle light
Snuffed out just at the heyday of its glow.
Give me high noon—and let it then be night!
Thus would I go.
And grant that when I face the grisly Thing,
My song may trumpet down the gray Perhaps.
Let me be as a tune-swept fiddlestring
That feels the Master Melody—and snaps!                                John G. Neihardt ..

in lieu of a text

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfrkUOq0ehg#t=115











....




             -this metis blackfoot poet was hit by a train and died

THE WORLD SEEMS......

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The world seems so palpable
And dense: people and things
And the landscapes
                They inhabit or move through.

Words, on the other hand,
Are so abstract—they’re
Made of empty air

                   Or black scratches on a page
      That urge us to utter
Certain sounds.

                           And us:
Poised in the middle, aware
Of the objects out there
               Waiting patiently to be named,
As if the right words
Could save them.

                               And don’t
They deserve it?    
                       So much hidden inside each one,
Such a longing
                  To become the beloved.

And inside us: the sounds
                 That could extend that blessing—
           How they crowd our mouths,
       How they press up against
    Our lips, which are such
                         A narrow exit for a joy so desperate.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gregory Orr

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

.

...and gael force winds

The Headless Body From the Irish Gaelic of Aonghas O Dalaigh (16th century) A lament for the rebel leader Fiach McHugh O'Byrne               I see your body headless stuck on Dublin’s steel spikes. The sight stuns me senseless. We poets never lost your likes.   Your body impaled before me a spectacle to our great crowd. Today your horror all may see, yesterday your courage our byword.   Once a fine figure with grand grace, now as I behold you horribly quartered my heart drains my face, my mind dismembers my memory.   The sight blinds even my blindside, weakens the strength of my stride. Seeing you spiked tightens my hide. Your tragedy shouts worldwide.   Now who’ll help the poor, patronize our teachers and poets too? O body, now that you hang headless ‘twere better not to live after you.   Who now will recompense the scholars, give hospitality, entertain? With you butchered so, in quarters, who will provide our wine?   Your four limbs hacked by butchery stuck on four sharp steel stakes before me here in Dublin city beggars my heart with blindness.   Your headless torso has now truly left green Leinster’s good men without the harp of hospitality to cultured conversation.   Your tortured torso’s a woeful sight. Giver of weapons and horses, hacked apart by an alien’s hatchet, limbs chopped off with curses.   Legion the laments of your history. Our hero’s headless horror stuck up on spikes indifferently, changed in colour and contour.   Telling tales of their travels like lords I heard foreign friends in your fort; gossip for girls, versed by your bards. Shut silent now that court.   Great grief! Beheaded in your glory who spoiled enemy territory, you’re now denied the honour our history should give your buried body.   Before I witnessed your sacrifice brave son of Aodh’s brave kind, my grief’s that my heart did not rise, that my eye was not blind.   We’ll never again see to emulate your strong stride, warm hand; no more admire your noble head’s shape, a noble image of Ireland.                                        Desmond  O'Grady     +2014                     ....