THIRTEEN WAYS OF LOOKING AT A BLACKBIRD

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.


II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.


III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.


IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.


V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections,
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.


VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.


VII
O thin men of Haddam
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?


VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.


IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.


X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.


XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.


XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.


XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.


                    Wallace Stevens










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one possible setting for language arts

http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/search/label/Michael%20McClure












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everybody's going to have a good time














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THE SKYLINE OF A MISSING TOOTH

1.


The ice hook untwists inside the whirlwind like a tail.

A raven's rib ripped from the electric socket
                 heats the palm,
             its rusted core bound by the apple's shaven hide.

Like a concussion cushioned between fingertips—
            egg batter congeals in cracks of concrete.

The fourth generation of bees flee the unlocked mouth.

The stoplight blinks
    midway between wing, beak and worm
       unwinding inside braided corn husk,
pulsing near the foot of the interrogator
          as he slams the gate shut.
The interrogator
   Every atom belonging to him, says:
      You there—hook and worm,
            you there—carved pebbles tucked under the glacier,
        your apathy grows like gray hair in these untied shoes.

The tundra's anvil and spine
    are flung back into the quarried pockets of the pilgrim.

The "safe feeling" blossoms next to the caged wren.

Motor oil trickles from the harpooned log.

The Milky Way backbones the nervous system of the stream the
deer sips.

This is where I broke the ice,

broke the sun's neck
    and the city raised its sunflower above a pond of gathered lice.

The storm took care if it!
Reached down, hammered them flat.
Walls erected, stoned down, down
    and as we fled,
    we unbraided our hair from the fan belt of the exhumed engine.
One twin kissed the other in the uncovered wagon.

2.

We watched them unravel from their neckties,
 and took shape of rain clouds blotting out the noon sun.

In their houses—
  the long night gloved the mist inside our gills.

And I stained the plaques clean
 memorized each brick flung from the window
    while roosters crowed the grip loose.

Who made them leap from shelves unnamed?
Made them buckle down low,
   pulled out by their tails
       from between each lie cupped inside another one?

A spear was driven into it—
Underneath the pilgrims skirt:
the skyline of a missing tooth.

                           Sherwin Bitsui






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something of the spirit of St. Valentine

                               












                        HEADLAND





The travelling mass goes landward,  the blind mass
Of headland thrusts a black snout in the sea.
The indifferent violence of the working water,
The winter southwind turning the gulls, stirring
The shell-fed headland grass ---these passionless
Elements feed passion and make our lives---
The lashed shelves, the basalt in foam,
The sea-rock dolphin-dark the green wave frays.



                             Brewster Ghiselin

Saint-John Perse

                                



                                                Nocturne






Now!  they are ripe, these fruits of a jealous fate.
From our dream grown,  on our blood fed,
         and haunting the purple of our nights,
     they are the fruits of long concern,  they are the fruits of long desire,
    they were our most secret accomplices and, often verging upon avowal,
   drew us to their ends out of the abyss of our nights....
Praise to the first dawn,  now they are ripe and beneath the purple,
      these fruits of an imperious fate. ─We do not find our liking here.

Sun of being, betrayal!  Where was the fraud, where was the offense?
 Where was the fault and where the flaw, and the error, which is the error?
 Shall we trace the theme back to its birth?
 Shall we relive the fever and the torment? ...
Majesty of the rose, we are not among your adepts:
    our blood goes to what is bitterer, our care to what is more severe,
   our roads are uncertain,  and deep is the night out of which our gods are torn.
Dog roses and black briars populate for us the shore of shipwreck.

Now they are ripening, these fruits of another shore:
"Sun of being, shield me!" ─ turncoat's words.
And those who have seen him pass will say: who was that man, and which his home?
Did he go alone at dawn to show the purple of this night? ...
Sun of Being,  Prince and Master?  our works are scattered,
       our tasks without honor and our grain without harvest:
             the binder of sheaves awaits, at the evening's ebb.
 
─Behold, they are dyed with our blood,  these fruits of a stormy fate.

At the gait of a binder of sheaves life goes, without hatred or ransom.

                                                              

                                                  Alexis Saint- Leger Leger






─Translated from the French by Richard Howard









....

The Crocodile

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This ruse, enduring for days,

will eventually cease, but now

even the birds mistake him for a log,

or a stone the fleeting drought

has lifted above the current.

Because there is a current, even in this cocoa-dark

 

side-pool, and the solution to hiding

so plainly under the sun is to glide as

the magnolia petals do, or the fallen limb of a tree,

as though alive not at all except secretly,

to hunger.

 

No other creature

could survive and be so torpid.

And yet he is ready,

the humid vault of the wetland

his camouflage. Wit and song

he leaves for others, prime

 

in his vigil, knowing without

memory, trusting without faith.

The door of his heartbeat opens,

and the same door slowly shuts. His sleep

and his waking are the same. Noon

 

sifts downward, and then the sunset

and soon, he knows, surely

very soon some quicker more beautiful

sojourner will discover

with what swiftness comes the end.

 

 

 

                     

 

 

 

 

 

                       Michael Cadnum

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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stolen prose transposed to poesy

Ah! and now
a favorite sound:
       a train in the distance--
                  checking the time,
it must be the same which brought me here,
and if it were dark outside,
and the moon were full,
you could see an opera
from the color of that noise.
This is much in that same emotion:
two birds, let out of a cage;
nonvows;
         possibilities;
                         lists for a long winter.






..............anon.

Villon

                  I



He whom we anatomized
‘whose words we gathered as pleasant flowers
and thought on his wit and how neatly he described things’
speaks
to us, hatching marrow,
broody all night over the bones of a deadman.

My tongue is a curve in the ear. Vision is lies.
We saw is so and it was not so,
the Emperor with the Golden Hands, the Virgin in blue.
(—A blazing parchment,
Matthew Paris his kings in blue and gold.)

It was not so,
scratched on black by God knows who,
by God, by God knows who.

In the dark in fetters
on bended elbows I supported my weak back
hulloing to muffled walls blank again
unresonant. It was gone, is silent, is always silent.
My soundbox lacks sonority. All but inaudible
I stammer to my ear:
Naked speech! Naked beggar both blind and cold!
Wrap it for my sake in Paisley shawls and bright soft fabric,
wrap it in curves and cover it with sleek lank hair.

What trumpets? What bright hands? Fetters, it was the Emperor
with magic in darkness, I unforewained.
The golden hands are not in Averrhoes,
eyes lie and this swine’s fare bread and water
makes my head wuzz. Have pity, have pity on me!

To the right was darkness and to the left hardness
below hardness darkness above
at the feet darkness at the head partial hardness
with equal intervals without
to the left moaning and beyond a scurry.
In those days rode the good Lorraine
whom English burned at Rouen,
the day’s bones whitening in centuries’ dust.

Then he saw his ghosts glitter with golden hands,
the Emperor sliding up and up from his tomb
alongside Charles. These things are not obliterate.
White gobs spitten for mockery;
and I too shall have CY GIST, written over me.

Remember, imbeciles and wits,
sots and ascetics, fair and foul,
young girls with little tender tits,
that DEATH is written over all.

Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul
they are so rotten, old and thin,
or firm and soft and warm and full—
fellmonger Death gets every skin.

All that is piteous, all that’s fair,
all that is fat and scant of breath,
Elisha’s baldness, Helen’s hair,
is Death’s collateral:

Three score and ten years after sight
of this pay me your pulse and breath
value received. And who dare cite,
as we forgive our debtors, Death?

Abelard and Eloise,
Henry the Fowler, Charlemagne,
Genée, Lopokova, all these
die, die in pain.

And General Grant and General Lee,
Patti and Florence Nightingale,
like Tyro and Antiope
drift among ghosts in Hell,

know nothing, are nothing, save a fume
driving across a mind
preoccupied with this: our doom
is, to be sifted by the wind,

heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands.
We are less permanent than thought.
The Emperor with the Golden Hands

is still a word, a tint, a tone,
insubstantial-glorious,
when we ourselves are dead and gone
and the green grass growing over us. 

 



                 II

 


Let his days be few and let
his bishoprick pass to another,
for he fed me on carrion and on a dry crust,
mouldy bread that his dogs had vomited,
I lying on my back in the dark place, in the grave,
fettered to a post in the damp cellarage.
Whereinall we differ not. But they have swept the floor,
there are no dancers, no somersaulters now,
only bricks and bleak black cement and bricks,
only the military tread and the snap of the locks.
Mine was a threeplank bed whereon
I lay and cursed the weary sun.
They took away the prison clothes
and on the frosty nights I froze.
I had a Bible where I read
that Jesus came to raise the dead—
I kept myself from going mad
by singing an old bawdy ballad
and birds sang on my windowsill
and tortured me till I was ill,
but Archipiada came to me
and comforted my cold body
and Circe excellent utterer of her mind
lay with me in that dungeon for a year
making a silk purse from an old sow’s ear
till Ronsard put a thimble on her tongue.
Whereinall we differ not. But they have named all the stars,
trodden down the scrub of the desert, run the white moon to a schedule,
Joshua’s serf whose beauty drove men mad.
They have melted the snows from Erebus, weighed the clouds,
hunted down the white bear, hunted the whale the seal the kangaroo,
they have set private enquiry agents onto Archipiada:
What is your name? Your maiden name?
Go in there to be searched. I suspect it is not your true name.
Distinguishing marks if any? (O anthropometrics!)
Now the thumbprints for filing.
Colour of hair? of eyes? of hands? O Bertillon!
How many golden prints on the smudgy page?
Homer? Adest. Dante? Adest.
Adsunt omnes, omnes et
Villon.
Villon?
Blacked by the sun, washed by the rain,
hither and thither scurrying as the wind varies.


         

             III






Under the olive trees
walking alone
on the green terraces
very seldom
over the sea seldom
where it ravelled and spun
blue tapestries white and green
gravecloths of men
Romans and modern men
and the men of the sea
who have neither nation nor time
on the mountains seldom
the white mountains beyond
or the brown mountains between
and their drifting echoes
in the clouds and over the sea
in shrines on their ridges
the goddess of the country
silverplated in silk and embroidery
with offerings of pictures
little ships and arms
below me the ports
with naked breasts
shipless spoiled sacked
because of the beauty of Helen

precision clarifying vagueness;
boundary to a wilderness
of detail; chisel voice
smoothing the flanks of noise;
catalytic making whisper and whisper
run together like two drops of quicksilver;
factor that resolves
unnoted harmonies;
name of the nameless;
stuff that clings
to frigid limbs
more marble hard
than girls imagined by Mantegna ...

The sea has no renewal, no forgetting,
no variety of death,
is silent with the silence of a single note.

How can I sing with my love in my bosom?
Unclean, immature and unseasonable salmon.

                                      

 

 

 

 

 

                             Basil Bunting

sagt Rilke

 

 

 

 

Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen

 

 

 

Ich lebe mein Leben in wachsenden Ringen,
die sich über die Dinge ziehn.
Ich werde den letzten vielleicht nicht vollbringen,
aber versuchen will ich ihn.

Ich kreise um Gott, um den uralten Turm,
und ich kreise jahrtausendelang;
und ich weiß noch nicht: bin ich ein Falke, ein Sturm
oder ein großer Gesang.








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