with all the nuance

                       








                          

                           L'Albatros



 

Souvent, pour s'amuser, les hommes d'équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

 
À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l'azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d'eux.

 
Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu'il est comique et laid!
L'un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L'autre mime, en boitant, l'infirme qui volait!

 
Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l'archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l'empêchent de marcher.






                               — Charles Baudelaire









.....

as in twelve serious tones

Poem in a Mode that Isn't Mine





to you, Rimbaud




My horse tripped over the semiquavers! The notes splatter up to the green sky of my soul: the eighth sky!


Apollo was a doctor and me I’m a pianist of the heart, if not in fact. It would be necessary, with the flats and all the bars, to unload the scribbled steamers, to collect the tiny battle flags to compose some canticles.


The minuscule, it’s huge! Whoever conceived Napoleon as an insect between two branches of a tree, who painted him a nose too large in watercolor, who rendered his court with shades too tender, wasn’t he greater than Napoleon himself, o Ataman Prajapati!


The minuscule, it’s the note!


Man bears upon himself photographs of his ancestors like Napoleon bore God, o Spinoza! Me, my ancestors, these are the notes of harps. God had conceived St. Helena and the sea between two branches of a tree. My black horse has a good eye, though albino, but he tripped on the harp notes.





                                                  Max Jacob



   ... trans...Elisa Gabbert & Kathleen Rooney






.

Vegetable-Life

Where the pulp lifts its germ and the sludge of beauty sighs, where the leaf pulls the branch to the breathy earth, where the rind cracks and buds rust into petals, where the clove steams and cinnamon bark spits out cinnamon air, where roots sweat and the earth boils in curds of steaming mud, where the stem draws up the seed and holds it like a lamb to the sun, where flowers rest their animal heads, there, full throated, limp with seed, lush and smiling is Vegetable-Life.   To come upon her you must journey through the rains, and sleep through a night of fish smells; there must be a dead man in a hot room, there must be a basket of figs and plums on the pier, there must be no new ship in the harbor, there must be the sound of flowers falling upon flowers, there must be no children swimming in the salt pools.   Where the Flamboyant spills into the vulcan dust, where the wild pig chews up the door frames, where the leper kneads his bones, where the sun is stuffed with guns, where the water flows like honey from the tap, where black flies swell in the gecko's translucent belly, where these are, there is Vegetable-Life: The Sultana of the Vine, The Goddess of the Harvest Gone Bad, The Spectrum Swallower.   In an ointment of wild saps, ripe fronds and mosses, tumid wheat, and barley, Abundance pours down over the head, heavy with pollen and in the puce interrogation of the harvest the intellect sprouts leaves.                                               Ned O'Gorman               .....

to add to winter

  Fairbanks Under the Solstice

Slowly, without sun, the day sinks
toward the close of December.
It is minus sixty degrees.

Over the sleeping houses a dense
fog rises—smoke from banked fires,
and the snowy breath of an abyss
through which the cold town
is perceptibly falling.

As if Death were a voice made visible,
with the power of illumination...

Now, in the white shadow
of those streets, ghostly newsboys
make their rounds, delivering
to the homes of those
who have died of the frost
word of the resurrection of Silence.

                                      John Haines




                        -this poet lived in my hometown
                          i never met him









....

a cold eye

THE NEW LOVE POEM






The new love poem
is known for its honesty.
The new love poem says
I don't love you.

The new love poem
remembers the old love poem
in which a woman's body
was compared to the entire world.
The new love poem tries not to feel
superior to the old love poem.

The new love poem can live
on a steady diet
of bitter fruit. The new love poem
thinks sweets
are for children.

When the new love poem sleeps,
it dreams
of getting old,
of shriveling to a chrysalis,
of something with wings
and color so loud it talks
emerging
to thrill someone who doesn't know any better
and who doesn't want to.




                            Philip Dacey














...

Some blues by a dead poet

                   






                    After the War

A vision for Kathleen

The sickness will come to all of us, out of the air;
we will have poisoned what we live in—a thing
no rat would ever do. That silly book
of Nevil Shute’s will turn out true, and even
the worst imaginings of Orwell and of Aldous Huxley
will seem utopian.
Despairingly, we’ll sort through the proverbs:
a cat will still be able to look at a king,
but no one will know the way to the dairy, no one
will tell the emperor the truth or hear the truth
if it is spoken.
It will not be spoken. Secretly,
each of us will absorb what she must. The pot
of gold at rainbow’s end will be radioactive
and death to touch; the miraculous child will not
be born; disappointment will spread, will become the natural
state-of-things. Expecting salvation, a few of us
will pray to the empty sky; believing in reason,
a few will write strictly accurate accounts of the sickness.
Still, the sickness will come to us all: to the young,
the beautiful, the cheerleaders and the quarterbacks, the ill-
at-ease, the all-too-confident . . .
At the very end,
simple kindness will count for something: unable
to help each other (could we ever?), we will share
morphine and alcohol and silly jokes . . .
I hope I will have the strength to wipe the blood
and sweat and so on from your face and lie to you;
I hope you will do the same for me. The others
will ask each other: “Did we win? Did we win?” I hope
that you and I will know.



                                     David Dwyer













.....

Nothing Can Compare

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Seeing this we fall to our knees. We

Wouldn’t be willing to stop being

Human he became willing to stop

Being wholly of light approachable

To become human and die as a

Helpless creature died in that

Jewish rite so that it’s drenching

Blood could besprinkle in its

Deep cleansing.
 

How can we

Understand this?
 

Being human what can we do

But bow, and believe now, or

When glory leaves all he made

Transformed, or stricken?

 

 

 

                           G.E.  Schwartz