how we pass time

The crowd at the ball game

is moved uniformly

by a spirit of uselessness

which delights them—

all the exciting detail

of the chase

and the escape, the error

the flash of genius—

all to no end save beauty

the eternal—

So in detail they, the crowd,

are beautiful

for this

to be warned against

saluted and defied—

It is alive, venomous

it smiles grimly

its words cut—

The flashy female with her

mother, gets it—

The Jew gets it straight— it

is deadly, terrifying—

It is the Inquisition, the

Revolution

It is beauty itself

that lives

day by day in them

idly—

This is

the power of their faces

It is summer, it is the solstice

the crowd is

cheering, the crowd is laughing

in detail

permanently, seriously

without thought

       William Carlos Williams MD

....

The Feed

                      






                               M. L.  Smoker














Several of my cousins lean up against the house, taking long drags
from the pack of Marlboros we share. We have always been this way
—addicted and generous. A pow wow tape plays from inside the open
garage where two old uncles are thinking to themselves in the safety
of its shadows. Our aunties are in the kitchen, preparing the boiled meat
and chokecherry soup and laughing about old jokes they still hang onto
because these things are a matter of survival. Outside, we ask about
who was driving around with who last night, where so-and-so got beat
up, whose girlfriend left him for someone else. (But she’ll go back to
him, we all think to ourselves.) Aunties carry the full pots and pans to the
picnic table, an uncle prays over our food in Assiniboine. We all want to
forget that we don’t understand this language, we spend lots of time
trying to forget in different ways. No one notices that the wild turnips
are still simmering in a pot on the stove.














.....

a friend of Mao

             RED MOON








And this same pallid moon tonight,
Which rides so quietly, clear and high,
The mirror of our pale and troubled gaze,
Raised to a cool Canadian sky.

Above the shattered mountain tops,
Last night, rose low and wild and red,
Reflecting back from her illumined shield,
The blood bespattered faces of the dead.

To that pale disc, we raise our clenched fists,
And to those nameless dead our vows renew,
“Comrades, who fought for freedom and the future world,
Who died for us, we will remember you.”






                                


                          Dr. Norman Bethune MD
                                  Canadian Physician Humanitarian
                                     Laid to rest in Communist China


















.......................

by a young netherlands lass named christa

Back in my room

  [ edit ]

For hours
I've been at school
and hoped
that I would be home



I have been on the train
and the bus
and I've said hello
to people working



But I'm home now
and I really
don't know
why I craved this

an overdue limerick

There was an Old Man who said, 'How
Shall I flee from that horrible cow?
I will sit on this stile,
And continue to smile,
Which may soften the heart of that cow.'










                               Edward Lear














.......

THE BIG SKY IS SOMETIMES SAD

                MONTANA BLUES

Goose bumps on your legs, muted thyroid
Dulled emotions to suppress memories of the abuse,
And yet, your spirit explodes!

Under the curtain you are an open book
Red letters wanting to be read, and then…
The fear slams the covers shut.

Tired avatar,
both liberated shell and mirror of inner shadows
covered by a black cloth.

Surreal midnight dinner,
Like high fever hallucination,
Dry food,
Dead couples staring at each other,
And a milkshake.

The plus and minus collide,
Keep spinning out of control
Until the curse stops it….
Your eyes betray your lying lips.

Feline face, furrowed eyebrows
Forehead Blackfoot square,
Pictures of the shaggy hair,
Are you just a face in the deck of cards
brought to life by my imagination?

The dealer makes it real:
First tears, then the joker fear.
Bows bounce in my imagination
There’s no space between art and life creation
From silence we can generate vibration,
Of the heart

.......   Ovidiu Marinescu

.......

consider the bird of prey

                                  Mortal Limit

I saw the hawk ride updraft in the sunset over Wyoming.
It rose from coniferous darkness, past gray jags
Of mercilessness, past whiteness, into the gloaming
Of dream-spectral light above the lazy purity of snow-snags.

There--west--were the Tetons. Snow-peaks would soon be
In dark profile to break constellations. Beyond what height
Hangs now the black speck? Beyond what range will gold eyes see
New ranges rise to mark a last scrawl of light?

Or, having tasted that atmosphere's thinness, does it
Hang motionless in dying vision before
It knows it will accept the mortal limit,
And swing into the great circular downwardness that will restore

The breath of earth? Of rock? Of rot? Of other such
Items, and the darkness of whatever dream we clutch?

                                             Robert Penn Warren

......

by Leonard Cohen

        For Marianne

It's so simple
to wake up beside your ears
and count the pearls
with my two heads

It takes me back to black boards
and I'm running with Jane
and seeing the day run

It makes it so easy
to govern this country

 I've already thought up the laws
I'll work hard all day
in Parliament

Then let's go to bed
right after supper

 Lets's sleep and wake up
all night

                                                                 from "Flowers for Hitler"


















.....

Dream Song 14

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) "Ever to confess you're bored
means you have no
Inner Resources." I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.

 Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.

 And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into the mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.










john berryman

Mt. Rushmore

Owls hang in the night air
between the visages of Washington, Lincoln
The Rough Rider, and Jefferson; and coyotes
mourn the theft of sacred ground.


A cenotaph becomes the tourist temple
of the profane.






                        Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
                                lakotah poetess

spring fling

     

          The Garden

                           David Solway

 

      Lyke as the Culver on the bared bough
          —Spenser, Amoretti, 89

 Under the pale lilac bush
moorgrass whispers from its hidden bed
to the monarch-bearing milkweed,
and the plump robin freighting
the berry-cumbered honeysuckle
whistles the secret to the chickadee
darting between the hedges.

Laden with epistles
a tumult of bluets and fritillaries
prints the air with messages
as mullein leans its slender stalk
to confide in a tigering of bees
busy with their blacks and golds
and the honey of their living.

Even purple loosestrife
races across the lower meadow
panicked by the yellow trumpets
of the brassy, orchestral lilies,
and the wood dove creaks with fright
for the cover of the branches.

Now the hummingbird,
milking petalled flocks of lavenders and pinks,
stalls in mid-maneuver
while the double-decker dragonfly
in the aftermath of rain
hovers by the spires of the bull thistle,
murmuring its encyclicals
of desire and regret
for the wet and shimmering kingdom.

For the news has spidered out
in the cold opulence of its silks
to every corner of the garden:
to where the tender seed heads
of the ditch-green sedges
purple toward the future
and the ovals of the rosehips
ripe with orpiment
pour their hearts out in the plummeting sun.

For the word has gone out
to all the tremulous creatures
beneath the parable of the white pines
dropping their soft sickles
in russet masses to the ground.
The word has gone out
in the colloquies of those who love the garden
that in the radiant vacancies they inhabit
there is only the gardener
to love them back.

.......

boethius reconsidered

      "The Alley Violinist,"




                
                                 by Robert Lax

if you were an alley violinist
and they threw you money
from three windows
and the first note contained
a nickel and said:

 

when you play, we dance and
sing,

 

signed
a very poor family

 

and the second one contained
a dime and said:

 

I like your playing very much,

 

signed
a sick old lady

 

and the last one contained
a dollar and said:

 

beat it,

 

would you:
stand there and play?
beat it?
walk away playing your fiddle?

Robert Lax was a college buddy of Thomas Merton
they remained friends through life
....he was a very free-spirited catholic


























......