ANOTHER COWBOY POEM - from Montana

WRECKS                                                         








Well, I’ve seen some wrecks ahorseback
An’ quite a few with cars,
An’ I’ve even seen the carnage
Of some awful wrecks in bars.
But the worst wrecks in my mem’ry
Was the ones a comin’ on
When there come a perfumed letter
That started off "Dear John."








                  Mike Logan




















....

where brooklyn trout swim

 












  The Lordly Hudson                                                            














"Driver, what stream is it?" I asked, well knowing
it was our lordly Hudson hardly flowing.
"It is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing,"
he said, under the green-grown cliffs."


Be still, heart! No one needs
your passionate suffrage to select this glory,
this is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing
under the green-grown cliffs.


"Driver, has this a peer in Europe or the East?"
"No, no!" he said. Home! Home!
Be quiet, heart! This is our lordly Hudson
and has no peer in Europe or the east.


This is our lordly Hudson hardly flowing
under the green-grown cliffs
and has no peer in Europe or the East.
Be quiet, heart! Home! Home!








                               – Paul Goodman




















....

latin candor

pablo neruda's confession                                                                                                               

And it was at that age... Poetry arrived in search of me.
I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating planations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
I felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars, my heart broke free on the open sky.








                    tr. A. Kerrigan

..

i dare say this poem was written by a woman

.

“What does Woman want?”
is not a question
you need to ask.
Instead, ask: How can
woman be curbed, how
kept at her task?

How can she be made
to know her place? Must
her ears be cropped?
The way she uses
her wits, her wiles! How
can she be stopped?

Was it wise to let
this genie out of
the bottle? See
man in chains, woman
his master! Is this
how things should be?

                   anonymous

                   - most famous poet

.

love at first sight

The Yawn                                                    

The black-haired girl
with the big
                     brown
                                eyes
on the Queens train coming
                     in to work, so
opens her mouth so beautifully
                     wide
                                in a ya-aawn, that
two stops after she has left the train
I have only to think of her          and I

                                      o-oh-aaaww-hm
                                                wow !








                      Paul Blackburn










































....

honestly

i  long  to  hold  some  lady                 

















I long to hold some lady
For my love is far away,
And will not come tomorrow
And was not here today.

There is no flesh so perfect
As on my lady's bone,
And yet it seems so distant
When I am all alone:


As though she were a masterpiece
In some castled town,
That pilgrims come to visit
And priests to copy down.

Alas, I cannot travel
To a love I have so deep
Or sleep too close beside
A love I want to keep.


But I long to hold some lady,
For flesh is warm and sweet.
Cold skeletons go marching
Each night beside my feet.






                   Leonard Cohen (   +  Nov. 7- 2016  )
















...

pathetic fallacies are bad science but

On reading Susanne K. Langer's Mind                                    






If  leaf-trash chokes the stream-bed,
reach for rock-bottom as you rake
the muck out. Let it slump dank,
and dry fading, flat above the bank.
Stand back. Watch the water vault ahead.
Its thrust sweeps the surface clean, shores the debris,
as it debrides its stone path to the lake,
clarity carrying clarity.

To see clear, resist the drag of  images.
Take nature as it is, not Dame nor Kind.
Act in events; touch what you name. Abhor
easy obverts of natural metaphor.
Let human speech breathe out its best poor bridges
from mind to world, mind to self, mind to mind.

Yet, I admit the event of the wood thrush:
In a footnote Langer (her book rapids-clean
like the spring-water aired over sleeked rock)
says she witnessed an August bird in shock
when a hawk snatched its mate. It perched, rushed
notes fluting two life-quotas in one flood,
its lungs pushing its voice, flushing the keen
calls, pumped out as the heart pumps blood,
not in twilight or warning but noon & wrong,
its old notes whistled too fast but accurate.

I read this drenched in bird-panic, its spine-
fusing loss all song, all loss; that loss mine
awash in unanswered unanswered song.
And I cannot claim we are not desolate.  










                                          Marie Ponsot


























...                     

try to make the best of things

Poems from Saint Pelagia Prison                                       








       by




Phillippe Soupault                                                               












I.


Wednesday on a barge
and you Saturday like a flag
the days have crowns
like kings and dead men
lissome as a kiss my hand
rests on chained foreheads
A child cries for her doll
and we'll have to start over again
Monday and Tuesday cold-blooded
four Thursdays off from work




 
II.


a thread unravels
a shadow falls
a butterfly exploded
chrysalis or glow worm




 
III


Who mounts
the storm
a balloon
honey or silver moon
Four by four
Let's look for the children
the parents of children
the children of children
the bells of springtime
the beginnings of summer
the regrets of autumn
the silence of winter
an elephant in his bathtub
and the three sleeping children
singular singular tale
tale of the setting sun


                         translation by Paulette Schmidt     
























.....

seasoned seasonal

AUTUMN                                         

                    

A horse collapses in the middle of an alley
Leaves fall on him
Our love trembles
And the sun too.

                    Jacques Prevert

....I don't know who translated this from the French

....

who's going to houston

Observations at the security checkpoint                                               

                              by                                        

                      Joel Brouwer

 

We should be glad our safety and security
are someone’s top priority, yet we
can’t help but hope for fresh announcements
in the terminal. Your personal integrity
is our first concern. We strive to increase
your capacity for grief. Here at Flying Air,
beauty matters more. An officer takes
the ancient Indian woman’s hand
and gently swabs for the promise of a bomb.
I hold my arms up in the scanner as if
already guilty and the machine churns
a circular blessing or judgment around me.
We all have bodies here for you to see.
I like all the little wounds, the scrape
on the back of this man’s neck,
blue penny of bruise on a child’s leg,
this woman’s black toenail suddenly
among us like a cricket when she takes
off her shoe to be searched. What caused
these harmless injuries? I’m outraged
by their tenderness, their benignity,
I want to kiss them better immediately,
my dear comrades in the GWAT must not
be suffered to suffer. Not even these
despondent retirees behind me in line.
Every two minutes she asks What’s wrong?
and he replies Nothing. Now our gestures
grow both more hurried and more delicate,
we stand on one foot to remove a boot,
take off our hats and jackets, as if for
sex or prayer, exposing ourselves to
each other and the officers, the officers
our lovers and our prophets both. Mastery
or surrender, the speakers assert
through static, are the only viable conduits
to the terminus of questions and the bliss
which awaits us there or at our final
destinations. All these moderns are
so smitten with the image of Montaigne
riding the vineyards of Bordeaux wholly
open to any question. They slide by
the fact that he believed in God.
At every step the hooves beneath him
clopped solid ground, never thrust through
into vacancy, bad turbulence, sudden
changes in cabin pressure. I lay my banana
on the belt and watch the officer
scan it on his screen, it seems so silly,
I watch him, smiling, hoping he’ll look up
and smile back, but he stares sternly
at the monitor, my banana must be taken
seriously. A young woman massages
her young boyfriend’s forehead and face
with such strong rhythmic pressure,
almost fury, as if demanding something,
they are adorable, hands all over
each other, reminding me of religious kids
when the lid finally blows off, they get
so humid with each other. People forget,
or fail or fear to savor, how thrilling it is
to cork desire, the blast that never
comes, the banana just a banana, no trace
explosive on the ancient woman’s hands,
no news flash. Such sweet disappointments.
Our electronic devices powered down,
our own power put down, we have nothing
to look at but the empty space ahead
or each other. A quick pitch and yaw
lifts our stomachs and casts them aside,
a girl turns to me from her makeup kit,
her eyes are wide, I take her hand, how could
she ever be my enemy? She’s going
to Houston. I’m going to Houston too

/////

the tempered anxiety of autumn

Prone,  November                                                                     
















Just your slow, pink movements near the doorway.
If there were fields, they'd long ago rolled back in agate bliss.

Until you were indelible, a dahlia.

Bale of hay, almost made for a woman bent over.

Her pale sweet hedging (which,

in certain landscapes,

is an early form of love. )

I want you slow: birds hover near my waist.

Not sleep in the distance but the mimeograph

of sleep.

Above all else, the trembling resembles a forest. 


















                                               Louise  Matthias




























////