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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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












.....



everybody's going to have a good time














......

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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