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


























...