I decided to write a poem in rhyme for a change! Fun times had by all (although come to think of it, it's pretty melancholy). Anyway, the inspiration for this poem is Schubert's "Death and the Maiden" (Der Tod und das Madchen)...it should be a better poem for material that lofty, but one of the downsides to "every day" is a dud once in awhile. Anyway, it would be pretty cool if you guys would sometimes leave suggestions for poetic forms or inspirations as comments. Think about it! :)
Schubert Hits Plympton Street
The cool day slips on
loosing its winds.
The tossed leaves murmur
to the light on their skins.
The sun sweeps out slow
over unmown fields.
The apple trees are shedding
their rotten, brindled yields.
A girl with long hair sings
in a foreign tongue.
She lifts her white legs high
Her voice clear and young:
“Lay me out gently
like a cut rose still red.
And lay the autumn leaves
unturned about my head.”
Sweetly she goes by
murmuring her lieder.
So death recalls itself
to the sapling and the cedar.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
feel free to suggest a better title.
also, if you're reading this and want to know when I put up a new poem, will ya press 'follow' on the right hand side of the page? It is a small matter that will make me ecstatic. :)
The Personal World is Universal Now
"There is no such thing as a perfect mirror. There is only a mirror that perfectly matches our expectations." -Orhan Pamuk
A famous author in his sixties said
that everyone, writing
characters, writes
themselves-- how one drinks
a glass of water more fitfully
when it rains and
one’s breath looks white on the window of a night train
and the first unquiet wind of winter stings one's cheek
the page rings true to it each for each
On the grass outside the lecture hall
a whippet was hunting blood alert
to the squirrel stammering his fear
in the dog’s eyes black as marbles
the recognition of ancient habits
the body sketched without wasted flesh
each and each do as they have always done
Every love like the books he spoke of
is small knowledge - a compendium of scars and misplaced hairs
each and each in time forget warm touch
leaving recalled rituals and moods
“I too am Madame Bovary”
I remind Flaubert
when I watch the small snow eke out your brow
I love the furrow of every man’s
every man has written his name in his own breath
on a night train's window
and every man erases each for each
The Personal World is Universal Now
"There is no such thing as a perfect mirror. There is only a mirror that perfectly matches our expectations." -Orhan Pamuk
A famous author in his sixties said
that everyone, writing
characters, writes
themselves-- how one drinks
a glass of water more fitfully
when it rains and
one’s breath looks white on the window of a night train
and the first unquiet wind of winter stings one's cheek
the page rings true to it each for each
On the grass outside the lecture hall
a whippet was hunting blood alert
to the squirrel stammering his fear
in the dog’s eyes black as marbles
the recognition of ancient habits
the body sketched without wasted flesh
each and each do as they have always done
Every love like the books he spoke of
is small knowledge - a compendium of scars and misplaced hairs
each and each in time forget warm touch
leaving recalled rituals and moods
“I too am Madame Bovary”
I remind Flaubert
when I watch the small snow eke out your brow
I love the furrow of every man’s
every man has written his name in his own breath
on a night train's window
and every man erases each for each
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Valor Begins in Sleep
I dreamed you had a wife, dressed
all in goat skins. I didn’t question this
nor the length of her hair which bent girls wove in looms.
She filled the dark tent like a red ember, singing,
pulling plump ropes of bread in her hands.
I wanted to drink water
from her fingers. Grace
is false, beauty is vain,
I loved your fictious wife despite and woke
confused. ‘Who is this woman
your wife?’ I asked. ‘Why didn’t you tell me
about her?’
You laughed. In your laughter
was the passage from one world to the next.
Your wife
was singing, “Kindness
is the basis of everything in this world,
but love is brief,”
she was baking new loaves in the ashes,
the girls wove yellow coats from her long hair
for the poor and the widows.
O, love me quietly
into the morning,
don’t laugh too harshly as I mutter
fitful in the pillow. Restive beneath my skin
the women croon, weaving
scarlet garments for their households,
lifting their gentle arms
in a sinuous rhythm of praise.
I dreamed you had a wife, dressed
all in goat skins. I didn’t question this
nor the length of her hair which bent girls wove in looms.
She filled the dark tent like a red ember, singing,
pulling plump ropes of bread in her hands.
I wanted to drink water
from her fingers. Grace
is false, beauty is vain,
I loved your fictious wife despite and woke
confused. ‘Who is this woman
your wife?’ I asked. ‘Why didn’t you tell me
about her?’
You laughed. In your laughter
was the passage from one world to the next.
Your wife
was singing, “Kindness
is the basis of everything in this world,
but love is brief,”
she was baking new loaves in the ashes,
the girls wove yellow coats from her long hair
for the poor and the widows.
O, love me quietly
into the morning,
don’t laugh too harshly as I mutter
fitful in the pillow. Restive beneath my skin
the women croon, weaving
scarlet garments for their households,
lifting their gentle arms
in a sinuous rhythm of praise.
Monday, September 28, 2009
and now for something completely different
[untitled]
I ma-tri-cu-la-ted in the school of hard knocks
she says drunk dangling her bare feet
black with cheap dye into the steam-belled air
after a harsh rain. I’ve been watching dark water
sluice into dark water for hours.
She enunciates with care
dragging her fingers through her hair
and licking her cheeks where streaked eye-paint streams down.
In the water the pink-finned sea bream swim
muscling on slim tails through the tide.
Down the white foot hangs,
a small life traced in the veins,
and the big night blinks its thousand eyes and dreams.
Everywhere small lives are annihilating themselves.
The rain hammers again into our open palms.
On the hours pile until the darkness dies
and the sun burns like the first brand on the pyre.
I ma-tri-cu-la-ted in the school of hard knocks
she says drunk dangling her bare feet
black with cheap dye into the steam-belled air
after a harsh rain. I’ve been watching dark water
sluice into dark water for hours.
She enunciates with care
dragging her fingers through her hair
and licking her cheeks where streaked eye-paint streams down.
In the water the pink-finned sea bream swim
muscling on slim tails through the tide.
Down the white foot hangs,
a small life traced in the veins,
and the big night blinks its thousand eyes and dreams.
Everywhere small lives are annihilating themselves.
The rain hammers again into our open palms.
On the hours pile until the darkness dies
and the sun burns like the first brand on the pyre.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
sometimes poems help me figure out things I am trying to figure out.
Poem for Erev Yom Kippur 5770
Sourly to penance slumps my soul in autumn.
All year I've shut the call to benediction out
my lips too parsimonious a purse for prayer.
But uncouth on the street I watch my books for signs
no earthly book could hold-
embossed, the solemn hours of my life.
Only when the call to prayer
fills the unceremonied air
we come; the mournful warble
of church bells, and the thin, stalwart voice of the muezzin;
even we Jews have conceived a siren
to yowl the Sabbath into streets filled with the unfaithful.
Dear faith, dear faith I hold fast even now
a book with pages whiter than the robe
my father wears to show the Heavenly Host
a heart pure of misdeeds,
how can I find my soul in a room
when even now under ancient songs
propelled by current tongues I hear
the sun hum down the horizion spilling out
in all plumed gaiety more light
than could fill the arch and eaves of holy rooms,
so crisp and fine in the last days of September
each stone could uncurl into a naked diamond,
each ridge of the river flares like a cup of gold?
Sourly to penance slumps my soul in autumn.
All year I've shut the call to benediction out
my lips too parsimonious a purse for prayer.
But uncouth on the street I watch my books for signs
no earthly book could hold-
embossed, the solemn hours of my life.
Only when the call to prayer
fills the unceremonied air
we come; the mournful warble
of church bells, and the thin, stalwart voice of the muezzin;
even we Jews have conceived a siren
to yowl the Sabbath into streets filled with the unfaithful.
Dear faith, dear faith I hold fast even now
a book with pages whiter than the robe
my father wears to show the Heavenly Host
a heart pure of misdeeds,
how can I find my soul in a room
when even now under ancient songs
propelled by current tongues I hear
the sun hum down the horizion spilling out
in all plumed gaiety more light
than could fill the arch and eaves of holy rooms,
so crisp and fine in the last days of September
each stone could uncurl into a naked diamond,
each ridge of the river flares like a cup of gold?
late poem Friday.
Hey, so:
I kind of decided (as I was sitting on the bus to Portland, Maine, and realizing there was no way I would get access to a computer by midnight) that the crux of the whole "poem a day" thing is writing a poem a day -- i.e., the most important thing is having the poem written by midnight, and not necessarily posted by midnight. But I realized that having decided to put each poem on a blog entails a performative aspect to the project, indicating that the audience (y'all) might be more important than I give it credit for. I tend to make seemingly firm but ultimately nebulous resolutions -- in fact, almost constantly -- and wind up wavering around quite a bit, but in this case the dimensions of the resolution aren't only in my own head for once. So, what are your thoughts? Should it be an iron deadline of posting by midnight, or is writing by midnight o.k.?
Without further ado, today's poehm:
"Poem for Jeremiah 2:2"
From the bus vestibule come the smells of fries and vinegar
and sweet false fruit. The building is bent on erasing itself
tile by tile from the minds of those who pass through it,
a place fixed firm in grimy placelessness.
From the bus I watch the light-pricked spires rise
high over the river into the hollow sky.
Under the elevated highway
the cars in the lot gleam like packed fish.
The townhouses light their narrow windows
the trees their attendants slim as girls
fanning their hair out wide in the light.
From a dark window peers the God of Deuteronomy
weary with absence, recalling the years of the betrothal,
forty years of fierce love and complaint--
enough years to fade hale youth,
not yet to send a lover to his grave,
a life younger than my father's life.
The fabled God speaks on awhile
muttering under wheels dark
on the dark road, and retreats.
I won't address the sweet subject of love,
two bodies confused in sleep,
the moon on the duvet, a bright marquee,
it is no palliative;
our loves have failed to match the films
in which all men are handsome and strong
and the women clarion as summer mornings
where nothing has yet gone wrong,
and nothing is at stake,
and the sun gleaming on the hills
sits like gold silt on every hair,
recalling to us the mercies of our youth
boundless and fair, and the whole bright earth is our bride-price.
I kind of decided (as I was sitting on the bus to Portland, Maine, and realizing there was no way I would get access to a computer by midnight) that the crux of the whole "poem a day" thing is writing a poem a day -- i.e., the most important thing is having the poem written by midnight, and not necessarily posted by midnight. But I realized that having decided to put each poem on a blog entails a performative aspect to the project, indicating that the audience (y'all) might be more important than I give it credit for. I tend to make seemingly firm but ultimately nebulous resolutions -- in fact, almost constantly -- and wind up wavering around quite a bit, but in this case the dimensions of the resolution aren't only in my own head for once. So, what are your thoughts? Should it be an iron deadline of posting by midnight, or is writing by midnight o.k.?
Without further ado, today's poehm:
"Poem for Jeremiah 2:2"
From the bus vestibule come the smells of fries and vinegar
and sweet false fruit. The building is bent on erasing itself
tile by tile from the minds of those who pass through it,
a place fixed firm in grimy placelessness.
From the bus I watch the light-pricked spires rise
high over the river into the hollow sky.
Under the elevated highway
the cars in the lot gleam like packed fish.
The townhouses light their narrow windows
the trees their attendants slim as girls
fanning their hair out wide in the light.
From a dark window peers the God of Deuteronomy
weary with absence, recalling the years of the betrothal,
forty years of fierce love and complaint--
enough years to fade hale youth,
not yet to send a lover to his grave,
a life younger than my father's life.
The fabled God speaks on awhile
muttering under wheels dark
on the dark road, and retreats.
I won't address the sweet subject of love,
two bodies confused in sleep,
the moon on the duvet, a bright marquee,
it is no palliative;
our loves have failed to match the films
in which all men are handsome and strong
and the women clarion as summer mornings
where nothing has yet gone wrong,
and nothing is at stake,
and the sun gleaming on the hills
sits like gold silt on every hair,
recalling to us the mercies of our youth
boundless and fair, and the whole bright earth is our bride-price.
Thursday, September 24, 2009
two-poem thursday!
Hey guys, if you are reading/following this blog and have a Google account, could you put yourselves down as following the blog? This doesn't mean you have to check it every day or anything, it would just be nice for me to know who, if anyone, is reading what I put up here...
Anyway, sometimes when I get a "stuffy nose," writerly speaking - when I'm not happy with what I'm writing and think it sounds a little off, and everything I write seems to be slightly awry, I try writing in Hebrew... I'm 'bilingual,' which means that I've been learning Hebrew since I was six years old (and my mom spoke it at home a little, although we always made fun of her for it) and I spent a year in Israel with Israelis and I've been relentlessly exposed to it... which is to say I have an imperfect, not very refined vocabulary... one of the good things about writing in a second but comfortable language is that I expect a certain degree of stiltedness and so I paradoxically am much freer to express the concepts I want to. All of which is a very long prelude to saying: I wrote a (clusmy) poem in Hebrew today. Following it is a clumsy translation.
לא נעים לי עוד לשוט בחיי
כספינה קטנה מוטלת ברוחות
לבד במים ומשתוקקת לנגיעות החול.
קשה עלי לסבול חיים בלי פלא.
לאהבה ולשמחה אני כאיש יושב בפתח בית
ובתוך הבית הילולה נדירה וגדולה
עם יין ומדורות...
נמעס לי עוד להרטיב את שרווליי בבכי
ולחלום על עבר מזהיר שלא היה.
עוצמת העולם עבר ממלך לאצילים,
נפוץ והתפזר ויושב עכשיו איתנו...
גם בי קיים כח ההחלטה,
חלש וכמעת נרדם,
לא בטוח, כמו נשמה, בהיותו בי בכלל...
אהה, השעות יורדות בבטן השעון החול! --
בוא אלי, אהוב, ופה נוכיח
שלא נעלמו כל חום וזעם משטח העולם.
I'm no longer content to sail in my life
like a small ship cast about by winds,
alone in the water, dying for the touch of the sand.
It weighs on me to live a life without wonder.
To love and joy I am like a man who sits on the threshold
and in the house is a rare party filled
with wine and bonfires...
I want no longer to wet my sleeves with weeping
and to dream of a shining and fictious past.
Power in the world passed down from kings to lords,
spread and diffused, and sits now in us all.
I also hold the power of decision,
weak, near to sleep,
unsure, like a soul, of its own existence there...
O, the hours descend in the belly of the clock!
Come to me, love, and we will prove
that all heat and wrath have not dispelled
from the surface of the world.
ALSO
this is the poem I was writing and then got discouraged and then wrote a poem in Hebrew and then finished:
Two women passed me in the square
carrying black bowls in their hands.
Outside the all-night market the beggar shakes her cup.
And another woman roared a love song at a stopped car's wheel
and took off howling her rotten joyful rage
like a shout down the great asphalt tongue
of the boulevard into the night.
The numbers gentle on through the belly of the clock.
If I walk long enough,
if the air grows cold enough on my body,
will I shed my husk at last,
will I grow admirable and good?
My soul is busking its desires
on a worn guitar to an indifferent promenade..
Anyway, sometimes when I get a "stuffy nose," writerly speaking - when I'm not happy with what I'm writing and think it sounds a little off, and everything I write seems to be slightly awry, I try writing in Hebrew... I'm 'bilingual,' which means that I've been learning Hebrew since I was six years old (and my mom spoke it at home a little, although we always made fun of her for it) and I spent a year in Israel with Israelis and I've been relentlessly exposed to it... which is to say I have an imperfect, not very refined vocabulary... one of the good things about writing in a second but comfortable language is that I expect a certain degree of stiltedness and so I paradoxically am much freer to express the concepts I want to. All of which is a very long prelude to saying: I wrote a (clusmy) poem in Hebrew today. Following it is a clumsy translation.
לא נעים לי עוד לשוט בחיי
כספינה קטנה מוטלת ברוחות
לבד במים ומשתוקקת לנגיעות החול.
קשה עלי לסבול חיים בלי פלא.
לאהבה ולשמחה אני כאיש יושב בפתח בית
ובתוך הבית הילולה נדירה וגדולה
עם יין ומדורות...
נמעס לי עוד להרטיב את שרווליי בבכי
ולחלום על עבר מזהיר שלא היה.
עוצמת העולם עבר ממלך לאצילים,
נפוץ והתפזר ויושב עכשיו איתנו...
גם בי קיים כח ההחלטה,
חלש וכמעת נרדם,
לא בטוח, כמו נשמה, בהיותו בי בכלל...
אהה, השעות יורדות בבטן השעון החול! --
בוא אלי, אהוב, ופה נוכיח
שלא נעלמו כל חום וזעם משטח העולם.
I'm no longer content to sail in my life
like a small ship cast about by winds,
alone in the water, dying for the touch of the sand.
It weighs on me to live a life without wonder.
To love and joy I am like a man who sits on the threshold
and in the house is a rare party filled
with wine and bonfires...
I want no longer to wet my sleeves with weeping
and to dream of a shining and fictious past.
Power in the world passed down from kings to lords,
spread and diffused, and sits now in us all.
I also hold the power of decision,
weak, near to sleep,
unsure, like a soul, of its own existence there...
O, the hours descend in the belly of the clock!
Come to me, love, and we will prove
that all heat and wrath have not dispelled
from the surface of the world.
ALSO
this is the poem I was writing and then got discouraged and then wrote a poem in Hebrew and then finished:
Two women passed me in the square
carrying black bowls in their hands.
Outside the all-night market the beggar shakes her cup.
And another woman roared a love song at a stopped car's wheel
and took off howling her rotten joyful rage
like a shout down the great asphalt tongue
of the boulevard into the night.
The numbers gentle on through the belly of the clock.
If I walk long enough,
if the air grows cold enough on my body,
will I shed my husk at last,
will I grow admirable and good?
My soul is busking its desires
on a worn guitar to an indifferent promenade..
Wednesday, September 23, 2009
two minutes before midnight
i post the poem I should have worked on longer.
The church bells peal in big mimicry of birds
filling the gaps in the hour with clangor.
The sound recalls to me
a past dense with faith, in every hour brilliant
as particles of light,
as plainly filling a room
so huge it swoops in a lucid arch to God.
How firmly the grand endeavors of man
once stood on the broad earth beseeching God,
whose love could fill the static breadth of space.
Now our clangor signifies nothing at all
no vast ire held against us but our own,
a crowd of children ravening for a drying teat,
rending the unwilling womb with our hands.
The orotund guards of the past are calling out
sheathed in a thin spire against the sun.
The church bells peal in big mimicry of birds
filling the gaps in the hour with clangor.
The sound recalls to me
a past dense with faith, in every hour brilliant
as particles of light,
as plainly filling a room
so huge it swoops in a lucid arch to God.
How firmly the grand endeavors of man
once stood on the broad earth beseeching God,
whose love could fill the static breadth of space.
Now our clangor signifies nothing at all
no vast ire held against us but our own,
a crowd of children ravening for a drying teat,
rending the unwilling womb with our hands.
The orotund guards of the past are calling out
sheathed in a thin spire against the sun.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
three short poems with no obvious connecting theme
some days you just ain't inspired.
1.
On the water the loons
crow like cracked bells
the streetlights are dim
as a battery of moons
with gentle love becalmed in torpor
we pass our days
2.
All night the rain beat on the slate.
The statues wept into their hair.
Water sluices hisses in the grate
And shorebirds hurl their bodies through the air.
My body swells, a white and present weight
in fulsome bloom, its rosy breasts are bare.
3.
Like the morning whose lean face hungers between the hills
I am pale and ready to become.
1.
On the water the loons
crow like cracked bells
the streetlights are dim
as a battery of moons
with gentle love becalmed in torpor
we pass our days
2.
All night the rain beat on the slate.
The statues wept into their hair.
Water sluices hisses in the grate
And shorebirds hurl their bodies through the air.
My body swells, a white and present weight
in fulsome bloom, its rosy breasts are bare.
3.
Like the morning whose lean face hungers between the hills
I am pale and ready to become.
Monday, September 21, 2009
fourth poem :)
(note: I don't know why all I write about is light. I'll work on expanding that. but it was such a pretty day, how could I help it?)
Notes on the Magnanimity of Light
Love is a word written by a girl
in a novelty pen as wide as her ten fingers,
so I ignore the swollen volumes
the light writes on your upper lip
and insteps, clasped like hands on the sulphurous grass.
We could make any riverbank the Seine
if we chose to, but we don't,
though the light compels itself through the leaves
onto your arms,
and the wind moans in the laurel without pause.
Soft love, you can die by the water
with the moulted down of geese
who leave the shorn brown banks in flocks,
cawing at the bellies of their brothers,
webs milling the air, ungainly, unalone.
But even autumn forgets itself
when the sun flares on the water!
Oh, let your lips fall open on a golden phrase
the wind takes up like a catechism through the trees.
Notes on the Magnanimity of Light
Love is a word written by a girl
in a novelty pen as wide as her ten fingers,
so I ignore the swollen volumes
the light writes on your upper lip
and insteps, clasped like hands on the sulphurous grass.
We could make any riverbank the Seine
if we chose to, but we don't,
though the light compels itself through the leaves
onto your arms,
and the wind moans in the laurel without pause.
Soft love, you can die by the water
with the moulted down of geese
who leave the shorn brown banks in flocks,
cawing at the bellies of their brothers,
webs milling the air, ungainly, unalone.
But even autumn forgets itself
when the sun flares on the water!
Oh, let your lips fall open on a golden phrase
the wind takes up like a catechism through the trees.
Friday, September 18, 2009
third post!
So once again I am writing in the nick of time before the deadline. I had planned to post this before Rosh Hashanah started but sadly the seven (!) hours it took to get from Boston to New York obviated this possibility. Luckily though, that heinous amount of time on the Fung Wah bus gave me a good opportunity to write?
Anyway, here's yet another moody poem about dusk.
[untitled]
Sunset is a venial hour. The stoops
are slick and pink as hams
in crepusculo, and the passersby swing their hips
into the murk helplessly at evening.
Each day in autumn the night rears itself higher
to catch a new hour of light in its teeth
swallowing briefly, bloodily, into the happening dusk...
I am surprised by my own lusts as always.
In the new darkness my limbs are a stranger's.
The sudden clumsiness of those who pass is an appeal to grace,
Even the cars move like half-blind dogs
muzzling hesitantly down the dim
borderless alleys of a hundred cities...
I am stained by light with the millions
who grope through the bowels of my country,
with their mouths open O in unknowing submission
unknowing possession O of the fat
frail soul that haunts the street
--
Also a bonus poem! For a fun project on the bus I memorized Matthew Arnold's "On Dover Beach" - I bought 'The Portable Matthew Arnold' on the way to the bus station, to enjoy what my friend Spencer calls "cantankerous Victoriana." This is just a silly response to that and the biographical essay by Lionel Trilling at the beginning of the book...
Off rhymes ftw!
Love Poem to Matthew Arnold
They say you were an Oxford dandy
Sleek and droll as Tristram Shandy,
And though you mope down Dover beach
I'd gladly dare to eat your peach.
O dour, dire, lettered Arnold,
Meek, upright, and barely carnal,
I dreamt you stepped forth from the page.
(And all the rest is verbiage.)
Anyway, here's yet another moody poem about dusk.
[untitled]
Sunset is a venial hour. The stoops
are slick and pink as hams
in crepusculo, and the passersby swing their hips
into the murk helplessly at evening.
Each day in autumn the night rears itself higher
to catch a new hour of light in its teeth
swallowing briefly, bloodily, into the happening dusk...
I am surprised by my own lusts as always.
In the new darkness my limbs are a stranger's.
The sudden clumsiness of those who pass is an appeal to grace,
Even the cars move like half-blind dogs
muzzling hesitantly down the dim
borderless alleys of a hundred cities...
I am stained by light with the millions
who grope through the bowels of my country,
with their mouths open O in unknowing submission
unknowing possession O of the fat
frail soul that haunts the street
--
Also a bonus poem! For a fun project on the bus I memorized Matthew Arnold's "On Dover Beach" - I bought 'The Portable Matthew Arnold' on the way to the bus station, to enjoy what my friend Spencer calls "cantankerous Victoriana." This is just a silly response to that and the biographical essay by Lionel Trilling at the beginning of the book...
Off rhymes ftw!
Love Poem to Matthew Arnold
They say you were an Oxford dandy
Sleek and droll as Tristram Shandy,
And though you mope down Dover beach
I'd gladly dare to eat your peach.
O dour, dire, lettered Arnold,
Meek, upright, and barely carnal,
I dreamt you stepped forth from the page.
(And all the rest is verbiage.)
Thursday, September 17, 2009
second poem! half an hour before the deadline.
I am taking a two day hiatus 'cause I'm going home for Rosh Hashanah and want to respect my parents' observance. I may or may not do three poems the day I return to this blog (probably not).
"Biological patchiness is a given..."
It's important to remember the logic of things.
The structure of leaves
piping the sun in dark veins,
twinned at the feet
diving perpetually away into the air --
This in the constant usuries of daily life,
the dereliction of the grand idea,
The sour progress of light into dimness
gouging the features of passing faces.
Strangers with hair like Spanish moss studded with flowers
look at me once and retreat from the light.
It dies on their backs like a pale child
forgetting itself in a crowd of shadows.
But the leaves recall themselves in ascending spirals
that sigh and tremble like moths in the empty street.
"Biological patchiness is a given..."
It's important to remember the logic of things.
The structure of leaves
piping the sun in dark veins,
twinned at the feet
diving perpetually away into the air --
This in the constant usuries of daily life,
the dereliction of the grand idea,
The sour progress of light into dimness
gouging the features of passing faces.
Strangers with hair like Spanish moss studded with flowers
look at me once and retreat from the light.
It dies on their backs like a pale child
forgetting itself in a crowd of shadows.
But the leaves recall themselves in ascending spirals
that sigh and tremble like moths in the empty street.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
A poem a day!
Hey guys!
My name is Talia, I'm a sophomore at Harvard, and my aim is to write a poem a day and put 'em all up here. This may result in some rushed, perfunctory poems, but a rushed, perfunctory poem is better than none. I had to name it "A Poem A Day From Harvard" because "A Poem A Day" was already taken, but rest assured my project will (hopefully) not be limited to self-serving, Harvard-worshipping crap.
Anyway, here's the first poem! I was reading Saul Bellow's "Ravelstein" and he mentions Eros a lot, specifically conflating Eros and the sun, so I was thinking about it.
"Eros is a sniper now in green"
Eros is a sniper now. In green
and proximal to the sun
burning his boots on the hot tar Eros aims,
piercing the serious ribs of the young,
and the light weeps like a cornet in his hair.
In a treble of light Eros fires outnumbered
by the unbloomed bellies of those who pass, ears coiled in sound,
eyes pinned to small lights that do not heed the sun. O love,
the serious jaw of Eros is set
and his young thumb urges the gun.
My name is Talia, I'm a sophomore at Harvard, and my aim is to write a poem a day and put 'em all up here. This may result in some rushed, perfunctory poems, but a rushed, perfunctory poem is better than none. I had to name it "A Poem A Day From Harvard" because "A Poem A Day" was already taken, but rest assured my project will (hopefully) not be limited to self-serving, Harvard-worshipping crap.
Anyway, here's the first poem! I was reading Saul Bellow's "Ravelstein" and he mentions Eros a lot, specifically conflating Eros and the sun, so I was thinking about it.
"Eros is a sniper now in green"
Eros is a sniper now. In green
and proximal to the sun
burning his boots on the hot tar Eros aims,
piercing the serious ribs of the young,
and the light weeps like a cornet in his hair.
In a treble of light Eros fires outnumbered
by the unbloomed bellies of those who pass, ears coiled in sound,
eyes pinned to small lights that do not heed the sun. O love,
the serious jaw of Eros is set
and his young thumb urges the gun.
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