[ Winter ; Vilhelms Purvitis (1910) ]

 

 

The Perfect Journey Is

-- A. R. Ammons

The perfect journey is

no need to go

another nothingly clear day and

I went

to walk between the pine

colonnades

up the road on the hill and there

hill-high in dry cold

I saw the weaves of glitterment

airborne, so fine,

the breeze sifting

figurations from the snow

reservoirs of the boughs

 

Snow of the

-- A. R. Ammons

Snow of the 

right consistency,

temperature, and

velocity will

fall in a lee

slope

building out over

space a

promontory of

considerable

reach in

downward curvature:

and snow

will do this

not once

but wherever possible,

a similarity of effect

extended

to diversity's 

exact numeration

* * *

here a month of snow,

more January than

February, intervenes

during which

I wrote

nothing: it is

the winter-deep, the 

annual sink:

leave it unwritten,

as snow unwrites

the landscape

* * *

  

 

Substantial Planes

--A. R. Ammons

It doesn't

matter

to me

if

poems mean

nothing:

there's no

floor

to the

universe

and yet

one

walks the

floor.

 

[ Tree ; Jacoba van Heemskerck (1918) ]

 

Absences

--Donald Justice

It's snowing this afternoon and there are no flowers.

There is only this sound of falling, quiet and remote,

Like the memory of scales descending the white keys

Of a childhood piano—outside the window, palms!

And the heavy head of the cereus, inclining,

Soon to let down its white or yellow-white.

Now, only these poor snow-flowers in a heap,

Like the memory of a white dress cast down . . .

So much has fallen.

                                    And I, who have listened for a step

All afternoon, hear it now, but already falling away,

Already in memory. And the terrible scales descending

On the silent piano; the snow; and the absent flowers

      abounding.

 

All We Have to Go By

--Linda Pastan

As if I had dreamed the snow

into falling,

I wake to a world

blanked out

in its particulars,

nearly erased.

The is the silence

of absolute whiteness- the mute

birds nowhere

in sight, the car

an animal tracks

filled in,

all boundaries,

as in love,

ambiguous.

Sometimes all we have

to go by

is the weather:

a message

the snow writes

an invisible ink,

what the sky means

by its litmus

colors.

Now my breath

on the chilly window

forms a cloud

which may turn

to rain later,

somewhere else.

 

Dark Register

--Cynthia Cruz

If you leave,

he said,

keep who you are.

Don’t let the world

and its desires

ruin you.

But after the dream

comes the habit.

And no way to fix it.

What is gone

cannot be put back.

Damage

from the inside.

What I have become

is warmed over

with that now

ancient dream.

What I was

is vanished.

I came back home

but I came back

gone.

 

[ Inside-Outside ; Heidrun Rathgeb (2021) ]

 

The Stars

--Simone Weil (tr. by Noah Rawlings)

Blazing stars, dotting the night sky’s distant plain,

Mute stars, forever frozen, forever spinning blind.

You tear from our hearts the days of yesteryear,

You toss us to tomorrow, heedless of our will,

And we weep, and all our cries to you are vain.

Since we must, we’ll follow you, our arms entwined,

Our eyes turned toward your brightness pure but bitter.

By your light, all sorrows matter little.

We fall silent, we stumble on our way.

Suddenly it’s there in our hearts: their divine flame.

 

The Book of Dreams

--Andrea Jurjević

I fall asleep under the tremolo voice box of the moon

I fall asleep under the scratched cymbal of the moon

The moon that’s the stone lodged in the throat of the night

The night so exiled it wants to find its way back home

I dream about the tough heel of a walnut roll from 1975

And sharing its sweet December bits with a clan of crows

I dream about a crow that’s my imaginary older brother

And a girl dance-swaying her bovine hips into widowhood

I dream of sun shooting itself up between the sharp shanks of hills

Down the ravine a woeful snake rent with a blunt fish knife

I dream of pouring woe into mugs and topping it with red wine

The river man that’s parched and all I have is that wine

In a dream I’m lying on a salamander-sleek slab inside a cave

Beside a skinless drum simmering with fat carp

The fish leaping in and out of the stew are soldiers in a foxhole

In a dream my love stirs that stew with long white oars

I have a native tongue and I grow a foreign one too

I have a need for closed captions when I talk to people

I have no feelings about god and a shipyard of suspicions about men

I also have rooms filled with clocks riffing in double time

I have a longing for the coiling shadows of cypresses

And a pull toward the soft gray hook of the moon

I have memory drawers filled with sweet chicory root

A pull to the purple lip of the sea and its theremin breath

In a naked dream I fall on the dock mum as cargo

Beg the rain to drop song on the pillows of my palms

The moon slips away like a pearly soap bubble

A glistening nipple pulled from a wet mouth

I winter in that waver

My bones are oars and within me a shady lady rows

I wake seasick from the sloshing in my veins

In another country I’m rain

 

A Ghost

--Cole Swensen

erodes the line between being and place becomes the place of being

.......time and so

the house turns in the snow is why a ghost always has the architecture of

.......a storm

The architect tore down room after room until the sound stopped. A

.......ghost is one

among the ages at the edge of a cliff empty sails on the bay even when

.......a ship

or the house moves off in fog asks you out loud to let the stranger in

 

[ Evening Walk; Deb Garlick (2019) ]

 

Thanks, Robert Frost

--David Ray

Do you have hope for the future?

someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.

Yes, and even for the past, he replied,

that it will turn out to have been all right

for what it was, something we can accept,

mistakes made by the selves we had to be,

not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,

or what looking back half the time it seems

we could so easily have been, or ought...

The future, yes, and even for the past,

that it will become something we can bear.

And I too, and my children, so I hope,

will recall as not too heavy the tug

of those albatrosses I sadly placed

upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,

yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,

and it brings strange peace that itself passes

into past, easier to bear because

you said it, rather casually, as snow

went on falling in Vermont years ago.

 

Back Soon; Driving—

--Carl Phillips

The way the present cuts into history,

or how the future can look at first

like the past sweeping through, there

are blizzards, and there are blizzards.

Some contain us; some we carry

within us until they die, when we do.

The snow falls there, barely snowing,

into a long wooden trough where

the cattle feed on those apples we

used to call medieval, or I did,

for their smallish size, as if medieval

meant the world in miniature but

not so different otherwise from

our own, just smaller, a bit sweeter,

more prone therefore to rot quickly,

which is maybe not the worst thing.

Revelation is not disclosure. I love

how the snow, taking itself now more

seriously, makes the cattle look softer,

for a moment, than their hard bodies are.

 

The Magi

--Louise Glück

Toward world's end, through the bare

beginnings of winter, they are traveling again.

How many winters have we seen it happen,

watched the same sign, come forward as they pass

cities sprung around this route their gold

engraved on the desert, and yet

held our peace, these

being the Wise, come to see at the accustomed hour

nothing changed: roofs, the barn

blazing in darkness, all they wish to see.

 

[ Read to Me ; Deb Garlick ]

 

                        *               

A poem should be motionless in time   

As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases

Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,   

Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time   

As the moon climbs.

                         * 

--from Ars Poetica; Archibald Maleish

 

Ancestral

--Archibald MacLeish

The star dissolved in evening—the one star

The silently

                   and night O soon now, soon

And still the light now

                                    and still now the large

Relinquishing

                     and through the pools of blue

Still, still the swallows

                                       and a wind now

                                                            and the tree

Gathering darkness:

                              I was small. I lay

Beside my mother on the grass, and sleep

Came—

          slow hooves and dripping with the dark

The velvet muzzles, the white feet that move

In a dream water

                        and O soon now soon

Sleep and the night.

                              And I was not afraid.

Her hand lay over mine. Her fingers knew

Darkness,—and sleep—the silent lands, the far

Far off of morning where I should awake.

 

Way-Station

--Archibald MacLeish

The incoherent rushing of the train

Dulls like a drugged pain

Numbs

To an ether throbbing of inaudible drums

Unfolds

Hush within hush until the night withholds

Only its darkness.

                            From the deep

Dark a voice calls like a voice in sleep

Slowly a strange name in a strange tongue.

Among

The sleeping listeners a sound

As leaves stir faintly on the ground

When snow falls from a windless sky—

A stir    A sigh

 

[ Dark Blue World ; Endre Balint (1947) ]

 

Haiku- Autumn 2024

early september,

dry cawing of a blue jay

scratched on a north wind

just a simple moth

and yellow in the gingko

slipping through boredom

peak autumn color-

old man sipping his coffee

out on the front porch

post election day,

again I'm finding a world

that's not what I thought

trying to hang on

to that something that's not meant

to be hung on to

 

When the Other Shoe Drops

Old house, new house, a few

token leaves that hang to the oak,

strung dried like a banjo tuned

to hard tones of falling acorns,

regular efforts, created patterns,

while others are elsewhere

mixed on an air of chance, fate,

fathoms off the smallest twig 

that holds until it won't, like

what gets kept alone and abides

up in the attic while weighing

on down to the slab basement

in creaks, cracks, of wood planks

worn off from a dule tree's hymnal,

sunset apples over the ground

with their vinegar of weariness,

that does pass, is only known

by a heart, a gasp, from what is

and has been a mere second-

meant by you, to last forever.

 

[ The witness (Clues and fragments cycle) ; Alberto Sughi ]

 

 

from City Without A Name

--Czeslaw Milosz

10

Unexpressed, untold.

But how?

The shortness of life,

the years quicker and quicker,

not remembering whether it happened in this or that autumn.

Retinues of homespun velveteen skirts,

giggles above a railing, pigtails askew,

sittings on chamberpots upstairs

when the sledge jingles under the columns of the porch

just before the moustachioed ones in wolf fur enter.

Female humanity,

children's snots, legs spread apart,

snarled hair, the milk boiling over,

stench, shit frozen into clods.

And those centuries,

conceiving in the herring smell of the middle of the night

instead of playing something like a game of chess

or dancing an intellectual ballet.

And palisades,

and pregnant sheep,

and   pigs, fast eaters and poor eaters,

and cows cured by incantations.

 

Faith

--Czeslaw Milosz (trans. Robert Hass)

The word faith means when someone sees

A dew – drop or a floating leaf,

and know that they are, because they have to be.

And even if you dreamed, or

closed your eyes and wished,

The world would still be what it was,

and the leaf would still be carried down the river.

It means that when someone’s foot is hurt

By a sharp rock,

He also knows that rocks are here so they can hurt our feet.

Look, see the long shadow cast by the tree;

And flowers and people throw shadows on the earth:

What has no shadow has no strength to live.

This World

--Czeslaw Milosz

It appears that it was all a misunderstanding.
What was only a trial run was taken seriously

The rivers will return to their beginnings.

The wind will cease in its turning about.

Trees instead of budding will tend to their roots.

Old men will chase a ball, a glance in the mirror--

They are children again.

The dead will wake up, not comprehending.

Till everything that happened has unhappended.

What a relief! Breathe freely, you who suffered much.

 

[ American Discovery Viewed by Native Americans ; Thomas Hart Benton ]

Peabody Essex Museum discussion: Benton painting Native Americans

 

Living at the End of Time

--Robert Bly

There is so much sweetness in children’s voices,

And so much discontent at the end of day,

And so much satisfaction when a train goes by.

I don’t know why the rooster keeps crying,

Nor why elephants keep raising their trunks,

Nor why Hawthorne kept hearing trains at night.

A handsome child is a gift from God,

And a friend is a vein in the back of the hand,

And a wound is an inheritance from the wind.

Some say we are living at the end of time,

But I believe a thousand pagan ministers

Will arrive tomorrow to baptize the wind.

There’s nothing we need to do about John. The Baptist

Has been laying his hands on earth for so long

That the well water is sweet for a hundred miles.

It’s all right if we don’t know what the rooster

Is saying in the middle of the night, nor why we feel

So much satisfaction when a train goes by.

 

The Cello

--Andrea Potos

Strings slide in

from somewhere

under,

carve out

the hollows

the deeper

sounds

of our bones.

Once they come—

no escaping

our quiet wounds

that just want to be music now.