4

Now I am quietly waiting for

the catastrophe of my personality

to seem beautiful again,

and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and

brown and white in trees,

snows and skies of laughter

always diminishing, less funny

not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of

the year, what does he think of

that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,

perhaps I am myself again.

--from Mayakovsky; Frank O'Hara

 

Thrilling Conclusion

--Robert Wood Lynn

And when the end came it came silent but clear like bird prints on snow

and no one was surprised to see it arrive

and still friends lingered in doorways letting goodbyes go bad

and chirping cats were fed a second time just to be sure

and the family dogs formed a congress in the woods with the coyotes

and someone was careful to leave bubble wrap for children to burst

and the night watchman pretended his glasses fogged over as we passed

and it turned out the trees were unmemorable

and the government a trick of the light

and it was sorry, the ending, but it didn’t know what for

and it was okay at least as much as we were

and we swam with it in whatever we had on under

and we kissed so hard we clanged teeth

and we ate without speaking

and then at last spoke all at once like an unkinked hose

and then it began, the ending, the way all creatures do, small

and angry at its own misunderstandings.

 

I Hate

--C. K. Williams

I hate how this unsummoned sigh-sound, sob-sound,

not sound really, feeling, sigh-feeling, sob-feeling,

keeps rising in me, rasping in me, not in its old disguise

as nostalgia, sweet crazed call of the blackbird;

not as remembrance, grief for so many gone,

nor either that other tangle of recall, regret   

for unredeemed wrongs, errors, omissions,

petrified roots too deep to ever excise;

a mingling rather, a melding, inextricable mesh   

of delight in astonishing being, of being in being,

with a fear of and fear for I can barely think what,

not non-existence, of self, loved ones, love;

not even war, fuck war, sighing for war,

sobbing for war, for no war, peace, surcease;

more than all that, some ground-sound, ground-note,   

sown in us now, that swells in us, all of us,   

echo of love we had, have, for world, for our world,

on which we seem finally mere swarm, mere deluge,

mere matter self-altered to tumult, to noise,

cacophonous blitz of destruction, despoilment,

din from which every emotion henceforth emerges,

and into which falters, slides, sinks, and subsides:

sigh-sound of lament, of remorse; sob-sound of rue,   

of, still, always, ever sadder and sadder sad joy.

 

[ Crystal Gradation ; Paul Klee (1921) ]

 

Of all the people born on earth,

only a thin fraction are alive now. So today and everyday

is international ghost day.

When the dirt whispers,

it is simply your mother

calling in the grey light of dawn, tugging you out

from the soft but insistent hands

of a dream that holds you

in the way light is held

by the icicle.

--from My Body Tells Me What to Do; Michael Bazzett

 

Kalsarikänni

--Michael Bazzett

Let’s put on our childhood clothes

and walk the secret streets.

Let’s remember that in Finland

they have a word that means

drinking at home, alone,

in your underwear. Let’s feel

the give in our bones again,

soft and green as flower stems.

You might not be my brother.

But you’re as close as we both

might get. Let’s use the sides

of our hands to scrape forts

out of the road-sand snowplows

left in the gutters, then watch

as they melt in rain. Let’s remember

old songs again. You can tell me

how chessboards lie about

the rules of war, how Mother’s

sigh was a descending note

that sharpened into nothingness.

Then we’ll each go our separate

ways, slip into our humming

houses, and drink one last pull

of starlight straight from the bottle.

 

God

--Michael Bazzett

(for Ada Limon)

Look, it’s not that I believe in him. Nor he

in me. We have moved beyond all that.

I just like having someone there in the dark.

Usually we sit in silence, waiting for passing

headlights to glide across the ceiling and knock

stray prayers loose from where they got

stuck on their way out, so many years ago.

It’s almost like finding old piñata candy,

says God, picking one from the floorboards.

He unwraps it, takes a quick taste. Winces.

Nods like he’s just remembered something

for the thousandth, thousandth time.

What is it? I ask. It’s kind of like chewing

tinfoil, he says. All that aching naked hope.

 

 

[ In January ; Werner Berg (1972) ]

 

  

You Learn By Living

--J. Patrick Lewis

                  for Eleanor Roosevelt

Who showed the world the world itself

     Was awkward, shy and plain.

A high-born leader in a long,

     Low decade full of pain.

Poor farmers, blacks, homeless, the least

     Advantaged hoped to see,

Magnificently unarrayed,

     Pure human dignity.

A lady first, the great first lady

     Looked fear in the face,

And said, There is no room for fear

     When courage take its place.

 

Raucous Prayer

--Patrick Rosal

Here, my one raucous prayer

coaxed from this poor drum,

my double heart, under a beat-up slat

of divine light. It’s habit: I evade 

the foreseeable blessing, this thorn

thief, this fiend for deep bass 

and the dynamics of  burning— 

now bird, now furnace, I’m returning

to love itself. Let me face 

the beginning of sound, first horn, 

origin of dirt and song. We are made

by touch, not terror for tat, 

but one humble pulse in a numb 

abyss. Bet, god breathes this air.

 

Banking Coal

--Jean Toomer

Whoever it was who brought the first wood and coal

To start the Fire, did his part well;

Not all wood takes to fire from a match,

Nor coal from wood before it’s burned to charcoal.

The wood and coal in question caught a flame

And flared up beautifully, touching the air

That takes a flame from anything.

Somehow the fire was furnaced,

And then the time was ripe for some to say,

“Right banking of the furnace saves the coal.”

I’ve seen them set to work, each in his way,

Though all with shovels and with ashes,

Never resting till the fire seemed most dead;

Whereupon they’d crawl in hooded night-caps

Contentedly to bed. Sometimes the fire left alone

Would die, but like as not spiced tongues

Remaining by the hardest on till day would flicker up,

Never strong, to anyone who cared to rake for them.

But roaring fires never have been made that way.

I’d like to tell those folks that one grand flare

Transferred to memory tissues of the air

Is worth a like, or, for dull minds that turn in gold,

All money ever saved by banking coal.

 

[ Blotter ; Peter Doig (1993) ]

 

 

Afterlife

--John Burnside

When we are gone

our lives will continue without us

– or so we believe and,

at times, we have tried to imagine

the gaps we will leave being filled

with the brilliance of others:

someone else gathering plums

from this tree in the garden,

someone else thinking this thought

in a room filled with stars

and coming to no conclusion

other than this –

this bungled joy, this inarticulate

conviction that the future cannot come

without the grace

of setting things aside,

of giving up

the phantom of a soul

that only seemed to be

while it was passing.

 

Being and Time

--John Burnside

There are times when I think

of the knowledge we had as children:

the patterns we saw in number, or the spells

and recipes we had

for love and fear;

the knowledge we kept in the bones

for wet afternoons,

the slink of tides, the absolutes of fog,

or how a lapwing’s egg can tip

the scale of the tongue;

how something was always present in the snow

that fell between our parish and the next,

a perfect thing, not what was always there,

but something we knew without knowing, as we knew

that everything was finite and alive,

cradled in warmth against the ache of space,

marsh-grass and shale, and the bloodroot we dug in the woods

that turned our fingers red, and left a stain

we kept for weeks, through snow and miles of sleep,

as if it was meant to happen, a sliver of fate

unstitching its place in the marrow, and digging in.

 

Amongst ‘livestock’

--John Burnside

Nothing is adapted to the fret

of LED and blockwork, snow-drift

gusted over ice into

the hayricks, scraps

of sackcloth, clagging, bodies scabbed with mud

and bedstraw, blotched eyes

searching: finding

nothing; giving in.

 

We know their names

from catalogues and songs; but these

are nothing like, just weather of a sort,

discarnate, eyeless, waiting for a sign:

run of matter blackening the floor,

the ache of rennet, hoofprints in the stone.

 

[ J. R. R. Tolkien’s illustration for ‘Letter From Father Christmas’ ]

 

 

Vertical

--Linda Pastan

Perhaps the purpose of leaves is to conceal

the verticality of trees which we notice in December

as if for the first time: row after row of dark forms

yearning upwards. And since we will be horizontal

ourselves for so long, let us now honor

the gods of the vertical: stalks of wheat which

to the ant must seem as high as these trees do to us,

silos and telephone poles, stalagmites and skyscrapers.

but most of all these winter oaks, these soft-fleshed poplars,

this birch whose bark is like roughened skin against

which I lean my chilled head, not ready to lie down.

 

December

The white dove of winter

sheds its first

fine feathers;

they melt

as they touch

the warm ground

like notes

of a once familiar

music; the earth

shivers and

turns towards

the solstice.

--from The Months; Linda Pastan

 

December 18: for M

--Linda Pastan

At the waning of the century,

with the weather warming

and even the seasons losing their way

listen to me. It is time

to sit still, to tilt your face

to the light and catch the notes of music

which sweeten the tongue

like snowflakes as they fall and melt

this bare December morning.

Your mouth was shaped for lullaby

or hymn, and your refusal

to sing bewilders

whole octaves of air. Enough

abstinence. Each day

that ends is gone, not a leaf is left

and soon enough it will be

time to sleep under the sway

of all that silence.

 

[ The Magpie ; Claude Monet (1868/69) ]

 

 

What the Thrush Said

--John Keats

O Thou whose face hath felt the Winter’s wind,

Whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist,

And the black elm tops ’mong the freezing stars,

To thee the spring will be a harvest-time.

O thou, whose only book has been the light

Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on

Night after night when Phœbus was away,

To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn.

O fret not after knowledge—I have none,

And yet my song comes native with the warmth.

O fret not after knowledge—I have none,

And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens

At thought of idleness cannot be idle,

And he’s awake who thinks himself asleep.

 

Let the fish philosophize the ice away from the Rivers in winter time and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight of summer. Look at the Poles and at the sands of Africa, Whirlpools and volcanoes – Let men exterminate them and I will say that they may arrive at earthly Happiness –The point at which Man may arrive is as far as the parallel state in inanimate nature and no further – For instance suppose a rose to have sensation, it blooms on a beautiful morning it enjoys itself – but there comes a cold wind, a hot sun – it can not escape it, it cannot destroy its annoyances – they are as native to the world as itself: no more can man be happy in spite, the worldly elements will prey upon his nature – The common cognomen of this world among the misguided and superstitious is "a vale of tears" from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to Heaven – What a little circumscribe[d] straightened notion! Call the world if you Please ”The vale of Soul-making” Then you will find out the use of the world (I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature admitting it to be immortal which I will here take for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which has struck me concerning it) I say ‘Soul making’ Soul as distinguished from an Intelligence – There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions – but they are not Souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself.  Intelligences are atoms of perception – they know and they see and they are pure, in short they are God – how then are Souls to be made? How then are these sparks which are God to have identity given them – so as ever to possess a bliss peculiar to each one's individual existence?  How, but by the medium of a world like this? 

--John Keats, from a letter to George and Georgiana Keats, 14 February - 3 May 1819

 

The Beautiful Lady Without Mercy

--John Keats

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

Alone and palely loitering?

The sedge has withered from the lake,

And no birds sing!

O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,

So haggard and so woe-begone?

The squirrel’s granary is full,

And the harvest’s done.

I see a lily on thy brow,

With anguish moist and fever-dew,

And on thy cheeks a fading rose

Fast withereth too.

I met a lady in the meads,

Full beautiful, a fairy's child;

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild.

I made a garland for her head,

And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;

She looked at me as she did love,

And made sweet moan.

I set her on my pacing steed,

And nothing else saw all day long,

For sidelong would she bend, and sing

A faery's song.

She found me roots of relish sweet,

And honey wild, and manna-dew,

And sure in language strange she said—

'I love thee true'.

She took me to her Elfin grot,

And there she wept and sighed full sore,

And there I shut her wild, wild eyes

With kisses four.

And there she lullèd me asleep,

And there I dreamed—Ah! woe betide!—

The latest dream I ever dreamt

On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings and princes too,

Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;

They cried—'La Belle Dame sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall!'

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,

With horrid warning gapèd wide,

And I awoke and found me here,

On the cold hill's side.

And this is why I sojourn here,

Alone and palely loitering,

Though the sedge is withered from the lake,

And no birds sing.

 

[ Winter (I) ; Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis (1907) ]

 

Haiku- Autumn 2025

bright colors of mums

as well that smell of something 

dead within the brush

it starts with one leaf-

a memory, willingly,

left to the wayside 

out on the wood porch,

the elderly woman knits

a warm red blanket

 

Toward Overture

The revealing collapse of beech leaves,

another thousand versions of yellow

wobbling sunny rain, unhindered sky,

a time when thought is free to secede

from litany and slide with the months'

diminishments, carry on with clear oxygen,

channel breath through raw elements

like flames of fire for currents of water, 

wind within moments, proposal of words

full as the life from where they arrived

to deepen a privacy that ages into home,

a story where each ending is beginning--

any memory echoed through the hand 

when held to the stars cupping initiation

of cold nothingness can grip a light 

down on through the plexus ground

 

[ Evening Walk ; Lyn Ward (1969) ]

 

Fall, leaves, fall; die, flowers, away;

Lengthen night and shorten day;

Every leaf speaks bliss to me

Fluttering from the autumn tree.

I shall smile when wreaths of snow

Blossom where the rose should grow;

I shall sing when night’s decay

Ushers in a drearier day.

--Emily Brontë

 

 

No Coward Soul Is Mine

--Emily Brontë

No coward soul is mine

No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere

I see Heaven's glories shine

And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear

O God within my breast

Almighty ever-present Deity

Life, that in me hast rest,

As I Undying Life, have power in Thee

Vain are the thousand creeds

That move men's hearts, unutterably vain,

Worthless as withered weeds

Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

To waken doubt in one

Holding so fast by thy infinity,

So surely anchored on

The steadfast rock of Immortality.

With wide-embracing love

Thy spirit animates eternal years

Pervades and broods above,

Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears

Though earth and moon were gone

And suns and universes ceased to be

And Thou wert left alone

Every Existence would exist in thee

There is not room for Death

Nor atom that his might could render void

Since thou art Being and Breath

And what thou art may never be destroyed.

 

 

Often rebuked, yet always back returning

    To those first feelings that were born with me,

And leaving busy chase of wealth and learning

    For idle dreams of things which cannot be:

To-day, I will seek not the shadowy region;

    Its unsustaining vastness waxes drear;

And visions rising, legion after legion,

    Bring the unreal world too strangely near.

I’ll walk, but not in old heroic traces,

    And not in paths of high morality,

And not among the half-distinguished faces,

    The clouded forms of long-past history.

I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:

    It vexes me to choose another guide:

Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding;

    Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side.

What have those lonely mountains worth revealing?

    More glory and more grief than I can tell:

The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling

    Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.

--Emily Brontë