Old Woman’s Lament in Autumn

--Rae Armantrout

for WCW

Sorrow is my corner store

where jack-o’-lantern balloons

get high on the last helium.

The endcap is gold today

with numbered bags

of Werther’s Original.

No one is Werther.

Last night a newscaster

mentioned an “elderly victim.”

Don’t call me that.

I’m old

and obdurate.

 

 

[ November ; Jacek Yerka ]

Star Man

--Maitreyabandhu

He saw a blue light entering his heart

coming from a man he couldn’t see

but knew was standing in the stars above

the playing field behind his house. The light

came like a curl of candle smoke and lit

a cooking-apple tree inside his head

where he’d built a den and brought flowers

in a broken mug without its handle.

He could see the usual things – the laurel hedge,

the path that marked the border of his world –

but no river murmured powerful thoughts,

no wind of meaning blew among the stars,

no nature’s heart beat full against his own,

just apple branches lit up in the dark.

 

 

Visitation

--Maitreyabandhu

Strange that you should come

like that, without any form at all,

carrying no symbolic implements,

without smile or frown

or any commotion,

as if you had been there all the time,

like a pair of gloves left in a pocket.

As if I had been looking that way,

into the wide blue yonder, and you were

beside me, enduring my hard luck stories

with infinite patience. Not even waiting –

the tree outside my window

doesn’t wait, nor the ocean-wedge

with its new, precise horizon – just there

like the shadow of a church

or a quiet brother.

And how I saw you, in the mess of things,

was as a slant of grey,

the perfect grey of house dust,

an absolute neutral, with no weaving,

no shimmer of cobalt

and light-years away from Byzantium.

Grey. And I want to add, like light,

as if a skylight opened in my skull,

and into the darkness fell

a diagonal of pure Bodmin Moor.

But even that’s too bright,

too world-we’re-busy-in.

Call it ‘dust’ then, or the bloom

of leaf-smoke from an autumn fire.

 

The Man

--Maitreyabandhu

The man was sitting by the kitchen window.

Outside, the trees were full of nervous birds,

nodding their heads or flicking up their tails

in gestures of defiance. A pheasant walked

along a hedge, his copper coat restrained,

even the sun held back behind the trees.

The man was watching ladybirds climb up

the windowpane: so many on the walls,

so many huddled near the lights! They fell

down on their backs as if they'd taken ether.

The house stood in the corner of a field

with woodpigeons, always woodpigeons, in twos

or squadrons in the trees; and a robin singing

from a post, his song as bright as teaspoons.

The sun rose in pale and broken stripes,

then set in a perfect orange ball. Nothing

happened inside the house. The man took off

his glasses when he slept, drank two strong cups

of coffee every day, and walked around

the garden with his scarf around his neck.

He wanted signs of life: the sound of someone

closing a drawer or slipping on a jacket;

but no-one pressed the gravel drive or opened

the kitchen door. A patch of sunlight swivelled

round the room, brightening the kettle's spout.

The man lay down and wrote inspiring things

on little scraps of card. He thought he heard

a hare snuffling in the grass, an owl

hooting in the night. But then the taps

ran dry and the blue pilot light went out.

 

[ Wood with Beech Trees ; Piet Mondrian (1899) ]

 

Violets in the Fall

--Maurice Manning

A gang of crows was chasing off

a hawk. The little stream was laughing

and shushing itself. The hawk's reflection

briefly blurred a pool of water

and then the pool went back to waiting

for nothing or the next reflection.

The maple trees were yellow and red,

but redder farther up the stream.

I wanted especially to share

the cloud of redder leaves upstream

with the little girl I had with me,

but she was sleeping. Walking home,

I thought the willow trees around

the pond were standing up like brooms

to sweep the sky. That was the voice

in my head describing the willow trees

as brooms, a thought to stop the world

for a moment's moment. She might have thought

the willows looked like lashes winking

around a deep-green eye,

but as I say, she was asleep

for this excursion in the world.

And she hasn't told me yet about

the voice inside her head. For the moment

that voice is learning how to listen

to its own mysterious silence. I expect

it's like a sanctuary in there

with a candle glowing at the back of the room

and violets dotting the grass outside.

 

A Blasphemy

--Maurice Manning

You wouldn't have believed it, how

the man, a little touched perhaps,

set his hands together and prayed

for happiness, yet not his own;

he meant his people, by which he meant

not people really, but trees and cows,

the dirty horses, dogs, the fox

who lived at the back of his place with her kits,

and the very night who settled down

to rock his place to sleep, the place

he tried so hard to tend he found

he mended fences in his sleep.

He said to the you above, who, let's

be honest, doesn't say too much,

I need you now up there to give

my people happiness, you let

them smile and know the reason; hear

my prayer, Old Yam. The you who's you

might laugh at that, and I agree,

it's funny to make a prayer like that,

the down-home words and yonder reach

of what he said; and calling God

the Elder Sweet Potato, shucks,

that's pretty funny, and kind of sad.

 

Sad and Alone

--Maurice Manning

Well, this is nothing new, nothing

to rattle the rafters in the noggin,

this moment of remembering

and its kissing cousin the waking dream.

I wonder if I'll remember it?

I've had a vision of a woman

reclining underneath a tree:

she's about half naked and little by little

I'm sprinkling her burial mounds

with grass. This is the kind of work

I like. It lets me remember, and so

I do. I remember the time I laid

my homemade banjo in the fire

and let it burn. There was nothing else

to burn and the house was cold;

the cigar box curled inside the flames.

But the burst of heat was over soon,

and once the little roar was done,

I could hear the raindrops plopping up

the buckets and kettles, scattered out

like little ponds around the room.

It was night and I was a boy, alone

and left to listen to that old music.

I liked it. I've liked it ever since.

I loved the helpless people I loved.

That's what a little boy will do,

but a grown man will turn it all

to sadness and let it soak his heart

until he wrings it out and dreams

about another kind of love,

some afternoon beneath a tree.

Burial mounds—that's hilarious.

[ from Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe; Harry Clarke ]

 

Night Mirror

--Li-Young Lee

Li-Young, don’t feel lonely

when you look up

into great night and find

yourself the far face peering

hugely out from between

a star and a star. All that space

the nighthawk plunges through,

homing, all that distance beyond embrace,

what is it but your own infinity.

 

And don’t be afraid

when, eyes closed, you look inside you

and find night is both

the silence tolling after stars

and the final word

that founds all beginning, find night,

 

abyss and shuttle,

a finished cloth

frayed by the years, then gathered

in the songs and games

mothers teach their children.

 

Look again

and find yourself changed

and changing, now the bewildered honey

 

fallen into your own hands,

now the immaculate fruit born of hunger.

Now the unequaled perfume of your dying.

And time? Time is the salty wake

of your stunned entrance upon

no name.

 

Nocturne

--Li-Young Lee

That scraping of iron on iron when the wind   

rises, what is it? Something the wind won’t   

quit with, but drags back and forth.

Sometimes faint, far, then suddenly, close, just   

beyond the screened door, as if someone there   

squats in the dark honing his wares against   

my threshold. Half steel wire, half metal wing,   

nothing and anything might make this noise   

of saws and rasps, a creaking and groaning

of bone-growth, or body-death, marriages of rust,   

or ore abraded. Tonight, something bows

that should not bend. Something stiffens that should   

slide. Something, loose and not right,   

rakes or forges itself all night.

 

Falling: The Code

--Li-Young Lee

1.

Through the night   

the apples

outside my window   

one by one let go   

their branches and   

drop to the lawn.

I can’t see, but hear

the stem-snap, the plummet

through leaves, then

the final thump against the ground.

Sometimes two   

at once, or one   

right after another.

During long moments of silence

I wait

and wonder about the bruised bodies,   

the terror of diving through air, and   

think I’ll go tomorrow

to find the newly fallen, but they

all look alike lying there

dewsoaked, disappearing before me.

2.

I lie beneath my window listening   

to the sound of apples dropping in

the yard, a syncopated code I long to know,

which continues even as I sleep, and dream I know

the meaning of what I hear, each dull   

thud of unseen apple-

body, the earth   

falling to earth

once and forever, over   

and over.

 

[ October Evening ; Leon Spilliaert (1912) ]

 

 

Leaves

--Ursula K. Le Guin

Years do odd things to identity.

What does it mean to say

I am that child in the photograph

at Kishamish in 1935?

Might as well say I am the shadow

of a leaf of the acacia tree

felled seventy years ago

moving on the page the child reads.

Might as well say I am the words she read

or the words I wrote in other years,

flicker of shade and sunlight

as the wind moves through the leaves.

 

Thank You

--Ross Gay

If you find yourself half naked

and barefoot in the frosty grass, hearing,

again, the earth's great, sonorous moan that says

you are the air of the now and gone, that says

all you love will turn to dust,

and will meet you there, do not

raise your fist. Do not raise

your small voice against it. And do not

take cover. Instead, curl your toes

into the grass, watch the cloud

ascending from your lips. Walk

through the garden's dormant splendor.

Say only, thank you.

Thank you.

 

3 

You'll be driving along depressed when suddenly

a cloud will move and the sun will muscle through

and ignite the hills. It may not last. Probably

won't last. But for a moment the whole world

comes to. Wakes up. Proves it lives. It lives—

red, yellow, orange, brown, russet, ocher, vermilion,

gold. Flame and rust. Flame and rust, the permutations

of burning. You're on fire. Your eyes are on fire.

It won't last, you don't want it to last. You 

can't stand any more. But you don't want it to stop. 

It's what you've come for. It's what you'll

come back for. It won't stay with you, but you'll 

        remember that it felt like nothing else you've felt

        or something you've felt that also didn't last.

--from Leaves; Lloyd Schwartz

 

[ Landscape with Trees ; Vincent van Gogh ]

 

Death Is a Simple Thing

--Dmitry Blizniuk

Here, in the countryside, death is simple and unpretentious.

It goes without makeup, and

a chipped log rattles

under a dented axe.

This low, big-boned tree stump

(be careful, watch your step)

is a guillotine for chickens.

Feathers and down are stuck in the notches in the wood,

like last unlit cigarettes before execution,

or unsent letters to beloved ones…

And autumn birches pose nude around the house:

armfuls of freckles are thrown up to the clouds

and hang there,

on the long, equine face of October.

 

 

Great Music

--Dmitry Blizniuk

There’s something about destiny

that resembles a dentist’s work:

sterility, perseverance, carefulness,

consistent cruelty,

disposable whiteness.

One day, you enter the kitchen and suddenly realize

that you’ve lost forever

this smiley summer,

this milky cloudy planet,

this slim nervous woman with green eyes.

And you put on the final movement of the Moonlight Sonata,

having no faith at all in art.

You throw a lousy witch into a fire,

expecting her to spit, swear, kick her legs.

Hah! The angered melody will soar up,

emitting smoke, the smell of sackcloth,

and the fume of uncombed felty gold of the hair.

And frightened, you close yourself off,

but the music will seep in even through the shuttered windows.

Its poisonous vapor will worm its way in.

Your body will start sweating at once,

getting covered with small drops of fright,

like hot chicken meat in a clear bag.

Oh, great music,

you work wonders

and nightmares.

 

Within the Word Autumn

--Dmitry Blizniuk

Someone walks within the word Autumn,

walks on high red heels,

one floor above,

one understanding above.

Someone stops at the window,

pulls the curtains open,

and secretly admires the suntanned horsemen of the falling leaves

that prance, rearing up on their hind legs, golden and flared.

The willow at the lamp post has lost its mind;

it mourns with bowed head,

dropping green saliva on the ants.

Then, later,

late at night,

the moon will come up,

it will be thin like an eyelid —

a teacher with a birthmark on her face

will take a crowd of stars-second-graders

on a trip above the night city.

 

[ Enso (the flowers smell but disappear) ; Zenkei Shibayama ]

 

 

When the immense drugged universe explodes

In a cascade of unendurable colour

And leaves us gasping naked,

This is no more than the ectasy of chaos:

Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal love

Which alone, as we know certainly, restores

Fragmentation into true being.

--Robert Graves; Ecstasy of Chaos

 

A Dancer's Life

--Donald Justice

The lights in the theater fail. The long racks

Of costumes abandoned by the other dancers

Trouble Celeste. The conductor asks

If she is sad because autumn is coming on,

But when autumn comes she is merely pregnant and bored.

On her way back from the holidays, a man

Who appears to have no face rattles the door

To her compartment. How disgusting, she thinks;

How disgusting it always must be to grow old.

Dusk falls, and a few drops of rain.

On the train window trembles the blurred

Reflection of her own transparent beauty,

And through this, beautiful ruined cities passing,

Dark forests, and people everywhere

Pacing on lighted platforms, some

Beating their children, some apparently dancing.

The costumes of the dancers sway in the chill darkness.

Now sinking into sleep is like sinking again

Into the lake of her youth. Her parents

Lean from the rail of a ferryboat waving, waving,

As the boat glides farther out across the waves.

No one, it seems, is meeting her at the station.

The city is frozen. She warms herself

In the pink and scented twilight of a bar.

The waiter who serves her is young. She nods assent.

The conversation dies in bed. Later,

She hurries off to rehearsal. In the lobby,

Dizzy still with the weight of her own body,

She waits, surrounded by huge stills of herself

And bright posters announcing events to come.

Her life—she feels it closing about her now

Like a small theater, empty, without lights.

 

Fish Rain

--James Davis May

It’s rare, but it happens:

A waterspout forms near land

and raptures the fish to the sky.

We’re not quite sure what happens next.

Well, we know that many die, 

that some are shredded by the winds,

that some are frozen into chunks of ice, 

and that some, some survive

even after the cyclone stops,

and they exist up there a while. 

Maybe they’re pummeled 

but supported by the currents

in the clouds, the way you keep

a tennis ball in the air

with a single racket—kept up 

until they aren’t and fall,

and even then some survive

to drown on land. What must it be like

to die after that ascension?

Before, life was so much hunger 

and short-lived satisfaction, 

but mostly buoyancy 

without knowing that word 

or any word. Yes, they’re dumb, 

but surely they know or sense 

something is ending,

one eye focused on the ground

the other on the lost sky—   

and the water an absence, 

a memory they can’t remember,

while that human sound of wonder

starts up when they’re found

and can’t, I imagine, help them. 

 

[ Dream ; Yasuo Kuniyoshi (1922) ]

 

 

Waking at 3 a.m. 

--William Stafford

Even in the cave of the night when you

wake and are free and lonely,

neglected by others, discarded, loved only

by what doesn’t matter—even in that

big room no one can see,

you push with your eyes till forever

comes in its twisted figure eight

and lies down in your head.

You think water in the river;

you think slower than the tide in

the grain of the wood; you become

a secret storehouse that saves the country,

so open and foolish and empty.

You look over all that the darkness

ripples across. More than has ever

been found comforts you. You open your

eyes in a vault that unlocks as fast

and as far as your thought can run.

A great snug wall goes around everything,

has always been there, will always

remain. It is a good world to be

lost in. It comforts you. It is

all right. And you sleep.

 

Your Life

--William E. Stafford

You will walk toward the mirror,

closer and closer, then flow

into the glass. You will disappear

some day like that, being

more real, more true, at last.

You learn what you are, but slowly,

a child, a woman, a man,

a self often shattered, and pieces

put together again, till the end:

you halt, the glass opens--

A surface, an image, a past.

 

Everything that happens is the message:

you read an event and be one and wait,

like breasting a wave, all the while knowing

by living, though not knowing how to live...

And sometimes no one is calling but we turn up

eye and ear—suddenly we fall into

sound before it begins, the breathing

so still it waits there under the breath—

And then the green of leaves calls out, hills

where they wait or turn, clouds in their frenzied

stillness unfolding their careful words:

“Everything counts. The message is the world.”

— William Stafford, from "A Message From Space"

 

[ Houses ; Vasile Dobrian (1932) ]