Like vanishing dew, a passing apparition or the sudden flash of lightning — already gone —thus should one regard one’s self.

--Ikkyu

 

Not here and now but now and here.

If you don't know the difference

is a matter of life and death, get down

naked on bare knees in the snow

and study the ticking of your watch.

--Jim Harrison; from After Ikkyu

 

 

See and realize

that this world

is not permanent.

Neither late nor early flowers

will remain.

--Ryokan

[via dreaming in the deep south]

 

Thinking of Li Bai from One End of the Sky

--Du Fu (trans. Wong May)

A cool wind arises from one end of the sky.

My friend, I cannot vouch for your intent.

Migratory birds arrive & part

Do we hold them to their schedule?

How full of water are the lakes & rivers

In Autumn! 

Good writing

Resents happy circumstances.

Good writers are rarely spared.

The demons of this world

Their gargoyle faces

Are made glad

Whenever men of talent hobble. 

One ought to have a chat

With poets of the land

Purported to have

Drowned.

                The wronged souls

Whether freezing water is their element. 

                                    But for the likes of one

We won't see again,

Fish, fiends, & friends 

I throw this poem 

Into the Miluo River.

 

 

[ Bare oaks, Newlands, late autumn; Gregoire Boonzaier]

 

 

Nobdy wears a yellow

--e. e. cummings

Nobody wears a yellow

flower in his buttonhole

he is altogether a queer fellow

as young as he is old

when autumn comes,

who twiddles his white thumbs

and frisks down the boulevards

without his coat and hat

-(and i wonder just why that

should please him or i wonder what he does)

and why(at the bottom of this trunk,

under some dirty collars) only a

moment

(or

was it perhaps a year) ago i found staring

me in the face a dead yellow small rose

 

 

here's a little mouse

--e. e. cummings

here's a little mouse)and

what does he think about, i

wonder as over this

floor (quietly with

bright eyes) drifts (nobody

can tell because

Nobody knows, or why

jerks Here &, here,

gr(oo)ving the room's Silence)this like

a littlest

poem a

(with wee ears and see?

tail frisks)

             (gonE)

"mouse",

         We are not the same you and

i,since here's a little he

or is

it It

?     (or was something we saw in the mirror)?

therefore we'll kiss; for maybe

what was Disappeared

into ourselves

who     (look).   ,startled

 

 

i go to this window

--e. e. cummings

i go to this window

just as day dissolves

when it is twilight(and

looking up in fear

i see the new moon

thinner than a hair)

making me feel

how myself has been coarse and dull

compared with you, silently who are

and cling

to my mind always

But now she sharpens and becomes crisper

until i smile with knowing

-and all about

herself

the sprouting largest final air

plunges

      inward with hurled

downward thousands of enormous dreams

 

 

.....[ Autumn Wind and Stars ; Karl Schrag (1988) ]

 

 

Seven Poems

--Mark Strand

.........1

At the edge

of the body’s night

ten moons are rising. 

.........2

A scar remembers the wound.

The wound remembers the pain.

Once more you are crying. 

.........3

When we walk in the sun

our shadows are like barges of silence. 

.........4

My body lies down

and I hear my own

voice lying next to me. 

.........5

The rock is pleasure

and it opens

and we enter it

as we enter ourselves

each night. 

.........6

When I talk to the window

I say everything

is everything. 

.........7

I have a key

so I open the door and walk in.

It is dark and I walk in.

It is darker and I walk in.

 

 

The Remains

--Mark Strand

I empty myself of the names of others. I empty my pockets.

I empty my shoes and leave them beside the road.

At night I turn back the clocks;

I open the family album and look at myself as a boy.

What good does it do? The hours have done their job.

I say my own name. I say goodbye.

The words follow each other downwind.

I love my wife but send her away.

My parents rise out of their thrones

into the milky rooms of clouds. How can I sing?

Time tells me what I am. I change and I am the same.

I empty myself of my life and my life remains.

 

Tomorrow

--Mark Strand

Your best friend is gone,

your other friend, too.

Now the dream that used to turn in your sleep,

like a diamond, sails into the year's coldest night.

What did you say?

Or was it something you did?

It makes no difference -- the house of breath collapsing

around your voice, your voice burning, are nothing to worry about.

Tomorrow your friends will come back;

your moist open mouth will bloom in the glass of storefronts.

Yes. Yes. Tomorrow they will come back and you

will invent an ending that comes out right.

 

.....,........[ Paul Rouphail ]

[via this isn't happiness] 

 

          Light Control

          --Melissa Broder

          I have never been inside myself

          Another place wants me dead

          It is built in a ring around my core

          Like asking a donut how to live

          It can only cry and be eaten

          Don’t you see

          Angels have tried to help me

          And I smiled for them

          Feeling genuinely good and kind

          Then after a while I got tired

          Of being on good behavior

          They never asked for perfection

          But I felt I needed to perform

          And the smile stayed no matter what I did

          Even when dying improperly

          I left everyone I knew in the other room

          But I picked them back up again

          Teach me to die teach me to die

          I want to create a beautiful dying

          The end will need to be dark and soft

          Like walking home to your real mother

 

I think the knowing we know less and less might be the knowing! The wisdom of knowing we know nothing.  This leaves room for the mystery, and what I love about the poetic form, is that it allows for—and celebrates—mystery: negative capability, learning to love the questions themselves, or at least, to sit with them. A poem is a realm where we can live in a question—and generate only more questions—and that’s a complete work of art.

I will say that there is one thing I have learned about obsession (though not through poetry) and that is: the day after you have a romantic dream about a person, do NOT contact them.

Something I have learned about god (though not through poetry): god’s will is never urgent.

Love: love is a verb, baby. I want it to be a feeling, a drug, but it’s a damn verb.

Something I’ve learned through death: that I am a person who will talk to a tree.

          Likes: being in a flow state. Dislikes: fear.

           --from Interview with Melissa Broder,  APR

 

Are We Fear

--Melissa Broder

The sky told me nothing about myself

The stars told me nothing about myself

Jupiter gave me zero

Except that I am dust

Which is a lot to go on

But not enough to stop the death

Where are we going to live?

I said to my unknown self

When one of us is dead

She did not say

But opened up a curtain

Where her silence lived

And I went behind the curtain

And laid my skeleton down

I lay in silence as she stroked my tired head

And then I heard a roaring crowd

And knew that I had been onstage

And knew that I was good

[via poetry daily]

 

,,,,..  ...,,[ Opulent October ; Tom Thomson ]

 

 

Bourbon with Petrarch

--Wendy Battin

If you can taste the oak in aging love,

then no betrayal overcomes the taste

of smoke on the lips and fire in the throat.

You drank some drug that no blood test can trace.

Love asks every thing, but will take nothing

for an answer. How you savored feta,

olive oil, oregano. Your wit rang

a blue note in sullen America.

And if you're gone, I'm not. The love goes on.

It has its own life, eating through the heart,

and heart eats all the world, the sight, the sound,

the scent you left, that I might track you by,

the road we staggered drunkenly to art.

Open your hand. Let you fly, let me fly.

Poem from ‘The Canzoniere’

-- Petrarch--------------------------

Breeze, blowing that blonde curling hair,

stirring it, and being softly stirred in turn,

scattering that sweet gold about, then

gathering it, in a lovely knot of curls again,

you linger around bright eyes whose loving sting

pierces me so, till I feel it and weep,

and I wander searching for my treasure,

like a creature that often shies and kicks:

now I seem to find her, now I realise

she’s far away, now I’m comforted, now despair,

now longing for her, now truly seeing her.

Happy air, remain here with your

living rays: and you, clear running stream,

why can’t I exchange my path for yours?

 

Ghazal

--Wendy Battin

The wall erased, its graffiti hang in the air:

We are open all night, like old men's windows.

The trees creak in the cold wind:

doors that rarely open, opening.

A man's borders include the ax he swings, the branch

it splits. The cold peal traveling elsewhere.

And who opens like a door cannot

say who might enter, or question

the gifts we make to morning, boosting

the last of our loves over the wall.

 

 

On a Line by Su Tung-p'o

--Wendy Battin

Only now that we've come and come to rest,

now that we've hinged apart like wings,

back-stroked on the bed and sinking--

boatmen and waterbirds

dream the same dream: the dream of not flying.

No one else dreams it.

 

Another Line from Su Tung-p'o

"Only the twilight crow knows how I feel."

--Wendy Battin

Only a fluke of sight,

the astigmatic

twilight makes a

crow shimmer. Who

knows black feathers knows

how no-light finds its prism.

I was not light this morning, now I

feel I scatter.

 

 

....[ The Open Door ; Leon Spilliaert (1945) ]

 

 

The Film

--Kate Northrop

Come, let’s go in.

The ticket-taker

has shyly grinned

and it’s almost time,

Lovely One.

Let’s go in.

The wind tonight’s too wild.

The sky too deep,

too thin. Already it’s time.

The lights have dimmed.

Come, Loveliest.

Let’s go in

and know these bodies

we do not have to own, passing

quietly as dreams, as snow.

Already leaves are falling

and music begins.

Lovely One,

it’s time.

Let’s go in.

 

 

Decorations

--Kate Northrop

                                   (tired and high-pitched)

Ghosts have been tied into the trees.

At dawn they pivot

In the wind slowly.

Where the moon windows in

I am of those

Who can’t stand it

Kept awake, humming with trucks

While anything lunar

Won’t rut, ruminates.  Overhead, uh-hunh—

Days, the neighbor’s girl plays a game: what is?

What is dusk, she says, as the sky

ends it begins.

I play myself. What is death?  What’s poetry?  What

Is time?  Time needs no hanky, time blows by

the Kleenex flowers.  Or time’s

so slow, starry-cold, even is cold

            and sure, little admonishments.

Were you awake all night?

I was.  I was awake all night.

 

Now over the Empty Apartment

--Kate Northrop

You in the door look back

        and are no longer there,

although that is the hall

        through which you walked a hundred times

thinking well, what of it?—awake

        in the middle of the night—

and that is the window where the sky drew back and night came on,

        where the planes banked in

scheduled and flashing from the west—

        Your hand was pulling shut the shade

and mornings, your hand pulled it up again

though you are not there, you in the door going over the days,

        going as a wave goes, that is

nowhere, and all your lovers now? Those real,

        imagined? The sad,

gratified sighs?

        All that while,

through the evenings, didn't something

        quietly call,

something off in the marginal light,

in the vapor through which

        the faces of passengers dimmed

and flickered? That slight

        rivering, insistent

beneath the blare of the television, beneath you as well, at the surface

busy with addresses, with pictures & books. You crowded the place,

        you in the door

who looking back now—over the hallway, the shine

        of the relentless floor—

can no longer be sure

you are the person indeed who had that body

        and lived days in it there.

...[ The Walk-Falling Leaves ; Vincent van Gogh (1889) ]