Posted in Not Waving But Drowning, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, Stevie Smith, Write, Writer on 05/30/2007| 1 Comment »
Not Waving But Drowning
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
-Stevie Smith
Posted in Hopkins, Margaret, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, Spring, Write, Writer on 05/29/2007| Leave a Comment »
Spring and Fall, to a Young Child
Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow’s springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
-Gerard Manley Hopkins
Posted in Nina Alvarez, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, Write, Writer on 05/28/2007| Leave a Comment »
Agnes Kelley, 51, Died of Pneumonia, 1906
I am long dead to you
Bones make sounds,
rattle under rock
This is my rock
And I talk
We are long dead
The ones who whisper
The ones who
Wander in a
Country shed
Batting at rakes
And plates
And sparrows
Squaking
This breath is talking
And you are listening
And we made it here
Through the great beyond
I laugh to think what you call it
It was a journey
I do not recall
What it took
Where it was
The time
If time exists
But we took it
To come here
And thought there
Was a hole somewhere in it
Up to heaven
I haven’t been canceled
Or put out
I am here
As real as relish
Not dead
No, not like they say
Not dead with a foot of rot
And a soul singing to God
I am here in a burned out charnel house
In the cavity of a lamb
In the crack of a sidewalk
Creeping like a spider
Shifting like a snake
I am darkness now
And the sun does not warm
A cold steel drum
Beats out
The long life
Of my death
-Nina Alvarez
Posted in love, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, Rick Wright, Write, Writer on 05/27/2007| Leave a Comment »
Untitled
She asked me
to walk by her side,
the velvet path
of sweet rosed lines.
Posted in poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, White Beard, William Felling, Write, Writer on 05/27/2007| Leave a Comment »
White Beard
Tonight I am the old man’s white beard
wizened and grizzled in deep lined cuts
resigned to the slope and bend of flesh
gravity pulled furrows over ashen dust
It was the clink of glasses that started this
taking small potent steps down the hall
inching closer to her hated breath
the weight of her, heavy, lurking,
creaking the same wood boards
Can one grow into a giant overnight
when the yearning stops and the
becoming is
knowing one’s art is revealed, suddenly
unearthed by one massive heave
of black earth
To know a person for so long
and see their face go colorless
foul scents utter unrecognizable clods
of rancid words and clouded tongue
Should I take on hatred and this dark
into me, onto me, held and sacred
like the vows now melted away by
the lightest heat from palest sun
Something disappears from me tonight
A piece I can never reclaim or repair
a note held deep in my heart
now scratched thin out of a rusty flute
aching for its rounded wonder
spitting tin and teeth and nails
It was the clink of glasses that started this
a dark celebration and bitter turn
a collapse and fold and deep line cut
of the old man’s white beard
-Rick Wright
Posted in Leda and the Swan, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, Write, Writer, Yeats on 05/25/2007| Leave a Comment »
Leda and the Swan
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
-W. B. Yeats
Posted in Nina Alvarez, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, question, rain, Rain Upon the Gossip Tree, Write, Writer on 05/24/2007| Leave a Comment »
Rain Upon the Gossip Tree
The window frames the Gossip tree tonight
Dark brick below
A clean gray blue above
It rained for over an hour
The air cooled
I thought of you
The birds sung
My room felt like a rain forest
I think of what I would say to you
I scratch my arm
There are many songs I could sing
Lullabyes and ballads
Sung a thousand times
They are so deep, like ruts
So easy to flow into
They tell a story you would like to be a part of
But I cannot imagine how I have come here
And that is what interests me
The question of being
How I came to be in this body
In this city
What of my past?
-1999
-the room I lived in during grad school
-the
Pacific Ocean
in its particular composition
of molecules
and vectors
in February 2000.
Where are the hours I thought
I would be in so much trouble
If I didn’t finish a paper, or read
Another chapter, or get to class on time
In what way have I escaped?
I look around me.
I am 29 years old, I live in
Philadelphia. I work.
You are 42. You are getting divorced. There is
A house involved. I live in an apartment. You
Have a studio. We sketch on Thursday nights.
I am me. The me who slipped, who wanted to die.
I am me, whose skin burned with self-consciousness,
Who saw pathos in bracelets and ponytails, who
Couldn’t befriend people she wanted to be.
I am her, but I am not her anymore. I am easy,
I make many words, and have a sure voice. I don’t
Ask.
But I don’t write my poems
Like I used to.
The need to confirm
That I have an interior.
My eyes had not adjusted to dreams or light,
Now, they suffuse all, and involve themselves in all.
I spare no personal expense
In entering.
But I spend nothing I do not wish to spend.
And yet, and yet,
Who is this
With arms that wave
With fingers that fly
Who I will not be
In a moment
Or day
Who is in this body
Who will remain in this body
But who will be left behind
In this Sunday evening, May 2007.
-Nina Alvarez
Posted in In Every Direction, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, Ralph Angel, Write, Writer on 05/22/2007| 1 Comment »
In Every Direction
As if you actually died in that dream
and woke up dead. Shadows of untangling vines
tumble toward the ceiling. A delicate
lizard sits on your shoulder, its eyes
blinking in every direction.
And when you lean forward and present your
hands to the basin of water, and glimpse the glass face
that is reflected there, it seems perfectly at home
beneath the surface, about as unnatural
as nature forcing everyone to face the music
with so much left to do, with everything
that could be done better tomorrow, to dance
the slow shuffle of decay.
Only one season becoming another,
continents traveling the skyway, the grass
breathing. And townspeople, victims, murderers,
the gold-colored straw and barbed-wire hair of the world
wafting over the furrows, the slashed roads
to the door of your office or into the living room.
The towel is warm and cool, soft to the touch,
but in another dream altogether
a screen door creaks open, slams shut,
and across the valley a car’s headlights swing up
and over. And maybe you are the driver
with both hands on the wheel, humming a tune
nobody’s ever heard before,
or maybe the woman on the edge of the porch,
grown quiet from fleeing,
tough as nails.
-Ralph Angel
Posted in Danse Russe, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, william carlos williams, Write, Writer on 05/21/2007| Leave a Comment »
Danse Russe
If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,-
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely,
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,-
Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
-William Carlos Williams
Posted in Giving Up, Nina Alvarez, poem, poem of the day, poet, poetry, to know, Write, Writer on 05/21/2007| 2 Comments »
Giving Up
Sometimes
It is good to be
Not good enough
To not know where the line breaks should go
To get angry at a fussy computer
To spill hot chocolate on it
To dislike Sunday evenings as the sun is going down
And you have to work all week
But don’t have money
For coffee
Sometimes
It is okay
To look through the hall of the century
Through your shoddy lens
And feel wistful for the Parisian twenties
To imagine that Gertrude Stein
Knew something you don’t
In all my words I kept planting a song
A hopeful victory song
Of a metal-chested knight,
His fist to his heart
I kept saying
I have something to say
But sometimes
It is just what it is
Here, in this moment
Not knowing what to say
Or where to put the line breaks
Just sliding down on someone
Else’s convention
Rushing through a poem
Without hope
Of answering
The vibration
That knaws
To know
-Nina Alvarez
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