Poemunity — your poem community

Local his discourse, not yet exemplary, Nowadays he is old, the translator, So old he is practically transparent. Good things and otherwise, evils done Come home to him, too close to the bone And so little transformed, Him so transparent, They float in and out of his window. Killing fields and the pumpkin patch, The combat boot putrid in a cherry tree, Stroke on stroke the mortal build-up, All the constraint, all the letting go, So insistent in his attentions That he needs a breathing block. For lack of a monitor he might levitate, The testy old bird, at his wondow; He needs an animal, a sure thing, One to imagine, at last. Speechless As bedrock, a rough reminder of that. A dog might be vigilant enough, Intact, all heart, a yellow desert dog. Avoirdupoids. A leopard? Markings Regular, talons to swat Any hurt away. Knowing Hunger, not the greed. Sufficient Unto itself, svelte, clean of limb; Free through self-discipline, yes, Yes, through self-discipline free, And fierce, yet doing no violence The wild by right he will restore To a holy place, in time. For want of that sort of a beast, He might make do with a frog.

I am the mother of sorrows, I am the ender of grief; I am the bud and the blossom, I am the late-falling leaf. I am thy priest and thy poet, I am thy serf and thy king; I cure the tears of the heartsick, When I come near they shall sing. White are my hands as the snowdrop; Swart are my fingers as clay; Dark is my frown as the midnight, Fair is my brow as the day. Battle and war are my minions, Doing my will as divine; I am the calmer of passions, Peace is a nursling of mine. Speak to me gently or curse me, Seek me or fly from my sight; I am thy fool in the morning, Thou art my slave in the night. Down to the grave will I take thee, Out from the noise of the strife; Then shalt thou see me and know me— Death, then, no longer, but life. Then shalt thou sing at my coming, Kiss me with passionate breath, Clasp me and smile to have thought me Aught save the foeman of Death. Come to me, brother, when weary, Come when thy lonely heart swells; I’ll guide thy footsteps and lead thee Down where the Dream Woman dwells.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level. Look at it talking to you. You look out a window Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it. You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other. The poem is sad because it wants to be yours, and cannot. What’s a plain level? It is that and other things, Bringing a system of them into play. Play? Well, actually, yes, but I consider play to be A deeper outside thing, a dreamed role-pattern, As in the division of grace these long August days Without proof. Open-ended. And before you know know / It The line began and ended with the same word when first published in the Times Literary Supplement(October 24, 1980):   know it / It It gets lost in the steam and chatter of typewriters. It has been played once more. I think you exist only To tease me into doing it, on your level, and then you aren’t there Or have adopted a different attitude. And the poem Has set me softly down beside you. The poem is you.

Record breaking Thriller dance attempt. * Wolfman Jack style dj in the video game says, “This is Wasteland Radio and we’re here for you” * You are here maintaining détente between the voices in your head. Immediacy is retro, says Lytle. * Nostalgic/futuristic scene in which we can read the code— green flowing algorithms. We can almost slip right in.

For Hayden Carruth Thought thrusts up, homely as a hyacinth wrapped in its bulb like a root-vegetable, a ninth-month belly, where the green indelible pattern's inscribed into the labyrinth. Thrust into light, it's air's inhabitant with light and air as food and drink. A hyacinth, tumescent pink on the low wooden Mexican chest confronts the wintry dusk with informed self-interest. Leaf-spears extravagantly ask what idea, still gnarled up in a knot of ganglions, will break through the husk shaped at last, recognizable as thought. • Trace, on a city map, trajectories of partially-forgotten words along the river's arteries, volatile substance of a sentient world. Mauve heather crowds the window-grill. The light lingers a little later, with a slight vernal inflection. In a moon-glazed vase bloom yellow freesias, like some rainy day's brook-bank, in someone else's memory. Small whirlpools of perception widen, ring an infant's numinous discoveries of syllables for animals, toys, trees: a Lab's thick coat, the dusty birds in Claremont Park each tardy urban spring, a stuffed pink leather horse with button eyes. • A question-mark in yellow overalls, I could read. I was three. I slept with that pink horse. My one doll's name was V. J. She'd been given to me to celebrate the Victory over Japan, that is to say, the Bomb I'd spend my schooldays taking shelter from. I couldn't tie my shoes. But Reddy the fox, Tootle the engine who jumped off the tracks, spelled me their stories on my mother's lap despite weak eyes and poor small-motor skills. My grandparents were dead: not in pogroms, not in the camps—of strokes and heart attacks, merely immigrants, not deportees. "When you die, does everything just stop?" • I'm four, in itchy woolen leggings, the day that I can't recognize the man down at the park entrance, waving, as my father. He has ten more years to live, that spring. Dapper and balding he walks toward me; then I run toward him, calling him, flustered by my flawed vision. Underfoot, the maples' green- winged seeds splay on mica-specked octagons. His round face, thin nose, moustache silvered gray at thirty-eight look (I think now) Hungarian. I like his wood-smell of two packs a day as he swings me up to his shoulder and I say, things look blurry far away —one Saturday, two years after the war.

Laid out flat in the back of the station wagon my father borrowed I look up: the leaves are immense, green and golden with clear summer light breaking through – though I turn only my neck I can see all of them along this avenue that has no limits. What does it matter that I am only eyes if I am to be carried so lightly under the trees of the world? From beyond the numbness of my strange body the wealth of the leaves falls forever into my small still watching.

Near the year 1000 we find Maximos Planudes nude writing to a friend in Asia Minor asking for parchment because the right quality is not for sale in his own neighborhood, presumably Constantinople. In the end, all he receives are some asses’ skins, which do not please him in the least, and a note: Dear Max, No parchment till the summer, months after the population begins to eat meat. Low yield should come as no surprise, our medieval animals being much smaller than their modern counterparts. Love, A. Minor

A child's a plaything for an hour; Its pretty tricks we try For that or for a longer space; Then tire, and lay it by. But I knew one, that to itself All seasons could controul; That would have mock'd the sense of pain Out of a grieved soul. Thou, straggler into loving arms, Young climber up of knees, When I forget thy thousand ways, Then life and all shall cease.

Nothing's in the nest. No needles. No newborn ravens. Maybe something like night in the deep hollow, an eggshell planet, cracked in the middle, an empty bowl of soup. Nothing's in the nest. No thread. No webs of words. Maybe something like my navel, the eclipse of a magnifying glass. A slice, mute with regard to its empty depths. In the nest, nothing. The web unwoven. Dismembered. In the space, something, yes. A piece of cloth. Sounding like flags taking wing, a worm in its beak and suddenly, eyes, my eyes which, cutting across the empty air, direct themselves at something noiseless over there.

When people ask how, I say a fire took them. And then they look at me like I'm the most pitiful thing in the world. So sometimes I just shrug and say They just died, that's all. A fire took their bodies. That's all. I can still feel their voices and hugs and laughing. Sometimes. Sometimes I can hear my daddy calling my name. Lonnie sometimes. And sometimes Locomotion come on over here a minute. I want to show you something.