Romance, who loves to nod and sing, With drowsy head and folded wing, Among the green leaves as they shake Far down within some shadowy lake, To me a painted paroquet Hath been—a most familiar bird— Taught me my alphabet to say— To lisp my very earliest word While in the wild wood I did lie, A child—with a most knowing eye. Of late, eternal Condor years So shake the very Heaven on high With tumult as they thunder by, I have no time for idle cares Through gazing on the unquiet sky.
This is not a small voice you hear this is a large voice coming out of these cities. This is the voice of LaTanya. Kadesha. Shaniqua. This is the voice of Antoine. Darryl. Shaquille. Running over waters
Feeling her head pick up her body, question mark, blurred misstamped question mark snakes out of bed, trying to jiggle unhappiness as little as possible, not to wake pain, not to raise a shade,
I write my God in blue. I run my gods upstream on flimsy rafts. I bathe my goddesses in foam, in moonlight. I take my reasons from my mother's snuff breath, or from an old woman, sitting with a lemonade, at twilight, on the desert's steps. Brown by day and black by night, my God has wings that open to no reason.
En mi país el Otoño nace de una flor seca, de algunos pajaros; . . . o del vaho penetrante de ciertos rios de la llanura. —Molinari, “Oda a una larga tristeza” Each instant comes with a price, the blue-edged bill
I am leading a quiet life in Mike’s Place every day watching the champs of the Dante Billiard Parlor and the French pinball addicts. I am leading a quiet life on lower East Broadway. I am an American.
Ages passed slowly, like a load of hay, As the flowers recited their lines And pike stirred at the bottom of the pond. The pen was cool to the touch. The staircase swept upward Through fragmented garlands, keeping the melancholy Already distilled in letters of the alphabet.
Over the honored bones of Boston (resting, as we say) old leaves’ bones underfoot are restless; and boys and schoolgirls going home splash through them, reciting alphabet lately received. They run the known, intone the unsure patterns, repeat the magic, nearly Grecian syllables;
Nature’s lay idiot, I taught thee to love, And in that sophistry, oh, thou dost prove Too subtle: Fool, thou didst not understand The mystic language of the eye nor hand: Nor couldst thou judge the difference of the air Of sighs, and say, this lies, this sounds despair: Nor by the’eye’s water call a malady Desperately hot, or changing feverously. I had not taught thee then, the alphabet Of flowers, how they devicefully being set And bound up, might with speechless secrecy Deliver errands mutely, and mutually. Remember since all thy words used to be To every suitor, “I, ’if my friends agree”; Since, household charms, thy husband’s name to teach,
As long as you believe in miracles You watch the sun fall into the sea Every evening Then you turn your back and sink Among the ferns sparkling from a moon or from the other
I. I’m trying to spell out a state of amazement, A sweet dilation, the sway of spirit, That only finds room in your shape. They say that Transposed in our alphabet A Chinese sentence can turn into A series of one and the same conjunction.
Methinks 'tis pretty sport to hear a child, Rocking a word in mouth yet undefiled. The tender racket rudely plays the sound, Which weakly banded cannot back rebound, And the soft air the softer roof does kiss, With a sweet dying and a pretty miss, Which hears no answer yet from the white rank Of teeth, not risen from their coral bank. The alphabet is searched for letters soft, To try a word before it can be wrought, And when it slides forth, it goes as nice, As when a man does walk upon the ice.
But how choose the appropriate sticking point to start at? Who wants to write a poem without the letter e, Especially for Thee, where the flourished vowel lends such panache to your carnet de bal (OK, peons: pizzazz to your dance card)? The alphabet’s such a horn Of plenty, why cork up its treasure? It hurts to think of “you” reduced to u In stingy text messages, as if ideally expression should be limited to formulas like x ≠ y,
Where the respectable truth of tautology leaves ambiguous beauty standing by Waiting to take off her clothes, if, that is, her percentage of body fat Permits it (a statement implicitly unfair, as if beauty, to remain sublime, had to keep up Lineaments already shaped by uninhibited divinity); implying, as well, fixated onlookers, i.e., Men and women kidding themselves that full-front-and-back nudity is the north Star of delight rather than imagined nakedness, shudderingly draped like a fully rigged, fully laden ship without a drop to bail,
Its hidden cargoes guessed at — perhaps Samian wine (mad- making!) — or fresh basil
On my way home I pass a cameraman On a platform on the bumper of a car Inside which, rolling and plunging, a comedian Is working; on one white lot I see a star Stumble to her igloo through the howling gale Of the wind machines. On Melrose a dinosaur And pterodactyl, with their immense pale
The thing written is a sexual thing, may bite, tell a truth some have died for, even the most casual initialing is a touch of love and what love goes for. A sometime thing, it smiles or has an ugly grin, on the page or wall may be holy and a sin. Writing wants, must have, must know, is flesh, blood, and bone,
Moonpoison, mullock of sacrifice, Suffuses the veins of the eyes Till the retina, mooncoloured, Sees the sideways motion of the cretin crab Hued thus like a tortoise askew in the glaucous moonscape A flat hot boulder it Lividly in the midst of the Doldrums Sidles
I amuse myself with my country. I glimpse its future approaching on the eyelashes of an ostrich, I toy with its history and its days, I strike it with stones and thunderbolts. I extinguish its lamps and light its windows, and at the other end of day I inaugurate its history.
I am a stranger to all of you. I am from the other end. I live in a country of my own, inflating the sky to see its ashes, and in sleeping and waking I open a bud to live within.
Something must be born, so I bore caverns in my skin for lightning and build nests. I must pass like thunder into lips as sad as straw, between stone and autumn, between pore and epidermis, between thigh and thigh. And so I sing: “Form worthy of our demise—advance.” And so I shout and sing: “Who will give us the maternity of the cosmos, who will nourish us with mines?”
I advance toward my self, toward ruins. The silence of calamity takes me—I’m too short to gird the earth like a rope, I’m not sharp enough to pierce the face of history and plunge in.
You want me to be like you. You boil me in the cauldron of your prayers; you mix me with the broth of armies and the pepper of tyrants, then pitch me like a tent for the wali and hoist my skull like a flag. (My death, Nevertheless I run toward you, I rush rush rush to you.)
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