D. Allan Posted April 24, 2008 Author Posted April 24, 2008 The Orchid Flower by Sam Hamill Just as I wonder whether it's going to die, the orchid blossoms and I can't explain why it moves my heart, why such pleasure comes from one small bud on a long spindly stem, one blood red gold flower opening at mid-summer, tiny, perfect in its hour. Even to a white- haired craggy poet, it's purely erotic, pistil and stamen, pollen, dew of the world, a spoonful of earth, and water. Erotic because there's death at the heart of birth, drama in those old sunrise prisms in wet cedar boughs, deepest mystery in washing evening dishes or teasing my wife, who grows, yes, more beautiful because one of us will die. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16621 Quote dAb O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
D. Allan Posted April 25, 2008 Author Posted April 25, 2008 In the Waiting Room by Elizabeth Bishop In Worcester, Massachusetts, I went with Aunt Consuelo to keep her dentist's appointment and sat and waited for her in the dentist's waiting room. It was winter. It got dark early. The waiting room was full of grown-up people, arctics and overcoats, lamps and magazines. My aunt was inside what seemed like a long time and while I waited I read the National Geographic (I could read) and carefully studied the photographs: the inside of a volcano, black, and full of ashes; then it was spilling over in rivulets of fire. Osa and Martin Johnson dressed in riding breeches, laced boots, and pith helmets. A dead man slung on a pole --"Long Pig," the caption said. Babies with pointed heads wound round and round with string; black, naked women with necks wound round and round with wire like the necks of light bulbs. Their breasts were horrifying. I read it right straight through. I was too shy to stop. And then I looked at the cover: the yellow margins, the date. Suddenly, from inside, came an oh! of pain --Aunt Consuelo's voice-- not very loud or long. I wasn't at all surprised; even then I knew she was a foolish, timid woman. I might have been embarrassed, but wasn't. What took me completely by surprise was that it was me: my voice, in my mouth. Without thinking at all I was my foolish aunt, I--we--were falling, falling, our eyes glued to the cover of the National Geographic, February, 1918. I said to myself: three days and you'll be seven years old. I was saying it to stop the sensation of falling off the round, turning world. into cold, blue-black space. But I felt: you are an I, you are an Elizabeth, you are one of them. Why should you be one, too? I scarcely dared to look to see what it was I was. I gave a sidelong glance --I couldn't look any higher-- at shadowy gray knees, trousers and skirts and boots and different pairs of hands lying under the lamps. I knew that nothing stranger had ever happened, that nothing stranger could ever happen. Why should I be my aunt, or me, or anyone? What similarities-- boots, hands, the family voice I felt in my throat, or even the National Geographic and those awful hanging breasts-- held us all together or made us all just one? How--I didn't know any word for it--how "unlikely". . . How had I come to be here, like them, and overhear a cry of pain that could have got loud and worse but hadn't? The waiting room was bright and too hot. It was sliding beneath a big black wave, another, and another. Then I was back in it. The War was on. Outside, in Worcester, Massachusetts, were night and slush and cold, and it was still the fifth of February, 1918. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15211 Quote dAb O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
D. Allan Posted April 26, 2008 Author Posted April 26, 2008 My Mother Would Be a Falconress by Robert Duncan My mother would be a falconress, And I, her gay falcon treading her wrist, would fly to bring back from the blue of the sky to her, bleeding, a prize, where I dream in my little hood with many bells jangling when I'd turn my head. My mother would be a falconress, and she sends me as far as her will goes. She lets me ride to the end of her curb where I fall back in anguish. I dread that she will cast me away, for I fall, I mis-take, I fail in her mission. She would bring down the little birds. And I would bring down the little birds. When will she let me bring down the little birds, pierced from their flight with their necks broken, their heads like flowers limp from the stem? I tread my mother's wrist and would draw blood. Behind the little hood my eyes are hooded. I have gone back into my hooded silence, talking to myself and dropping off to sleep. For she has muffled my dreams in the hood she has made me, sewn round with bells, jangling when I move. She rides with her little falcon upon her wrist. She uses a barb that brings me to cower. She sends me abroad to try my wings and I come back to her. I would bring down the little birds to her I may not tear into, I must bring back perfectly. I tear at her wrist with my beak to draw blood, and her eye holds me, anguisht, terrifying. She draws a limit to my flight. Never beyond my sight, she says. She trains me to fetch and to limit myself in fetching. She rewards me with meat for my dinner. But I must never eat what she sends me to bring her. Yet it would have been beautiful, if she would have carried me, always, in a little hood with the bells ringing, at her wrist, and her riding to the great falcon hunt, and me flying up to the curb of my heart from her heart to bring down the skylark from the blue to her feet, straining, and then released for the flight. My mother would be a falconress, and I her gerfalcon raised at her will, from her wrist sent flying, as if I were her own pride, as if her pride knew no limits, as if her mind sought in me flight beyond the horizon. Ah, but high, high in the air I flew. And far, far beyond the curb of her will, were the blue hills where the falcons nest. And then I saw west to the dying sun-- it seemd my human soul went down in flames. I tore at her wrist, at the hold she had for me, until the blood ran hot and I heard her cry out, far, far beyond the curb of her will to horizons of stars beyond the ringing hills of the world where the falcons nest I saw, and I tore at her wrist with my savage beak. I flew, as if sight flew from the anguish in her eye beyond her sight, sent from my striking loose, from the cruel strike at her wrist, striking out from the blood to be free of her. My mother would be a falconress, and even now, years after this, when the wounds I left her had surely heald, and the woman is dead, her fierce eyes closed, and if her heart were broken, it is stilld I would be a falcon and go free. I tread her wrist and wear the hood, talking to myself, and would draw blood. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15709 Quote dAb O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
D. Allan Posted April 27, 2008 Author Posted April 27, 2008 In cold spring air by Reginald Gibbons In cold spring air the white wisp- visible breath of a blackbird singing— we don’t know to un- wrap these blind- folds we keep thinking we are seeing through http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20123 Quote dAb O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
D. Allan Posted April 28, 2008 Author Posted April 28, 2008 The Alien by Greg Delanty I'm back again scrutinizing the Milky Way of your ultrasound, scanning the dark matter, the nothingness, that now the heads say is chockablock with quarks & squarks, gravitons & gravitini, photons & photinos. Our sprout, who art there inside the spacecraft of your Ma, the time capsule of this printout, hurling & whirling towards us, it's all daft on this earth. Our alien who art in the heavens, our Martian, our little green man, we're anxious to make contact, to ask divers questions about the heavendom you hail from, to discuss the whole shebang of the beginning&end, the pre–big bang untime before you forget the why and lie of thy first place. And, our friend, to say Welcome, that we mean no harm, we'd die for you even, that we pray you’re not here to subdue us, that we’d put away our ray guns, missiles, attitude and share our world with you, little big head, if only you stay. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19626 Quote dAb O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
D. Allan Posted April 29, 2008 Author Posted April 29, 2008 The Plaid Dress by Edna St. Vincent Millay Strong sun, that bleach The curtains of my room, can you not render Colourless this dress I wear?— This violent plaid Of purple angers and red shames; the yellow stripe Of thin but valid treacheries; the flashy green of kind deeds done Through indolence high judgments given here in haste; The recurring checker of the serious breach of taste? No more uncoloured than unmade, I fear, can be this garment that I may not doff; Confession does not strip it off, To send me homeward eased and bare; All through the formal, unoffending evening, under the clean Bright hair, Lining the subtle gown. . .it is not seen, But it is there. http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16030 Quote dAb O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
D. Allan Posted April 30, 2008 Author Posted April 30, 2008 The White Fires of Venus by Denis Johnson We mourn this senseless planet of regret, droughts, rust, rain, cadavers that can't tell us, but I promise you one day the white fires of Venus shall rage: the dead, feeling that power, shall be lifted, and each of us will have his resurrected one to tell him, "Greetings. You will recover or die. The simple cure for everything is to destroy all the stethoscopes that will transmit silence occasionally. The remedy for loneliness is in learning to admit solitude as one admits the bayonet: gracefully, now that already it pierces the heart. Living one: you move among many dancers and don't know which you are the shadow of; you want to kiss your own face in the mirror but do not approach, knowing you must not touch one like that. Living one, while Venus flares O set the cereal afire, O the refrigerator harboring things that live on into death unchanged." They know all about us on Andromeda, they peek at us, they see us in this world illumined and pasteled phonily like a bus station, they are with us when the streets fall down fraught with laundromats and each of us closes himself in his small San Francisco without recourse. They see you with your face of fingerprints carrying your instructions in gloved hands trying to touch things, and know you for one despairing, trying to touch the curtains, trying to get your reflection mired in alarm tape past the window of this then that dark closed business establishment. The Andromedans hear your voice like distant amusement park music converged on by ambulance sirens and they understand everything. They're on your side. They forgive you. I want to turn for a moment to those my heart loves, who are as diamonds to the Andromedans, who shimmer for them, lovely and useless, like diamonds: namely, those who take their meals at soda fountains, their expressions lodged among the drugs and sunglasses, each gazing down too long into the coffee as though from a ruined balcony. O Andromedans they don't know what to do with themselves and so they sit there until they go home where they lie down until they get up, and you beyond the light years know that if sleeping is dying, then waking is birth, and a life is many lives. I love them because they know how to manipulate change in the pockets musically, these whose faces the seasons never give a kiss, these who are always courteous to the faces of presumptions, the presuming streets, the hotels, the presumption of rain in the streets. I'm telling you it's cold inside the body that is not the body, lonesome behind the face that is certainly not the face of the person one meant to become http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19654 Quote dAb O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!
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