The Opening of the Forth Road Bridge, 4.IX.64
–Edwin Morgan
Photo by Amund Røed on Unsplash
mist
Month: December 2017
Better red than…
The Problem of Describing Color
–Robert HassIf I said – remembering in summer,
The cardinal’s sudden smudge of red
In the bare gray winter woods –If I said, red ribbon on the cocked straw hat
Of the girl with pooched-out lips
Dangling a wiry lapdog
In the painting by Renoir –If I said fire, if I said blood welling from a cut –
Or flecks of poppy in the tar-grass scented summer air
On a wind-struck hillside outside Fano –If I said, her one red earring tugging at her silky lobe,
If she tells fortunes with a deck of fallen leaves
Until it comes out right –Rouged nipple, mouth –
(How could you not love a woman
Who cheats at the Tarot?)Red, I said. Sudden, red.
Photo by Samuel Zeller on Unsplash
“What is left till I see you?”
From the North
–Edwin Morgan
Photo by LoboStudio Hamburg on Unsplash
twist the meaning
Oh my word. Is this not beautiful?
Dogfish
–Mary Oliver
Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman’s boot,
with a white belly.If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.And you know
what a smile means,
don’t you?*
I wanted the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,whoever I was, I was
alive
for a little while.*
It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don’t know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.*
Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don’t we?Slowly
*
the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.
*
You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listento the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway it’s the same old story – – –
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.*
And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.*
And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,they can do it.
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
spurting
“If the horror of the world were the truth of the world,
he said, there would be no one to say it
and no one to say it to.”
Winged and Acid Dark
–Robert Hass
A sentence with “dappled shadow” in it.
Something not sayable
spurting from the morning silence,
secret as a thrush.The other man, the officer, who brought onions
and wine and sacks of flour,
the major with the swollen knee,
wanted intelligent conversation afterward.
Having no choice, she provided that, too.Potsdamerplatz, May 1945.
When the first one was through he pried her mouth open.
Bashō told Rensetsu to avoid sensational materials.
If the horror of the world were the truth of the world,
he said, there would be no one to say it
and no one to say it to.
I think he recommended describing the slightly frenzied
swarming of insects near a waterfall.Pried her mouth open and spit in it.
We pass these things on,
probably, because we are what we can imagine.Something not sayable in the morning silence.
The mind hungering after likenesses. “Tender sky,” etc.,
curves the swallows trace in air.
Photo by Vincent van Zalinge on Unsplash
two flakes
Snowstorm in the Midwest
–James Wright
‘years between us like a sea’
The Divide
–Edwin Morgan
I keep thinking of you – which is ridiculous.
These years between us like a sea.
and dignity that came with growing older
would stop my pencil on the paper.
The player was open; you asked for the Stones;
got that, got steaming coffee, conversation.
The heavy curtains kept a wild night out.
I keep thinking of your eyes, your hands.
There is no reason for it, none at all.
You would say I can’t be what I’m not,
yet I can’t not be what I am.
Where does that leave us? What can we do?
The silence after Jagger was like a cloak
I’d have thrown over you – only the wind
was left, and the clock ticked as you sipped,
clutching the green mug in both hands.
Don’t look up suddenly like that!
How hard is not to watch you.
We had got to the stage of not talking
and not worrying, and that
was almost happy. Then, late,
When you lay on one elbow on the carpet
I could feel nothing but that hot knife
of pain telling me what it was
and I can’t tell you about it, not one word.
Photo by Anastasia Taioglou on Unsplash
“nothing for show”
A snow show from a Czech soul.
Snow
–Vladimir Holub
It began to snow at midnight. And certainly
the kitchen is the best place to sit,
even the kitchen of the sleepless.
It’s warm there, you cook yourself something, drink wine
and look out of the window at your friend eternity.
Why care whether birth and death are merely points
when life is not a straight line.
Why torment yourself eyeing the calendar
and wondering what is at stake.
Why confess you don’t have the money
to buy Saskia shoes?
And why brag
that you suffer more than others.
If there were no silence here
the snow would have dreamed it up.
You are alone.
Spare the gestures. Nothing for show.
distractions
Very much like the current political environment. Plans, reports, chaos, non-presidential circus all distractions to keep us from seeing what really happens (until it’s too late).
Plans, Reports
–Adam Zagajewski
Photo by Chris Barbalis on Unsplash
“the bones smile”
Poem of Night
–Galway Kinnell1
I move my hand over
slopes, falls, lumps of sight,
Lashes barely able to be touched,
Lips that give way so easily
it’s a shock to feel underneath themThe bones smile.
Muffled a little, barely cloaked,
Zygoma, maxillary, turbinate.2
I put my hand
On the side of your face,
You lean your head a little
Into my hand–and so,
I know you’re a dormouse
Taken up in winter sleep,
A lonely, stunned weight.3
A cheekbone,
A curved piece of brow,
A pale eyelid
Float in the dark,
And now I make out
An eye, dark,
Wormed with far-off, unaccountable lights.4
Hardly touching, I hold
What I can only think of
As some deepest of memories in my arms,
Not mine, but as if the life in me
Were slowly remembering what it is.You lie here now in your physicalness,
This beautiful degree of reality.5
And now the day, raft that breaks up, comes on.
I think of a few bones
Floating on a river at night,
The starlight blowing in a place on the water,
The river leaning like a wave towards the emptiness.
Photo by Hannah Gibbs on Unsplash