Crazy Jane:

Here's a Poem I Wrote Recently

It's the first one in a long time I've liked after having produced it, and I hope you won't all find this posting of it torturous.

It's untitled...

***

Memories are indistinct, just
shadows where
some joy or pain once lived, now
losing their shapes, fermenting
like mulching leaves, layer
upon layer, by some fast
flowing stream.
Leaves, or maybe fish, just flashes
in the murky depth, barely seen and
caught in crude nets by words, where
they wriggle, pulled out of the water
to drown in the small boat
of our new days.
Somewhere along the way, I
stopped fishing, and now
when they leap into my boat as if
eager to be eaten,
I throw them back.

***

In other news, there are some new pictures in my flickr, and if you're interested, Jack has one, too.

More Haikus on the Usual Topic

Something nice happened
to me; since then, I have been
looking for words

to talk about a
thing too new for much talk, but
so sweet that I can't

not want to tell it.
It's fall in Prague, and the streets
are dark and wet. I

kick through the fallen
leaves when I walk to the bus,
and feel like singing.

A Sonnet By My Monkey

Now, I know I've carried on and on to you all about how my little monkey is the cleverest and sweetest little monkey ever, but today, I bring you proof, because, for homework, he wrote this sonnet. I helped him punctuate, and use the Rhyming Dictionary, but other than that, it's the product of his own pure brain:

As I behold the sky as a great dome
It seems my feet leave the ground, I seem to fly
through billions of stars that light this earth, my home.
Then, I look down at the sea, so like a mirror of the sky,
how similar are its depths, and yet so different.
As many silver fish as there are stars in sight,
fixed in the vault of heaven, the firmament;
but the fish, their opposite, as fast as little rays of light.
Now I seem to float to earth again
and come to land soft upon a grassy hill,
The night slips away, as the day's power gains, and
Night seeps from the sky, when the sun asserts his will.
With the sun and stars my dreaming goes
And with the sun, new life into me flows.

Right, people? Pretty freaking awesome. Needless to say, I am quite proud, really.

One by Brendan Kennelly

Time for another poem, I think. I really like the hell out of this one. Maybe some of my Daily Peloton compatriots will know why I picked it today...

Proof

I would like all things to be free of me,
Never to murder the days with presupposition,
Never to feel they suffer the imposition
Of having to be this or that. How easy
It is to maim the moment
With expectation, to force it to define
Itself. Beyond all that I am, the sun
Scatters its light as if by accident.

The fox eats its own leg in the trap
To go free. As it limps through the grass
The earth itself appears to bleed.
When the morning light comes up
Who knows what suffering midnight was?
Proof is what I do not need.

From The Penguin Book of Contemporary Irish Poetry
Edited by Peter Fallon & Derek Mahon

Time for a Poem

It's been awhile since we've had a poem, and there's nothing more fortifying than a good poem. This is an extra good one. It's by Wendell Berry, from his book A Timbered Choir, which is a collection of poems written on the Sabbath from 1979-1997.

This one is number VII from 1994. Enjoy!

I would not have been a poet
Except that I have been in love
Alive in this mortal world,
Or an essayist except that I
Have been bewildered and afraid,
Or a storyteller had I not heard
Stories passing to me through the air,
Or a writer at all except
I have been wakeful at night
And words have come to me
Out of their deep caves
Needing to be remembered.
But on days when I am lucky
Or blessed, I am silent.
I go into the one body
That two make in making marriage
That for all our trying, all
Our deaf-and-dumb of speech,
Has no tongue. Or I give myself
To gravity, light, and air
And am carried back
To solitary work in fields
And woods, where my hands
Rest upon a world unnamed,
Complete, unanswerable, and final
As our daily bread and meat.
The way of love leads all ways
To life beyond words, silent
And secret. To serve that triumph
I have done all the rest.

One by Richard Wilbur

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
"Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven."

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

"Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance."

From New and Collected Poems.

Two by Rilke

The Solitary

Like one who's voyaged over foreign oceans
am I among these eternally at home;
the full days stand dumbly on their tables,
but to me the far-off is full of dream.

Deep inside my face a world reaches,
which perhaps is uninhabited, like a moon;
but they leave no feeling to itself,
and all their words have long been lived in.

The things I brought with me from far away
appear outlandish, compared to theirs--:
in their great homeland they were wild animals,
here they hold their breath out of shame.

From The Book of Images

The Angel

With a slight tilt of his forehead he rejects
everything that hems in and obliges;
for the wide circles of the eternal Coming
move hugely erected through his heart.

The deep heavens stand before him full of shapes,
and each may call to him: come, know me--,
Give his light hands nothing to hold
of your burdens. Otherwise they'll come at night

to you, to test you with a firmer grip,
and go like someone angry through your house
and sieze you as if they'd created you
and break you out of your mold.

From New Poems, 1907

By Rainer Maria Rilke, Translations by Edward Snow

Two Good Poems by Rumi

Translations by Coleman Barks

Love of Certain Work

Traveling is as refreshing for some as staying at home
is for others. Solitude

in a mountain place fills with companionship for this
one, dead-weariness

for that one. This person loves being in charge of the
working of a community. This

one loves the ways that heated iron can be shaped with
a hammer. Each has been

given a strong desire for certain work, love for those
motions, and all motion

is love. The way sticks and pieces of dead grass and
leaves shift about in

the wind and the directions of rain and puddle water
on the ground, those

motions are following the love they've been given.

***

Some Kiss We Want

There is some kiss we want with
our whole lives, the touch of

spirit on the body, Seawater
begs the pearl to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling! At

night, I open the window and ask
the moon to come and press its

face against mine. Breathe into
me. Close the language-door and

open the love-window. The moon
won't use the door, only the window.

A Poem I Wrote in High School

Today I found this poem, written when I was 15, in an old notebook. I was looking for my birth certificate in old files to find out what time of the day I was born (for astrological purposes) when I found a journal of my somewhat tortured teenage self. In it, there was a lot of embarrassing rumination about a man I used to be consumed by in those days. He was much older than me, but looking back with my 20/20 hindsight, spent rather enough time with me to possibly be considered a bit of a pervert. There were drawings of him, to go with the ruminations, some time spent on my hatred for Algebra, loads of evidence of my generalized pubescent melancholy, and some poems like this one.

It's untitled.

Heaven in that body
and my body just
This. Sweet soul music on those lips
and my lips just
These.

Everyone knows my rain day.
Love that ranges over the ferris wheel
with the muse of lyric poetry,
smoking clove cigarettes while
the delicate surface of my age
chases me down the street.
What strange days.
Grey sky, yellow moon,
spinning colors and clear eyes;
looking for an angel over my shoulder
with the instruction from heaven
to this body.

This is a Good Poem, FYI

The Swimmer
by Brendan Kennelly

For him the Shannon opens
Like a woman
He has stepped over the stones

And cut the water
With his body
But this river does not bleed for

Any man. How easily
He mounts the waves, riding them
As though they

Whispered subtle invitations to his skin,
Conspiring with the sun
To offer him

A white, wet rhythm. The deep beneath
Gives full support
To the marriage of wave and heart,

The waves he breaks turn back to stare
At the repeated ceremony
And the hills of Clare

Witness the fluent weddings
The flawless congregation
The choiring foam that sings

To limbs which must, once more,
Rising and falling in the sun,
Return to shore.

Again he walks upon the stones
A new music in his heart,
A river in his bones

Flowing forever through his head
Private as a grave
Or as the bridal bed.