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street-light-poetry · 22 hours
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note: although this was printed as a prose poem, the form conceals a perfect sonnet written in iambic pentameter.
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I Have Gone Marking
by Pablo Neruda tr. W.S. Merwin
I have gone marking the atlas of your body with crosses of fire. My mouth went across: a spider, trying to hide. In you, behind you, timid, driven by thirst. Stories to tell you on the shore of evening, sad and gentle doll, so that you should not be sad. A swan, a tree, something far away and happy. The season of grapes, the ripe and fruitful season. I who lived in a harbour from which I loved you. The solitude crossed with dream and with silence. Penned up between the sea and sadness. Soundless, delirious, between two motionless gondoliers. Between the lips and the voice something goes dying. Something with the wings of a bird, something of anguish and oblivion. The way nets cannot hold water. My toy doll, only a few drops are left trembling. Even so, something sings in these fugitive words. Something sings, something climbs to my ravenous mouth. Oh to be able to celebrate you with all the words of joy. Sing, burn, flee, like a belfry at the hands of a madman. My sad tenderness, what comes over you all at once? When I have reached the most awesome and the coldest summit my heart closes like a nocturnal flower.
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Field of Skulls
by Mary Karr
Stare hard enough at the fabric of night,    and if you're predisposed to dark — let’s say    the window you’ve picked is a black postage stamp you spend hours at, sleepless, drinking gin after the I Love    Lucy reruns have gone off — stare
like your eyes have force, and behind any night’s taut scrim will come the forms    you expect pressing from the other side.    For you: a field of skulls, angled jaws and eye-sockets, a zillion scooped-out crania.    They’re plain once you think to look.
You know such fields exist, for criminals roam your very block, and even history lists    monsters like Adolf and Uncle Joe who stalk the earth’s orb, plus minor baby-eaters    unidentified, probably in your very midst. Perhaps    that disgruntled mail clerk from your job
has already scratched your name on a bullet — that’s him    rustling in the azaleas. You caress the thought, for it proves there’s no better spot for you than here, your square-yard of chintz sofa, hearing    the bad news piped steady from your head. The night    is black. You stare and furious stare,
confident there are no gods out there. In this way,    you’re blind to your own eye’s intricate machine    and to the light it sees by, to the luck of birth and all    your remembered loves. If the skulls are there — let’s say they do press toward you against night’s scrim — could they not stare with slack jawed envy at the fine flesh that covers your scalp, the numbered hairs,    at the force your hands hold?
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“I arrived by air, in the dark,” she wrote, two years later. “When night descended over the ocean, many unfamiliar stars sprang out in the sky; as we approached land, there began to blossom below me such an irregular confusion of small lights it was difficult to be certain if the starry sky lay above or below me. So the aeroplane ascended or descended into an electric city where nothing was what it seemed at first and I was absolutely confused.” There she is—dizzy, suspended between two beds of light. 
Angela Carter’s Feminist Mythology, Joan Acocella
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Year's End
by Jorge Luis Borges tr. W.S. Merwin
Neither the symbolic detail of a three instead of a two, nor that rough metaphor that hails one term dying and another emerging nor the fulfillment of an astronomical process muddle and undermine the high plateau of this night making us wait for the twelve irreparable strokes of the bell.
The real cause is our murky pervasive suspicion of the enigma of Time, it is our awe at the miracle that, though the chances are infinite and though we are drops in Heraclitus’ river, allows something in us to endure, never moving.
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"Let me offer a simple observation. There is a greater contrast between the moon and the night sky than there is between the sun and the daytime sky. And this contrast is more conducive to sorrow, which always separates or isolates itself, than it is to happiness, which always joins or blends. And to stand face-to-face with the sun is preposterous—it would blind you. Every child is taught not to stare at the sun. The sun is the source of life itself, the great creative power. One cannot confront god without instant annihilation; you can't look directly at Medusa, but you can look at her useless reflection. The moon has no light of its own; our apprehension of it is but a reflection of the sun. And some believe artists reflect the creative powers of some original impulse too great to name. Another thing: the moon is the very image of silence—and, as Charles Simic says, "The highest levels of consciousness are wordless." The great lunacy of most lyric poems is that they attempt to use words to convey what cannot be put into words. On the other hand, stars were the first text, the first instance of gabbiness; connecting the stars, making a pattern out of them, was the first story, sacred to storytellers. But the moon was the first poem, in the lyric sense, an entity complete in itself, recognizable at a glace, one that played upon emotions so strongly that the context of time and place hardly seemed to matter."
— Mary Ruefle, Madness, Rack and Honey: Collected Lectures
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Caylin Capra-Thomas, from "Lightning Suspected in Deaths of Horses", Iguana Iguana
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street-light-poetry · 11 days
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some thing's wrong here
(tip/support)
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street-light-poetry · 13 days
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“Opera has the power to warn you that you have wasted your life. You haven't acted on your desires. You've suffered a stunted, vicarious existence. You've silenced your passions. The volume, height, depth, lushness, and excess of operatic utterance reveal, by contrast, how small your gestures have been until now, how impoverished your physicality; you have only used a fraction of your bodily endowment, and your throat is closed.”
— Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire.
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street-light-poetry · 14 days
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The Night, the Porch
by Mark Strand
To stare at nothing is to learn by heart What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by. Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish. What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting For something whose appearance would be its vanishing — The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf, Or less. There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.
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street-light-poetry · 18 days
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“I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries”, Leonard Cohen
from The Spice-Box of Earth (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1961)
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street-light-poetry · 18 days
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street-light-poetry · 22 days
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new poem on patreon! (transcript in image description)
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street-light-poetry · 22 days
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Cages
by Jane Kenyon
I. Driving to Winter Park in March, past Cypress Gardens and the baseball camps, past the dead beagle in the road, his legs outstretched, as if he meant to walk on his side in the next life. At night, the air smells like a cup of jasmine tea. The night-bloomer, white flowering jasmine, and groves of orange trees breathing through their sweet skins.
And cattle in the back of the truck, staggering as the driver turns off the highway.
II. By the pool, here at the hotel, animals in cages to amuse us: monkeys, peacocks, a pair of black swans, rabbits, parrots, cockatoos, flamingoes holding themselves on one leg, perfectly still, as if they loathed touching the ground.
The black swan floats in three inches of foul water, its bright bill thrust under its wing. And the monkeys: one of them reaches through the cage and grabs for my pen, as if he had finally decided to write a letter long overdue.
And one lies in the lap of another. They look like Mary and Jesus in the Pietà, one searching for fleas or lice on the other, for succour on the body of the other -- some particle of comfort, some consolation for being in this life.
III. And the body, what about the body? Sometimes it is my favorite child, uncivilized as those spider monkeys loose in the trees overhead.
They leap, and cling with their strong tails, they steal food from the cages -- little bandits. If Chaucer could see them, he would change "lecherous as a sparrow" to "lecherous as a monkey."
And sometimes my body disgusts me. Filling and emptying it disgusts me. And when I feel that way I treat it like a goose with its legs tied together, stuffing it until the liver is fat enough to make a tin of paté. Then I have to agree that the body is a cloud before the soul's eye.
This long struggle to be at home in the body, this difficult friendship.
IV. People come here when they are old for slow walks on the beach with new companions. Mortuaries advertise on bus-stop benches. At night in nearby groves, unfamiliar constellations rise in a leafy sky, and in the parks, mass plantings of cannas are blooming, their outrageous blooms, as if speaking final thoughts, no longer caring what anyone thinks...
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street-light-poetry · 23 days
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“God is nowhere to be found, yet there is still so much light! Light that dazzles and maddens; crisp, ruthless light. Space echoes like an immense tomb, yet the stars still burn. Why does the sun take so long to die? Or the moon retain such fidelity to the Earth? Where is the new darkness? The greatest of all unknowings? Is death itself shy of us?”
— Thirst for Annihilation
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street-light-poetry · 23 days
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street-light-poetry · 23 days
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Soft Sound
by Vladimir Nabokov
When in some coastal townlet, on a night of low clouds and ennui, you open the window -- from afar whispering sounds spill over. Now listen closely and discern the sound of seawaves breathing upon land, protecting in the night the soul that harkens unto them.
Daylong the murmur of the sea is muted, but the unbidden day now passes (tinkling as does an empty tumbler on a glass shelf);
and once again amidst the sleepless hush open your window, wider, wider, and with the sea you are alone in the enormous and calm world.
Not the sea’s sound… In the still night I hear a different reverberation: the soft sound of my native land, her respiration and pulsation.
Therein blend all the shades of voices so dear, so quickly interrupted and melodies of Pushkin’s verse and sighs of a remembered pine wood.
Repose and happiness are there, a blessing upon exile; yet the soft sound cannot be heard by day drowned by the scurrying and rattling.
But in the compensating night, in sleepless silence, one keeps listening to one’s own country, to her murmuring, her deathless deep.
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