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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some thing's wrong here
(tip/support)
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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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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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“I Have Not Lingered in European Monasteries”, Leonard Cohen
from The Spice-Box of Earth (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1961)
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new poem on patreon! (transcript in image description)
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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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“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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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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