recurring poem #9

Peter Porter : 'Your Attention Please'

(Notes on the poem can also be read here).

Image: "XX-11 IVY MIKE, was fired on Enewetak on October 31, 1952. It was an experimental thermonuclear device." (From Wikimedia Commons)

recurring poem #8

I heard a reading of this poem the other day, and thought I should post it here, considering it also ties in the with the ekphrasis theme at Overload. It never fails to send shivers.

John Keats : 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' (1820)

Thou still unravished bride of quietness!
_Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
_A flow'ry tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
_Of deities or mortals, or of both,
__In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
_What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
__What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
_Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared,
_Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
_Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
__Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
_Though winning near the goal -yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
__For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
_Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
_For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
_For ever warm and still to be enjoyed,
__For ever panting and for ever young;
_All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloyed,
__A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
_To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
_And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
_Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
__Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
_And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
__Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
_Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
_Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold pastoral!
_When old age shall this generation waste,
__Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
_Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," -that is all
__Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.


Below: Tracing of an engraving of the Sosibios vase by John Keats.

recurring poem #7

Rae Armantrout : 'The Subject'

It's as if we've just been turned human
in order to learn
that the beetle we've caught
and are now devouring
is our elder brother
and that we
are a young prince.

*

I was just going to click
on "Phoebe is changed
into a mermaid
tomorrow!" when suddenly
it all changed
into the image
of a Citizen watch.

*

If each moment is in love
with its image
in the mirror of
adjacent moments

(as if matter stuttered)

then, of course, we're restless!

"What is a surface?"
we ask,

trying to change the subject.


From Rae Armantrout, 7 Poems (2004), freely available as a pdf via Beard of Bees.

Recurring Poem #6

C.P. Cavafy : 'Dangerous Thoughts'

Said Myrtias (a Syrian student
in Alexandria during the reign
of the Emperor Konstans and the Emperor Konstantios;
in part a heathen, in part christianized):
"Strengthened by meditation and study,
I won't fear my passions like a coward;
I'll give my body to sensual pleasures,
to enjoyments I've dreamed of,
to the most audacious erotic desires,
to the lascivious impulses of my blood,
without being at all afraid, because when I wish -
and I'll have the will-power, strengthened
as I shall be by meditation and study -
when I wish, at critical moments I'll recover
my ascetic spirit as it was before. "

(Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard)

Below: portrait of Cavafy by Panagiotis Gravallos

recurring poem #5

Samuel Wagan Watson : cold storage

bussed it into Mitchell
from out of nowhere
and found it on ice

to the horizon line
a smothering layer of cold political rhetoric
the hopeless arguments of history palpitating
__-gently into the cracks
__-of stoneware earth

hurting is the season here in the bush
and winter is the additive that comes with it,
the storm shutters are up -
every second store closed or having a closing-down sale

the hunger pains of the city end here
the spirits are being sucked away into this gas-pipeline
as the Beast just keeps taking ... taking ... taking ...

black and white struggle to reconcile
slashing their own bloodlines
the kids packed off to the Big Smoke
where all the opportunities now manifest

a rainbow-serpent dormant on cryogenic dreams
chiling over into the landscape
while a secret war is fueled on urban innuendo
as a country-town loses another generation of its young
to the lust of the city

a main street void
____________-of the laughter of its children


Below: Sam Wagan Watson at the Brisbane Writers Festival

recurring poem #4

Dorothy Porter: 'Overture' from Carmen

Three days of heatwave,
A hot lid of dinning cicadas.
At night only a flock of bats lifts
__and flies across a hot scrap of moon.
Colours flow hot and slow like lava;
__the sea is never cold
__shining like the bluish basking belly
____of a snake.
Even mauve smoky twilight scratches along the skin
__behind the eyes
__like a hot thorn.
A black and white butterfly
__floats past a bright orange weed
____that flutters hungrily
______like a fly-trap.
Around an oozing broken pipe
__midges cluster
____ogling the milky water
______that gives off a green stink.
The road is empty
__but for the bright disturbing green feathers
____of a rainbow lorikeet
______smeared across the hot bitumen.

But. Look now.
There's a white light
______glancing off the water;
a spatter of rain
hisses on the road
and wafts up
__in a dew of dust and petrol;
flecks of parrot piss float
__from a luxuriant blossoming gum;
white cars
__in this fierce light
__hurt the most.
Carmen
__drives with one loose dark hand
Carmen
__drives a white hot car.

recurring poem #3

Federico Garcia Lorca: New York (Office and Denunciation)

To Fernando Vela


Under the multiplications,
a drop of duck's blood;
under the divisions,
a drop of sailor's blood;
under the additions, a river of tender blood.
A river that sings and flows
past bedrooms in the boroughs -
and it's money, cement, or wind
in New York's counterfeit dawn.
I know the mountains exist.
And wisdom's eyeglasses,
too. But I didn't come to see the sky.
I'm here to see the clouded blood,
the blood that sweeps machines over waterfalls
and the soul toward the cobra's tongue.
Every day in New York, they slaughter
four million ducks,
five million hogs,
two thousand pigeons to accommodate the tastes of the dying,
one million cows,
one million lambs,
and two million roosters
that smash the sky to pieces.

It's better to sob while honing a blade
or kill dogs on the delirious hunts
than to resist at dawn
the endless milk trains,
the endless blood trains
and the trains of roses, manacled
by the dealers in perfume.
The ducks and the pigeons,
and the hogs and the lambs
lay their drops of blood
under the multiplications,
and the terrified bellowing of the cows wrung dry
fills the valley with sorrow
where the Hudson gets drunk on oil.

I denounce everyone
who ignores the other half,
the half that can't be redeemed,
who lift their mountains of cement
where the hearts beat
inside forgotten little animals
and where all of us will fall
in the last feast of pneumatic drills.
I spit in all your faces.
The other half hears me,
devouring, pissing, flying in their purity,
like the supers' children in lobbies
who carry fragile twigs
to the emptied spaces where
the insect antennae are rusting.
This is not hell, but the street.
Not death, but the fruit stand.
There is a world of tamed rivers and distances just beyond our grasp
in the cat's paw smashed by a car,
and I hear the earthworm's song
in the hearts of many girls.
Rust, fermentation, earth tremor.

You yourself are the earth as you drift in office numbers.
What shall I do now? Set the landscapes in order?
Order the loves that soon become photographs,
that soon become pieces of wood and mouthfuls of blood?
No, no: I denounce it all.
I denounce the conspiracy
of these deserted offices
that radiate no agony,
that erase the forest's plans,
and I offer myself as food for the cows wrung dry
when their bellowing fills the valley
where the Hudson gets drunk on oil.

- Federico Garcia Lorca, 1930, from Poet in New York, translated by Greg Simon & Steven F White.

Below: Federico Garcia Lorca, Self-portrait in New York

recurring poem #2

H.D. : Oread

Whirl up, sea -
Whirl your pointed pines,
Splash your great pines
On our rocks;
Hurl your green over us,
Cover us with your pools of fir.
















H.D. (1886-1961)

recurring poem #1

... first of a series of poems by (very significant) others, selected for properties of recurrence / return.


Robert Creeley: The Skeleton

The element in which they live,
the shell going outward until
it never can end, formless,
seen on a clear night as stars,
the term of life given them
to come back to, down to,
and then to be in
themselves only, only skin.












Robert Creeley (1926-2005)