where the plum wallpaper was kind

                                  

                                  STRANGE CINEMA

                                  by Adam Fitzgerald

My ode to failure begins like a girl who awakens in a dream

and realizes the surface of her sleep over ungroomed clouds,

suspected in a vague pleasure of doubt. It continues on then

like a train departing from its track, sluicing invisible foam

and realizes the surface of . . . Her sleep over ungroomed clouds

troubled me. She failed too, the pungent musk of her hair

like a train departing from its track, sluicing invisible foam.

I don't care about any of this. I miss the person inside who

troubled me (she failed too). The pungent musk of her hair

is all that matters in the lobby where I slept, vacantly foraging.

I don't care about any of this. I miss the person inside who

hears nothing but the tracing of loss, some minor addenda.

Is all that matters in the lobby where I slept, vacantly foraging,

your shadow? Like cut pink fruit? A sudden shaft of sun?

Hear nothing but  the tracing of loss, some minor addenda.

Or hear something, if you want, casually, a crevice in a name.

Your shadow like a cut of pink fruit, a sudden shaft of sun.

But that was before, when we could share our fumbled sex,

hearing something we wanted, casually, a crevice in a name,

in a room of lost boots, where the plum wallpaper was kind.

But that was before, when we could share our fumbled sex.

My ode to failure begins like a girl who awakens in a dream,

in a room of lost boots, where the plum wallpaper was kind.

Suspended in a vague pleasure of doubt, it continues on then.




from Adam Fitzgerald, The Late Parade,, 2013.

A coming and going music

                             by Ted Hughes

IN THE DARK VIOLIN OF THE VALLEY

All night a music

Like a needle sewing body

And soul together, and sewing soul

And sky together and sky and earth

Together and sewing the river to the sea.

In the dark skull of the valley
A lancing, fathoming music

Searching the bones, engraving

On the draughty limits of ghost

In an entanglement of stars.

In the dark belly of the valley

A coming and going music

Cutting the bed-rock deeper

To earth-nerve, a scalpel of music

The valley dark rapt

Hunched over its river, the night attentive

Bowed over its valley, the river

Crying a violin in a grave

All the dead singing in the river

The river throbbing, the river the aorta

And the hills unconscious with listening.

WHITENESS

Walks the river at dawn.

The thorn-tree hiding its thorns

With too much and too fleshy perfume.

Thin water. Uneasy ghost.

Whorls clotted with petals.

Trout, like a hidden man's cough,

Slash under dripping roots.

Heron. Clang

Coiling its snake in heavy hurry

Hoists away, yanked away

Ceases to ponder the cuneiform

Under glass

Huge owl-lump of dawn

With wrong fittings, a parasol broken

Tumbles up into strong sky

Banks precariously, risks a look

A writhing unmade bedstead

Sets the blade between its shoulders

and hang-falls

Down a long aim

Dangles its reed

Till it can seen its own pale eyes

Suddenly shakes off cumbersome cloud

To anchor, tall,

An open question.

Now only the river nags to be elsewhere.

from Ted Hughes, River: New Poems, 1983.

The day they carried you off

                        THE COATS

                    by Tess Gallagher

                                             for Mary Kepler (1884-1966)

They made you complicated,

a new one each year

and underneath, the same

old print dress. Outside

under the maples you were smart

and garrulous on my grandfather's arm

walking down Valley Street

to the shops, talking into his silence

as into some idea of yourself

grown to your side.

Yet you loved telling how

you were engaged to another

the night he took you off 

in his buckboard.  Marriage too

came like an impulse

to turn against yourself.  Life

caught you up in its clumsy arms

and danced you out of your Oklahoma

youth into the milltown

of my birth, you in your new coat,

leading me into the dimestore

to buy silk ribbons.

Shut in the closet, your coats

were a family of witnesses

who could not remember you.

They were waiting for the one

to send them all again

into the weather.  Standing

before your mirror once

in the dark of the bedroom

I put myself into a heavy tweed

with its cold silk lining.  The wide arms

were a hiding place; the hem

brushed my patent leather shoes.

It was a bargaining

that I should turn into the room,

you age about me like a sack.

I wanted to throw something over you

the day they carried you off

like a trophy in your silk lining

Rosy and familiar you received each of us

in a housedress that denied you

were going anywhere.  That year

the winter came over the ground

like a rich white pelt.

I thought of you accepting it,

something chosen, a comfort

that had sought you out

in the cold of the land.

from Tess Gallagher, Amplitude: New and Selected Poems, 1987.

Pan

                       

                                            PAN

                               by Angelos Sikelianos

Over rocks on the deserted shore, over the burning heat

          of harsh pebbles,

beside the emerald waves, noon, like a fountain,

          rose shimmering.

Salamis a blue trireme deep in the sea,

          in spring's spindrift;

the pines and mastic trees of Kineta a deep breath

          I drew inside me.

The sea burst into foam and, beaten by the wind,

          shattered white,

and a flock of goats, countless, iron-gray, plummeted headlong

          down the hill.

With two harsh whistles, fingers pressing

          his curled tongue,

the goatherd huddled them on the shore,

          the whole five hundred.

They gathered in close, crowding the brush

          and wild thyme,

and as they gathered, a drowsiness seized

          both goats and man.

And then, over the shore's stones and the goats' swelter,

          dead silence;

and between their horns, as from a tripod, the sun's quick heat

          shimmered upward.

Then we saw the herd's lord and master, the he-goat,

          rise alone

and mover off, he tread slow and heavy,

          toward a rock

wedged into the sea to shape a perfect lookout point'

          there he stopped,

on the very edge where spray dissolves,

          and leaning motionless,

upper lip pulled back so that his teeth shone,

          he stood

huge, erect, smelling the white-crested sea

          until sunset.   

from Angelos Sikelianos, Selected Poems.  Trans. by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. 1979.