Ring of bright water

                         by  Kathleen Raine

The Marriage of Psyche

He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water
Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea,
He has married me with a ring of light, the glitter
Broadcast on the swift river.
He has married me with the sun's circle
Too dazzling to see, traced in summer sky.
He has crowned me with the wreath of white cloud
That gathers on the snowy summit of the mountain,
Ringed me round with the world-circling wind,
Bound me to the whirlwind's centre.
He has married me with the orbit of the moon
And with the boundless circle of stars,
With the orbits that measure years, months, days, and nights,
Set the tides flowing,
Command the winds to travel or be at rest.

At the ring's centre,
Spirit, or angel troubling the pool,
Causality not in nature,
Finger's touch that summons at a point, a moment
Stars and planets, life and light
Or gathers cloud about an apex of gold,
Transcendent touch of love summons my world into being.

The Rocks Remain

Because I see these mountains they are brought low,
Because I drink these waters they are bitter,
Because I tread these black rocks they are barren,
Because I have found these islands they are lost;
Upon seal and seabird dreaming their innocent world.
My shadow has fallen. 

 

But what word was it

by Anne Carson

IX. But what word was it

Word that overnight

showed up on all the walls of my live inscribed simpliciter no explanation.

What is the power of the unexplained.

There he was one day (new town) in a hayfield outside my school standing

under a black umbrella

in a raw picking wind.

I never asked

how he got there a distance of maybe three hundred miles.

To ask

would break some rule.

Have you ever read 'The Homeric Hymn to Demeter'?
Remember how Hades rides out of the daylight

on his immortal horses swathed in pandemonium.

Takes the girl down to a cold room below

while her mother walks the world and damages every living thing.

Homer tells it

as a story of the crime against the mother.

For a daughter's crime is to accept Hades' rules

which she knows she can never explain

and so breezing in she says

to Demeter:

'Surely mother here is the whold story.

For slyly he placed in my hands a pomegranate seed sweet as honey.
Then by force and against my will he made me eat.

I tell you this truth though it grieves me.'

Made her eat how? I know a man

who had rules

against showing pain,

against asking why, against wanting to know when I'd see him again.

From my mother

emanated a fragrance, fear.

And from me

(I knew by her face at the table)

smell of sweet seed.

Roses in your room'd he send you those?

Yes.

What's the occasion?

No occasion.
What's going on with the colour.

Colour.

Ten white one red what's that mean.

Guess they ran out of white.

To abolish seduction is a mother's goal.

She will replace it with what is real: products.

Demeter's victory

over Hades

does not consist in her daughter's arrival from down below,

it's the world in bloom -

cabbages lures lambs broom sex milk money!

These kill death.

I still have that one red rose dried to powder now.

It did not mean hymen as she thought.

London Review of Books, 13 April 2000.

from The Beauty of the Husband

This is a joke

                             by Alan Dugan

On Looking for Models

The trees in time
have something else to do
besides their treeing. What is it.
I'm a starving to death
man myself, and thirsty, thirsty
by their fountains but I cannot drink
their mud and sunlight to be whole.
I do not understand these presences
that drink for months
in the dirt, eat light,
and then fast dry in the cold.
They stand it out somehow,
and how, the Botanists will tell me.
It is the "something else" that bothers
me, so I often go back to the forests.

How We Heard the Name

The river brought down
dead horses, dead men
and military debris,
indicative of war
or official acts upstream,
but it went by, it all
goes by, that is the thing
about the river. Then
a soldier on a log
went by. He seemed drunk
and we asked him Why
had he and this junk
come down to us so
from the past upstream.
''Friends,'' he said, ''the great
Battle of Granicus
has just been won
by all of the Greeks except
the Lacedaemonians and
myself: this is a joke
between me and a man
named Alexander, whom
all of you ba-bas
will hear of as a god.'' 

 

Chickens, Haydn, Fear

                              Tomas Tranströmer

Allegro

After a black day, I play Haydn,

and feel a little warmth in my hands.

The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.

The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

The sound says that freedom exists

and someone pays no tax to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my haydnpockets

and act like a man who is calm about it all.

I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
"We do not surrender. But want peace."

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;

rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

The rocks roll straight through the house

but every pane of glass is still whole.

Kyrie

Sometimes my life opened its eyes in the dark.

A feeling as if crowds drew through the streets

in blindness and anxiety on the way towards a miracle,

while I invisibly remain standing.

As the child falls asleep in terror

listening to the heart's heavy tread.

Slowly, slowly until morning puts its rays in the locks

and the doors of darkness open.

Standing Up

In a split second of hard though, I managed to catch her.  I stopped, holding the hen in my hands.  Strange, she didn't really feel living: rigid, dry, an old white plume-ridden lady's hat that shrieked out the truths of 1912.  Thunder in the air.  An odor rose from the fence-boards, as when you open a photo album that has got so old that no one can identify the people any longer.

      I carried her back inside the chicken netting and let her go.  All of a sudden she came back to life, she knew who she was, and ran off according to the rules.  Hen yards are thick with taboos.  But the earth all around is full of affection and tenacity.  A low stone wall half overgrown with leaves.  When dusk begins to fall the stones are faintly luminous with the hundred-year-old warmth from the hands that built it.

      It's been a hard winter, but summer is here and the fields want us to walk upright.  Every man unimpeded, but careful, as when you stand up in a small boat.  I remember a day in Africa: on the banks of the Chari, there were many boats, an atmosphere positively friendly, the men almost blue-black in color with three parallel scars on each cheek (meaning the Sara tribe).  I am welcomed on a boat -- it's a canoe hollowed from a dark tree.  The canoe is incredibly wobbly, even when you sit on your heels.  A balancing act.  If you have the heart on the left side you have to lean a bit to the right, nothing in the pockets, no big arm movements, please, all rhetoric has to be left behind.  Precisely: rhetoric is impossible here.  The canoe glides out over the water.

 Tomas Tranströmer, Selected Poems: 1954-1986. 1987.  Translators: Robert Bly, Robert Fulton, Robert Bly.

 

Thrall

               

Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaeus;

or, The Mulata

                  After the painting by Diego Velásquez, c. 1619

                                                by Natasha Trethewey

She is the vessels on the table before her:

the copper pot tipped toward us, the white pitcher

clutched in her hand, the black one edged in red

and upside-down. Bent over, she is the mortar,

and the pestle at rest in the mortar -- still angled

in its posture of use. She is the stack of bowls

and the bulb of garlic beside it, the basket hung

by a nail on the wall and the white cloth bundled

in it, the rag in the foreground recalling her hand.

She’s the stain on the wall the size of her shadow --

the color of blood, the shape of a thumb. She is echo

of Jesus at table, framed in the scene behind her:

his white corona, her white cap. Listening, she leans

into what she knows. Light falls on half her face.

 

Thrall

             Juan de Pareja, 1670

         He was not my father

though      he might have been

         I came to him

the mulatto son

                   of a slave woman

        just that

as if       it took only my mother

       to make me

                    a mulatto

meaning

                   any white man

could be my father

            *

In his shop     bound

       to the muller

I ground his colors

       my hands dusted     black

with fired bone     stained 

      blue     and flecked

with glass     my nails

edged vermilion     as if

     my fingertips bled

In this way     just as

     I'd turned the pages

of his books

    I meant to touch

          everything he did

          *

With Velásquez     in Rome

     a divination

At market     I lingered to touch

     the bright hulls of lemons

          closed by eyes until

    the scent was oil

and thinner     yellow ocher

    in my head

         And once

the sudden taste of iron

         a glimpse of red

   like a wound-opening

         the robes of the pope

a portrait

         that bright shade of blood

         before it darkens

purpling nearly to black

           *

Because he said

        painting was not

        labor     was

the province of free men

       I could only 

watch     Such beauty

      in the work of his hands

               his quick  strokes

     a divine language I learned

over his shoulder

               my own hands

tracing the air

     in his wake     Forbidden

              to answer in paint

I kept my canvases secret

              hidden until

     Velásquez decreed

              unto me

     myself     Free

I was apprentice     he

             my master still

         *

How intently at times

      could he fix his keen eye

              upon me

though only once

     did he fix me     in paint

my color a study

     my eyes wide

             as I faced him

a lace collar at my shoulders

     as though I'd been born

             noble

     the yoke of my birth

gone from my neck

     In his hand     a long brush

            to keep him far

     from the canvas

far from it     as I was

     the distance between us

           doubled     that

he could observe me

     twice     stand closer

           to what he made

For years     I looked to it

     as one looks into a mirror

     *

                  And so

  in The Calling of Saint Matthew

     I painted my own

likeness     a freeman

     in the House of Customs

           waiting to pay

my duty     In my hand

     an answer     a slip of paper

           my signature on it

     Juan de Pareja     1661

Velásquez     one year gone

     Behind me

            upright on a shelf

a forged platter     luminous

            as an aureole

     just beyond my head

            my face turned

to look out from the scene

     a self-portrait

To make it

           I looked at how

my master saw me     then

     I narrowed my eyes

     *

Now

     at the bright edge

of sleep     mother

She comes back to me

    as sound

           her voice

in the echo of birdcall

    a single syllable

           again

and again     my name

    Juan Juan Juan

or     a bit of song    that

          waking

I cannot grasp 

 

 Natasha Trethewey, Thrall: Poems. (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012).

See also Blacks in Renaissance Painting.

Some days the sea

                          by Richard Blanco

The sea is never the same twice. Today

the waves open their lions-mouths hungry

for the shore and I feel the earth helpless.

Some days their foamy edges are lace

at my feet, the sea a sheet of green silk.

Sometimes the shore brings souvenirs

from a storm, I sift spoils of sea grass:

find a broken finger of coral, a torn fan,

examine a sponge's hollow throat, watch

a man-of-war die a sapphire in the sand.

Some days there's nothing but sand

quiet as snow, I walk, eyes on the wind

sometimes laden with silver tasting salt,

sometimes still as the sun. Some days

the sun is a dollop of honey and raining

light on the sea glinting diamond dust,

sometimes there are only clouds, clouds—

sometimes solid as continents drifting

across the sky, other times wispy, white

roses that swirl into tigers, into cathedrals,

into hands, and I remember some days

I'm still a boy on this beach, wanting

to catch a seagull, cup a tiny silver fish,

build a perfect sand castle. Some days I am

a teenager blind to death even as I watch

waves seep into nothingness. Most days

I'm a man tired of being a man, sleeping

in the care of dusk's slanted light, or a man

scared of being a man, seeing some god

in the moonlight streaming over the sea.

Some days I imagine myself walking

this shore with feet as worn as driftwood,

old and afraid of my body. Someday,

I suppose I'll return someplace like waves

trickling through the sand, back to sea

without any memory of being, but if

I could choose eternity, it would be here

aging with the moon, enduring in the space

between every grain of sand, in the cusp

of every wave, and every seashell's hollow.  

Richard Blanco is to read one of his poems at the Inauguration of President Obama tomorrow, 21 January.  For more of his on-line poetry, go to http://www.floatingwolfquarterly.com/6/richard-blanco/#0/contents,  and several other sites listed on his webpage here.

The Pale King

                     by David Foster Wallace

§ 1

Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb's-quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother's soft hand on your cheek. An arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak's thatch. The glitter of dew that stays where it is and steams all day.  A sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys.  All nodding.  Electric sounds of insects at their business.  Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow.  insects all business all the time. Quartz and chert and sxhist and chondrite iron scabs in granite.  Very old land. Looka round you.  The horizon trembling, shapeless.  We are all of us brothers.

       Some crows come overhead then, three or four, not a murder, on the wing, silent with intent, corn-bound for the pasture's wire beyond which one horse smells at the other's behind, the lead horse's tail obligingly lifted. Your shoes' brand incised in the dew.  An alfalfa breeze.  Socks' burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert.  Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se. No Hunting. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak.  The pasture's crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail.  Read these.