Most of all I wanted to see your eyes

                           Yannis Keats

                                   +--------`               by Angelos Sikelianos

A branch, the hand of Apollo,

The plane tree’s polished, broad bough,
Spread above you, may it bring you
The universe’s immortal peace.

You'd meet me on the broad and shining shore

            Of Pylos, so I'd planned,

With Mentor's tall ship pulled up on the beach

          Snug in the sand.

We would be bound, as those who sailed with the gods,

         In the winged friendship of youth,

And would take our seats in the stone thrones that Time

         And custom had made smooth

And meet that man who still in the third generation

        Reigned serene, a sage

Whose tales of travels and holy decrees had ripened

        In his mind with age --

At dawn we'd attend the sacrifice to the gods,
        The ritual slaughterers
Of the three-year old heifers, and hear the single cry
        That rose from his three daughters.

When the axe thwacked, and the black-fringed, slow-rolling eye

        Drowned in a swoon

Of darkness, and the gilt horns were rendered idle,

      A hazy half moon.

My love imagined you, as a sister her brother

      In your virginal bath,

How Polycaste rinsed your naked body and dressed you

      In a robe of fine cloth.

I thought to prod you a little with my foot

      As dawn was about to break:

The gleaming chariot's yoked for us and ready.

     No time to lose! Awake!

And to spend all day in the talk that comes and goes,

     Or silence, when no one spoke,

While we drove the horses who were always leaning one way

     Or another against the yoke,

But most of all I wanted to see your eyes,

     Your deer-like eyes, behold

The palace of Menelaus, and forget themselves

     In bronze and the gleam of gold.

Unwavering gaze, sinking the sight so deep,

     You'd never remember

The figured silver, the ivory, gilded or whte,

    The heavy amber,

And I thought that I would say in a hushed voice

    Leaning close to your ear,

Watch out, my friend, because in a moment, soon,

    Helen will appear

Before our very eyes, the one and only

    Daughter of the Swan,

And then we will sink our eyelids in the river

    Of Oblivion.

                              ●

So brightly I saw you; but what grassy roads

     Have led me to your tomb!

And the blazing roses with which I strew your grave

    And make all Rome abloom,

Light the way unto your golden songs

    As though they were the brave,

Armed bodies that turn to dust before one's eyes

    In an ancient, new-breached grave,

And all the worth treasure of Mycenae

    The golden plunder

I thought to lay before you -- goblet, sword,

    And diadem -- past wonder,

A mask on your dead beauty like the mask

    That covered the face

Of the king of the Achaeans,

    Hammered upon Death's trace.

Trans. A. E. Stallings 

The great door in the air

by Ted Hughes    

            Opus 131        

Opus 131 in C sharp minor

Opened the great door

In the air, and through it

Flooded horror. The door in the hotel room

And the curtain at the window and even

The plain homely daylight blocking the window

Were in the wrong dimension

To shut it out. The counterpoint pinned back

The flaps of the body. Naked, faceless,

The heart panted there, lie a fetus.

Where was the lifeline music? What had happened

To consolation, prayer, transcendence --

To the selective disconnecting

Of the pain center? Dark insects

Fought with their instruments

Scampering through your open body

As if you had already left it. Beethoven

Had broken down. You strained, listening

Maybe for divorce to be resolved

In the arithmetic of vibration

To pure zero, for the wave-particles

To pronounce on the unimportance

Of the menopause. Beethoven

Was trying to repair

The huge constellations of his silence

That flickered and glinted in the wind.

But the notes, with their sharp vaces,

Were already carrying you off,

Each with a different bit, into the corners

Of the universe.

River

Fallen from heaven, lies across

The lap of his mother, broken by world.

But water will go on

Issuing from heaven

In dumbness uttering spirit brightness

Through its broken mouth.

Scattered in a million pieces and buried

Its dry tombs will split, at a sign in the sky,

At a rending of veils.

It will rise, in a time after times,

After swallowing death and the pit

It will return stainless

For the delivery of this world

So the river is a god

Knee-deep among reeds, watching men,

Or hung by the heels down the door of a dam

It is a god, and inviolable.

Immortal.  And will wash itself of all deaths.

From River: New Poems, 1983.

The first to say star, water, stone

The Makers

                          by Howard Nemerov

Who can remember back to the first poets,

The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus?
No one has remembered that far back

Or now considers, among the artifacts,

And bones and cantilevered inference

The past is made of, those first and gretest poets,

So lofty and disdainful of renown

They left us not a name to know them by.

They were the ones that in whatever tongue

Worded the world, that were the first to say

Star, water, stone, that said the visible

And made it bring invisbles to view

In wind and time and change, and in the mind

Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world

And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers

Of the city into the astonished sky.

The were the first great listeners, attuned

To interval, relationship, and scale,

The first to say above, beneath, beyond,

Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine,

Who having uttered vanished from the world

Leaving no memory but the marvelous

Magical elements, the breathing shapes

And stops of breath we build our Babels of.

The lunatic fringe

The Lunatic Fringe

                       by Christine Brooke-Rose 

 

Have you ever felt madness behind your eyes
cold as a draught from a forgotten door,
when you are talking intelligently to those
who think you sane, poised and perhaps a little more
brilliant than that flask of liquid brain allows,
that honeycomb filled with the drugs of bees
out of a season’s hearts, then drained
by the insomniac insolent machinery of love?

Madness, like shame or rage, is not hot as they say,
but like a stylus needling in a groove
to some loudspeaker at a distance of
about God’s nearness to us,
which for the lunatic is close
as his own brain that sometimes runs away
into an ocean of prehistoric fish,
long-playing to the beak of a bird,
and amplified
in, maybe, sex.

I must get into the mad world now.
There is a secret in the lunatic fringe,
a way of impinging
on God without mock-heroics of spirit.
When the soul is anyway lost,
given up with awareness,
generously as a gambit
in life’s deadly conversation with death,
there then can be no remorse,
only the cold closeness of creation,
a white filament of matter through the brain
ejaculating from generation to generation,
like Lucifer, falling.

 

 (1956) 

From TLS 13 April 2013. 

 

The cat's clean careful mouth

by Carolyn Kizer

The Intruder

My mother -- preferring the strange to the tame:

Dove-note, bone marrow, deer dung,

Frog's belly distended with finny young,

Leave-mould wilderness, hare-bell, toadstool.

Odd, small snakes roving through the leaves,

Metallic beetles rambling over stones: all

Wild and natural! -- flashed out her instinctive love, and quick, she

Picked up the fluttering, bleeding bat the cat laid at her feet,

And held the little horror to the mirror, where

He gazed on himself, and shrieked like an old screen door far off.

Depended from her pinched thumb, each wing

Came clattering down like a small black shutter.

Still tranquil, she began, "It's rather sweet . . . ."
The soft mouse body, the hard feral glint

In the caught eyes. Then we saw,

And recoiled: lice, pallid, yellow,

Nested within the wing-pits, cosily sucked and snoozed.

The thing dropped from her hands, and with its thud,

Swiftly, the cat, with a clean careful mouth

Closed on the soiled webs, growling, took them out to the back stoop.

But still, dark blood, a sticky puddle on the floor

Remained, of all my mother's tender, wounding passion

For a whole wild, lost, betrayed and secret life

Among its dens and burrows, its clean stones,

Whose denizens can turn upon the world

With spitting tongue, an odor, talon, claw,

To sting or soil benevolence, alien

As our clumsy traps, our random scatter of shot.

She swept to the kitchen. Turning on the tap,

She washed and washed the pity from her hands.

Summer near the River

I have carried my pillow to the windowsill

And try to sleep, with my damp arms crossed upon it, 

But no breeze stirs the tepid morning.

Only I stir. . . . Come, tease me a little!

With such cold passion, so little teasing play,

How long can we endure our life together?

No use.  I put on your long dressing-gown;

The untied sash trails over the dusty floor/

I kneel by the window, prop up your shaving mirror

And pluck my eyebrows.

I don't care if the robe slides open

Revealing a crescent of belly, a tan thigh.

I can accuse that non-existent breeze. . . .   

I am as monogamous as the North Star,

But I don't want you to know it.  You'd only take advantage.

While you are as fickle as spring sunlight.

All right. Sleep! The cat means more to you than I.

I can rouse you, but then you swagger out.

I glimpse you from the window, striding towards the river.

When you return, reeking of fish and beer,

There is salt dew in your hair.  Where have you been?

Your clothes weren't that wrinkled hours ago, when you left.

You couldn't have loved someone else, after loving me!

I sulk and sigh, dawdling by the window.

Later, when you hold me in your arms

It seems, for a moments, the river ceases flowing.

                                                                                     Themes from the Tzu Yeh Songs and  

                                                                                     the Mo-ch'ou Songs.

  

From Carolyn Kizer, Mermaids in the Basement: Poems for Women (1984). 

The Moose

by Elizabeth Bishop

For Grace Bulmer Bowers

From narrow provinces
of fish and bread and tea,
home of the long tides
where the bay leaves the sea
twice a day and takes
the herrings long rides,

where if the river
enters or retreats 
in a wall of brown foam
depends on if it meets
the bay coming in,
the bay not at home;

where, silted red,
sometimes the sun sets
facing a red sea,
and others, veins the flats'
lavender, rich mud
in burning rivulets;

on red, gravelly roads,
down rows of sugar maples,
past clapboard farmhouses
and neat, clapboard churches,
bleached, ridged as clamshells,
past twin silver birches,

through late afternoon
a bus journeys west,
the windshield flashing pink,
pink glancing off of metal,
brushing the dented flank
of blue, beat-up enamel;

down hollows, up rises,
and waits, patient, while
a lone traveller gives
kisses and embraces
to seven relatives
and a collie supervises.

Goodbye to the elms,
to the farm, to the dog.
The bus starts.  The light
grows richer; the fog,
shifting, salty, thin,
comes closing in.

Its cold, round crystals
form and slide and settle
in the white hens' feathers,
in gray glazed cabbages,
on the cabbage roses
and lupins like apostles;

the sweet peas cling
to their wet white string
on the whitewashed fences;
bumblebees creep
inside the foxgloves,
and evening commences.

One stop at Bass River.
Then the Economies 
Lower, Middle, Upper;
Five Islands, Five Houses,
where a woman shakes a tablecloth
out after supper.

A pale flickering.  Gone.
The Tantramar marshes 
and the smell of salt hay.
An iron bridge trembles 
and a loose plank rattles
but doesn't give way.

On the left, a red light
swims through the dark:
a ship's port lantern.
Two rubber boots show,
illuminated, solemn.
A dog gives one bark.

A woman climbs in 
with two market bags,
brisk, freckled, elderly.
"A grand night.  Yes, sir,
all the way to Boston."
She regards us amicably.

Moonlight as we enter 
the New Brunswick woods,
hairy, scratchy, splintery;
moonlight and mist
caught in them like lamb's wool
on bushes in a pasture.

The passengers lie back.
Snores.  Some long sighs.
A dreamy divagation
begins in the night,
a gentle, auditory,
slow hallucination. . . .

In the creakings and noises,
an old conversation
--not concerning us,
but recognizable, somewhere,
back in the bus:
Grandparents' voices

uninterruptedly
talking, in Eternity:
names being mentioned,
things cleared up finally;
what he said, what she said,
who got pensioned;

deaths, deaths and sicknesses;
the year he remarried;
the year (something) happened.
She died in childbirth.
That was the son lost
when the schooner foundered.

He took to drink. Yes.
She went to the bad.
When Amos began to pray
even in the store and
finally the family had
to put him away.

"Yes . . ." that peculiar
affirmative.  "Yes . . ."
A sharp, indrawn breath,
half groan, half acceptance,
that means "Life's like that.
We know it (also death)."

Talking the way they talked 
in the old featherbed,
peacefully, on and on,
dim lamplight in the hall,
down in the kitchen, the dog
tucked in her shawl.

Now, it's all right now
even to fall asleep
just as on all those nights.
--Suddenly the bus driver
stops with a jolt,
turns off his lights.

A moose has come out of 
the impenetrable wood
and stands there, looms, rather,
in the middle of the road.
It approaches; it sniffs at
the bus's hot hood.

Towering, antlerless,
high as a church,
homely as a house
(or, safe as houses).
A man's voice assures us
"Perfectly harmless. . . ."

Some of the passengers
exclaim in whispers,
childishly, softly,
"Sure are big creatures."
"It's awful plain."
"Look! It's a she!"

Taking her time,
she looks the bus over,
grand, otherworldly.
Why, why do we feel
(we all feel) this sweet
sensation of joy?

"Curious creatures,"
says our quiet driver,
rolling his r's.
"Look at that, would you."
Then he shifts gears.
For a moment longer,

by craning backward,
the moose can be seen
on the moonlit macadam;
then there's a dim
smell of moose, an acrid
smell of gasoline.

Counting the red stars

          by Sylvia Plath

The Colossus

I shall never get you put together entirely,

Pieced, blued, and properly jointed.

Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles

Proceed from your great lips.

It's worse than a barnyard.

Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,

Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.

Thirty years now I have labored

To dredge the silt from your throat.

I am none the wiser.

Scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails of lysol

I crawl like an ant in mourning

Over the weedy acres of your brow

To mend the immense skull plates and clear

The balc, white tumuli of your eyes.

A blue sky out of the Oresteia

Arches above us. O father, all by yourself

You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.

I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.

Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.

It would take more than a lightning-stroke

To create such a ruin.

Nights, I squat in the cornucopia

Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.

The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.

My hours are married to shadow.

No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel

On the blank stones of the landing.

Sow

God knows how our neighbor managed to breed

His great sow:

Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid

In the same way

He kept the sow -- impounded from public stare,

Prize ribbon and pig show.

But one dusk our questions commende dus to a tour

Through his lantern-lit maze of barns to the lintel of the sunk sty door

To gape at it:
This was no rose-and-larkspurred china suckling

With a penny slot

For thrifty children, nor dolt pig ripe for heckling,

About to be

Glorified for prime flesh and golden crackling

In a parsley halo;

Nor even one of the common barnyard sows,

Mire-smirched, blowxy,

Maunching thistle and knotweed on her snout-cruise --

Bloar tun of milk

On the move, hedged by a litter of feat-foot ninnies

Shrilling her hulk

To halt for a swig at the pink teats.  No.  This vast

Brobdingnag bulk

Of a sow lounged belly-bedded on that black compost,

Fat-rutted eyes

Dream-filmed.  What a vision of ancient hoghood must

Thus wholly engross

The great grandam! -- our marvel blazoned a knight,

Helmed, in cuirass,

Unhorsed and shredded in the grove of combat

By a grisly-bristled

Boar, fabulous enough to straddle that sow's heat

But our farmer whistled,

then, with a jocular fist thwacked the barrel nape,

And the green-copse-castled

Pig hove, letting legend like dried mud drop,

Slowly, grunt

On grunt, up in the flickering light to shape

A monument

Prodigious in gluttonies as that hog whose want

Made lean Lent

Of kitchen slops and, stomaching no constraint,

Proceeded to swill

The seven troughed seas and every earthquaking continent.

From Sylvia Plath, The Colossus (1957).