It takes talent to live at night

          

SONG

         by Frank Bidart

You know that it is there, lair

where the bear ceases

for a time even to exist.

Crawl in. You have at last killed

enough and eaten enough to be fat

enough to cease for a time to exist.

Crawl in. It takes talent to live at night, and scorning

others you had that talent, but now you sniff

the season when you must cease to exist.

Crawl in. Whatever for good or ill

grows within you needs

you for a time to cease to exist.

It is not raining inside

tonight. You know that it is there. Crawl in.

THE YOKE

            by Frank Bidart

don't worry           I know you're dead

but tonight

Turn your face again

toward me

when I hear your voice there is now

no direction in which to turn

I sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep and wake and

but tonight

turn your face again

toward me

see     upon my shoulders is the yoke

that is not a yoke

don't worry            I know you're dead

but tonight

turn your face again  

NYTimes Review

Fleas, Flies, and Friars

Walter of Bibbesworth, 1240s

When a woman's time is near

That her infant will appear,

Let her find a midwife, wise

To assist her and advise.

When the child is born at last,

Tie it up with swathings fast,

In a cradle lay it softly

With a nurse to rock it oftly.

Babies first may only crawl

For they cannot walk at all

And they dribble quite a bit,

Making messes on their kit,

So the nurs, the clothes to spar,

Should provide a bib to wear.

When they start to walk, beware!

Dirts and hurts are everywhere,

So, for safety, please emply

A small servant girl or boy

To attend them and ensure

That they don't fall on the floor.

[School exercise book, 15th C]

      Hey, hey, hey, hey,

      I will have the whetstone if I may.      [prize for the best lie]

I saw a dog cooking sowse,                       [pickled pork]

And an ape thatching a house,

And a pudding eating a mouse:

      I will have the whetstone if I may.

I saw an urchin shape and sew,                [hedgehog]

And another bake and brew,

Scour the pots as they were new:

      I will have the whetstone if I may.

I saw a codfish corn sow.

And a worm a whistle blow

And a pie treading a crow:                       [magpie]

I will have the whetstone if I may.

. . . . .

I saw a sow her kerchiefs was

The second sow had a hedge to plash,    [plait together]

The third sow went to the barn to thresh:

      I will have the whetstone if I may.

I saw an egg eating a pie,

Give me drink, my mouth is dry;

It is not long since I told a lie:

      I will have the whetstone if I may.

[From a handbook on hunting by a woman for her son, 15th C]

Wheresoever you far, by frith or by fell,

My dear child, take heed how Tristram doth you tell

How many beasts of venery there were,

Listen to your dame and then you shal hear.

Four manners of beasts of venery there are:

The first of them is the hart, the second is the hare

The others are the boar,

The wolf and no more.

And where that you come in plain or in place,

I shall tell you which be the beasts of the chase:

One of them is the buck, another is the doe,

The fox and the marten, and the wild roe,

And my dear child, you shall other beasts all

Wheresoever you find them, 'rascal' them call,

In frith or in fell, or in forest as I tell

. . . . . .

And for to speak of the hart, if you will it hear,

You shall call him a calf at the first year,

The second year a brocket, so shall you him call,

The third year a spayad: learn these words all;

The fourth year a stag, call him by any way,

The fifth year a great stag, your dame bidgs you say.

The sixth year, call you him a hart;

Do so, my child, while you be alert.

My child, talk of 'herds' of hart and of hind

And of buck and of doe where you shall them find,

And a 'bevy' of roes, what place they be in,

And call it a 'sounder' of the wild swine.

And a 'rout' of wolves wherever you come in;

These beasts all,

Thus shall you them call.

From Fleas, Flies, and Friars: Children's Poetry from the Middle Ages, 

Nicholas Orme, Cornell University Press, 2011.

The splintered islands of wild cherry and of seal

                             by Nikos Gatsos

ELEGY (1946)

God will have smiled at the fire in your eyes

Spring will have closed its heart like a pearl

from an ancient shore

Now, luminous in your sleep

in the frozen fields where the grapevines

become embalmed wings marble doves

dumb children of anticipation –

I wished you would come some evening covered in cloud

mist from stone frost from olive

because on your chaste brow

sometimes I would see

the snow of sheep and of lilies

But you passed from life like a tear of the sea

like summer lights and the last rains of May

though once you were one of its geranium waves

one of its sharp pebbles

one of its small swallows in a pathless wood

without dawn bells without lamps at dusk

with your passionate heart turned toward the unknown

to the shattered tusks of another shore

to the splintered islands of wild cherry and of seal

TAKE YOUR RING (1994) *

In memory of Maria Nomikou

God will have smiled at the fire in your eyes

Spring will have closed its heart like a pearl

        from an ancient shore

Now, luminous in your sleep

on the sands of the stars, you are a sharp pebble

in the embrace of Kelaino and Maia

Take your ring

Take the silver of the meadows to tint your face

Come to me to sleep

to sink perpetually into an springtime sea

Some summer night when I turn toward your eyes

lost on the shores of some pale galaxy

come like the sun of April in the window of my dream

with the ribbon round your throat

to greet the cranes that travel toward the unknown

to close up a rose just like doves sing a child to sleep

under the leaves of the grapevines on the banks of the

Aspropotamo

in the embrace of the platan trees by a cave of the Eurotas

Life was for you like a tear of the sea

like a fire in summer and a scarf in May

just so, you were one of its geranium waves

one of its sharp pebbles

one of its small swallows wandering in the woods

without fire for the dawn without stars for spring

with your hot heart turned toward the unknown

to the shattered tusks of another shore

to the dead children of wild cherry and seal  

* Draft for Elegy published after Gatsos' death in 1992.   

Translation, DW, 2006.

Moonless waters that stretched forever

LET ME BEGIN AGAIN

                   by Philip Levine

Let me begin again as a speck

of dust caught in the night winds

sweeping out to sea. Let me begin

this time knowing the world is

salt water and dark clouds. The world

is grinding and sighing all night, and dawn

comes slowly and changes nothing. Let

me go back to land after a lifetime

of going nowhere. This time lodged

in the feathers of some scavenging gull

white above the black ship that docks

and broods upon the oily waters of

your harbor. This leaking freighter

has brought a hold full of hayforks

from Spain great jeroboams of dark

Algerian wine, and quill pens that can't

write English. The sailors have stumbled

off toward the bars or the bright houses.

The captain closes his log and falls asleep.

1/10/'28/. Tonight I shall enter my life

after being at sea for ages quietly

in a hospital named for an automobile.

The one child of millions of children

who has flown alone by the stars

above the black wastes of moonless waters

that stretched forever, who has turned

golden in the full sun of a new day.

A tiny wise child who this time will love

his life because it is like no other.

Shining even to the closed eye

                             by Tess Gallagher

FRESH STAIN

I don't know now if it was kindness -- we do

and we do. But I wanted you with me

that day in the cool raspberry vines, before

I had loved anyone, when another girl and I

saw the owner's son coming to lift away

our heaped flats of berries. His white shirt outside his jeans so

tempting. That whiteness, that quick side-glance

in our direction. So we said nothing,

but quickly gathered all the berries we could, losing

some in our mirth and trampling them

like two black ponies who only want to keep their backs

free, who only want to be shaken with

the black night-in-day murmur of hemlocks

high above. our slim waists, our buds

of breasts and red stain of raspberries cheapening

our lips. We were sudden, we were

two blurred dancers who didn't need paradise. his shirt,

his white shirt when the pelting ended, as if

we had kissed him until his own blood

opened. So we refused every plea and

were satisfied. And you didn't touch me then, just

listened to the cool silence after. Inside,

the ripe hidden berries as we took up our wicker baskets

and lost our hands past the wrists

in the trellised vines. Just girls with the arms of

their sweaters twisted across their hips

in mottled sunlight, that girl you can almost

remember now as she leans into the vine,

following with pure unanswerable desire, a boy

going into the house to change his shirt.

PARADISE

He always liked to pour his darkness into

his light. The stupor of my moonbeam there too, its

hapless funneling

in the night-thickened house.

Then my childhood friend

who's been staying awake for me, left the house

so I could be alone with the powerful raft of his body,

that entryway.

I talked to him, told him things I needed to hear myself

tell him, and he listened, I can say "peacefully,"

thought maybe it was only an effect he had, the body's surety

when it becomes one muscle. Still, I believe I heard

my own voice then, as he might have heard it, eagerly

like the nostrils of any mare blowing softly over

the damp presence he was, telling it

all is safe here, all is calm and yet to be

endured here where you are gone from.

Since his feet were still there and my hands

I rubbed his feet, because it is hard to imagine

at first that the dead don't enjoy those same things

they did when alive. And even if it was only a last thing, it

was the right last thing.

What is forever beyond speech

pulls action out of us, and if it is only childlike and

unreceived, the way a child hums to the stick

it is using to scratch houses into the dirt, it is a silky

membrane and shining even to

the closed eye.

Tess Gallagher, Nine Poems, The American Poetry Review, January/February 1992.

Angels, where were you?

ADDRESS TO THE ANGELS

                     by Maxine Kumin

Taking off at sunset over the city

it seems we pull the sun up

and pin it over the rim

or is it the other way round,

is it the horizon we push down

like a loose cuticle?

I am up here grieving, tallying

my losses, and I think how once,

the world was flat and rested on

the back of a giant fish whose tail

was in his mouth and on the Day

of Judgment all the sinners fell

overboard into the black gulf.

Once we walked distances

or went by horse and knew our places

on the planet, gravity-wise.

Now angels, God's secret agents,

I am assured by Billy Graham, circulate among us to tell

the living they are not alone.

On twenty-four-hour duty, angels

flutter around my house and barn

blundering into the cobwebs,

letting pots boil over

or watching the cat torture

a chipmunk When my pony,

filching apples, rears and catches

his halter on a branch and hangs

himself all afternoon, I like

to think six equine angels fan 

the strangling beast

until his agony is past.

Who knows how much or little

anyone suffers? Animals

are honest through their inability

to lie. Man, in his last hour,

has a compulsion to come clean.

Death is the sacred criterion.

Always it is passion that

confuses the issue. Always

I think that no one

can be sadder than I am.

For example, now, watching

this after-sunset

in the sky on top of Boston

I am wanting part of my life back

so I can do it over.

So I can do it better.

Angels, where were you when

by best friend did herself in?

Were you lunching beside us

that final noon, did you catch

some nuance that went past my ear?"

Did you ease my father out

of his cardiac arrest that wet

fall day I sat at the high crib bed

holding his hand? And when

my black-eyed susan-child ran

off with her European lover

and has been ever since an unbelonger,

were you whirligiging over

the suitcases? Did you put

your imprimature on

that death-by-separation?

It's no consolation, angels,

knowing you're around

helplessly observing like

some sacred CIA. Even

if you're up here, flattened

against the Fasten Your Seatbelt sign

or hugging the bowl in the lavatory,

we are, each one of us, our own

prisoner. We are

locked up in our own story.

From Maxine Kumin, Our Ground Time Here Will Be Brief: New and Selected Poems (1982).

Generous ghosts must walk that house at night

A Mild-Spoken Citizan Finally Writes to the

White House

                    by William Meredith

Please read this letter when you are alone.

Don't be afraid to listen to what may change you.

I am urging on you only what I myself have done.

Int he first place, I respect the office, although one night

last spring, when you had committed (in my eyes)

criminal folly, and there was a toast to you, I wouldn't rise.

A man's mistakes (if I may lecture you), his worst acts,

aren't out of character, as he'd like to think,

are not put on him by power or stress or too much to drink,

but are simply a worse self he consents to be. Thus

there is no mistaking you. I marvel that there's

so much disrespect for a man just being himself, being his errors.

'I never met a worse man than myself'

Thoreau said. When we're our best selves, we can all

afford to say that. Self-respect is vest when marginal.

And when the office of the presidency will again

accommodate that remark, it may be held by better men

than you or me. Meantime I hear there is music in your house,

your women wear queens' wear, though winds howl outside,

and I say, that's all right, the man should have some ease,

but does anyone say to your face who you really are"

No, they say Mr. President, while any young person

feels free to call me voter, believer, even causer.

And if I were also a pray-er, a man given to praying,

(I'm often in fact careless about great things, like you)

and I wanted to pray for your office, as in fact I do,

the words that would come to me would more likely be

god change you than god bless the presidency.

I would pray, God cause the President to change.

As I myself have been changed, first my head, then my heart,

so that I no longer pretend that I don't swindle or kill

when there is swindling and killing on my nation's part.

Well. Go out into your upstairs hall tonight with this letter.

Generous ghosts must walk that house at night,

carrying draughts of the Republic like cold water

to a man parched after too much talk and wine and smoke.

Hear them. They are elected ghosts, though some wil be radicals

and all may want to tell you things you will not like.

It will seem dark in the carpeted hall, despite the nightlights

in the dull sconces. Make the guard let you pass.

'If you are the President,' a shade with a water glass

will ask you (and this is all I ask), calling you by name,

himself perhaps a famous name, 'If you are the President

and things in the land have come to all this shame,

why don't you try doing something new? This building rose

laborious as a dream, to house one character:

man trusting man anew. That's who each tenant is

-- or an imposter, as some of us have been.'

1969