mushrooms/ sylvia plath

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.


: sylvia plath, ‘mushrooms’/ collected poems

how to kill a living thing/ eibhlín nic eochaidh

Neglect it
Criticise it to its face
Say how it kills the light
Traps all the rubbish
Bores you with its green

Continually
Harden your heart
Then
Cut it down close
To the root as possible

Forget it
For a week or a month
Return with an axe
Split it with one blow
Insert a stone

To keep the wound wide open.


: eibhlín nic eochaidh, ‘how to kill a living thing’/ staying alive. real poems for unreal times (edited by neil astley)

crown/ kay ryan

Too much rain
loosens trees.
In the hills giant oaks
fall upon their knees.
You can touch parts
you have no right to—
places only birds
should fly to.

: kay ryan, ‘crown’/ say uncle

on sleep stones/ anne carson

Camille Claudel lived the last thirty years of her
life in an asylum, wondering why, writing letters
to her brother the poet, who had signed the
papers. Come visit me, she says. Remember, I
am living here with madwomen; days are long.
She did not smoke or stroll. She refused to
sculpt. Although they gave her sleep stones—
marble and granite and porphyry—she broke
them, then collected the pieces and buried these
outside the walls at night. Night was when her
hands grew, huger and huger until in the photo-
graph they are like two parts of someone else
loaded onto her knees.

: anne carson, ‘on sleep stones’/ short talks; plainwater

my god, it's full of stars/ tracy k. smith

1. 

 

We like to think of it as parallel to what we know,

Only bigger. One man against the authorities.

Or one man against a city of zombies. One man

 

Who is not, in fact, a man, sent to understand

The caravan of men now chasing him like red ants

Let loose down the pants of America. Man on the run.

 

Man with a ship to catch, a payload to drop,

This message going out to all of space. . . . Though

Maybe it’s more like life below the sea: silent,

 

Buoyant, bizarrely benign. Relics

Of an outmoded design. Some like to imagine

A cosmic mother watching through a spray of stars,

 

Mouthing yes, yes as we toddle toward the light,

Biting her lip if we teeter at some ledge. Longing

To sweep us to her breast, she hopes for the best

 

While the father storms through adjacent rooms

Ranting with the force of Kingdom Come,

Not caring anymore what might snap us in its jaw.

 

Sometimes,  what I see is a library in a rural community.

All the tall shelves in the big open room. And the pencils

In a cup at Circulation, gnawed on by the entire population.

 

The books have lived here all along, belonging

For weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence

Of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face,

 

A pair of eyes. The most remarkable lies.

 

 

          2.

 

Charlton Heston is waiting to be let in. He asked once politely.

A second time with force from the diaphragm. The third time,

He did it like Moses: arms raised high, face an apocryphal white.

 

Shirt crisp, suit trim, he stoops a little coming in,

Then grows tall. He scans the room. He stands until I gesture,

Then he sits. Birds commence their evening chatter. Someone fires

 

Charcoals out below. He’ll take a whiskey if I have it. Water if I don’t.

I ask him to start from the beginning, but he goes only halfway back.

That was the future once, he says. Before the world went upside down.

 

Hero, survivor, God’s right hand man, I know he sees the blank

Surface of the moon where I see a language built from brick and bone.

He sits straight in his seat, takes a long, slow high-thespian breath,

 

Then lets it go. For all I know, I was the last true man on this earth. And:

May I smoke? The voices outside soften. Planes jet past heading off or back.

Someone cries that she does not want to go to bed. Footsteps overhead.

 

A fountain in the neighbor’s yard babbles to itself, and the night air

Lifts the sound indoors. It was another time, he says, picking up again.

We were pioneers. Will you fight to stay alive here, riding the earth

 

Toward God-knows-where? I think of Atlantis buried under ice, gone

One day from sight, the shore from which it rose now glacial and stark.

Our eyes adjust to the dark.

 

 

          3.

 

Perhaps the great error is believing we’re alone,

 

That the others have come and gone—a momentary blip—

 

When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,

 

Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel

 

Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,

 

Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,

 

Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones

 

At whatever are their moons. They live wondering

 

If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,

 

And the great black distance they—we—flicker in.

 

 

Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,

 

Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on

 

At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns

 

Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want to be

 

One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.

 

Wide open, so everything floods in at once.

 

And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,

 

Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.

 

So that I might be sitting now beside my father

 

As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe

 

For the first time in the winter of 1959.

 




          4.
 

 

In those last scenes of Kubrick’s 2001

When Dave is whisked into the center of space,

Which unfurls in an aurora of orgasmic light

Before opening wide, like a jungle orchid

For a love-struck bee, then goes liquid,

Paint-in-water, and then gauze wafting out and off,

Before, finally, the night tide, luminescent

And vague, swirls in, and on and on. . . . 

 

In those last scenes, as he floats

Above Jupiter’s vast canyons and seas,

Over the lava strewn plains and mountains

Packed in ice, that whole time, he doesn’t blink.

In his little ship, blind to what he rides, whisked

Across the wide-screen of unparcelled time,

Who knows what blazes through his mind?

Is it still his life he moves through, or does

That end at the end of what he can name?

 

On set, it’s shot after shot till Kubrick is happy,

Then the costumes go back on their racks

And the great gleaming set goes black.

 

 

          5.

 

When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said

They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed

In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white.

 

He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,

His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years,

When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled

 

To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons

Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.

His face lit-up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise

 

As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending

Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons

For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.

 

We learned new words for things. The decade changed.

 

The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed

For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,

The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is—

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

 

: tracy k. smith, ‘my god, it's full of stars’; life on mars

the old poets of china/ mary oliver

Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.


: mary oliver, ‘the old poets of china’; new and selected poems, volume ii

unknowing before the heavens of my life/ rainer maria rilke

Unknowing before the heavens of my life
I stand in wonder. O the great stars.
The rising and the going down. How quiet.
As if I didn't exist. Am I part? Have I dismissed
the pure influence? Do high and low tide
alternate in my blood according to this order?
I will cast off all wishes, all other links,
accustom my heart to its remotest space. Better
it live in the terror of its stars than
seemingly protected, soothed by something near.

: rainer maria rilke, uncollected poems (tr. edward snow)

transcendental etude/ adrienne rich

(..)
But there come times–perhaps this is one of them–
when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die;
when we have to pull back from the incantations,
rhythms we’ve moved to thoughtlessly,
and disenthrall ourselves, bestow
ourselves to silence, or a severer listening, cleansed
or oratory, formulas, choruses, laments, static
crowding the wires. We cut the wires,
find ourselves in free-fall, as if
our true home were the undimensional
solitudes, the rift
in the Great Nebula.
No one who survives to speak
new language, has avoided this:
the cutting-away of an old force that held her
rooted to an old ground
the pitch of utter loneliness
where she herself and all creation
seem equally dispersed, weightless, her being a cry
to which no echo comes or can ever come.
(..)

: adrienne rich, een fragment uit ‘transcendental etude’; the dream of a common language: poems 1974-1977

september/ jennifer michael hecht

Tonight there must be people who are getting what they want.
I let my oars fall into the water.
Good for them. Good for them, getting what they want.

The night is so still that I forget to breathe.
The dark air is getting colder. Birds are leaving.

Tonight there are people getting just what they need.

The air is so still that it seems to stop my heart.
I remember you in a black and white photograph
taken this time of some year. You were leaning against
a half-shed tree, standing in the leaves the tree had lost.

When I finally exhale it takes forever to be over.

Tonight, there are people who are so happy,
that they have forgotten to worry about tomorrow.

Somewhere, people have entirely forgotten about tomorrow.
My hand trails in the water.
I should not have dropped those oars. Such a soft wind.

: jennifer michael hecht, ‘september’; the next ancient world

crater lake/ louise glück

There was a war between good and evil.
We decided to call the body good.

That made death evil.
It turned the soul
against death completely.

Like a foot soldier wanting
to serve a great warrior, the soul
wanted to side with the body.

It turned against the dark,
against the forms of death
it recognized.

Where does the voice come from
that says suppose the war
is evil, that says

suppose the body did this to us,
made us afraid of love—

: louise glück, ‘crater lake’; averno

on waterproofing/ anne carson

Franz Kafka was Jewish. He had a sister, Ottla,
Jewish. Ottla married a jurist, Josef David, not
Jewish. When the Nuremberg Laws were intro-
duced to Bohemia-Moravia in 1942, quiet Ottla
suggested to Josef David that they divorce. He
at first refused. She spoke about sleep shapes
and property and their two daughters and a
rational approach. She did not mention, be-
cause she did not yet know the word, Ausch-
witz, where she would die in October 1943.
After putting the apartment in order she packed
a rucksack and was given a good shoeshine by
Josef David. He applied a coat of grease. Now
they are waterproof, he said.

: anne carson, ‘on waterproofing’/ short talks; plainwater

sweet darkness/ david whyte

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision is gone,
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your home
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except he one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

: david whyte, ‘sweet darkness’ (uit the house of belonging)

freud's beautiful things/ emily berry

     A cento

I have some sad news for you
I am but a symbol, a shadow cast on paper
If only you knew how things look within me at the moment
Trees covered in white blossom
The remains of my physical self
Do you really find my appearance so attractive
Darling, I have been telling an awful lot of lies lately
If only I knew what you are doing now?
Standing in the garden and gazing out into the deserted street?
Not a mermaid, but a lovely human being
The whole thing reminds me of the man trying to rescue a birdcage from the burning house
(I feel compelled to express myself poetically)
I am not normally a hunter of relics, but ...
It was this childhood scene ...
(My mother ... )
All the while I kept thinking: her face has such a wild look
... as though she had never existed
The fact is I have not yet seen her in daylight
Distance must remain distance
A few proud buildings; your lovely photograph
I find this loss very hard to bear
The bells are ringing, I don't quite know why
What makes all autobiographies worthless is, after all, their mendacity
Yesterday and today have been bad days
This oceanic feeling, continuous inner monologues
I said, “All the beautiful things I still have to say will have to remain unsaid,” and the writing table flooded

: emily berry, ‘freud's beautiful things’ (uit poetry magazine june 2015)

to know the dark/ wendell berry

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

: wendell berry, ‘to know the dark’; the peace of wild things

postscript/ seamus heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the care sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

: seamus heaney, ‘postscript’; the spirit level

real poems for unreal times

ik kocht een dik boek vol poëzie, getiteld staying alive. real poems for unreal times. het is gemaakt, samengesteld door neil astley. dit is het eerste gedicht dat ik las:

the hug/ tess gallagher

A woman is reading a poem on the street
and another woman stops to listen. We stop too,
with our arms around each other. The poem
is being read and listened to out here
in the open. Behind us
no one is entering or leaving the houses.

Suddenly a hug comes over me and I'm
giving it to you, like a variable star shooting light
off to make itself comfortable, then
subsiding. I finish but keep on holding
you. A man walks up to us and we know he hasn't
come out of nowhere, but if he could, he
would have. He looks homeless because of how
he needs. ‘Can I have on of those?’ he asks you,
and I feel you nod. I'm surprised,
surprised you don't tell him how
it is – that I'm yours, only
yours, etc., exclusive as a nose to
its face. Love – that's what we're talking about, love
that nabs you with ‘for me
only’ and holds on.

So I walk over to him and put my
arms around him and try to
hug him like I mean it. He's got an overcoat on
so thick I can't feel
him past it. I'm starting the hugh
and thinking, ‘How big a hug is this supposed to be?
How lang shall I hold this hug?’ Already
we could be eternal, his arms falling over my
shoulders, my hands not
meeting behind his back, he is so big!

I put my head into his chest and snuggle
in. I lean into him. I lean my blood and my wishes
into him. He stands for it. This is his
and he's starting to give it back so well I know he's
getting it. This hug. So truly, so tenderly
we stop having arms and I don't know if
my lover has walked away or what, or
if the woman is still reading the poem, or the houses –
what about them? – the houses.

Clearly, a little permission is a dangerous thing.
But when you hug someone you want it
to be a masterpiece of connection, the way the button
on his coat will leave the imprint of
a planet on my cheek
when I walk away. When I try to find some place
to go back to.

heart labor/ maggie anderson

When I work too hard and then lie down,
even my sleep is sad and all worn out.
You want me to name the specific sorrows?
They do not matter. You have your own.
Most of the people in the world
go out to work, day after day,
with their voices chained in their throats.
I am swimming a narrow, swift river.
Upstream, the clouds have already darkened
and deep blue holes I cannot see
churn up under the smooth flat rocks.
The Greeks have a word, paropono,
for the complaint without answer,
for how the heart labours, while
all the time our faces appear calm
enough to float through the moonlight.


: maggie anderson, ‘heart labor’; a space filled with moving

the collector/ matthew hollis

Seek rarity as old men might seek time.
By which you meant such glimpses in the grasses:

a fledgling bittern, a Norfolk Hawker,
an earthstar last seen in the war;

and now a scarce fen orchid,
found on just three sites you will not name.

I've seen it, in the reed beds of the alder carr,
staked to keep it out from under foot,

You'd barely note its modesty:
its simple, yellow-greening flowers,

its humble leaves, unscented airs,
so well within the frame of ordinary.

But scarcity can lend a mind to madness,
to strain to keep in harness what runs out.

In these numb unnumbered mornings,
our tea-bags clouding in the cup,

what's common is suddenly so precious:
this sunburst through a pane of glass;

an arrow of geese
pointed somewhere sout;

the toddler in the street below
who looks so far to see just up ahead,

his eyeline tilted skyward,
reaching an ungloved hand for rain.

: matthew hollis, ‘the collector’; gevonden in the analog sea review #2

lies about sea creatures/ ada limón

I lied about the whales. Fantastical blue
water-dwellers, big, slow moaners of the coastal.
I never saw them. Not once that whole frozen year.
Sure, I saw the raw white gannets hit the waves
so hard it could have been a showy blow hole.
But I knew it wasn’t. Sometimes, you just want
something so hard you have to lie about it,
so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute,
how real hunger has a real taste. Someone once
told me gannets, those voracious sea birds
of the North Atlantic chill, go blind from the height
and speed of their dives. But that, too, is a lie.
Gannets never go blind and they certainly never die.

: ada limón, ‘lies about sea creatures’; bright dead things

choices/ tess gallagher

I go to the mountain side
of the house to cut saplings,
and clear a view to snow
on the mountain. But when I look up,
saw in hand, I see a nest clutched in
the uppermost branches.
I don't cut that one.
I don't cut the others either.
Suddenly, in every tree,
an unseen nest
where a mountain
would be.


: tess gallagher, ‘choices’; midnight lantern: new and selected poems