Poems & poem-like things – Page 1190

March 19, 2006September 17, 2015 by Dave Bonta

Woods and water

This entry is part 41 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I have been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own. This is the next to last poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of Zweig’s Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading.

Eternity’s Woods
by Paul Zweig

I
I have come to this house
Of soft angular stone, wondering
How much must fall away before I have nothing.

[Remainder of poem removed to avoid violating copyright]

* * * *

Water

I have sought to borrow inspiration
as others borrow comfort
from strange lovers. Let me

press my ear, I said, against
the scallop shell at the base
of your throat. Let me hear

the throb of the surf, & dream
of ships. What were we
talking about, again? I caught

nothing but a swallowed sob,
a corrosive drip. Compostela
remained a day’s walk away from
the Cape of the End of the Earth,

which was of course pure hype.
Right here in the hollow
where I grew up, I have heard
water trickling under the rocks,

& once my brother & I even dug
for it, four feet down through
a jumble of sandstone. When
we quit, the water sounded

just as loud as it had before
we started. I used to search
for a clearing in the woods
where, when the wind stopped,

the only sound would come
from a hidden spring. But
I didn’t want it ever to be found,

not even by me. Solitude
has since become my deadliest habit.
I don’t know what I am doing

here, talking to a dead poet as if to
my better nature, dreaming of poems
that would taste as good as water.

March 12, 2006 by Dave Bonta

March rain

It’s raining.
Downspouts gargle furiously
around frogs of ice.
The barn cat listens & licks her pregnant belly.

It’s raining, the first warm rain of spring.
Sap rises, & the green nibs
where bulbs will write
their deathless names in the air.

It’s raining, it’s pouring.
Worms poke through the muddy ruins
of once-grand palaces of frost.

It’s raining.
Under the bark of a log,
the ant queen resumes her slow march.

March 10, 2006 by Dave Bonta

Dump in the woods

Same pics, different day

It was in a month of Sundays, shirking from work, that I drove a shovel’s metal moon deep into the old farm dump & came up full. Squat bottles lay nested in circles like dinosaur eggs, or children at play suddenly engulfed by the pyroclastic flow from a backwoods Vesuvius.

To be human is to be the object of a bear’s withering scorn. You won’t read this in any philosophical treatise, but it’s true. I have found survey tape ripped from trees, hunters’ blinds torn apart, an abandoned plastic jerry can stippled with tooth-marks. We must seem slow & skinny & hairless & weak. But worst of all, we are heedless. We dump in the woods. A bear could be watching me right this minute, blinking myopically as the moist wings of her nostrils flutter open & shut.

Springs hope eternally for one last go-round before the ground swallows them, one more, rusty bump & grind of their hurdy-gurdy epithaliamium, muffled now under sheet music of leaves.

Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry,
Go to sleep little baby,
When you awake, you will have cake,
And all the pretty little horses.

Way down yonder, down in the meadow,
There’s a poor little lambie,
Bees and butterflies pecking out its eyes,
The poor little thing cried mammy.

Good god, what hullabaloo used to qualify for a lullaby! No wonder the old toys still make a break for it whenever a flood interrupts their uneasy sleep.

Heaved from the bed of a pickup, the microwave oven bounded down slope and came to rest against a clump of witch hazel with its door ajar. Now at last it was free to welcome all comers, including metal forks & spoons & anything with an ounce of water in it, all the one-time occupants of Noah’s Ark. Scattered nearby, plastic bones of the microwave-safe leviathan slowly crumbled under the sun’s ultraviolet rays.

Glass is forever, chant the moss plants as they crowd in for another mass betrothal.

After Ma Bell gave birth to the first transistor, an engineer quipped: Nature abhors a vacuum tube. But it’s not so. All circuit boards face an equally grim future as viscera: the glass & metal organs of some monstrous creature of habit, abstract & imperishable.

I peer down at the rusty bucket as into a crystal ball, seeing clear to the other side of a slightly squashed world where blue geese rise from rice stubble on wings of zinc.

February 18, 2006May 30, 2016 by Dave Bonta

Lost in thought: poems of Lady Izumi

This morning, for no particular reason, I thought I’d try my hand at some translations of tanka by the Japanese court poet Izumi Shikibu (fl. ca. 1000 CE). I included versions of the first two tanka in earlier posts, back in January and February of 2004.

UPDATE (Feb. 22): I’ve revised the first of these in response to the astute critique and observations of reader Hari Prasad (no web address) in the comments [subsequently lost]

If the one I wait for came now,
what would I do?
Gazing at my garden,
I’m loathe to see anything spoil
its trackless snow.

We hold the flowers
in our thoughts
after we pass,
entrusting ourselves completely
to the oblivious horses.

If I could see you one more time,
even if only by lightning flash
in a night-time storm –
visible, invisible –
it would ease my longing.

(Mourning a deceased lover.)

Once we’re beyond this world,
there’s nothing to cling to –
so thinking, I imagine
you here once again, your reply,
that give-&-take.

Which of us
would she miss the most?
She would miss her children
as I am missing mine,
my own dead daughter.

To be here to find
your name freshly written,
instead of moldering beside you
under the moss –
it’s hard to bear.

(After receiving a piece of mail addressed to her dead daughter.)

Lost in thought,
watching a firefly rise
out of the marsh
as if from my own body,
as if it were me.

February 17, 2006September 17, 2015 by Dave Bonta

Night

This entry is part 40 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’ve been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own. This is the twenty-fourth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of Zweig’s Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or two to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

The Taking Away
by Paul Zweig

The close-fitting sleepless night,
Everything still: the woodchuck in its hole
Under the rock pile, the apple tree outside my window.
[…]

* * * *

Outside In

A night of wind
& the smell of thawed soil,
rustle of nightcrawlers
tugging leaves down
under the earth,
rapid footfalls of rain.
At the woods’ edge,
a constant creaking
& groaning, as if
from doors swinging
loose on their hinges,
which are stiff with rust
from a lifetime in
the open air. I sleep
without dreaming,
wake without waking up.
Two more hairs turn white
according to schedule.
The house shakes
with the effort to keep
from flying apart.

February 10, 2006September 9, 2013 by Dave Bonta

Claiming the Body

Body
of work
you make my heart race

body of evidence
weighed
wanting

body of knowledge
errata

body of the report
here comes
the red pen

governing body
hold me

body of water
hold me
up

body count
deadening
you overwhelm

body image
upside-down in the lens

body in motion
you rest
at a constant speed

body of Christ
one size
fits all

body of missing pilot
missing
missing

body of a Venus
elastic
full of give

body work
everything
comes into play

body art
thou.
__________

See also Chant for the Summit of the World Body

February 2, 2006September 17, 2015 by Dave Bonta

A sown darkness

This entry is part 39 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’ve been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own. This is the twenty-third poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of Zweig’s Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or two to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

The Other Ocean
by Paul Zweig

It was the whip-marks of the horned asp,
And the Beduin sucking his coffee
Through cracked fleshy lips…
[Remainder of poem removed]
* * * *

The Other Coltrane

when the new moon’s still a sliver
pale fingernail against
the blackboard

& you hear
the shriek of wheels gone
slightly off-true with the track

ninety-nine cars heaped high with coal
hurtling by in the darkness

don’t it make you shiver
that night train

January 31, 2006September 17, 2015 by Dave Bonta

Always present

This entry is part 38 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’ve been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own. This is the twenty-second poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of Zweig’s Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or two to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

And Yet . . .
by Paul Zweig

It’s true, we carry the world inside us,
Always present like light.
[…]

* * * *

Inside-Out

1.
It’s false, the world we carry inside us,
like a stone in a chicken’s crop,
that false tooth.
The winter light;
the red haze of maple buds just beginning to swell;
the story in the paper about the walled-off beach in Haiti
where cruise ships disgorge their passengers
without telling them where they are,
& the local man interviewed for the story says
They want to come here, because they’ve been everywhere else
& my country is the loveliest of all –
it hurts, this world, it makes us ache with longing.
And yet no amount of saliva will grow a pearl around it,
because it is not the real world, which we do not know.

2.
But the world knows us.
It doesn’t stop where we do, at the fingertips,
doesn’t get sidetracked in the labyrinths of lung & gut.
We glow in its shadow the way the moon glows, lurid,
during an eclipse.
It seeds us with cities, this world that was once a womb.
When we die, the abandoned residents
eat themselves out of house & home.

3.
Like the wish hiding in the wishbone,
I take my own sweet time.
If you want to see me sooner, stand
between two mirrors turned to face each other.
Though the antibodies will all muster out,
crane your neck as best you can,
look over their shoulders.
There at the end of the tunnel:
that darkness. A hint of stars.

January 22, 2006September 17, 2015 by Dave Bonta

Exodus

This entry is part 37 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’ve been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own. This is the twenty-first poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of Zweig’s Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or two to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

Parting the Sea
by Paul Zweig

Fog hides the shallow ditch, no more
Than a grassy furrow, marking the edge of our land.
[…]

* * * *

Molding the Image
Aaron speaks

Stay up on the mountain too long, & it changes you.
Droplets of cloud cling to your beard.
Your skin begins to glow like a salamander’s belly.
The occasional groans of the trees start to sound
like the way a crowd should murmur.

Waking up every morning to find the same,
present moment whispering
its incessant demands in your ear –
it makes you intolerable.
You lose touch with the teeming pleasures
that ordinary people crave, because their days are long
& time points in one direction.

Living in the clouds, you lose all perspective,
until one day your worst fantasies
rise up against you:
the luster of gold unfastened from wrist & ankle,
oiled bodies ready for some glistening bullock.
The smashed tablets.
The swords dripping with gore.

Look, I am not that man Moses,
so incoherent with whatever strong emotion
happens to possess him.
God gave me the subtle tongue of a go-between
& the vision to match, bending
in both directions. Look,
the needs of the people are holy to me.
I have been to the mountain, & I can tell you,
there’s nothing up there that’s even faintly human.

January 19, 2006September 17, 2015 by Dave Bonta

Wake

This entry is part 36 of 42 in the series Antiphony: Paul Zweig

I’ve been reading Paul Zweig, and responding to his poems with poems of my own. This is the twentieth poem in the third (“Eternity’s Woods”) section of Zweig’s Selected and Last Poems, followed by my response. See here for details on this experiment in responsive reading. I’ll remove Zweig’s poems after a week or two to prevent egregious copyright infringement.

Early Waking
by Paul Zweig

Again the ashen light,
A tiny spider swinging on its pendulum thread
Against the pane.
[…]

* * * *

Waking Up Dead

Lost the letter I in a card game
& wake up still a little drunk.
The sky looks like the proverbial world
of hurt, scarred by contrails that fade slowly,
much too slowly.
Laundry flaps on the line, & I can make out
every word: Red. Black.
Blue. The dark wash.

But where is everybody?
This old light bulb is fresh out of ideas,
even bad ones.
This body wants to be thumbed through
like someone’s bedtime reading.
The kind with covers of broken-down leather,
dog-eared pages edged
in ineradicable gilt –
the sun through closed eyelids.

Jesus.
This would be a damn sight easier
if I still made sense.