"We spend our morning
in the flower stalls counting
the dark tongues of bells
that hang from ropes waiting
for the silence of an hour."
POTD - There She Is by Linda Gregg
"...I think
I am supposed to look. I am not supposed
to turn away. I am supposed to see each detail
and all expression gone..."
POTD - The Rain by Robert Creeley
The Rain
All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.
What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it
that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me
something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.
Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out
of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.
I had the great privilege of meeting Robert Creeley on several occasions and then carry on a bit of a correspondance with him for a few months. Initially I was so struck by his resemblance to my own father, even down to the one blind/bad eye. But what emerged in our emails was much more connection than instruction. His reading suggestions to me were not pat suggestions but had all the marks of his having listened and read. I can only hope that I was able to give him something, anything in return.
POTD - Dream Song 29 by John Berryman
Dream Song 29
There sat down, once, a thing on Henry’s heart
só heavy, if he had a hundred years
& more, & weeping, sleepless, in all them time
Henry could not make good.
Starts again always in Henry’s ears
the little cough somewhere, an odour, a chime.
And there is another thing he has in mind
like a grave Sienese face a thousand years
would fail to blur the still profiled reproach of. Ghastly,
with open eyes, he attends, blind.
All the bells say: too late. This is not for tears;
thinking.
But never did Henry, as he thought he did,
end anyone and hacks her body up
and hide the pieces, where they may be found.
He knows: he went over everyone, & nobody’s missing.
Often he reckons, in the dawn, them up.
Nobody is ever missing.
Source: The Dream Songs (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1991)
Berryman's voice, immutable through all its transformations, speaks with such a bright-dark thread.
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POTD - Mayakovsky by Frank O'Hara (and read by Don Draper)
Mayakovsky
BY FRANK O'HARA
1
My heart’s aflutter!
I am standing in the bath tub
crying. Mother, mother
who am I? If he
will just come back once
and kiss me on the face
his coarse hair brush
my temple, it’s throbbing!
then I can put on my clothes
I guess, and walk the streets.
2
I love you. I love you,
but I’m turning to my verses
and my heart is closing
like a fist.
Words! be
sick as I am sick, swoon,
roll back your eyes, a pool,
and I’ll stare down
at my wounded beauty
which at best is only a talent
for poetry.
Cannot please, cannot charm or win
what a poet!
and the clear water is thick
with bloody blows on its head.
I embrace a cloud,
but when I soared
it rained.
3
That’s funny! there’s blood on my chest
oh yes, I’ve been carrying bricks
what a funny place to rupture!
and now it is raining on the ailanthus
as I step out onto the window ledge
the tracks below me are smoky and
glistening with a passion for running
I leap into the leaves, green like the sea
4
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.
It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.
Frank O’Hara, “Mayakovsky” from Meditations in an Emergency. Copyright © 1957 by Frank O’Hara. Reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc..
Source: Meditations in an Emergency (Grove/Atlantic Inc., 1996)
Don Draper does a bit of justice to the inimitable Frank O'Hara.
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POTD - ALL HALLOWS by Louise Glück
All Hallows
by Louise Glück
Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
Sleep in their blue yoke,
The fields having been
Picked clean, the sheaves
Bound evenly and piled at the roadside
Among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:
This is the barrenness
Of harvest or pestilence
And the wife leaning out the window
With her hand extended, as in payment,
And the seeds
Distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one
And the soul creeps out of the tree.
One fall, while teaching at a girl's high school in Taipei, I decided to have students memorize and recite this poem. Two years later when I returned to teach another term, some of the students ran up to recite it in its entirety. Glück's words seem to just fall into place.
POTD - The Kingfisher by Mary Oliver
Mary Oliver
The Kingfisher
by Mary Oliver
The kingfisher rises out of the black wave
like a blue flower, in his beak
he carries a silver leaf. I think this is
the prettiest world—so long as you don’t mind
a little dying, how could there be a day in your whole life
that doesn’t have its splash of happiness?
There are more fish than there are leaves
on a thousand trees, and anyway the kingfisher
wasn’t born to think about it, or anything else.
When the wave snaps shut over his blue head, the water
remains water—hunger is the only story
he has ever heard in his life that he could believe.
I don’t say he’s right. Neither
do I say he’s wrong. Religiously he swallows the silver leaf
with its broken red river, and with a rough and easy cry
I couldn’t rouse out of my thoughtful body
if my life depended on it, he swings back
over the bright sea to do the same thing, to do it
(as I long to do something, anything) perfectly.
Mary Oliver will certainly be a poet I often reach for. This first POEM OF THE DAY from Oliver shows her greatest strength: being a fearless and talented student of the world.
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