I enrich the darkening horizon
with chills of the great secret.
All that is hard to know
becomes a greater riddle
under my very eyes
because I love alike
flowers, lips, eyes, and graves.
Miyazawa Kenji (1896 – 1933)
Daydreaming on the Trail2
(Translation by Gary Snyder)
A lonely stretch, in the bind of poor fishing and drought,
following the ocean
crossing pass after pass,
fields of wild reeds,
I’ve come this far alone,
dozing in the pale sun
on the sand of a dried-up riverbed
back and shoulder chilled
something bothered me—
I think at that last quartzite pass
I left the oak gate in the fence
of the cow pasture open
probably because I was hurrying—
a white gate—
did I close it or not?
light cool sky,
mistletoe on chestnut floats in vision
manylayered clouds upriver
cool lattice of sunlight
some unknown big bird calling
faintly, crork crork
Louise Bogan (1897 – 1970)
from Beginning and End—Knowledge1
Now that I know
how passion warms little
of flesh in the mould,
and treasure is brittle,—
I’ll lie here and learn
how, over their ground
trees make a long shadow
and a light sound.
Ernest Hemingway (1899 – 1960)
from Wanderings — Chapter Heading1
For we have thought the longer thoughts
and gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devils’ tunes,
shivering home to pray;
to serve one master in the night,
another in the day.
Wen I-to (1899 – 1946)
Dead Water2
Translation by Ma Wentong
A pond despaired of any hope,
no breeze can stir up any ripples.
Better be the dump of disused brass and iron wares
and the cesspool of leftover dishes.
Maybe the brass will green into sapphire
and iron can will the rust into peach flowers;
let grease weave into colorful silky patterns,
and the mould steam out rainbows.
Let this dead water ferment into a pond of green wine,
floating with foams like pearls,
with smaller pearls simmering into larger ones
that pop out by the onslaught of wine thieving bugs.
A pond of such despair
has its own claims to freshness.
If frogs cannot put up with the silence
it is the dead water that invokes their songs.
This is a pond despaired of hope;
this is not where beauty dwells.
Better let the evil plough in all this
see what would come out of it.
Anonymous
The Anvil—God’s Word1
Last eve I passed beside a blacksmith’s door
and heard the anvil ring the vesper chime;
then, looking in, I saw upon the floor
old hammers, worn with beating years of time.
“How many anvils have you had,” said I,
“To wear and batter all these hammers so?”
“Just one,” said he, and then with twinkling eye,
“The anvil wears the hammers out, you know.”
And so, thought I, the anvil of God’s Word,
for ages skeptics blows have beat upon;
yet, though the noise of falling blows was heard,
the anvil is unharmed—the hammers gone.
Langston Hughes (1902 – 1967)
Dream Deferred: Harlem2
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Evil1
Looks like what drives me crazy
don’t have no effect on you—
but I’m gonna keep on at it
till it drives you crazy, too.
Maybe2
I asked you, baby,
if you understood—
you told me that you didn’t,
but you thought you would.
Suicide’s Note3
The calm,
cool face of the river
asked me for a kiss.
Stevie Smith (1902 – 1983)
Not Waving but Drowning4
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
but still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
and not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larking
and now he’s dead
it must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
they said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
and not waving but drowning.
Sunt Leones1
The lions who ate the Christians
on the sands of the arena
by indulging native appetites
played as has now been seen a
not entirely negligible part
in consolidating at the very start
the position of the Early Christian Church.
Initiatory rights are always bloody
in the lions, it appears
from contemporary art, made a study
of dyeing Coliseum sands a ruddy
liturgically sacrificial hue
and if the Christians felt a little blue—
well, people being eaten often do.
Theirs was the death, and there’s was a crown undying,
a state of things which must be satisfying.
My point which up to this has been obscured
is that it was the lions who procured
by chewing up blood gristle flesh and bone
the martyrdoms on which the church has grown.
I only write this poem because I thought it rather looked
as if the part the lions played was being overlooked.
By lions’ jaws great benefits and blessings were begotten
and so our debt to Lionhood must never be forgotten.
W.H. Auden (1907 – 1973)
Dichtung and Wahrheit1
XXXIII
Alas, it is as impossible that my answer to the question Who are You?
and your answer to the question “Who am I?” should be the same as that
either of them should be exactly and completely true. But if they are not
the same, and neither is quite true, then my assertion I love You cannot
be quite true either.
From Selected Shorts2
Whatever their personal faith,
all poets, as such,
are polytheists.
Marginalia (Extracts)3
When we do evil,
we and our victims
are equally bewildered.
A dead man
who never caused others to die
seldom rates a statue.
Animal femurs
ascribed to saints who never
existed, are still
more holy than portraits
of conquerors who,
unfortunately, did.
His thoughts pottered
from verses
to sex to God
without punctuation.
How cheerful they looked,
the unoccupied bar-stools
in mid-afternoon,
freed for some hours from the weight
of drab defeated bottoms.
Even Hate should be precise:
very few White Folks
have fucked their mothers.
Zawgee (1907 – 1973)
The Way of the Water-Hyacinth1
Translated from the Burmese by Lyn Aye
Bobbing on the breeze blown waves
bowing to the tide
hyacinth rises and falls
falling but not felled
by flotsam, twigs, leaves
she ducks, bobs and weaves.
Ducks, ducks by the score
jolting, quacking and more
she spins through—
spinning, swamped, slimed, sunk
she rises, resolute
still crowned by petals.
Elizabeth Bishop (1911 – 1979)
Filling Station1
Oh, but it is dirty!
—this little filling station,
oil-soaked, oil-permeated
to a disturbing, over-all
black translucency.
Be careful with that match!
Father wears a dirty,
oil-soaked monkey suit
that cuts him under the arms,
and several quick and saucy
and greasy sons assist him
(it’s a family filling station),
all quite thoroughly dirty.
Do they live in the station?
It has a cement porch
behind the pumps, and on it
a set of crushed and grease-
impregnated wickerwork;
on the wicker sofa
a dirty dog, quite comfy.
Some comic books provide
the only note of color—
of certain color. They lie
upon a big dim doily
draping a taboret
(part of the set), beside
a big hirsute begonia.
Why the extraneous plant?
Why the taboret?
Why, oh why, the doily?
(Embroidered in daisy stitch
with marguerites, I think,
and heavy with gray crochet.)
Somebody embroidered the doily.
Somebody waters the plant,
or oils it, maybe. Somebody
arranges the rows of cans
so that they softly say:
ESSO—SO—SO—SO
to high-strung automobiles.
Somebody loves us all.
In the Waiting Room1
In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist’s appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist’s waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
—“Long Pig,” the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
—Aunt Consuelo’s voice—
not very loud or long.
I wasn’t at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn’t. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I—we—were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.
I said to myself: three days
and you’ll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
—I couldn’t look any higher—
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.
Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities—
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts—
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How—I didn’t know any
word for it—how “unlikely” …
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn’t?
The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.
Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.
One Art1
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Sestina1
September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
si
ts in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.
She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,
it’s time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle’s small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac
on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.
It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.
But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.
The Armadillo1
for Robert Lowell
This is the time of year
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain height,
The Giant Book of Poetry Page 34
