February 2012
1 post
December 2011
3 posts
September 2011
1 post
"The world to come... I don't really know what... →
July 2011
3 posts
Debussy - Pour le piano: 2. Sarabande
August 2010
2 posts
April 2010
1 post
The Poet Goes About Her Business
by Linda Gregg
Michele has become another dead little girl. An easy poem.
Instant Praxitelean. Instant seventy-five year old photograph
of my grandmother when she was a young woman with shadows
I imagine were blue around her eyes. The beauty of it.
Such guarded sweetness. What a greed of bruised gardenias.
Oh Christ, whose name rips silk, I have seen raw cypresses
so dark the mind comes to them...
November 2009
2 posts
Borges y Yo [a classic]
“The other one, Borges, is the one to whom things happen. I walk through the streets of Buenos Aires and I delay myself, perhaps almost mechanically, to look at the arch of an entrance hall and the grillwork on the gate; of Borges I get news through the mail, and I see his name on a list of professors or in a biographical dictionary. I like hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography,...
Losing Track
by Denise Levertov
Long after you have swung back
away from me
I think you are still with me:
you come in close to the shore
on the tide
and nudge me awake the way
a boat adrift nudges the pier:
am I a pier
half-in half-out of the water?
and in the pleasure of that communion
I lose track,
the moon I watch goes down, the
tide swings you away before
I know I'm
alone again long since,
mud...
August 2009
2 posts
July 2009
1 post
If It All Went Up in Smoke
by George Oppen
that smoke
would remain
the forever
savage country poem's light borrowed
light of the landscape and one's footprints praise
from distance
in the close
crowd all
that is strange the sources
the wells the poem begins
neither in word
nor meaning but the small
selves haunting
us in the stones and is less
always than that help me I am
of that people the grass
blades touch
and...
June 2009
1 post
May 2009
2 posts
Δώρια
By Ezra Pound
Be in me as the eternal moods
of the bleak wind, and not
As transient things are -—
gaiety of flowers.
Have me in the strong loneliness
of sunless cliffs
And of gray waters.
Let the gods speak softly of us
In days hereafter,
the shadowy flowers of Orcus
Remember thee.
“And then, thought Krug, on top of everything, I am a slave of images. We speak...”
– Vladimir Nabokov, Bend Sinister
April 2009
5 posts
“Im Wunderschönen Monat Mai”, from...
cutting greens
By Lucille Clifton
curling them around
i hold their bodies in obscene embrace
thinking of everything but kinship.
collards and kale
strain against each strange other
away from my kissmaking hand and
the iron bedpot.
the pot is black.
the cutting board is black,
my hand,
and just for a minute
the greens roll black under the knife,
and the kitchen twists dark on its spine
and i taste in my natural...
from "Rising, Falling, Hovering"
by C.D. Wright
Floods of feelings
militarize our nights currents of solitude cordon off
our days Oct 16 the famous Carousel Bar reopened
in the Crescent City customers resumed drinking
revolving and sinking Providence continues to launch
hurtle hurl its leaves And as of Sat Nov 12
according to the Associated Press 2,066
of our members will remain Forever Young
O...
Song
By H. D.
You are as gold
as the half-ripe grain
that merges to gold again,
as white as the white rain
that beats through
the half-opened flowers
of the great flower tufts
thick on the black limbs
of an Illyrian apple bough.
Can honey distill such fragrance
As your bright hair --
For your face is as fair as rain,
yet as rain that lies clear
on white honey-comb,
lends radiance to...
March 2009
4 posts
Andrew Bird - Anonanimal
Jorge Luis Borges - The Circular Ruins →
No one saw him disembark in the unanimous night, no one saw the bamboo canoe sink into the sacred mud, but in a few days there was no one who did not know that the taciturn man came from the South and that his home had been one of those numberless villages upstream…
The Red Dog
by Laura Jensen
You know that he is going to die
as soon as I tell you
he is standing beside me
his hair in spikes and dripping
from his body. He turns his head.
Canadian geese
all of them floating along the shore.
The red dog is swimming for them
only his head shows now
they flap into a curve and move
farther along the bay.
You know that he is going to die
this is the time for it
this is the...
“You only disappointed me once,
and that was when you were angry about
and I...”
February 2009
5 posts
The Dismemberment Plan - Spider in the Snow
The Locust Tree in Flower
by William Carlos Williams
Among
of
green
stiff
old
bright
broken
branch
come
white
sweet
May
again
Thao - Fear and Convenience
January 2009
9 posts
“Between 50 billion and 70 billion cells die each day due to apoptosis in the...”
– Wikipedia article on apoptosis
Practice
by Ellen Bryant Voigt
To weep unbidden, to wake at night in order to weep, to wait for the whisker on the face of the clock to twitch again, moving the dumb day forward— is this merely practice? Some believe in heaven, some in rest. We’ll float, you said. Afterward we’ll float between two worlds— five bronze beetles stacked like spoons in one peony blossom, drugged by lust: if I came back as a...
Bach, Fugue no. 8 in D# Minor, Book II of...
December 2008
1 post
All the modern things, Like cars and such, Have always existed. They’ve just been waiting In a mountain For the right Moment