the tragedy of the leaves

Charles Bukowski

I awakened to dryness and the ferns were dead,

the potted plants yellow as corn;

my woman was gone

and the empty bottles like bled corpses

surrounded me with their uselessness;

the sun was still good, though,

and my landlady's note cracked in fine and

undemanding yellowness; what was needed now

was a good comedian, ancient style, a jester

with jokes upon absurd pain; pain is absurd

because it exists, nothing more;

I shaved carefully with an old razor

the man who had once been young and

said to have genius; but

that's the tragedy of the leaves,

the dead ferns, the dead plants;

and I walked into a dark hall

where the landlady stood

execrating and final,

sending me to hell,

waving her fat, sweaty arms

and screaming

screaming for rent

because the world had failed us

both.

____________________________________________________________________

the birds

Charles Bukowski

the acute and terrible air hangs with murder

as summer birds mingle in the branches

and warbleio

and mystify the clamor of the mind;

an old parrot

who never talks,

sits thinking in a Chinese laundry,

disgruntled

forsaken

celibate;

there is red on his wing

where there should be green,

and between us

the recognition of 

an immense and wasted life.

...my second wife left me

because I set our birds free:

one yellow, with crippled wing

quickly going down and to the left,

cat-meat,

cackling like an organ;

and the other,

mean green,

of empty thimble head,

popping up like a rocket

high into the hollow sky,

disappearing like sour love

and yesterday's desire

and leaving me

forever.

and when my wife

returned that night

with her bags and plans,

her tricks and shining greeds,

she found me

glittering over a yellow feather

seeking out the music

which she,

oddly,

failed to 

hear.

____________________________________________________________________

Through the Struan Door

Robin Robertson

There is the story of a boy, fetched from the water.

He was set to work, feeding the cauldron of the she-witch —

a whole year, stirring the herbs that would magic

wisdom and future-sight to her two children,

before he made the mistake.

Licking some spilt juice from his hand, his mind turned;

he knew then what would happen next.

Raging that he'd swallowed the cream

of her enchantment, the glamourie,

the witch went after him.

            Gifted with knowledge now,

                            he changed to the ways of a mountain hare

so she made the form of a hunting hound,

                            he turned to a mackerel

            slipping under the waves,

so she swam into the shape of a sea-otter bitch,

                            he flew up with the wings of a starling

so she stopped from the sky as a hawk,

                            and then he knew it was almost done

            so he lost himself in a field, as an ear of corn,

and she made herself back to a huge brown rat and ate him down.

But he did not die. He just set seed, inside. The witch waited,

and nine months later she was ready with her knife.

Re-born, he was so beautiful she couldn't cut his throat —

so she tied him inside a leather-skin bag, dropped it

into a coracle, and sent him out to sea.

But he did not die, and was found alive

on another coast, after weeks on the ocean,

and he grew to become a bard, they say,

singing forever of her greed and cruelty.

How being strong is being many.

*

My doors swing open. In the looking-glass

the hair on the side of my head pricks up, 

coarsening, going from red to grey, each ear

twisting outwards into a cup; my chin

lengthens to beard, the forehead nubs

grow heavy, hardening to horn,

a new shape becoming visible;

then the eyes roll back into white

and starts to spin like a drum

through all the changes, settling with a soft click

into goat:

each fat, black, horizontal bar of pupil

a floating letter-box.

What have I ushered in now: already

streaming over this threshold?

A body in flux — a man or a beast or a god —

a kind of Christ, perhaps: busy at his endless resurrections.

_________________________________________

Struan: anglicisation of srùthán (Gaelic) meaning 'place of streams'

story of a boy: a version of the Welsh legend of Taliesin

 

Of Mùthadh/Mutability

Robin Robinson

            (a protection spell)            

This book is for the taken: for all those feart of the glamour,

the skaith of the evil eye — weird-set, ill-minted

or only wildering — their bodies in motion, flowing

or full-flown, rapt with heart-hunger.

*

Grass twists up through my hair now

and my mouth is full of stones.

Tell my mother and father I am coming, tell them

I have not grown old.

____________________________________________________________________

mùthadh: (Gaelic) change, mutability, metamorphosis; pronounced 'moo-huh'

glamour: magic, enchantment (cf. glamourie, gramarye, grimoire)

skaith: hurt, harm, damage

weird-set: fated, destined, cursed

ill-minted: malformed

wildering: going astray, bewildered, lost

flowing: unstable, changeable

heart-hunger: a longing for affection

The Shadow on the Stone

Thomas Hardy

     I went by the Druid stone

   That stands in the garden white and lone,

And I stopped and looked at the shifting shadows

   That at some moments there are thrown

   From the tree hard by with a rhythmic swing,

   And they shaped in my imagining

To the shade that a well-known head and shoulders

   Threw there when she was gardening.

     I thought her behind my back,

   Yea, her I long had learned to lack,

And I said: "I am sure you are standing behind me,

   Though how do you get into this old track?"

   And there was no sound but the fall of a leaf

   As a sad response; and to keep down grief

I would not turn my head to discover

   That there was nothing in my belief.

     Yet I wanted to look and see

   That nobody stood at the back of me;

But I thought once more: "Nay, I'll not unvision

   A shape which, somehow, there may be."

   So I went on softly from the glade,

   And left her behind me throwing her shade,

As she were indeed an apparition —

   My head unturned lest my dream should fade.

____________________________________________________________________

The Arrow and the Song

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I shot an arrow into the air,

It fell to earth, I knew not where;

For, so swiftly it flew, the sight

Could not follow it in its flight.

I breathed a song into the air,

It fell to earth, I knew not where;

For who has sight so keen and strong,

That it can follow the flight of song?

Long, long afterward, in an oak

I found the arrow, still unbroke;

And the song, from beginning to end,

I found again in the heart of a friend.

____________________________________________________________________

 Wind in a Box

Terrance Hayes

   —after Lorca

I want to always sleep beneath a bright red blanket

of leaves. I want to never wear a coat of ice.

I want to learn to walk without blinking.

I want to outlive the turtle and turtle's father,

the stone. I want a mouth full of permissions

and a pink glistening bud. If the wildflower and ant hill

can return after sleeping each season, I want to walk

out of this house wearing nothing but wind.

I want to greet you, I want to wait for the bus with you

weighing less than a chill. I want to fight off the bolts

of gray lighting the alcoves and winding paths

of your hair. I want to fight off the damp nudgings

of snow. I want to fight off the wind.

I want to be the wind and I want to fight off the wind

with its sagging banner of isolation, its swinging

screen doors, its gilded boxes, and neatly folded pamphlets

of noise. i want to fight off the dull straight lines

of two by fours and endings, your disapprovals,

your doubts and regulations, your carbon copies.

If the locust can abandon its suit,

I want a brand new name. I want the pepper's fury

and the salt's tenderness. I want the virtue

of the evening rain, but not its gossip.

I want the moon's intuition, but not its questions. 

I want the malice of nothing on earth. I want to enter

every room in a strange electrified city

and find you there. I want your lips around the bell of flesh

at the bottom of my ear. I want to be the mirror,

but not the nightstand. I do not want to be the light switch.

I do not want to be the yellow photograph

or book of poems. When I leave this body, Woman,

I want to be a pure flame. I want to be your song.

____________________________________________________________________

Love Song

Denise Levertov

Your beauty, which I lost sight of once

for a long time, is long,

not symmetrical, and wears

the earth colors that make me see it.

A long beauty, what is that?

A song

that can be sung over and over,

long notes or long bones.

Love is a landscape the long mountains

define but don't

shut off from the

unseeable distance.

In fall, in fail,

your trees stretch

their long arms in sleeves

of earth-red and

sky-yellow, a little

lop-sided. I take

long walks among them. The grapes

that need frost to ripen them

are amber and grow deep in the

hedge, half-concealed,

the way your beauty grows in long tendrils

half in darkness.

The Peace of Wild Things
Wendell Berry


When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.


_________________________________________________

Argument

Argument
Elizabeth Bishop

Days that cannot bring you near

or will not,

Distance trying to appear

something more than obstinate,

argue argue argue with me

endlessly 

neither proving you less wanted nor less dear.

Distance: Remember all that land

beneath the plane;

the coastline

of dim beaches deep in sand

stretching indistinguishably

all the way to where my reasons end?

Days: And think

of all those cluttered instruments,

one to a fact, 

canceling each other's experience;

how they were

like some hideous calendar

"Compliments of Never & Forever, Inc."

The intimidating sound

of these voices

we must separately find

can and shall be vanquished:

Days and Distance disarrayed again

and gone

both for good and from the gentle battleground.

______________________________________

Plea to the Wind

Alice Oswald

Describe the Wind, 

                        Wind!

Say something marked by discomfort

That wanders many cities and harbours,

Not knowing the langauge.

Be much travelled.

Start with nothing but the hair blown sideways

And say:

            Gentle

                       South-easterly

                                  Drift

                       With Rain.

Say: Downdraught.

Unglue the flog from the woods from the waist up

And speak disparagingly of leaves.

Be an old man blowing a shell.

Blow over the glumness of a girl

Looking up at the air in her red hood

And say:

                         Suddenly

                                     Violent

                                          Short-lived

                                     Gust.

Then come down glittering

With a pair of ducks to rooftop.

Go on. Be North-easterly.

Be enough chill to ripple a pool.

Be a rumour of winter.

Whip the green cloth off the hills

And keep on quietly

Lifting the skirts of women not wanting to be startled

And pushing clouds like towers of clean linen

Till you get to the

                         Thin

                              Cry

                         That 

                              Suffers

                 On seas.

Ignore it.

Say Snow.

Say Ditto.

Wait for five days

In which everything fades except aging.

Then try to describe being followed by heavy rain.

Describe voices and silverings,

Say:

           Strong

              Wet

       Southwester

From December to March.

Describe everything leaning.

Bring a tray of cool air to the back door.

Speak increasingly rustlingly.

Say something winged

Om the branch of the heart.

Say:

               Song.

Beacsue you know these things.

You are both Breath

             And Breath

And your mouth mentions me

Just at the point where I end.

                                                                                                     

Hymn to Iris

Alice Oswald

Quick moving goddess of the rainbow

You whose being is only an afterglow of a passing-through

Put your hands

Put your heaven-taken shape down

On the ground. Now. Anywhere

Like a bent down bough of nothing

A bridge built out of the linked cells of thin air

And let there be instantly in its underlight —

At street corners, on swings, out of car windows —

A three-moment blessing for all bridges

May impossible rifts be often delicately crossed

By bridges of two thrown ropes or one dropped plank

May the unfixed forms of water be warily leaned over

On flexible high bridges, huge iron sketches of the mathematics of strain

And bridges of see-through stone, the living-space drips and echoes

May two fields be bridged by a stile

And two hearts by the tilting footbridge of a glance

And may I often wake on the broken bridge of a word,

Like in the wind the trace of a web. Tethered to nothing

Crossing the Water
Sylvia Plath

Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.

Where do the black trees go that drink there?

Their shadows must cover Canada.

A little light is filtering from the water flowers.

Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:

They are round and flat and full of dark advice.

Cold worlds shake from the oar.

The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.

A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale land;

Stars open among the lilies.

Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?

This is the silence of astounded souls.

An October Salmon

Ted Hughes

He's lying in poor water, a yard or so depth of poor safety.

Maybe only two feet under the no-protection of an outleaning small oak,

Half under a tangle of brambles.

After his two thousand miles, he rests,

Breathing in that lap of easy current

In his graveyard pool.

About six pounds weight,

Four years old at most, and hardly a winter at sea —

But already a veteran,

Already a death-patched hero. So quickly it's over!

So briefly he roamed the gallery of marvels!

Such sweet months, so richly embroidered into earth's beauty-dress,

Her life-robe —

Now worn out with her tirelessness, her insatiable quest,

Hangs in the flow, a frayed scarf —

An autumnal pod of his flower,

The mere hull of his prime, shrunk at shoulder and flank.

The sea-going Aurora Borealis of his April fury,

The primrose and violet of that first upfling in the estuary

Ripened to muddy dregs,

The river reclaiming his sea-metals —

In the October light

He hangs there, patched with leper-cloths.

Death has dressed him

In her clownish ceremonials, badges and decorations,

Mapping the completion of his service,

His face a ghoul-mask, a dinosaur of senility, and his whole body

A fungoid anemone of canker —

Can the caress of water ease him?

The flow will not let up for a minute.

What a change! From that covenant of Polar light

To this shroud in a gutter!

What a death-in-life! — to be his own spectre!

His living body become death's puppet,

Dolled by death in her crude paints and drapes —

He haunts his own staring vigil,

And suffers the subjugation, and the dumbness,

And the humiliation of the role!

And that is how it is.

That is what is going on here, under the scrubby oak tree, hour after hour.

That is what the splendour of the sea has come down to,

And the eye of ravenous joy — king of infinite liberty

In the flashing expanse, the bloom of sea-life,

On the surge-ride of elation, weightless,

Body simply the armature of energy

In that earliest sea-freedom, the savage amazement of life,

The salt mouthful of actual existence,

With strength like light —

Yet this was always with him. This was inscribed in his egg.

This chamber of horrors is also home.

He was probably hatched in this very pool.

And this was the only mother he ever had, this uneasy channel of minnows

Under the mill-wall, with bicycle wheels, car-tyres, bottles 

And sunk sheets of corrugated iron.

People walking their dogs trail their evening shadows across him.

If boys see him they will try to kill him.

All this, too, is stitched into the torn richness, 

The epic poise

That holds him so steady in his wounds, so loyal to his doom, so patient

In the machinery of heaven.