Poems from Larry Robinson

Where We Are

(after Bede)

A man tears a chunk of bread off the brown loaf,
then wipes the gravy from his plate. Around him at the long table, friends fill their mouths with duck and roast pork, fill their cups from pitchers of wine. Hearing a high twittering, the man

*
looks to see a bird -- black with a white patch
beneath its beak -- flying the length of the hall,
having flown in by a window over the door. As straight as a taut string, the bird flies beneath the roofbeams, as firelight flings its shadow against the ceiling.

*
The man pauses -- one hand holds the bread,
the other rests upon the table -- and watches the bird, perhaps a swift, fly toward the window
at the far end of the room. He begins to point it out to his friends, but one is telling hunting stories, as another describes the best way
*
to butcher a pig. The man shoves the bread in his mouth, then slaps his hand down hard on the thigh of the woman seated beside him, squeezes his fingers to feel the firm muscles and tendons beneath the fabric of her dress.

A huge dog snores on the stone hearth by the fire.

*
From the window comes the clicking of pine needles blown against it by an October wind.

A half moon hurries along behind scattered clouds, while the forest of black spruce and bare maple and birch surrounds the long hall the way a single rock can be surrounded
*
by a river. This is where we are in history -- to think the table will remain full; to think the forest will remain where we have pushed it; to think our bubble of good fortune will save us from the night -- a bird flies in from the dark, flits across a lighted hall and disappears.

*
******- Stephen Dobyns

Against Sundials

The gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish hours! Confound him, too,
Who in this place set up a sundial,
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small portions! When I was a boy,
My belly was my sundial -- one surer,
Truer, and more exact than any of them.
This dial told me when 'twas proper time
To go to dinner, when I had aught to eat;
But nowadays, why even when I have,
I can't fall to unless the sun gives leave.
The town's so full of these confounded dials
The greatest part of the inhabitants,
Shrunk up with hunger, crawl along the street.

- Plautus
(c.254-184 BC)

Shame

after Pessoa

I miss things that meant nothing to me
and so much was nothing.
The world begins returning
like a sailor climbing the hill
to his house, lugging a duffle
bulging with what really happened.

As if the leaves aren't falling
in your mind. As if your memories
aren't like bright leaves falling,
so that the sidewalks are there
only because they are remembered
under the leaves, and things not remembered
are reshaped and unsaved.

I labor to defend myself
against the tedium of the telephone
and its cries of uncaring delight.

These dreams, these visions,
what a vulgar way to be released.
But the squeak of my office chair
is not better, the static of admonition
on the public address system.

My co-worker says, the nice thing
about all this is you can't miss
what you can't remember.
Suppose you had Alzheimer's.
You'd stare at the phone
and it would mean less than nothing.

Shame of the insensate rushed hour.
Immobilized in spurts on the way home,
I miss my knitted sweater,
I miss my grandmother.
Then I climb the hill
with leaves layering the driveway
and the structure of maples candidly clear.

- Ron Slate

*Mindful
*
Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
*
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
*
in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for -
to look, to listen,
*
to lose myself
inside this soft world -
to instruct myself
over and over
*
in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,
*
the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant -
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,
*
the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help
*
but grow wise
with such teachings
as these -
the untrimmable light
*
of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?
*
- Mary Oliver

A Prayer

Refuse to fall down.
If you cannot refuse to fall down,
refuse to stay down.
If you cannot refuse to stay down,
lift your heart toward heaven,
and like a hungry beggar,
ask that it be filled,
and it will be filled.
You may be pushed down.
You may be kept from rising.
But no one can keep you
from lifting your heart
toward heaven -
only you.
It is in the middle of misery
that so much becomes clear.
The one who says nothing good
came of this,
is not yet listening.

*******- Clarissa Pinkola Estes

What Kind of a Person

"What kind of a person are you," I heard them say to me.
I'm a person with a complex plumbing of the soul,
Sophisticated instruments of feeling and a system
Of controlled memory at the end of the twentieth century,
But with an old body from ancient times
And with a God even older than my body.

I'm a person for the surface of the earth.
Low places, caves and wells
Frighten me. Mountain peaks
And tall buildings scare me.
I'm not like an inserted fork,
Not a cutting knife, not a stuck spoon.

I'm not flat and sly
Like a spatula creeping up from below.
At most I am a heavy and clumsy pestle
Mashing good and bad together
For a little taste
And a little fragrance.

Arrows do not direct me. I conduct
My business carefully and quietly
Like a long will that began to be written
The moment I was born.

s Now I stand at the side of the street
Weary, leaning on a parking meter.
I can stand here for nothing, free.

I'm not a car, I'm a person,
A man-god, a god-man
Whose days are numbered. Hallelujah.

- Yehuda Amichai

(Translated from the Hebrew by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav, in A Life of Poetry: 1948 - 1994, New York, HarperCollins)

TERMINUS

It is time to be old,
To take in sail:--
The gods of bounds,
Who sets to seas a shore,
Came to me in his fatal rounds,
And said: 'No more!
No farther shoot
Thy broad ambitious branches, and thy root.
Fancy departs: no more invent;
Contract thy firmament
To compass of a tent.
There's not enough for this and that,
Make thy option which of two;
Economize the failing river,
Not the less revere the Giver,
Leave the many and hold the few.
Timely wise accept the terms,
Soften the fall with wary foot;
A little while
Still plan and smile,
And,--fault of novel germs,--
Mature the unfallen fruit.
Curse, if thou wilt, thy sires,
Bad husbands of their fires,
Who, when they gave thee breath,
Failed to bequeath
The needful sinew stark as once,
The Baresark marrow to thy bones,
But left a legacy of ebbing veins,
Inconstant heat and nerveless reins,--
Amid the Muses, left thee deaf and dumb,
Amid the gladiators, halt and numb.'

As the bird trims her to the gale,
I trim myself to the storm of time,
I man the rudder, reef the sail,
Obey the voice at eve obeyed at prime:
'Lowly faithful, banish fear,
Right onward drive unharmed;
The port, well worth the cruise, is near,
And every wave is charmed.'

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Don't look down on the heart.
Even if it is not behaving well.
Even in that shape, the heart
is more precious than the teaching
of exulted sultans.
The broken heart is where God looks.
How lucky the soul
that mends the heart!
For God, consoling the heart
that is broken into hundreds of pieces
is better than going on a pilgrimage.
God's treasures are buried in ruined hearts.

- Hafiz

The Work of the Left Hand


When the combat has stopped
and the soldiers lie still in their blood,
after the city is sacked
the women raped
and you find the gold
is only gold, and the salt
of every attempt to escape the empty hour
only sharpens your pain

if you make a cup
of your grief, it becomes
an invitation --
Construct it
as a bird makes its nest --
a shelter, a cradle

And in that room
of your emptiness, wait,
until the waiting is a place
you have lived, a place you know
by heart

When you lie awake
amid the ruins of your sleeping city
waiting for dreams
that have abandoned you
and you wait
through the night,
hold the emptiness
like a porch light left on
or a door left open
to welcome the vast mysterious dark

In the holding, the cupping, the waiting,
you will shape your longing,
you will grow stronger
and stronger,
till when the Great Love comes,
magnificent black wings shining,
you have made a place
so immense
from the shadows of your doubt
that place is all there is of you

Then you become
The Visitation
You swallow that black star
and for a while
you are light itself

- Elizabeth Carothers Herron

Our Eyes Are Sweet Obedient Dogs
*
The mind must reach beyond time,
not revise or think at all;
thought is always late for truth.
Take the one bright element
from heaven on earth, the blazing
word inside the throat of rivers
and sky, desert and fields,
that will not burn, and speak
its flame without a sound.
Fire catches in sight and feeds
on gross imagination.
We do not see for fear
of burning here alive.
*
Chard de Niord

Can Poetry Matter?

Heart feels the time has come to compose lyric poetry.
No more storytelling for him. Oh, Moon, Heart writes,
sad wafer of the heart’s distress. And then: Oh, Moon,
bright cracker of the heart’s pleasure. Which is it,
is the moon happy or sad, cracker or wafer? He looks
from the window but the night is overcast. Oh, Cloud,
he writes, moody veil of the Moon’s distress. And then,
Oh, Cloud, sweet scarf of the Moon’s repose. Once more
Heart asks, Are clouds kindly or a bother, is the moon sad
or at rest? He calls scientists who tell him that the moon
is a dead piece of rock. He calls astrologers. One says
the moon means water. Another that it signifies oblivion.
The girl next door says the Moon means love. The nut
up the block says it proves that Satan has us under his thumb.
Heart goes back to his notebooks. Oh, Moon, he writes,
confusing orb meaning one thing or another. Heart feels
that his words lack conviction. Then he hits on a solution.
Oh, Moon, immense hyena of introverted motorboat.
Oh, Moon, upside down lamppost of barbershop quartet.
Heart takes his lines to a critic who tells him that the poet
is recounting a time as a toddler when he saw his father
kissing the baby-sitter at the family’s cottage on a lake.
Obviously, the poem explains the poet’s fear of water.
Heart is ecstatic. He rushes home to continue writing.
Oh, Cloud, raccoon cadaver of colored crayon, angel spittle
recast as foggy euphoria. Heart is swept up by the passion
of composition. Freed from the responsibility of content,
no nuance of nonsense can be denied him. Soon his poems
appear everywhere, while the critic writes essays elucidating
Heart’s meaning. Jointly they form a sausage factory of poetry:
Heart supplying the pig snouts and rectal tissue of language
which the critic encloses in a thin membrane of explication.
Lyric poetry means teamwork, thinks Heart: a hog farm,
corn field, and two old dobbins pulling a buckboard of song.

- Stephen Dobyns


PALLBEARERS ENVYING THE ONE WHO RIDES (Penguin, 1999)

For Strong Women

A strong woman is a woman who is straining
A strong woman is a woman standing
on tiptoe and lifting a barbell
while trying to sing "Boris Godunov."
A strong woman is a woman at work
cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,
and while she shovels, she talks about
how she doesn't mind crying, it opens
the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up
develops the stomach muscles, and
she goes on shoveling with tears in her nose.
A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, I told you so,
ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,
why aren't you feminine, why aren't
you soft, why aren't you quiet, why aren't you dead?
A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not be done. She is pushing up on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way through a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you're so strong.
A strong woman is a woman bleeding
inside. A strong woman is a woman making
herself strong every morning while her teeth
loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,
a tooth, midwives used to say, and now
every battle a scar. A strong woman
is a mass of scar tissue that aches
when it rains and wounds that bleed
when you bump them and memories that get up
in the night and pace in boots to and fro.
A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she is not strong as a stone but as a wolf
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.
What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make
each other. Until we are all strong together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.

- Marge Piercy

*** It is a difficult and sorrowful story that we are in.* It requires everything of each of us who have enough love, sorrow and courage in our hearts.* We have to find the pieces of this story that may yet sustain creation.* “Epiphany,” I wrote during a weeklong vision quest in a cave in New Mexico, “occurs as the stories in the field come together into one story.”* We have to bring them together, find the coherence and possibility among all the parts.* We have to find and then live the coherent story.
**** That true healing, restoration and peace might come through dream, alliance with spirits, council, collaboration and vision, even though so many of us are beginning to live, successfully, according to these ways in our own lives, still seems implausible. How can these means go up against a smart bomb or an atomic missile?* What short of equal strength, power and destructiveness can challenge the weapons and war machines of the world? Perhaps we are being advised to step out of the mindset that has been framed by a world devoted to the technology of power, alienation and death.* Can we imagine that a bomb, even The Bomb, is not the final instrument of power and domination we think it is?
**** The world of possibility being revealed to us is not one of our own invention but coheres in a field of connections, intersecting stories and events that includes knowledge from old wisdom traditions and stories from indigenous peoples who love the earth above all things.* Here Spirit is the glue; this is a real world.* Even if we are not changed enough to trust this new view of reality, nevertheless, we will benefit from yielding to the possibilities and wonders that are before us, to the life force and its mysterious ways.** We are being called to defer to what we do not understand and what is beyond us, and what we reflexively diminish as mere myths and fantasies but which, when experienced, emerge as cogent ways of knowing and living.* Spiritual experiences, like Gnosticism and shamanism, the gathering of individual visions and stories, confirm the presence of the divine.*

Deena Metzger
From Grief into Vision: A Council

Twilight in Hendy Woods

This is the hour of magic
When this world and the other world
Touch in a lingering kiss
And a deep stillness settles over all things.

This is the hour of magic
When the Earth,
For one eternal moment, holds its breath
Before turning from the sun.

This is the hour of magic
When, if you listen
With an open heart and a quiet mind,
You can hear the Ancient Ones, the elders of the forest

Telling the old stories:
Of the chainsaw massacres and the fires;
Of the great ice ages and the birth of mountain ranges;
Of the times long past when they were many and covered the Earth.

They are leaving us now.
When they are gone,
Who will tell these stories?

Larry Robinson

FOR SALE

*

I remember passing by here

day after day

Monday through Friday

for years

driving my kids to the school

up the road

watching the seasons change

through the plantings

the old man did

on the corner of his yard

marigolds in the spring

naked ladies in the early fall

well

as we all know

the naked ladies raise themselves

but still he must have planted

them once, long ago.

The children grew up

and the old man grew older

and after awhile

the marigolds disappeared

from spring--

only the naked ladies

remained

when I would occasionally pass by

in the fall.

Now the old man

is gone, too

the house is empty--

listed for sale

as an almost million dollar

"fixer upper."

In the meantime

I see a family of quail

has happily moved in.

*

Lilith Rogers

GREEN FIELDS

By this part of the century few are left who believe
*** in the animals for they are not there in the carved parts
of them served on plates and the pleas from the slatted trucks
*** are sounds of shadows that possess no future
there is still game for the pleasure of killing
*** and there are pets for the children but the lives that followed
courses of their own other than ours and older
*** have been migrating before us some are already
far on the way and yet Peter with his gaunt cheeks
*** and point of white beard the face of an aged Lawrence
Peter who had lived on from another time and country
*** and who had seen so many things set out and vanish
still believed in heaven and said he had never once
*** doubted it since his childhood on the farm in the days
of the horses he had not doubted it in the worst
*** times of the Great War and afterward and he had come
to what he took to be a kind of earthly
*** model of it as he wandered south in his sixties
by that time speaking the language well enough
*** for them to make him out he took the smallest roads
into a world he thought was a thing of the past
*** with wildflowers he scarcely remembered and neighbors
working together scything the morning meadows
*** turning the hay before the noon meal bringing it in
by milking time husbandry and abundance
*** all the virtues he admired and their reward bounteous
in the eyes of a foreigner and there he remained
*** for the rest of his days seeing what he wanted to see
until the winter when he could no longer fork
*** the earth in his garden and then he gave away
his house land everything and committed himself
*** to a home to die in an old chateau where he lingered
for some time surrounded by those who had lost
*** the use of body or mind and as he lay there he told me
that the wall by his bed opened almost every day
*** and he saw what was really there and it was eternal life
as he recognized at once when he saw the gardens
*** he had made and the green fields where he had been
a child and his mother was standing there then the wall would close
*** and around him again were the last days of the world

- W.S. Merwin

Junkyard Dog



Let's say, for the sake of discussion,
that before you were born you were made of light,
or something like it.
Let's say that you were not

anything at all like

this oddly shaped living thing
(no offense)
that you are now,

but that something of you existed.
Maybe you were just more see-through
than you are now,
or more vast, or fluffier,

but there you were


and then in one excited wet moment
the body you know now
began, grew for nine months,

then landed here.

It might have been
the luck of the draw
where you landed -
it wasn't onto towels on a

dirt floor in Mexico, for example -

my guess is that you landed in

a well-lit sterile room.



You were probably naked for just a second,

and then you began collecting things,

because that's what we do here.



And here we all are,

getting around in these bodies,

living in a culture so filled with things

we can't even think straight,

living in a country where the man

in charge is like a dumb

drooling junkyard dog,

protecting his piles of scrap metal

and drums of oil

as if that's all there is to do,

even sending some of us

to faraway places to do his bullying for him.



We really don't know how to be

with all of this, so we do the best we can,

getting around in our various bodies,

collecting things,

food and clothes and houses

and electronic devices,

doing tasks to earn money

to collect more things, and

trying to have a good time

in the process.



Meanwhile,

we start to feel a wee bit protective,

like junkyard dogs ourselves, even,

guarding the piles of stuff that we've gathered,

and taking things a little too

personally sometimes and

lunging at the fence we've built

around all of it.

It's all so much to handle

that sometimes

we have to hire insurance people

and attorneys to help.



But here's the great thing -

in the middle of all of this

collecting and protecting

we seem to have been granted,

most of the time,

the ability to learn

and to feel

and to notice the things

that were here all along,

like sunsets

and wild-ass fields of orange poppies

and the fact that having a body

is actually a lot of fun,

especially when we're

rubbing them around on each other,

or dancing.







We discover that loving

someone else

feels better than anything,

and that the important stuff

can't be collected at all.



And somewhere along the way,

there is that tin man moment,

when you know you have a heart

because it's breaking



and you realize that courage is nothing

like a slathering fanged dog -

courage is being willing to let go,

open the damn gate

and share the goods.



If you're lucky,

by the time you're old,

you've found humility,

which doesn't mean

that you're not important,

it means that you're everything -

because we're all made out

of the same stuff,

some kind of light,

something vast and fluffy

covered in skin.



- Margaret Barkley

[Margaret is a multi-talented original and current Wacco! - Barry]

The Chapel Doors At Beth Abraham
*
Four massive bronze stars
***********adorned the double doors
***********whose surface had been
***********strangely covered
***********with that most modern material,
***********fake wood paneling,
***********a veneer so thin,
if indeed, it was veneer at all,
adhered to some substrate
of pressed paper,
now deteriorating and crumbling away
after just a year or two
or so I’m told by the local congregant
who had asked my help
in trying to dress them up a bit.—
“We just had the doors re-done
two years ago,” he’d said.
*
They were a bit shameful—
that is, if one took the time to see
and think about those doors,
openings and closings
to sacred space—
and it did seem to be a sacred space
while I was there
with children being taught
the rules of life.
The doors were off
and I could hear a bit
now and again,
between the sounds of saws
and drills and hammers
but I couldn’t tell for sure.
And that set me to thinking
about sacred space
and what have doors
got to do with that
at all?

- Bill Denham

In Memory of W. B. Yeats

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.




II


You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.





III


Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

- W. H. Auden



(From Another Time by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1940 W. H. Auden)

Pine Valley

*
1
While I was not watching
sunrise came with a ruby throat
and gold-flecked wings.
****************************************************************
2
Blue
and a small wisp of cloud
above the dark pine.
A jaysquall
leaves a small bruise
on one corner
of sky.
*
3
Boiling coffee.
A blue enamel pot
nestled in warm coals
beside the cold
sliding water.
Sky so close
you fear
*bumping your head.
***********************************************************
4
A brown breaks surface
rising to wingshadow
drifting on the blue selvage
of pond.
*
5
Golden lace.
Sunrise pours slantwise
into clear water
through the blue spruce,
the deep tangle of pine
and purled woodsmoke.
*
6
I turned
and the earth hushed.
While I leaned into silence
a morning too vast to fathom
filled with light.
*
7
Praise.

- Dave Lee

Exercise

First forget what time it is
for an hour
do it regularly every day

then forget what day of the week it is
do this regularly for a week
then forget what country you are in
and practice doing it in company
for a week
then do them together
for a week
with as few breaks as possible

follow these by forgetting how to add
or to subtract
it makes no difference
you can change them around
after a week
both will help you later
to forget how to count

forget how to count
starting with your own age
starting with how to count backward
starting with even numbers
starting with Roman numerals
starting with fractions of Roman numerals
starting with the old calendar
going on to the old alphabet
going on to the alphabet
until everything is continuous again

go on to forgetting elements
starting with water
proceeding to earth
rising in fire

forget fire

- W.S. Merwin

And The Men

want back in:
all the Dougs and the Michaels, the Darnells, the Erics and Joses,
they're standing by the off-ramp of the interstate
holding up cardboard signs that say WILL WORK FOR RELATIONSHIP.

Their love-mobiles are rusty.
Their Shaggin' Wagons are up on cinderblocks.
They're reading self-help books and practicing abstinence,
taking out Personals ads that say
**********"Good listener would like to meet lesbian ladies,
***************************************for purposes of friendship only."

In short, they've changed their minds, the men:
they want another shot at the collaborative enterprise.
Want to do fifty-fifty housework and childcare;
They want commitment renewal weekends and couples therapy.

Because being a man was finally too sad --
In spite of the perks, the lifetime membership benefits.
And it got old,
telling the joke about the hooker and the priest

at the company barbeque, praising the vintage of the beer and
***********punching the shoulders of a bud
****************in a little overflow of homosocial bonhomie --
Always holding the fear inside
*************************like a tipsy glass of water --

Now they're ready to talk, really talk about their feelings,
in fact they're ready to make you sick with revelations of
*************************their vulnerability --
A pool of testosterone is spreading from around their feet,
it's draining out of them like radiator fluid,
like history, like an experiment that failed.

So here they come on their hands and knees, the men:
Here they come. They're really beaten. No tricks this time.
****************No fine print.
Please, they're begging you. Look out.

--Tony Hoagland

Instant Glimpsable Only for an Instant





Moment. Moment. Moment.



—equal inside you, moment,


the velocitous mountains and cities rising and falling,


songs of children, iridescence even of beetles.



It is not you the locust can strip of all leaf.



Untouchable green at the center,


the wolf too lopes past you and through you as he eats.



Insult to mourn you, you who mourn no one, unable.



Without transformation,


yours the role of the chorus, to whom nothing happens.


The living step forward: choosing to enter, to lose.



I, who am made of you only,


speak these words against your unmasterable instruction—



A knife cannot cut itself open,


yet you ask me both to be you and to know you.

- Jane Hirshfield

They



The Bishop tells us: 'When the boys come back
'They will not be the same; for they'll have fought
'In a just cause: they lead the last attack
'On Anti-Christ; their comrades' blood has bought
'New right to breed an honourable race,
'They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.'



'We're none of us the same!' the boys reply.
'For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind;
'Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die;
'And Bert's gone syphilitic: you'll not find
'A chap who's served that hasn't found some change.
' And the Bishop said: 'The ways of God are strange."

- Siegfried Sassoon

The Emperor of Ice-Cream

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

- Wallace Stevens

Note to a Pine Ridge Girl
Who Can No Longer Read



I keep dreaming these dreams
where I lose you, literally lose
you like misplaced car keys
and wake up sweating and
call and cuss, mutter for you
to reveal yourself, not in dream
but in my wide-awake frustration.
Thank God my closest neighbors
are simple Hmong who think all
Americans are crazed cannibals.
Ah, sweet mumbling darling,
I've been offered a great job
far from these mindless Plains
at a white castle of utmost
pay and supreme prestige.
Oh love, what are we to do?
A decade of intense meds
has made your face puffy.
I don't look any better, but
you cannot talk*little light
breaks in your eyes when I visit.
The wasicu staff tells me your
chanli will now be cut off
because you keep putting
the lit end in your mouth.
Pain and indignity floods
our being and our memory.
I can't tell you how many times
we've sat holding hands while
you've dirtied your diapers.
Two of your toes have curled
into claws*two of your fingers
did until they chopped them off.
God forgive me for okaying that.
When I catch your attention
and stand before you and do
the twist, you sometimes still
smile crazily, my little one.
That you smile at my dance
of tears is enough, my love.
Dearest woman, that is enough.
That is all I need. That's plenty.
Forgive me once and again
for thinking only of myself.
Everything is clear now and
I will not be crawling away to
some new life at this late date.
I'll keep playing the game
for the paycheck and
you, my love*
eternal.


Adrian C. Louis

I want to thank Larry Robinson once again for sharing these poems with us!

Since Larry is posting his poems to this thread as replies to keep them all in one thread for your reading and subscribing pleasure, I want point out a couple of options of how to make it easier for you to see his most recent posts:

There is a setting in your user control panel here, called Thread Display Mode which governs whether posts in a thread are displayed Newes First or Oldest First. So if you set it to "Linear - Newest first" you will see the most recent replies first on all threads on the website. This is how I have my profile set and I reccomend it if you use the website often.

https://img70.imageshack.us/img70/70...laymodeek8.jpg

If you have that setting set to Linear - Oldest First, which is the default, you will see a link on the top of the first post of each thread called "View First Unread" which does what it says!

https://img233.imageshack.us/img233/...tunreadfr8.jpg

Hard Rain

After I heard It's a Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
I understood there's nothing
we can't pluck the stinger from,

nothing we can't turn into a soft drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people

quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hole golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.

You can't keep beating yourself up, Billy
I heard the therapist say on television
to the teenage
murderer,
About all those people you killed—
You just have to be the best person you can be,

one day at a time—

and everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.

Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
are covered with blood-
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present;
Should I say something?
Signed, America.

I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,

but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth—

whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.


- Tony Hoagland

What I would say in one sentence is that, for Americans, the real work is becoming native to North America. The real work is becoming native in your heart, coming to understand we really live here, that this is really the continent we're on and that our loyalties are here, to these mountains and rivers, to these plant zones, to these creatures. The real work involves developing a loyalty that goes back before the formation of any nation state, back billions of years and thousands of years into the future. The real work is accepting citizenship in the continent itself.

- Gary Snyder

Temporary Poem of My Time

Hebrew writing and Arabic writing go from east to west,
Latin writing, from west to east.
Languages are like cats:
You must not stroke their hair the wrong way.
The clouds come from the sea, the hot wind from the desert,
The trees bend in the wind,
And stones fly from all four winds,
Into all four winds. They throw stones,
Throw this land, one at the other,
But the land always falls back to the land.
They throw the land, want to get rid of it.
Its stones, its soil, but you can't get rid of it.

They throw stones, throw stones at me
In 1936, 1938, 1948, 1988,
Semites throw at Semites and anti-Semites at anti-Semites,
Evil men throw and just men throw,
Sinners throw and tempters throw,
Geologists throw and theologists throw,
Archaelogists throw and archhooligans throw,
Kidneys throw stones and gall bladders throw,
Head stones and forehead stones and the heart of a stone,
Stones shaped like a screaming mouth
And stones fitting your eyes
Like a pair of glasses,
The past throws stones at the future,
And all of them fall on the present.
Weeping stones and laughing gravel stones,
Even God in the Bible threw stones,
Even the Urim and Tumim were thrown
And got stuck in the beastplate of justice,
And Herod threw stones and what came out was a Temple.

Oh, the poem of stone sadness
Oh, the poem thrown on the stones
Oh, the poem of thrown stones.
Is there in this land
A stone that was never thrown
And never built and never overturned
And never uncovered and never discovered
And never screamed from a wall and never discarded by the builders
And never closed on top of a grave and never lay under lovers
And never turned into a cornerstone?

Please do not throw any more stones,
You are moving the land,
The holy, whole, open land,
You are moving it to the sea
And the sea doesn't want it
The sea says, not in me.

Please throw little stones,
Throw snail fossils, throw gravel,
Justice or injustice from the quarries of Migdal Tsedek,
Throw soft stones, throw sweet clods,
Throw limestone, throw clay,
Throw sand of the seashore,
Throw dust of the desert, throw rust,
Throw soil, throw wind,
Throw air, throw nothing
Until your hands are weary
And the war is weary
And even peace will be weary and will be.

- Yehuda Amichai

Translated from the Hebrew by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav, in A Life of Poetry: 1948 - 1994 New York, HarperCollins, 1994, with thanks to the publishe

The Fall of Rome


(for Cyril Connolly)


The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

- W. H. Auden

Long Hair
Hunting Season:

Once every year, the Deer catch human beings. They
do various things which irresistibly draw men near them;
each one selects a certain man. The Deer shoots the man,
who is then compelled to skin it and carry its meat home
and eat it. Then the deer is inside the man. He waits and
hides in there, but the man doesn't know it. When
enough Deer have occupied enough men, they will strike all
at once. The men who don't have Deer in them will
also be taken by surprise, and everything will change some.
This is called "takeover from inside".

Deer Trails:

Deer trails run on the side hills
cross country access roads
dirt ruts to bone-white
board house ranches,
tumbled down.

Waist high through manzanita,
Through sticky, prickly, crackling
gold dry summer grass.

Deer trails lead to water,
Lead sideways all ways
Narrowing down to one best path --
And split --
And fade away to nowhere.

Deer trails slide under freeways
slip into cities
swing back and forth in crops and orchards
run up the sides of schools!

Deer spoor and crisscross dusty tracks
Are in the house: and coming out the walls:

And deer bound through my hair.

Gary Snyder

Snow Geese

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask

of anything, or anyone,

yet it is ours,
and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.

One fall day I heard
above me, and above the sting of the wind, a sound
I did not know, and my look shot upward; it was

a flock of snow geese, winging it
faster than the ones we usually see,
and, being the color of snow, catching the sun

so they were, in part at least, golden. I

held my breath
as we do
sometimes
to stop time
when something wonderful
has touched us

as with a match,
which is lit, and bright,
but does not hurt
in the common way,

but delightfully,
as if delight
were the most serious thing
you ever felt.

The geese
flew on,
I have never seen them again.

Maybe I will, someday, somewhere.
Maybe I won't.
It doesn't matter.
What matters
is that, when I saw them,
I saw them
as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly.

- Mary Oliver


I will be on retreat for the next while, so this will be the last poem I will post until October 24.
Larry

The Diameter Of The Bomb

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won't even mention the howl of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.

- Yerhuda Amichai

(translated by Chana Bloch & Stephen Mitchell)

Twilight in Hendy Woods

This is the hour of magic
When this world and the other world
Touch in a lingering kiss
And a deep stillness settles over all things.

This is the hour of magic
When the Earth,
For one eternal moment, holds its breath
Before turning from the sun.

This is the hour of magic
When, if you listen
With an open heart and a quiet mind,
You can hear the Ancient Ones, the elders of the forest

Telling the old stories:
Of the chainsaw massacres and the fires;
Of the great ice ages and the birth of mountain ranges;
Of the times long past when they were many and covered the Earth.

They are leaving us now.
When they are gone,
Who will tell these stories?

Larry Robinson