I dreamed the streets of Katmandu
Were full of flowers
As the earth-mother mountains
Were shrugging off their glaciers
While a sea rose up somewhere
And vultures dreamed of feasts
But a young woman smiled and said
Nothing’s too much to bear
And sure enough she had sung
Her child to sleep
And the streets of Katmandu
Were full of flowers.
“No ideas but in things.”
William Carlos Williams
All righty then
so say I want an idea
you’re saying I need to
bust open a thing
and find an idea inside
maybe a bunch of them
twisting like worms
and then what?
What the hell
am I supposed to say
about all these busted things
and all these twisty ideas?
Because right now
the place is littered with things I’ve busted
that don’t work anymore
and won’t even stand up
and the ideas
have got into the floorboards
and the bag of sugar
and the mattress.
I tell you
if this is poetry
it’s nothing like what I was led to believe
back when they gave us
that wheelbarrow poem to read.
So tell me
sage of Paterson
tell me
old witch
old doctor
tell me what’s the big idea
mister thing?
that pencil
was decisive as an arrow once
but soon I noticed
it was always a little short of sharp
but maybe
but who can say
anyway I persevered
and every scratch of the way
there was that pencil
unsharp ever
barely shy of blunt at times
anyway I persevered
now look at it
all chewed up like an argument
nobody won
(a translation from the Spanish of Jorge Luis Borges)
Fifty-two cards push real life aside:
flimsy, parti-colored charms
that make us forget where we’re bound to end up in the end.
And who cares where? —we’ve stolen this time, anyway,
let’s build a house of cards,
decorate it, move in, and then play
as we were always meant to play.
Nothing beyond the table’s edges
carries any weight.
Inside, it’s a foreign land
where bluff and bid are high affairs of state:
The Ace of Spades swaggers authoritatively
like Lord Byron, capable of anything;
the nine of diamonds glitters like a pirate’s dream.
A headlong rush of lethargy
slacks conversation to a drawl:
our slow words come and go
the while chance exalts some, lays others low;
the while the players echo and re-echo all the tricks they know:
until it seems that they’re returned—or nearly so:
the crones and cronies and their bony friends
who showed us what it meant to be true Americans
with the same old songs, the same old works for idle hands.
I don’t know why
it never occurred to me before
but today I thought
that I could kiss you
something serious
for letting me know poetry
after all is
a respectable thing to love
so even though it’s years on
and you, last time we met,
hated me, anyway
there’s a kiss outstanding
you don’t really want
and I won’t really give
and that’s poetry too
as much as anything is
The little boy runs back laughing
from the rushing surf
laughing but all the while he knows
the ocean takes what it wants.
for poetry
you need wings
that’s what they say
so that’s what you think
but the thing for which
poetry really begs
is legs
1.
This train platform
so skillful in the daytime
to lie flat, soak up heat
and breathe it out gently
into shimmering air
by night hardly knows its own name.
2.
It seems like daytime
always comes around again.
3.
There was this kid
was smoking this pack of cigarettes
all the way to the bottom
kept his back to the tracks
refusing all destinations.
4.
They’re inside the train
You know what I mean?
I mean they’ll never understand.
I mean it’s different
and they’ll never understand.
I mean the question is
which is it goes by
you or the world?
Time was, we had to be cautious
since the dead world could quicken
and anything was always inexplicably
about to become an animal:
bare dirt birthed worms,
toads sprang full-blown from muck,
and mice could breed
from a stale loaf kept in a quiet cupboard.
We now know that’s not the way of it:
life’s not spontaneous,
but always it’s the product of
some effortful seed
and some intent or accident of sperm;
life breeds life, and furiously
goes on living.
Not magic but poetry.
Bag of Anything 