Blackbird settles
on the topmost bough
and the whole tree nods
as if to say,
I see. I see how it is.
Blackbird settles
2
Tag Archives: poem
At least you died beloved
At least you died beloved
Though surrounded by snow
And after the slow twilight
Had gathered and then gone.
Not how you thought to go,
Maybe, when you were young
And winter a long way off,
Before anything was known.
Couldn’t the end have come
One day in summer?
One perfect day
That would be like living always?
A field of flowers, warm sun,
Your loved ones gathered round
And after one bird’s wistful song
No pain, and no good-byes unsaid?
I harbor no regrets for you.
You were our perfect day,
He your warm sun, and we
Your field of flowers.
The Museum Elephants
Within the murmurous expanse
Beneath the bas-relief-ringed dome
The taxidermied elephants
Reign over their eternal home:
With tiles for the grass-giving earth;
For sun-burnt destinations, walls.
Eight times a week, the monkey mirth
Of school groups echoes through the halls
While in and out the galleries
Architectonically discrete
The docents’ high-toned rhapsodies
Contend with sounds of scuffling feet.
And once a month someone comes in
Brushes the dust from wrinkled skin
Sweeps cobwebs from the painted skies
And polishes the glittering eyes.
No Dice
Logic leads me to surmise
Our Lord doesn’t play at dice:
Surely He flips coins instead,
Letting the angels call Tails or Heads.
How else could He fairly settle fights
In Heaven, where everyone is always right?
Edna St. Vincent Millay (a clerihew)
Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare…
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Was heard on occasion to say
That only the author of Euclid’s Elements
Had ever seen Beauty without habiliments.
One supposes she meant to imply that people who do maths
Have taken quite the best of all available paths
And that study of the other sciences might be eschewed
If one wished for a chance to see Beauty nude.
But I wonder what she’d have said had she lived to learn
About the physicists at CERN
Who have managed to catch the Higgs Boson
Without any clothes on?
How lovely is the semblance
How lovely is the semblance
Eternity is come
And Past and Future gathered are
In compass of this room;
How beautiful the sleeping form
The eyes that look within
The hands that do not seek to grasp
The legs that will not run;
Though Memory’s in water writ
However still it pools
This vision having once had
I cannot bear to lose;
I shall become a student
At that patient school of art
That studies years to draw one line
Direct from eye to heart.
There you were
There you were
helping your friends
who were not yet married
before their reception
by cutting something small
smaller,
carrots or cucumbers,
something.
You were being mindful
of the knifeness of the knife
and how strange it was
not because it cut
but because of the way
it cut
and in consequence
you were working
slowly,
holding up
everything and everyone
that depended on you.
I loved you for
your mindful sluggishness,
and how you were unconscious
of your beauty
in the beautiful moment
so now
I think sometimes
how if that beautiful moment had lasted
I might have married you
and you me
and how eventually
someone else would have had to take over
for both of us.
And I think:
how lucky
one moment
doesn’t lead to the next.
A Song for Music, with Music, and Ham Kicker
“A Following Song” is a song! Alex Floor wrote the music and recorded it. As songs sometimes do, this one has changed its monicker: you may call it “They Went Their Ways.” It joins Stone’s Throw, which the redoubtable Godescalc (more mundanely, James) brilliantly set to music some time ago…
The thing came about this time because I once happened across the oddly-named Ham Kicker website, “an exhibition of collaborative musical work”:
Poets are encouraged to submit poetry. Songwriters are encouraged to work with poets and their poems to develop songs. Performers are encouraged to interpret or reinterpret songs.
So I sent Ham Kicker’s proprietor (turns out his name is Joe) a poem to put up on the site, and forgot about it for more than a year. And then, a while ago, Joe let me know that Alex had written and recorded music for what is now indisputably a Song. Which made me happy, as you might guess, for it’s a lovely song.
Here is the Hamkicker post introducing the thing; here (again) is the song in all its mp3-compressed glory; there’s sheet music! (I love sheet music!) Here, for some reason, is an undated interview with Joe.
And why not, here’s the poem again, with its new title:
They Went Their Ways
Down by the hill, or lower down,
The larks and lizards built a town.
They sang for fun and lay in the sun
And life was easy.
Seasons came, and came, and came,
And some were different, some the same;
The flowers grew, and blossomed, and blew,
And life was easy.
But a lark grows bold to stretch its wing
While a lizard sleeps and dreams of spring.
So the larks forgot – what the lizards did not –
That life is easy.
Then they went their ways, no one knew why,
Some to the desert and some to the sky,
With the turning spheres and the passing years,
Like life, so easy.
Paradise (pt.5)
Venice, the city precarious,
built as for eternity,
founded upon water;
The floods each year,
water jealous of stone
rising up;
Every stone brought from afar,
and the city’s treasures traded for or stolen,
laid up like stones;
Those living beside the sea
are of necessity traders —
are of necessity grubbers at the sea’s verge,
Where even careful tending
will not make a garden…
Traders, as all men,
As the bankers trade in money & in war
coin & credit
mustard gas & “security”
In the interest of security,
in the interest…
Ignorance of the masses,
“ignorance of coin,
credit and circulation!”
But with a day’s reading
a man may have the key in his hands,
with one day’s reading…
To make of all things, one thing,
and out of one, all:
A cinema of words,
image following image,
& so on,
& because these things have been joined
they have been meant to be joined,
they increase in meaning;
The key in his hand,
“The terrifyin’ voice of civilization…”
Paradise (pt.3)
Up a thousand steps,
a thousand steps and a dusty lane,
Fig-trees, leaves the color of the sea,
glint of sea-mirror, whence one had started;
A violin bowed by skillful hands,
playing Vivaldi, not practicing, playing to be heard;
And Il Poeta, come to stay the weekend,
come to see his daughter,
His daughter, and not his wife,
and also the skillful woman who plays Vivaldi.
The eye that covets,
The hand that moves upon the impulse of the eye.
It has been this way for some time,
and so why should we speak of it?
And a thousand steps below,
upon the promenade, the women in their finery,
the men not less fine.
And Dorothy has done with Henry James at last,
Only she may read The Princess Casamassima again,
Or perhaps start in on one of the French novelists…
Bag of Anything 