Gift by Czeslaw Milosz

One of my ruby-throated Hummingbirds.

Gift
By Czeslaw Milosz

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early, I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

From:  "Teaching With Fire:  Poetry that Sustains the Courage to Teach", page 159

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

From Preface to "Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman

“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem. . ."

All Things Pass by Timothy Leary

All Things Pass
By Timothy Leary, homage to Lao Tzu

All things pass

A sunrise does not last all morning

All things pass

 A cloudburst does not last all day
All things pass
Nor a sunset all night

But Earth... sky... thunder...
wind... fire... lake...
mountain... water...
These always change

And if these do not last
Do man’s visions last?
Do man’s illusions ?

Take things as they come
All things pass

Rome Itself by Rod McKuen

Photo of the Coliseum from poster.com

In the early 70's I was a teenager and my boyfriend used to give me poems he said he'd written for me.  They were pretty good, too.  After we married, I discovered his small collection of Rod McKuen books and the poems he'd 'borrowed' from them to win my heart.   We used to use the poem below as our secret code for having sex.  If either of us mentioned Rome, we'd skitter home to have some fun.  And trust me, it's not that easy to work Rome into a conversation at your mother's house.  LOL!  Ah, the joys of youth! I own every single one of Rod McKuen's books, a few battered copies from the early days of our marriage.  I still enjoy reading Mr. McKuen's poetry.  It never fails to move me and bring up great memories.  xo


ROME ITSELF
By Rod McKuen

I carry down between my legs
Rome itself, for you love Rome
and I would drive Rome into you
or drive you into Rome.
This room your coliseum till you board
your plane. These arms your forum
cats included.

Self-propelled am I between
the morning and the midnight
I glide along your groin and earn my wings
by testing out your thighs
like some new willful Wiley Post.
My flight is not away, not to or from.
Above you, below you - I soar
and perch upon your second pillow.

I have no need for such mechanical devices
as winged shoes or wings. I am made uncommon
by the need to know you and thereby
come to know myself.

Rome, though in the distance, is no farther
than the dresser and not so far away
that I can't take you there.

For me the Spanish Steps
are centered on your tongue
and Caesar could content himself with
California wine had he your eyes to follow
and your breath to capture with his own breath.

We'll go to Rome
as slowly as you like
and be there by tonight.

- from "Fields of Wonder", 1971

The Broken Field by Sara Teasdale

The Broken Field
By Sara Teasdale

My soul is a dark ploughed field
In the cold rain;
My soul is a broken field
Ploughed by pain.

Where windy grass and flowers
Were growing,
The field lies broken now
For another sowing.

Great Sower, when you tread
My field again,
Scatter the furrows there
With better grain

=======================
 
Today is Sara Teasdale's birthday.  She was born in 1884.  Ms. Teasdale is one of my favorite poets.  I began reading her poetry when I was 13 years old and became hooked for life.  I credit her for starting my early love affair with poetry. 
 
In 1931, an old suitor of Ms. Teasdale, the poet Vachel Lindsay, killed himself. Sara was devastated. Sadly, in 1933, she committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills.
 
You can get many of her early works free at Amazon.com if you have a Kindle or other wireless device.  I love her book, "Rivers to the Sea".

"God's Justice" by Anne Carson

dragonfly art by marion

God’s Justice

By Anne Carson

In the beginning there were days set aside for various tasks.
On the day He was to create justice
God got involved in making a dragonfly

and lost track of time.
It was about two inches long
with turquoise dots all down its back like Lauren Bacall.

God watched it bend its tiny wire elbows
as it set about cleaning the transparent case of its head.
The eye globes mounted on the case

rotated this way and that
as it polished every angle.
Inside the case

which was glassy black like the windows of a downtown bank
God could see the machinery humming
and He watched the hum

travel all the way down turquoise dots to the end of the tail
and breathe off as light.
Its black wings vibrated in and out.

From: “Glass, Irony and God” page 49

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I've posted this poem before and probably will again.  Every time I pick up this book, it turns itself to the page with this poem.  Ms. Carson is an amazing poet and I'm glad to have discovered her in the last few years.



The Secret by Denise Levertov

The Secret
By Denise Levertov

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don't know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can't find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Dear Poems
By Marion

Dear Poems:
You give me sustenance,
breath
heartbeat.

You give my life
color,
depth,
dimension.

You are, I know,
my raison d'etre &
my silence amidst
chaos

I love you.

6/29/08

"The Street of Crocodiles" by Bruno Schulz

I will forever think of the excerpt below every August for the rest of my life...  The heat here is crippling so I hibernate in my air-conditioned house and read. ( It's so hot, the dragonflies appear almost magically and drink from the water hose as I water my drooping plants.)  I've wanted to post this excerpt for a while, but thought it would be better appeciated in the month of August about which he writes.

I cannot even begin to describe the luminous beauty of the writings of Bruno Schulz.  My hands tremble with uncertainty even trying to write this...When I first opened "The Street of Crocodiles" and began reading it, I wept and had to put it away.  (How could I have lived so many years and not read this  book?!?)  I've been trying to read the entire book for months.  I read a page, then weep at the radiant words.  Colors & scents swirl and jump from the page.  The pages of my book remain tear-damp, underlined, highlighted, annotated, ink-smeared.  (I long to lunge into the pages of this book and walk around in & inhabit these stories...)

I've re-read the same few pages over and over and over.  I try to move on but I don't want to have read this book.  I forever want to be reading it....in the present tense.  I will soon have to buy another copy so I can try to continue reading without weeping on the pages.  I mourn the untimely, brutal, senseless death of Mr. Schulz at the hands of a Gestapo officer and the words that he never got to write.   I weep at the brutality of man and the death of beauty. 

If you never, ever read another book, you must read this one.  It is so much more than a book...

It's now my #1 favorite book of all time.  xoxo

Here's the exerpt:

“A tangled thicket of grasses, weeds, and thistles crackled in the fire of the afternoon. The sleeping garden was resonant with flies. The golden field of stubble shouted in the sun like a tawny cloud of locusts; in the thick rain of fire the crickets screamed; seeds pods exploded softly like grasshoppers.

And over by the fence the sheepskin of grass lifted in a hump, as if the garden had turned over in its sleep, its broad, peasant back rising and falling as it breathed on the stillness of the earth. There the untidy feminine ripeness of August had expanded into enormous, impenetrable clumps of burdocks spreading their sheets of leafy tin, their luxuriant tongues of fleshy greenery. There, those protuberant bur clumps spread themselves, like resting peasant women, half-enveloped in their own swirling skirts. There, the garden offered free of charge the cheapest fruits of wild lilac, the heady aquavit of mint and all kinds of August trash. But on the other side of the fence, behind that jungle of summer in which the stupidity of weeds reigned unchecked, there was a rubbish heap on which thistles grew in wild profusion. No one knew that there, on the refuse dump, the month of August had chosen to hold that year its pagan orgies. There, pushed against the fence and hidden by the elders, stood the bed of the half-wit girl, Touya, as we all called her. On a heap of discarded junk, of old saucepans, abandoned single shoes, and chunks of plaster, stood a bed, painted green, propped up on two bricks where one leg was missing.

The air over the midden, wild with heat, cut through by the lightning of shiny horseflies, driven mad by the sun, crackled as if filled with invisible rattles, exciting one to frenzy.

Touya sits hunched up among the yellow bedding and odd rags, her large head covered by a mop of tangled black hair. Her face works like the bellows of an accordion. Every now and then a sorrowful grimace folds it into a thousand vertical pleats, but astonishment soon straightens it out again, ironing out the folds, revealing the chinks of small eyes and damp gums with yellow teeth under snoutlike, fleshy lips. Hours pass, filled with heat boredom; Touya chatters in a monotone, dozes, mumbles softly, and coughs. Her immobile frame is covered by a thick cloak of flies. But suddenly the whole heap of dirty rags begins to move, as if stirred by the scratching of a litter of newborn rats. The flies wake up in fright and rise in a huge, furious buzzing cloud, filled with colored light reflected from the sun. And while the rags slip to the ground and spread out over the rubbish heap, like frightened rats, a form emerges and reveals itself: the dark half-naked idiot girl rises slowly to her feet and stands like a pagan idol, on short childish legs; her neck swells with anger, and from her face, red with fury, on which the arabesques of bulging veins stand out as in a primitive painting, comes forth a hoarse animal scream, originating deep in the lungs hidden in that half-animal, half-divine breast. The sun-dried thistles shout, the plantains swell and boast their shameless flesh, the weeds salivate with glistening poison, and the half-wit girl, hoarse with shouting, convulsed with madness, presses her fleshy belly in an excess of lust against the trunk of an elder, which groans softly under the insistent pressure of that libidinous passion, incited by the whole ghastly chorus to hideous unnatural fertility…”

 ~From: “The Street of Crocodiles” by Bruno Schulz, pages 6, 7

Apologia by Jill Alexander Essbaum

Apologia
By Jill Essbaum

I have been sodden with wine.
I have been confused by wine.
I have been lied to by men,
And yet, I lie down upon such men,
Still and willing in the manners that they please.
Lord, I’ve been the blemish at your love feast.

And I’ve been tangled in nettles and brambles,
Have dwelt in seamy hotels, have ambled
Down roads that once, so necessary,
Seemed. And I’ve prayed, hot and overloadedly,
Having meddled in such matters
That ought be closed to me.

Darkness. I have done dread deeds in,
Hearkening to apocalyptic heathen,
Even as I cocked my lips to yours. And I have slept
On floors. And I have crept along on all fours.
And. More. I have lived briskly in nice houses.
I have swigged whiskey in icehouses.

I have been June, July, and August.
I have been riotous when I felt like I must
Or I could be. And I’ve hung on your tree like a ripe fig.
Desiring to be plucked. And I’ve flung my body to your bed
Like a white bride pining to be rubbed up against.
Like a suckling child hungry in a viper’s den.

And I have been Dismas, the penitent
Thief. And I have been Judas. And I’ve spent
My plenty silvers chiefly on my hells.
In that, I have seldom, if ever, failed.
It’s just as well. For as the ibis devours her carrion,
I feed upon what queasy defeats I carry on

My back. Thus the beggar becomes her bowl.
And the hangwoman surrenders to the scaffold.
And irrevocable acts of god and doom consume me.
Can this be mercy? I fear there isn’t any
Left. Even the chrism is bereft.
Wretched, most wretched it says.

While my guilt unfolds like a napkin in your lap.
Will a dog grow fat on crumbs the master drops?
I have been a grabber at your garment hem.
And I have been a Magdalene outside your tomb.
And I’ve bathed atop roofs, have pounded with rue,
Have pooled my pearls, the sorrowful few---

Like milky mea culpas they rattle fragile on a string.
Christ: Forgive me everything.

From: “The Best American Poetry 2010,” pages 51, 52

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

"Jill Alexander Essbaum is a Christian erotic poet distinguished as the author of the 1999 Bakeless Prize winner in poetry, Heaven, the 2005 collection of sonnets, Oh Forbidden, and the full length collections Harlot (poetry) (No Tell Books, 2007) and Necropolis (neoNuma Arts, Spring 2008). She has described herself as "nettled and hectored by a good dozen obsessions--more, probably. There are but three that ultimately matter to me (maybe to anyone): God, sex, death. Anything worthwhile I've ever thought or said will be about those things." Essbaum's poetry features puns, wordplay and dark humor mixed with searing religious and erotic imagery. Bruce Covey singled out Essbaum as "contemporary poetry’s best punster". She currently teaches at the University of California Riverside Palm Desert Graduate Center in the Masters of Creative Writing Graduate Program."  From:  Amazon.com

Amy Winehouse - Rest In Peace

"A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music...and then people crowd about the poet and say to them:  'Sing for us soon again;' that is as much as to say, 'May new sufferings torment your soul.'"  ~Kierkegaard

==================================
Ms. Winehouse died today.  My heart goes out to her family.  I love her music and her unique, soulful voice.  She will be missed.  :-(

Frenzy by Anne Sexton

One of my collaged composition books.

FRENZY
by Annie Sexton

I am not lazy.
I am on the amphetamine of the soul.
I am, each day,
typing out the God
my typewriter believes in.
Very quick. Very intense,
like a wolf at a live heart.
Not lazy.
When a lazy man, they say,
looks toward heaven,
the angels close the windows.

Oh angels,
keep the windows open
so that I may reach in
and steal each object,
objects that tell me the sea is not dying,
objects that tell me the dirt has a life-wish,
that the Christ who walked for me,
walked on true ground
and that this frenzy,
like bees stinging the heart all morning,
will keep the angels
with their windows open,
wide as an English bathtub.


From:  "The Complete Poems, Anne Sexton", page 466