SEE ALL TAGS & MOODS
i
At the heart there is a hollow sun
by which we are constructed and undone
Praise the rain, the seagull dive
The curl of plant, the raven talk-
Praise the hurt, the house slack
An ars poetica
I remember the death, in Russia,
of postage stamps
with the tip of my spring tongue, ayîki frog
your mouth will be the web
catching apihkêsis words, …
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an urban image from the eighties
when we hung out at Chez Madame Arthur
The calendar marred with birds and you are kik-kik-kik-kicking all the way into June.
180 days scratched with black X’s and crow’s feet: bird-of-two minds (goodandevil
…
The rain set early in to-night,
The sullen wind was soon awake,
It tore the elm-tops down for spite,
Someone waiting in the lobby of a Hotel Imperial amid
the spaciousness tourists and peeling gold leaf
might see it all as too hesitant for truth
yesterday at the Oakland zoo
I was walking alone for a moment
past the enclosure holding the sun bear
Dear Regret, my leaning this morning, my leather foot, want of
Sometimes we are led through the doorway
by a child, sometimes
by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing
The trick to building houses was making sure
they didn’t taste good. The ocean’s culinary taste
was growing more sophisticated and occasionally
I’ve heard the phrase between you
and me too many times to believe
it to be true, but between me and you
— so we said to the somewhat: Be born —
& the shadow kept arriving in segments,
cold currents pushed minerals
In my body flows the blood of Gallic
Bastille stormers and the soft, gentle
ways of Salish/Cree womanhood.
To Kristin Lems
We miss something now
as we think about it
You are still on the highway and the great light of
noon comes over the asphalt, the gravelled
shoulders. You are on the highway, there is a kind of
At the beginning I noticed
the huge stones on my path
I knew instinctively
Wild Nights — Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Sweet sweet sweet sweet sweet tea.
Susie Asado.
a glass tube
for my leg says Hugo Ball
my hat a cylinder
They said, ‘You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.’
The man replied, ‘Things as they are…
If I were to sleep, it would be on an iron bed,
bolted to the floor in a bomb-proof concrete room
with twelve locks on the door.
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain,
And Mourners to and fro
Kept treading — treading — till it seemed
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam
wade
through black jade.
Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
My bands of silk and miniver
Momently grew heavier;
The black gauze was beggarly thin;
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; —
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font.
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
Out of the deep and the dark,
A sparkling mystery, a shape,
Something perfect,
Methought I saw my late espoused saint
Brought to me, like Alcestis, from the grave,
Whom Jove’s great son to her glad…
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That Valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
When Love with unconfinèd wings
Hovers within my Gates,
And my divine Althea brings
From plains that reel to southward, dim,
The road runs by me white and bare;
Up the steep hill it seems to swim
O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge has withered from the lake,
Drink to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup,
A thin wet sky, that yellows at the rim,
And meets with sun-lost lip the marsh’s brim.
The pools low lying, dank with moss and mould,
Glory be to God for dappled things —
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple…
I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling…
Nothing is so beautiful as Spring —
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens,…
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
A startled stag, the blue-grey Night,
Leaps down beyond black pines.
Behind — a length of yellow light —
There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
I am — yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes —
