Night View

 

Window - Carl Sandburg

Night from a railroad car window
Is a great, dark, soft thing
Broken across with slashes of light.

Cloud Watching

'Clouds are all sorts. They are a medium of revelation, through which the gods show themselves. They're a playground for human imagination, where we can see any number of forms and creatures ("Very like a whale!"). They are mood music, the emotional backdrop to a scene. They are complex natural phenomena, which challenge our capacity for accurate observation..." 

- On Constable's Study of Clouds, The Independent

I love clouds. They are like the sky's personality! And watching them eddy and flow is a constant fascination.

The English painter Constable is renowned for his masterly depictions of clouds and his many cloud studies. Rumour has it that he even painted a sky every day. Now there's dedication, or rather, adoration. If you want to see more of Constabe's clouds have a look here.

 Student of Clouds - Billy Collins
 
The emotion is to be found in clouds,
not in the green solids of the sloping hills
or even in the gray signatures of rivers,
according to Constable,who was a student of clouds
and filled shelves of notebooks with their motion,
their lofty gesturing and sudden implication of weather.

Outdoor, he must have looked up thousands of times,
his pencil trying to keep pace with their high voyaging
and the silent commotion of the eddying and flow.
Clouds would move beyond the outlines he would draw
as they moved within themselves, tumbling into their centers
and swirling off at the burning edges in vapors
to dissipate into the universal blue of the sky.

In photographs we can stop all this movement now
long enough to tag them with their Latin names.
Cirrus, nimbus, stratocumulus -
dizzying, romantic, authoritarian -
they bear their titles over the schoolhouses below
where their shapes and meanings are memorized.

High on the soft blue canvases of Constable
they are stuck in pigment but his clouds appear
to be moving still in the wind of his brush,
inching out of England and the nineteenth century
and sailing over these meadows where I am walking,
bareheaded beneath the cupola of motion,
my thoughts arranged like paint on a high blue ceiling.

Lighthousekeeping

Lighthouse Keeping - Kay Ryan 

Seas pleat
winds keen
fogs deepen
ships lean no
doubt, and
the lighthouse
keeper keeps
a light for
those left out.
It is intimate
and remote both
for the keeper
and those afloat.

Messenger

A poet's job description, or everyone's truest vocation, really:


Messenger - Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird —
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

Summer Starry Nights

Summer night - Kobayashi Issa

Summer night-
even the stars
are whispering to each other.

Hour of Stars - Federico Garcia Lorca

The round silence of night,
one note on the stave
of the infinite.

Ripe with lost poems,
I step naked into the street.
The blackness riddled
by the singing of crickets:
sound,
that dead
will-o’-the-wisp,
that musical light
perceived
by the spirit.

A thousand butterfly skeletons
sleep within my walls.

A wild crowd of young breezes
over the river.

Silver Wind

 

Silver Wind - Carl Sandburg

Do you know how the dream looms? how if summer misses one of us the two
of us miss summer—
Summer when the lungs of the earth take a long breath for the change to low
contralto singing mornings when the green corn leaves first break through the
black loam—
And another long breath for the silver soprano melody of the moon songs in
the light nights when the earth is lighter than a feather, the iron mountains
lighter than a goose down—
So I shall look for you in the light nights then, in the laughter of slats of silver
under a hill hickory.
In the listening tops of the hickories, in the wind motions of the hickory
shingle leaves, in the imitations of slow sea water on the shingle silver in the
wind—
    I shall look for you.

Sea Shell

I love sea shells, don't you?


The Sea Shell - William Wordsworth

A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract
Of inland ground, applying to his ear
The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell;
To which, in silence hushed, his very soul
Listened intensely; and his countenance soon
Brightened with joy; for murmurings from within
Were heard, sonorous cadences! whereby
To his belief, the monitor expressed
Mysterious union with his native sea.
Even in such a shell the Universe itself
Is to the ear of Faith: and there are times,
I doubt not, when to you it doth impart
Authentic tidings of invisible things;
Of ebb and flow and ever-during power;
And central peace, subsisting at the heart
Of endless agitation.

A Pretty Song

A Pretty Song - Mary Oliver

From the complications of loving you
I think there is no end or return.
No answer, no coming out of it.

Which is the only way to love, isn't it?
This isn't a playground, this is
earth, our heaven, for a while.

Therefore I have given precedence
to all my sudden, sullen, dark moods
that hold you in the center of my world.

And I say to my body: grow thinner still.
And I say to my fingers, type me a pretty song,
And I say to my heart: rave on.

Starry Dreams

                                                      

That lovely last verse! 'The sky was starry to the very rind...' (*sigh*)



Dreams - Linda Pastan 

Dreams are the only 
afterlife we know;
the place where the children
we were
rock in the arms of the children
we have become.

They are as many as leaves
in their migrations,
as birds whose deaths we learn of
by the single feather
left behind: a clue,
a particle of sleep

caught in the eye.
They are as irretrievable as sand
when the sea creeps up
its long knife glittering
in its teeth
to claim its patrimony.

Sometimes my father 
in knickers and cap
waits on that shore,
the dream of him
a wound
not even morning can heal.

The dog's legs pump
in his sleep;
your closed eyelids flicker
as the reel unwinds:
watcher and watched,
archer and bull's-eye.

Last night I dreamed a lover in my arms
and woke innocent.
The sky was starry to the very rind,
his smile still burning there
like the tail of a comet
that has just blazed by.

Illumination, Luminate

Don't Allow the Lucid Moment to Dissolve - Adam Zagajewski

Don’t allow the lucid moment to dissolve
Let the radiant thought last in stillness
though the page is almost filled and the flame flickers
We haven’t risen yet to the level of ourselves
Knowledge grows slowly like a wisdom tooth
The stature of a man is still notched
high up on a white door
From far off, the joyful voice of a trumpet
and of a song rolled up like a cat
What passes doesn’t fall into a void
A stoker is still feeding coal into the fire
Don’t allow the lucid moment to dissolve
On a hard dry substance
you have to engrave the truth

Translated from the Polish by Renata Gorczynski

A Song With No End

a song with no end - Charles Bukowski

when Whitman wrote, "I sing the body electric"

I know what he
meant
I know what he
wanted:

to be completely alive every moment
in spite of the inevitable.

we can't cheat death but we can make it
work so hard
that when it does take
us

it will have known a victory just as
perfect as
ours.

Midsummer

This poem encapsulates a lot of what summer is really about. The ripe days of living.



Midsummer - Louise Gluck

On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry,   

the boys making up games requiring them to tear off  the girls’ clothes   

and the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since last summer

and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones   

leaping off  the high rocks — bodies crowding the water.

The nights were humid, still. The stone was cool and wet,

marble for  graveyards, for buildings that we never saw,   

buildings in cities far away.

On cloudy nights, you were blind. Those nights the rocks were dangerous,   

but in another way it was all dangerous, that was what we were after.   

The summer started. Then the boys and girls began to pair off   

but always there were a few left at the end — sometimes they’d keep watch,

sometimes they’d pretend to go off  with each other like the rest,

but what could they do there, in the woods? No one wanted to be them.   

But they’d show up anyway, as though some night their luck would change,   

fate would be a different fate.

At the beginning and at the end, though, we were all together.

After the evening chores, after the smaller children were in bed,   

then we were free. Nobody said anything, but we knew the nights we’d meet   

and the nights we wouldn’t. Once or twice, at the end of summer,   

we could see a baby was going to come out of all that kissing.

And for those two, it was terrible, as terrible as being alone.   

The game was over. We’d sit on the rocks smoking cigarettes,   

worrying about the ones who weren’t there.

And then finally walk home through the fields,   

because there was always work the next day.   

And the next day, we were kids again, sitting on the front steps in the morning,   

eating a peach.  Just that, but it seemed an honor to have a mouth.   

And then going to work, which meant helping out in the fields.   

One boy worked for an old lady, building shelves.   

The house was very old, maybe built when the mountain was built.

And then the day faded. We were dreaming, waiting for night.   

Standing at the front door at twilight, watching the shadows lengthen.   

And a voice in the kitchen was always complaining about the heat,

wanting the heat to break.

Then the heat broke, the night was clear.   

And you thought of  the boy or girl you’d be meeting later.   

And you thought of  walking into the woods and lying down,   

practicing all those things you were learning in the water.   

And though sometimes you couldn’t see the person you were with,

there was no substitute for that person.

The summer night glowed; in the field, fireflies were glinting.

And for those who understood such things, the stars were sending messages:   

You will leave the village where you were born   

and in another country you’ll become very rich, very powerful,

but always you will mourn something you left behind, even though   

you can’t say what it was,

and eventually you will return to seek it.

 

How Birds Sing

How Birds Sing - Kay Ryan 

One is not taxed;
one need not practice;
one simply tips
the throat back
over the spine axis
and asserts the chest.
The wings and the rest
compress a musical
squeeze which floats
a series of notes
upon the breeze.

Summer Music

Let the music of summer begin! 


Summer Music - May Sarton

Summer is all a green air—
From the brilliant lawn, sopranos
Through murmuring hedges
Accompanied by some poplars;
In fields of wheat, surprises;
Through faraway pastures, flows
To the horizon's blues
In slow decrescendos.

Summer is all a green sound—
Rippling in the foreground
To that soft applause,
The foam of Queen Anne's lace.
Green, green in the ear
Is all we care to hear—
Until a field suddenly flashes
The singing with so sharp
A yellow that it crashes
Loud cymbals in the ear,
Minor has turned to major
As summer, lulling and so mild,
Goes golden-buttercup-wild.

Postcard

postcard from cape cod - Linda Pastan

just now I saw
one yellow
butterfly
migrating
across buzzard's bay
how brave I thought
or foolish
like sending
a poem
across months
of silence
and on such
delicate
wings

Summer Solstice

Warm Summer Sun - Mark Twain

Warm summer sun,

    Shine kindly here,

Warm southern wind,

    Blow softly here.

Green sod above,

    Lie light, lie light.

Good night, dear heart,

    Good night, good night.

 

 

Swallow of Summer

                                                    

Swallows in flight always seem to remind me of writing: the daring swoop and soar of it, free-falling finesse, all those aerial acrobatics, the feeling of naturally letting oneself go, trusting sky, cartwheeling in jubilant confidence in one's own element. Work, that is play, play that is work. 

I know Hughes is talking about something else entirely in this poem - the different nature and conflict of work and play - but I just love the descriptions of the summer swallow in it, 'a blue-dark knot of glittering voltage,' 'a boomerang of rejoicing shadow.'  Fantastic! 

Work and Play - Ted Hughes

The swallow of summer, she toils all the summer,
A blue-dark knot of glittering voltage,
A whiplash swimmer, a fish of the air.
But the serpent of cars that crawls through the dust
In shimmering exhaust
Searching to slake
Its fever in ocean
Will play and be idle or else it will bust.

The swallow of summer, the barbed harpoon,
She flings from the furnace, a rainbow of purples,
Dips her glow in the pond and is perfect.
But the serpent of cars that collapsed on the beach
Disgorges its organs
A scamper of colours
Which roll like tomatoes
Nude as tomatoes
With sand in their creases
To cringe in the sparkle of rollers and screech.

The swallow of summer, the seamstress of summer,
She scissors the blue into shapes and she sews it,
She draws a long thread and she knots it at the corners.
But the holiday people
Are laid out like wounded
Flat as in ovens
Roasting and basting
With faces of torment as space burns them blue
Their heads are transistors
Their teeth grit on sand grains
Their lost kids are squalling
While man-eating flies
Jab electric shock needles but what can they do?

They can climb in their cars with raw bodies, raw faces
And start up the serpent
And headache it homeward
A car full of squabbles
And sobbing and stickiness
With sand in their crannies
Inhaling petroleum
That pours from the foxgloves
While the evening swallow
The swallow of summer, cartwheeling through crimson,
Touches the honey-slow river and turning
Returns to the hand stretched from under the eaves -

A boomerang of rejoicing shadow.

#Yeats2015

 

We are celebrating Yeats' 150th birthday here in Ireland with a variety of events and publications. You can check out the myriad of content under the hashtag #Yeats2015. In the mean time, here is one one of my favourites of his short poems, lyrical as ever and softly tuned:

Where My Books Go - WB Yeats

All the words that I gather,
   And all the words that I write,
Must spread out their wings untiring,
  And never rest in their flight,
Till they come where your sad, sad heart is,
  And sing to you in the night,
Beyond where the waters are moving,
  Storm darkened or starry bright.

Honey-Locust

 

It's June already, can you believe it? The start of summer. Gold-gilded, lovely, honey-warm, yellow sunny June. Mary Oliver captures its essence in this poem I think.

Honey Locust - Mary Oliver 

Who can tell how lovely in June is the

    honey locust tree, or why

a tree should be so sweet and live

    in this world? Each white blossom

on a dangle of white flowers holds one green seed -

    a new life. Also each blossom on a dangle of flower

         holds a flask

of fragrance called Heaven, which is never sealed.

    The bees circle the tree and dive into it. They are crazy

with gratitude. They are working like farmers. They are as

    happy as saints. After awhile the flowers begin to

wilt and drop down into the grass. Welcome

shines in the grass.

                                         Every year I gather

handfuls of blossoms and eat of their mealiness; the honey

     melts in my mouth, the seeds make me strong,

both when they are crisps and ripe, and even at the end

when their petals have turned dully yellow.

 

                                                                                So it is

if the heart has devoted itself to love, there is

    not a single inch of emptiness. Gladness gleams

all the way to the grave.

A Clear Midnight

A Clear Midnight - Walt Whitman

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best.
Night, sleep, death and the stars.

Swallows Flight

Have you ever seen swallows in flight? They look so free, frolicking up there in the heights of sky, soaring through the expressive expanse of it. Like anchors unweighted.  I always think of them like the spirit in that way -  delighting in the berth of sky, free, at last. Sara Teasdale's lovely lyrical language captures this perfectly.

Deep In The Night - Sara Teasdale 

Deep in the night the cry of a swallow,
Under the stars he flew,
Keen as pain was his call to follow
Over the world to you.

Love in my heart is a cry forever
Lost as the swallow's flight,
Seeking for you and never, never
Stilled by the stars at night.







Swallows Flight - Sara Teasdale 

I love my hour of wind and light,
I love men's faces and their eyes,
I love my spirit's veering flight
Like swallows under evening skies.

When Great Trees Fall

'A great soul never dies. It brings us together again and again.'  

~ Maya Angelou

When Great Trees Fall - Maya Angelou 

When great trees fall,

rocks on distant hills shudder,

lions hunker down

in tall grasses,

and even elephants

lumber after safety.



When great trees fall

in forests,

small things recoil into silence,

their senses

eroded beyond fear.



When great souls die,

the air around us becomes

light, rare, sterile.

We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,

see with

a hurtful clarity.

Our memory, suddenly sharpened,

examines,

gnaws on kind words

unsaid,

promised walks

never taken.


Great souls die and

our reality, bound to

them, takes leave of us.

Our souls,

dependent upon their

nurture,

now shrink, wizened.

Our minds, formed

and informed by their

radiance, 
fall away.

We are not so much maddened

as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
 of
dark, cold

caves.



And when great souls die,

after a period peace blooms,

slowly and always

irregularly. Spaces fill

with a kind of

soothing electric vibration.

Our senses, restored, never

to be the same, whisper to us:
They existed. They existed.

We can be. Be and be

better. For they existed.

For Paul x
April 1982 - May 2015.



 Funeral Blues - WH Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message 'He is Dead'.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

***


Edges of Emptiness - Marge Piercy

Those who truly inhabit our lives

whose faces, whose gestures

like fine choreography align the air,

whose voices enter that ghostly inner ear

so that we shall hear them ten years

later in an empty room at dusk,

never can their presence be replaced.

Those with whom we are truly intimate

sometimes with hands and organs,

sometimes with the paste of words alone,

the creatures for whom the hollow

places of our solitude are opened wide

to shimmer with the lighted lamps of love,

we shape ourselves to hold them.

We have been configured to a use,

a habitation. We are the chambered

shell of a nautilus, the high steep

coil of a conch, and always those vaults,

those winding galleries of pearl

will futilely await the one whose need

and pleasure they hardened around.

In love we weave ourselves together,

Persian carpets with the colors

of each friendship knotted fine and tight,

the pattern as visible on the reverse.

That dance of hue and light we studied

to perfect will never again join.

Loneliness is general or precise:

broad as a wheatfield under a broad Nebraska

sky or narrow as a footpath between

cliff and canyon. Particular, we starve

at Thanksgiving table. Feed us voices, tales,

faces, ornaments, we suck a shard of glass.

Those hungers lodge in our bones where they

sign to the skilled in X-rays, until death.

***

Death Is Nothing At All -  Henry Scott Holland

Death is nothing at all.
I have only slipped away
into the next room.

Nothing has happened.
Everything remains exactly as it was.
I am I, and you are you.
And the old life that we lived
so fondly together
is untouched,  unchanged.
Whatever we were to each other,
that we still are.

Call me by my old familiar name,
Speak of me in the easy way you always used.
Put no difference in your tone,
wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed
at the little jokes we shared together.
Let my name be ever
the household word it always was.
Let it be spoken without effort,
without a trace of a shadow on it.
Life means all that it ever meant,
It is the same as it ever was.
There is unbroken continuity.

Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?
I am but waiting for you
for an interval.
Somewhere, very near,
just around a corner.

All is well.
Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost.
One brief moment and all
will be as it was before.
How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting
when we meet again!

Addendum VII: Ode To A Croissant

Oh, for Sunday morning coffee and glorious croissants!



Petit Dejeuner - Linda Pastan
 
I sing a song
of the croissant
and of the wily French
who trick themselves daily
back to the world
for its sweet ceremony.

Ah to be reeled 
up into morning 
on that crisp,
buttery
hook. 

Addemdum VI: Heart Space

No Help For That - Charles Bukowski

there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled

a space

and even during the
best moments
and
the greatest
times

we will know it

we will know it
more than
ever

there is a place in the heart that
will never be filled
and

we will wait
and
wait

in that space.

Addendum V: Recipe for Happiness

Today is Poetry Day here in Ireland. One of the initiatives run by Poetry Ireland this year is 'Pocket Poems' - where you can download and distribute little pocket-sized poems as keepsakes.

Since I don't happen to agree much with any of their choices, I'm doing my own series of Pocket Poems and you can find them over on my main blog today: A Blog of One's Own, one of which is this short, simple and straight arrow burst of joy from Lawrence Ferlinghetti. 

Recipe for Happiness - Lawrence Ferlinghetti

One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand cafe in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups.

One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you.

One fine day.