Just good poems the world seems to have forgotten (and should read). Curated by @PeterVertacnik
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ALT Therefore Nothing exists that is not marred; therefore we are obliged to imagine how thing might be: the sea at its green uttermost, the shore white to exaggeration, white before it was checked and clouded by its spent debris. Nothing exists that does not end, and so to knowledge we must deliberately be untrue: you murmuring that you will not go, when you will go, promising to do always what you cannot do: hold the sun steady, and the sky new. No one exists who be loved the same by day as by dark; it is that sleeping place, lame, we attempt to follow into, and cannot trace, that makes us lie, saying we know his face, as if we knew even half of his true name.
ALT Lost The tap of snow, The feet of mice, Humming in walls, And the log's precise Spit of resin: Is this a dream Of sound? Ah, does it Only seem This winter night Was years ago, That I lie under A younger snow, That the clawed mice Are little bones Like ivory spindles Among these stones?
ALT Convalescent In the great house the hardest room to find Between the storeys, up the shortest flight, Had thick mosquito netting for a blind, So that the world outside was blurred with white. Here quiet and bemused the child was lying, The peaceful child come halfway back from dying. No longer in the walls can be discovered The little stair, the window's pallid spell, But from her childhood never quite recovered, From old enchantments never wholly well, She keep till death that remnant of true sight, The winding-sheet of wonder on the night.
ALT The Sea Birds No light except the stars, but from the cliff I saw in motion, out on the rolling waves, The white sea birds that swim beyond the surf. Their movements made a pattern on the mauve, Contorted stretch of cold, corrosive water, Where even the images of stars dissolve. When I had thought the birds were fixed in order, I saw the swimming rim of their starlit ring Minutely swerve and spiral toward the center! The birds that had been swimming in between Were shuttled outward on a wheel of light, Reflecting, like the sea, the star's design. I paused, and looked, and saw a star burn out And sink back into space as through a fissure. It was an ancient word without a thought. Perhaps birds move in pattern for the measure It imposes on the ruptured waves at night; Perhaps they spiral purely for their pleasure. While I was trying to untie this knot, A motion in the motion of the weather Turned, and the birds turned too and tore the net
ALT I knitted for them (a star had torn another I had knitted for stars). I saw them climb the gale That drove small arrows in through every feather-- One by one they spread their flapping sails. I think the stars are moving in a school With restless birds above a freezing pool, And no one shall put salt on their bright tails.
ALT Departure After I died, I could not close my eyes, And when everything appeared In sweeping glares where people swayed Like trees in dreaming blows, I tried to say, "The horror is all yours." A woman wailed when rocks fell on my house. I never knew a gentler music. I hear contrasting rhythms not of rain. Quiet descends like lint. The air is being absorbed. I miss nothing yet unless it's God, But I am breaking loose, And as I wander through the stones That churn like seas inside, The terror is the getting lost in earth.
ALT Fish Clouds and Stars Tonight I think about the fish who possess no prayerbooks, no creeds on ocean altars, whose bodies are impaired by no meek genuflections, their very existence a simple and perpetual hallelujah, swimming home tonight in silver packs on the soft spears of the sea. And clouds, scarves thrown back over the summer's shoulder, exist by turning everything in one direction, shapes in the lamb-like air combed back into goats' beards, or plush figures of rams with sharp horns and marble bleats. Baudelaire, too, know the clouds have no cause to shrink or die. It's true the stars have limbs and eyes when we see them as the women they become; or like benign heroes in the void they own a sad and noble light. You ascend in the center of your life with hair and pencil, you paint them black, you color them gold, with long and prejudiced shadows.
ALT Fish Clouds and Stars Tonight I think about the fish who possess no prayerbooks, no creeds on ocean altars, whose bodies are impaired by no meek genuflections, their very existence a simple and perpetual hallelujah, swimming home tonight in silver packs on the soft spears of the sea. And clouds, scarves thrown back over the summer's shoulder, exist by turning everything in one direction, shapes in the lamb-like air combed back into goats' beards, or plush figures of rams with sharp horns and marble bleats. Baudelaire, too, know the clouds have no cause to shrink or die. It's true the stars have limbs and eyes when we see them as the women they become; or like benign heroes in the void they own a sad and noble light. You ascend in the center of your life with hair and pencil, you paint them black, you color them gold, with long and prejudiced shadows.
ALT The Inner Eye It is always night where I look on the other side of the eye in the dark room of the mind. Daylight comes to surprise the matinee eyes of the owl who resides in an owl gloom. The world is braille to the mole. He has his nose in the text. Weight is the fullness of all to the round sense of the stone holding the motion of earth in the interstellar ground, the black of the moon, the blind underside of the light, the always night where I look.
ALT The World Under the Limetree Along with what the leaf whispers this world under the limetree hears the blackbird's tongue, the song of the gnat. Blossom and fruit and falling fruit are all one season; one with them the leafmoth's individual autumn, seen through silk, as under glass. High in the leaves, in the blue spaces, spiders spin their machinations luring flies to cul-de-sacs. The planetary sphere includes a dancing air that lifts and loses loads of sunlight in the sparse Antarctic circles of the grass. It turns a page whose words are flame. This world can make no sense of them.
ALT Middle Age What a relief it is Now that we know we can Never keep up with our dust, And know the char's compromise Of sweeping under an edge Is what we finally must Do with all loves and judgements If we accept being man. What a relief it is Now we are sure we can't Ever get clear: But no-one is so wise As to know whose dust he weeps for, Or not to know--in fear-- What the expedient sweeping Up of ghosts will do. Or won't.
ALT The Last Day of Marriage You told my mother your old husband died In the small house in the dark glen, Glendhu; That no one there could lay him out but you; And your one place to sleep was by his side, As if the double bed were still your bed. And now your son's that age, I think my mother (Foreseeing widowhood) fears such another Dissolving night beside the newly dead. The hours of little sleep at either end Of marriage are too secret to be told; The grandson and the son must not pretend To understand the silence of the old. I try to reach across those thirty years With comfort: the dumb comfort of a kiss Suddenly given can relieve those fears-- But how I wish that we could speak of this.
