Posts tagged: poem
月落烏啼霜滿天
江楓漁火對愁眠
榖素成外寒山寺
夜半鐘聲到客船
by Mary Oliver
-
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice —
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do —
determined to save
the only life you could save.
by Rainer Maria Rilke
The road from intensity to greatness passes thro sacrifice — Kassner
For a long time he attained it in looking.
Stars would fall to their knees
beneath his compelling vision.
Or as he looked on, kneeling,
his urgency’s fragrance
tired out a god until
it smiled at him in its sleep.
Towers he would gaze at so
that they were terrified:
building them up again, suddenly, in an instant!
But how often the landscape,
overburdened by day,
came to rest in his silent awareness, at nightfall.
Animals trusted him, stepped
into his open look, grazing,
and the imprisoned lions
stared in as if into an incomprehensible freedom;
birds, as it felt them, flew headlong
thro it; and flowers, as enormous
as they are to children, gazed back
into it, on and on.
And the rumour that there was someone
who knew how to look,
stirred those less
visible creatures:
stirred the women.
Looking how long?
For how long now, deeply deprived,
beseeching in the depths of his glance?
When he, whose vocation was Waiting, sat far from home-
the hotel’s distracted unnoticing bedroom
moody around him, and in the avoided mirror
once more the room, and later
from the tormenting bed
once more:
then in the air the voices
discussed, beyond comprehension,
his heart, which could still be felt;
debated what thro the painfully buried body
could somehow be felt – his heart;
debated and passed their judgement:
that it did not have love.
(And denied him further communions.)
For there is a boundary to looking.
And the world that is looked at so deeply
wants to flourish in love.
Work of the eyes is done, now
go and do heart-work
on all the images imprisoned within you; for you
overpowered them: but even now you don’t know them.
Learn, inner man, to look on your inner woman,
the one attained from a thousand
natures, the merely attained but
not yet beloved form.
[tr. stephen mitchell]
By Ryan Scott Nance
Warm. It can be simply the sun
that has warmed your skin. But it
is certainly not something as far
away as that that pulses up
the edge of your neck. On its way
to your brain, your warm blood
enacts your heart’s primal wish:
to wish; to want; to be; to love.
A fully functioning heart lets
its warmth stream through it.
It beats on the inside of your
lower lip which I feel when my two
lips hold it, each swelling
a decision to want and want more.
Devereau, the warm river system
of your veins, the transport of your
spirit that, like a shimmering gold line
marks the countryside into homelands,
people, languages and cultures, also
carries your future of love and longing
downstream to the port cities of your hands.
With every touch of your soft fingers on
me, I feel your warm blood, delivered by your
heart, infused with the intention and decision you
make everyday: Today I say yes. I am
saying yes to you today.
by Ryan Scott Nance
Wicked Samurai in Cartoon Disguises by 5thingsilearnedtoday
Out of the corner will
Surely spring the sword-wielding
Kind hearted ender of each
Of us. The kitten faced
The laughably ineffectual
The well fortified city, Senlis
In France for example, or Toledo’s
Rocky approaches, can withstand
With measured grit and Roman
Pipes a great siege, the Hoarde,
The army Intent on blood and
Fatherhood of your children’s children. But what walls,
Tall and stony, can’t keep
Out, or won’t keep out, is
The clowns, the ridiculous,
The harmlessly looney. A parade
Of them, grinning and grimey
Prostrating themselves before
The proud queen combing her
Hair in the moonlight on Saturday
Evenings high in her iron-braced
Tower.
Today, just today, a wicked
Samurai, masterfully trained
To let human life drain onto
A kitchen’s meticulous floor,
Arrived at your door in a
Cartoon disguise. An afternoon
Bright with imagined future
Remembrance darkened quickly
With a silent honed knife.
And that was it. You bled
Out on your private battlefield.
You failed to defend your life.
The mugger you frightened off years
Ago, the teetering semi truck you
Swerved around, the unceremoniously poisoned kebabs
You didnt buy from the jibbering
Street vendor, all were not
Your doom.
In the last few brain cycles your
Blood’s quickly fleeing oxygen affords
You should really wonder who
Sent your well loved killer.
And why. You won’t know either,
Ever. You really ever only know
Your own heart, and that only
If you are brave and open.
by Ryan Scott Nance About is to get vermilion on around dawn.Verbmongering
That which is through, is off, purled off in sheets of off.
Off and off.
Bound a sickle is.
A lid off is.
Off a lid is.
Off is a lid.
All about, less or more than another other.
Made the rabbit was.
Made until the fur was off the rabbit was; eyes of, fish before were.
Corn-nub cornea resembled.
Tad-tail unplugged optic cable moved like.
Cornea corn-nub moved like unplugged rabbit optic nerve retrembled.
Long flanks of haired muscles tremble unlive the way unhaired muscle retremble alived.
Up upon the hook so done, the foot-bound shuttle of unlost rabbit-soul is hung in wind and window of not this, but that, unclosed butcher haven.
Not ever eat, but ingest, and not unalive get the vermilion bond on around down the leak the sun might fall on through to the other other.
by Denis Johnson
It’s after one. You’re probably alone.
All night the moon rings like a telephone
in an empty booth above our separateness.
Now is the hour one answers. I am home.
Hello, my heart, my god, my president,
my darling: I’m alarmed by the alarm
clock’s iridescent face, hung like a charm
from darkness’s fat ear. This accident
that was my life will have its witnessess:
now, while the world lies whooly motionless
and sorry in a crapulence of stars,
now is the hour one rises to address
the ages and history of the universe;
I swear you’ll never see my face again.
Leaves flap through the dark windows like stiff-veined flags. Wind stirs much of the street. An uncut lime is small and fits in the palm’s hollow, near the wrist. It turns like a key: the apartment door and the neighbors’ door, the front door to the sidewalk beneath the tree of urgent flags, and the windows which seem so much like passages—— should be looked through, but not stepped through. Inside the refrigerator, the light blinks out again, again the calm of cold puts off expiration a little longer. The smell of the wind before its charge through the window, the odor of gas announces the maniacal blue flame, rising smoke wraith and the sweet forgiving smell, the long dedication of the tea whistles, the tea’s wheaty steam. On the teacup’s lip, very nearly saying it. There is no detail. No turn to make. Only the heat before, the heat after.Saying It
By Ryan Scott Nance
It isn’t enough, the world
for the beauty it is the face of.
The cities of childlike hopes
are swelling with citizens, and cars.
The farmlands of hard regret and soil
are lying fallow in the slideshows
I see daily. Our wrists
that might be torn open with
an intent pink eraser. It was a far distance
I saw from this first look at danger.
The menacing teeth. The wolfshead.
From a parade of familiar characters,
clogging the rueful suburbs and small
towns, surrounded by the approaching desert, marsh, tundra…
whichever it is that you got coming for you.
The marketplaces and their seemingly maniacal
monkeys are the true hearts of the world.
And don’t think for a second I am meaning to
say that money is the blood of humanity,
although saying it aloud nearly makes sense.
It is the unfettered exchange of croquettes for
plastic pencil cases for stolen medical supplies
for iridescent discs of shiny pop music.
by Anne Sexton
For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959
Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.
We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.
My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.
And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in the stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
