Even a charcoal smudge can elevate
Shadowy bodies hunched beneath umbrellas,
In the formidable dark of winter –
Create, and pay your dues to the sweetness of life –
Lick the tip of your pen
So as to draw your lover, reclined just so,
Ablaze because of you
Because of you –
Create, because of you and
Because there is no other way
Around or above your impression of the world –
Create, because of the extraordinary naked body
Create, because nothing is commonplace, after all.
Create, because of the sleeplessness and worry
Because of war and your remoteness.
Create, because you itch to do something
Like the dog, paw to ear
Create, because each moment deserves
To be scratched and therein lies some measure
Of your participation –
Create, because your reaction to the dome of
Night sky from your specific junction
In longitude and latitude, within one
Singular moment in time, is so lusty that it
Cannot otherwise be contained –
Create, so as to linger on,
Create, so as to extend your appetite –
Create, to know one’s self –
What a terrifying and radiant thing.
“Poems very seldom consist of poetry and nothing else; and pleasure can be derived also from their other ingredients. I am convinced that most readers, when they think they are admiring poetry, are deceived by inability to analyze their sensations, and that they are really admiring, not the poetry of the passage before them, but something else in it, which they like better than poetry.”
Excerpt from The Name and Nature of Poetry, 1933 lecture by A.E. Houseman
Could we let more go, overlook, extricate –
Only to watch where things lean on their own accord
As in the unkempt shoulder, where the holly and blackberry
Are knotted in camaraderie. Similarly, would
We be kinder to each other if we uncorked our
Hearts like anniversary wine taken off the shelf –
Now it’s gone, we might say, and yet
It is just a matter of alternating emptiness and fullness.
Why shame the unrestrained joy or candid pleasure
(Lick me like a mineral salt deposit!)
Politely greet the dearth after the storm
Forgive meanness and the thousand bruises behind
Each dishonest word or snarled lip, and
Let it be known that rigidity is befitting only to a pole –
Haven’t you heard how even the trees moan, so do not be afraid
Of flipping backwards into your love and desire
What all you will learn by observing the holly and blackberry entwine or,
Letting it go for the time being to lean into him and him into you,
Making room for more, by giving up more, mutually.
Furthermore, as everyone knows by now, one must love poetry. Poetry is like faith – it isn’t meant to be understood but to be received in a state of grace. No one should say “this is clear,” because poetry is obscure. And no one should say “this is obscure,” because poetry is clear. What we must do is search out poetry energetically and virtuously so that it will surrender to us. But we need to have forgotten poetry completely before it can fall naked into our arms….The imagination hovers over reason the way fragrance hovers over a flower, wafted on the breeze but tied, always, to the ineffable center of its origin…As long as he does not try to free himself from the world, the poet can live happily in his golden poverty…The mission of the poet is just that – to give life (animar), in the exact sense of the word: to give soul…Poetry doesn’t need skilled practitioners, she needs lovers, and she lays down brambles and shards of glass for the hands that search for her with love.
What is there left to be made new –
To be young and so glutted by bounty
That astonish is already spoken for, and beauty
Has been driven in by the chair of the tongue
Where it all sits riding the distance from
Shapeless to this like wide hips giving birth:
Words are tourists, given a world and belonging nowhere.
I wonder what is left
That hasn’t been said generations ago, only to be
Forgotten so it feels new against the palate.
Do we forget our pains, so the heartache is new each time?
Just as the first cool, honey sweet bite of melon
Is lost the moment it is tasted, so words
Leave the tongue petrified, and die –
Newness is the fox you catch on the
Outside of a glass door,
Dragging your boot by the shoelace.
For Thomas Graham, Rest in Peace
You have done your work
You are happy enough
To let your legs dangle
In the cool, dark water
With your face turned upwards
All shades of purple, of gentle,
Of meekness, which is akin to
Knowing how blessed life is
Between air and water
Between love and psalm
In family and in clemency
Drifting slowly in the deep
Somewhere attached.
I sat down at the table
To talk about love
Allegory, myth, lore and fable
Which I know nothing of.
Parsley, dill and basil
Fresh and fragrant on my plate –
Convince them which of those is better first,
Then move on to fate.
“Besides, the affinities between poems and declarations of love are well known. In both cases, huge risks are involved that are dependent on language itself. It is about uttering a word the effects of which, in existence, can be almost infinite. That is also the desire driving a poem. The simplest words become charged with an intensity that is almost intolerable. To make a declaration of love is to move on from the event-encounter to embark on a construction of truth.”
Alain Badiou on Love and Poetry, In Praise of Love
Am I to desire you who teach non-attachment?
I am tsunami; with violence and duration
My petitions, as in wave shoaling, heighten to break in fists
And sea spray upon your coastline
Am I to desire you who speak of immaterial love?
Alone, to embrace these long, lilac shadows?
When your mouth is tropical water, a sleepy harbor
Of honeysuckle skin and halcyon limbs.
Am I to desire you who whisper in parables of reason?
You persuade me that need is only the howling infant,
With softness you cradle my angry wet face
With patience you crouch at my perimeter
Until I learn to swim in the waters of my ego, relentlessness,
And the miles and miles of longing
Am I to desire you who are afraid of the word and the action?
I am sea storm and you are the fishing vessel,
I lap at the port of your manhood and obliterate your resolve
Until you commit to the bow of the word with conviction
And my miles and miles
This poem is ogiji, sweet fugitive,
That my deference may suspend in your mind like
The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
Hold the world close
Like a hymnal to your heart
Stand against the seashore
Like a Cypress, arms outstretched.
When passion stabs you over and over
Go back to the spot with a mouthful of words
And the entire chapter to rewrite
Still bent on rendering everything into language
It is a mercy that all life is a mystery
So you can sing instead of speak
So you can climb the rock face that has been silent for centuries
And submit to that very concept until all images
Grow so old you also fall dumb –
So you can lie in bed with another and submit yourself
To them thoughtlessly, and be cut open by love so that
You can return to Moat Creek a year later
And see how loss has made you into
An exquisite and fierce creature
Howling against the grain of time.
petals and bees 