Smallest Rivers - Poetry Thursday

The PT prompt this week is simply the word rivers.

Rain

Without thunder,
twitching leaves
is the only sound
you make and
that is no sound at all.

Rain, so slight,
even the clouds
must be unaware
that you’ve come.

But you are persistent,
and I know
when you’re done
the featherless baby sparrows

born in the eaves
will be drowned, know
I will find one or two
beneath the drainpipe,

pressed into the dirt,
wings of skin extended
in grotesque flattened flight
while above, the sun

dries the remains of
their nest.
I am old and young then,
in these least rains,
where the smallest rivers flood.

Here Boy

Looks like we are finally going to get ourselves a little puppy - a border terrier. Like these pictured here courtesy of Google. He will be coming all the way from Indianapolis to Ohio. My God, the cuteness is unbearable.


No more cricket pets. Slug pets. You see, my son Whit has stray love (regardless of species and whether they're truly strays) which I completely understand. But the puppy's time has finally come.

Cernuda Tellier Anyone's Guess

A father son poem I have always liked.

Though, because my housekeeping is sloppy sometimes, I did not write down the poet. I think it is Luis Cernuda, or Jorge Tellier. Sorry.

The Never-Ending Tale
for my son

Sea and sky, indefatigable powers,
concur beneath the clearing light.
Only I, in the afternoon, am weary.

This intense blue imposes itself on all,
a blue arched toward its own calm,
just beginning to form
variations of the sea-spray.
Vague-bodied clouds
await the festival of twilight.
My eyes scan what they have always loved,
a vision even more seductive now,
fragile beneath the shadows
that lean across my gaze toward darkness.
If the years have given me their riches
yet they pile up their numbers
and the current that carries me
hurriedly toward my end
seems swifter.

It does not matter. The light counts,
ceaselessly recounts an adventure,
and does not end, does not end:
there is no conclusion.
The adventure of a sun and some men.
Extinguished finally,
lost as a sky closes over them.
The sky is immortal.
He is happy to whom it has fallen
to spend his ephemeral days—
like those of the yellowing leaves—
on this planet.
Am I more than a leaf
on a rustling tree?
A common destiny—
the only one?--unites us on the crust
of a planet always astir,
all of us caught up
in the motion that leads us
toward … is there perhaps no purpose?

The world which in me is waning
continues before me, intact
in its cool, fabulous air.

An open balcony,
a hidden shadow by the wall
along a street, in a summer doze,
streets, cities, fields, skies, infinite
lights … and man
with his terrible power,
and in the midst of the din,
among innumerable convulsive troubles,
the everyday miracle of an orchestra.

Memory cannot contain even one life.

Circles of friendships,
spirits who do not touch
history, or public,
woman, love, children,
our existence consummated fully
among good and evil.

In how many directions
does gratitude spill?
The compass rose unfolds.

Friends! The globe
flourishes with dialogues:
extraordinary flora
(mingling with the jungle
that is never destroyed)
among the diminutive histories
that preserve without dates
those supreme, most humble, instants.
The root of my being has kept them
to form the one I am. Richer,
full of breath, I give thanks.
Man among men,
sun among stars—
spinning round some consciousness?

I look back. Oblivion has blurred
so much of what I was!
Memory conceals its treasures.
How can one say good-bye,
a final good-bye, to the world?
And no one takes leave of himself,
except in the drama of suicide.
Being dead is nothing.
Dying is merely sad.
It will grieve me to leave you—
you who will go on here—
and to have no part in your life.
The tale does not end.
Only he who tells you the tale comes to an end.

Rexroth Poem

I would love to post more Rexroth, but can't find my faves online which means keystroking which I can't do just now ... until then ...

QUIETLY

Lying here quietly beside you,
My cheek against your firm, quiet thighs,
The calm music of Boccherini
Washing over us in the quiet,
As the sun leaves the housetops and goes
Out over the Pacific, quiet --
So quiet the sun moves beyond us,
So quiet as the sun always goes,
So quiet, our bodies, worn with the
Times and the penances of love, our
Brains curled, quiet in their shells, dormant,
Our hearts slow, quiet, reliable
In their interlocked rhythms, the pulse
In your thigh caressing my cheek. Quiet.

PoTAYtoe, PoTAHtoe

.... a kind of poem that is a happening, not a poem which is just a discussion.
Louis Simpson

Art does not seek to describe but to enact.
Charles Olson

What they said.

More Famous Look Alikes?

Here is another Whitman look-alike. Actually, a lot of look alikes. I give it one thumb up.

Jaunty Hat

I see a lot of similarities between my Blog photo and the classic Leaves of Grass Whitman image.

The frosty beard, the hat (a hat I should say), the shirt unbuttoned in that inviting "let's sit in some warm shade and talk". Maybe while I am there someone's tongue will plunge into my ribs? My hands are, however, limp in my lap. My baseball cap is not tilted, cocked like a question made of cloth. Nor is my head tilted. What does that leave? An unbuttoned shirt, a beard?

Okay maybe the likeness is a s-t-r-e-t-c-h. Still, I feel today the way I imagine he feels in this picture. And who says a baseball hat can't be jaunty.

What Work Is, Isn't

This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence — to the spirit as well as to the body. It is about ulcers as well as about accidents, about shouting matches as well as fistfights, about nervous breakdowns as well as kicking the dog around. It is, above all (or beneath all), about daily humiliations. To survive the day is triumph enough for the walking wounded among the great many of us.
Studs Terkel, Working, 1972

I'm still working today. Some friends of mine are not. This is for those who punched out early yesterday - not by choice.

Listening to Haines

John Haines is quiet these days.

I think his most recent book came out in 1998 or thereabouts: End of Summer. But even this collection was earlier work if memory serves. He wrote some of the quietest poetry I have ever read. Poems, reminiscent at times, of WCW’s painting and painterly poems. A bit like the poem below. It has a still life feel to it.

Haines was a big discovery for me. Beyond Wordsworth and Stevens, he was one of those poet that had me nodding through almost every poem mumbling “yes, yes, yes” to myself. Here was someone articulating for me the deep archetypal resonances I knew I had experienced, and continued to experience during my many hikes, hunts, and endless outdoor encounters. Someone besides The Smiths explaining another part of my life to me. I have never and will never homestead in Alaska, but have dwelled in my own version of humbling solitude. Not as epic as the Alaskan wilderness must have been. The silence of his landscape in poems from Winter News for instance, is a real presence, not merely a descriptive accent. Here is one of my favorite Haines poems.

Listening in October

In the quiet house
a lamp is burning
where the book of autumn
lies open on the table.

There is tea with milk
in heavy mugs,
brown raisin cake, and thoughts
that stir the heart
with promises of death.

We sit without words,
gazing past the limit
of the fire into the towering
darkness....

There are silences so deep
you can hear
the journeys of the soul,
enormous footsteps
downward in a freezing earth.

In many of his poems, the end is punctuated with a sound, a sound that breaks the silence the poem works to create. I know from being married that listening does not always mean hearing. That’s one of the qualities in his poetry I so admire. That reminder to hear, not simply listen.

Tim McNulty

Tim McNulty's poetry, in many instances, has a kind of haiku purity I find very attractive. No ornamentation, no fanciful poet-making-metaphor surges. Clear and precise language.

Here's a short poem titled "Frost" in its entirety – I am sure the lineation will get all out of whack.

August blueberries, arctic cranberries,
gathered in a wooden bowl
(whole bushes uprooted where the bears
have been, branches sucked to the pith).
Already in the low carpet of tundra
a slight shift in color:
deep greens fading some,
faint tinges of red among the huckleberry
and fireweed,
and the lowest leaves of the dwarf willow
yellowing
like the pages of an old book
left out too long in a shed
unread:

this from a single frost.

The language is slow and hypnotically lush, and except for “carpet" and the “old book”, nicely emptied out of simile and metaphor. I can imagine this is descriptive but boring to some readers. I am predisposed to liking it via the Chinese and Japanese classics, though, how the poem's energy and attention deepen along the way through this accumulation of descriptive detail without epiphanies, meditative lurches and outtakes, etc., until that last line: this from a single frost - an unforced observation that has real weight to me.

ABE - Advanced Book Exchange

I know all you poetry hounds out there on the hunt must know about ABE, a decent online book source ... but just in case, here's the scoop. ABE is a lot like Amazon in that they list matches lowest price first, and they seem to have a better selection on the whole. This week I was able to wallow in my newest poetry crush and got Mary Ruefle's The Adamant, Cold Pluto, Post Meridian and Apparition Hill. Cheapo. Check it out if you need some used, but like new books of poems.

'Scuse Me While I Kiss This Guy'

Inspired in a cock-eyed way by Brent’s Neil Young post, I was thinking about misunderstood song lyrics. I think someone put together a whole book of them if I’m not mistaken.

I’ll start with the two most painful "misunderstandings" I came up with and maybe you can add to the list:

1. Pretty little love song, ten feet tall.

Can you guess the song?

And …

2. Dirty deeds and the thunder chief.

Guess again?

Update: As much as I despise my profession (advertising) it does cough up some good lines and funnies here and there.

On the subject of song lyrics, I saw a campaign for speakers/sound quality a while back and the whole campaign was built around misunderstood song lyrics. By far, the funniest was:

Small common Walter, the fire engine guy. Think Deep Purple.

Do you have any doozies?