Nicole

I would have liked to see this, and I was even in Flint yesterday. http://www.mlive.com/entertainment/fljournal/index.ssf?/base/features-0/114605966237190.xml&coll=5

you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you're young, whatever life you wear
it will become you;and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love
whose any mystery makes every man's
flesh put space on; and his mind take off time
that you should ever think, may god forbid
and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies, the foetal grave
called progress, and negation's dead undoom.
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

Some malign this poem as being one of Roethke's cheesier works (which is heresy, as far as this Roethke-lover is concerned); it may also be cheesy to send out a dedication, but here goes:

To Sergei, who once quoted it to me–

(Imagine Kasey Kasem's voice saying, "Ni in Michigan, here's your request and dedication"…)

In A Dark Time
Theodore Roethke

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood–
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.
What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks–is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is–
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark, dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

THE READER

All night I sat reading a book,
Sat reading as if in a book
Of sombre pages.

It was autumn and falling stars
Covered the shrivelled forms
Crouched in moonlight.

No lamp was burning as I read,
A voice was mumbling, “Everything
Falls back to coldness,

Even the musky muscadines,
The melons, the vermilion pears
Of the leafless garden.”

The sombre pages bore no print
Except the trace of burning stars
In the frosty heaven.

— Wallace Stevens

I started a poetry blog, http://inverse.wordpress.com/. It’s mostly just ones I like or have saved for some reason, but I sneak in a few of my own too.

It’s not LJ-based, because I was thinking of embedding a blog into my personal site, and, having heard mixed reviews of Blogger and Movable Type, I wanted to try out WordPress. I’m not really liking the interface though.

DREAMS

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep – while I weep!
O God! – can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! – can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

НАКАНУНЕ ГОДОВЩИНЫ 4 АВГУСТА 1864 г.

Вот бреду я вдоль большой дороги
В тихом свете гаснущего дня,
Тяжело мне, замирают ноги…
Друг мой милый, видишь ли меня?

Все темней, темнее над землею -
Улетел последний отблеск дня…
Вот тот мир, где жили мы с тобою,
Ангел мой, ты видишь ли меня?

Завтра день молитвы и печали,
Завтра память рокового дня…
Ангел мой, где б души ни витали,
Ангел мой, ты видишь ли меня?

3 августа 1865

Ф.И.Тютчев

ON THE EVE OF THE ANNIVERSARY OF AUGUST 4TH., 1864

Here I go along the highway
In the silent light of dying day,
Heavy to me, legs become transfixed…
My sweet friend, do you see me?

It is dark, darker over all the earth.
Day's last glimmer flying off…
Here is the world where I lived with you.
My angel, do you see me?

Tomorrow is a day of prayer and grief.
Tomorrow a memory of that fateful day.
My angel, wherever souls wander,
My angel, do you see me?

(This was in my head today)

THE BROOK

I COME from haunts of coot and hern,
I make a sudden sally,
And sparkle out among the fern,
To bicker down a valley.
 
By thirty hills I hurry down,
Or slip between the ridges,
By twenty thorps, a little town,
And half a hundred bridges.
 
Till last by Philip's farm I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.
 
I chatter over stony ways,
In little sharps and trebles,
I bubble into eddying bays,
I babble on the pebbles.
 
With many a curve my banks I fret
by many a field and fallow,
And many a fairy foreland set
With willow-weed and mallow.
 
I chatter, chatter, as I flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may comeand men may go,
But I go on forever.
 
I wind about, and in and out,
with here a blossom sailing,
And here and there a lusty trout,
And here and there a grayling,
 
And here and there a foamy flake
Upon me, as I travel
With many a silver water-break
Above the golden gravel,
 
And draw them all along, and flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.
 
I steal by lawns and grassy plots,
I slide by hazel covers;
I move the sweet forget-me-nots
That grow for happy lovers.
 
I slip, I slide, I gloom, I glance,
Among my skimming swallows;
I make the netted sunbeam dance
Against my sandy shallows.
 
I murmur under moon and stars
In brambly wildernesses;
I linger by my shingly bars;
I loiter round my cresses;
 
And out again I curve and flow
To join the brimming river,
For men may come and men may go,
But I go on forever.

Jack Gilbert – The Great Fires 

Love is apart from all things.
Desire and excitement are nothing beside it.
It is not the body that finds love.
What leads us there is the body.
What is not love provokes it.
What is not love quenches it.
Love lays hold of everything we know.
The passions which are called love
also change everything to a newness
at first. Passion is clearly the path
but does not bring us to love.
It opens the castle of our spirit
so that we might find the love which is
a mystery hidden there.
Love is one of many great fires.
Passion is a fire made of many woods,
each of which gives off its special odor
so we can know the many kinds
that are not love. Passion is the paper
and twigs that kindle the flames
but cannot sustain them. Desire perishes
because it tries to be love.
Love is eaten away by appetite.
Love does not last, but it is different
from the passions that do not last.
Love lasts by not lasting.
Isaiah said each man walks in his own fire
for his sins. Love allows us to walk
in the sweet music of our particular heart.