Post your favourite Poems

[secondwind]

        Monet's Waterlilies

Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
     I come again to see
the serene great picture that I love.
Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
     The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
     that was not, was, forever is.

O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
     each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.

                          Robert Hayden, 1970


I love this poem because it so closely echoes my own response to Monet's waterlilies when I first visited them in New York.  When I went into the room that was there for the waterlilies alone (waterlilies all around, just a bench in the middle of the room) I experienced a couple of things for the first time.  For the first time, I knew what it was to want to own a work of art, to possess it and control it, to the exclusion of others.  I wanted that room, I wanted the only key to it, I wanted to be able to go there whenever I wanted, and to allow in only those I wished to allow in, or no one, forever.  And for the first time, I experienced the ability of a visual art to transform my experience in ways that hitherto (and usually) only music could accomplish.  In the presence of those paintings, I was transported not to Giverny, nor even to Monet's mind's view of Giverny, but to some supremely peaceful inner sanctum of my own soul that I had no awareness of having visited before.

[Ugh]

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -

Emily Dickinson

[Sergeant Rock]

When I went into the room that was there for the waterlilies alone (waterlilies all around, just a bench in the middle of the room)....I wanted that room...

I understand. I want it too...better than a zen garden! I saw the Waterlilies at the Orangerie in 1972. I don't know how we lucked out but my wife and I had the room to ourselves for several minutes--the summer Parisian crowds just magically disappeared and we possessed that great art for a moment.

The poem really takes me back...1970. I was stationed on the DMZ in Korea, listening to Communist propaganda and music broadcast across the barrier from the North, always expecting cross border raids and ambushes; reading the news of home (northeastern Ohio), the Kent State shootings; and contemplating my next assignment: Vietnam. I needed that room then.

Sarge

[Sergeant Rock]

I really like the Mahler poem, Sarge...I love the last stanza!

So do I--you do know he was born in Germany? His name at birth was Heinrich Karl Bukowski.

My favorite line is "he must have looked like an earthquake walking down the street."

Sarge

[secondwind]

So do I--you do know he was born in Germany? His name at birth was Heinrich Karl Bukowski.

My favorite line is "he must have looked like an earthquake walking down the street."

Sarge

That is a great line!  I didn't know he was born in Germany.  Now you're making me wonder about his childhood, possible cultural disruptions, etc.  I feel a Wikipedia feeding frenzy coming on. . .

[secondwind]

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -

Emily Dickinson

I love Emily Dickinson.  Somehow, I had never seen this poem before.  "a Loaded Gun" -- was she ever!

[Sergeant Rock]

It must be a common psychological ploy when faced with the painful end of a relationship to rationalize why it went wrong, to find any excuse not to blame ourselves but in the end to simply conclude, well, we never really loved them anyway. I'd quite happily done that when my first marriage ended after five years. And then along came poet Hugo Williams to shoot a hole in my carefully constructed emotional barrier 

First his poem--then my counter argument.


IN THE BLINDFOLD HOURS by Hugo Williams

In the blindfold hours,
in the memory wars,
don't fool yourself it never happened,
that you never loved her.
Don't degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.

Go to the window. Listen to the trees.
It's only air we live in.
There is nothing to be frightened of.



A CONVERSATION WITH HUGO WILLIAMS by Sergeant Rock

In the blindfold hours,
in the memory wars,
don't fool yourself it never happened,
that you never loved her... But Hugo,
   
if you don't, the pain confronts:
the realization that you weren't really the one,
the sensitive one to ride her amative moods,
soothing her fears, forcing her nature gently,
and accepting, accepting, her resistance with patience
while awaiting the inevitable leap,
the bloom beyond childhood legacy
into the woman you always wanted,
the woman you craved...the woman you lost.

In the fading light, through the dank late autumn leaves,
to enter the comfort of her room
--a cluttered room, where the ashes
still glow warm with memory, five roses persist,
gold droplets of Piesporter mature in crystal
and a collage, echoic, of Mahler, Marieke,
Bluebird Wine and Le Meteque is heard;
where the waft of Charlie still lingers
sensuously in the cobwebbed rafters
and The Education of Don Juan lies
on the mantle in the dust
bookmarked at that certain page--is to come
face to face with loss,
the horror of regret...if I did love her.

Better to browse with feigned disinterest,
seeking no lost treasures: no easy
laughter nor cat eyes crinkled, seducing; no summer
body, all blonde and bronzed; no unique
and feminine source, welling the sea; no chansons.
Ignore the heat, the musky scent.
Then congratulate yourself on how little you find,
how little you feel.
Afterall, you only need chilled air to breathe.

Open a window:
listen to the leaves tumbling in the wind,
feel the hint of frost, inhale the musty scent.


Sarge

[secondwind]

Interesting dialogue of poems, Sarge.  But  the harder you work to argue against Hugo Williams' admonition, or against your own history of love, the more you prove them right.  Love, I am convinced, is like energy--it may change form, but it cannot ever not be, it can't change from being to not being.  I don't belabor the point with my husband, but every man I ever loved, I love still.  And live with the pain, brokenness, and loss that you write of so well.

[Guido]

Yeats, 1899

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,   
Enwrought with golden and silver light,   
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths   
Of night and light and the half light,   
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;   
I have spread my dreams under your feet;   
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.   

[Florestan]

Reminds me.

When You are Old
   
WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep   
  And nodding by the fire, take down this book,   
  And slowly read, and dream of the soft look   
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;   
 
How many loved your moments of glad grace,         
  And loved your beauty with love false or true;   
  But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,   
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.   
 
And bending down beside the glowing bars,   
  Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled   
  And paced upon the mountains overhead,   
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.   

W. B. Yeats
 

[secondwind]

Guido, Florestan. . .thanks!  Those are two of my favorites!

[Antoine Marchand]

Borges and I

The other one, Borges, is the one to whom things happen. I wander through Buenos Aires, and pause, perhaps mechanically nowadays, to gaze at an entrance archway and its metal gate; I hear about Borges via the mail, and read his name on a list of professors or in some biographical dictionary. I enjoy hourglasses, maps, eighteenth century typography, etymology, the savour of coffee and Stevenson's prose: the other shares my preferences but in a vain way that transforms them to an actor's props. It would be an exaggeration to say that our relationship is hostile; I live, I keep on living, so that Borges can weave his literature, and that literature justifies me. It's no pain to confess that certain of his pages are valid, but those pages can't save me, perhaps because good writing belongs to no one, not even the other, but only to language and tradition. For the rest, I am destined to vanish, definitively, and only some aspect of me can survive in the other. Little by little, I will yield all to him, even though his perverse habit of falsifying and exaggerating is clear to me. Spinoza understood that all things want to go on being themselves; the stone eternally wishes to be stone, and the tiger a tiger. I am forced to survive as Borges, not myself (if I am a self), yet I recognise myself less in his books than in many others, less too than in the studious strumming of a guitar. Years ago I tried to free myself from him, and passed from suburban mythologies to games of time and infinity, but now those are Borges' games and I will have to think of something new. Thus my life is a flight and I will lose all and all will belong to oblivion, or to that other.

          I do not know which of us is writing this page.

By Jorge Luis Borges

[Sergeant Rock]

Interesting dialogue of poems, Sarge.  But  the harder you work to argue against Hugo Williams' admonition, or against your own history of love, the more you prove them right. 

You're right, of course. My poem--while seeming to disagree with Williams--actually proves him right. To lie to yourself puts you in a cold, emotionless wasteland, perhaps less painful than accepting, and living with, the regret of lost love but wthout the consolation of memory and truth. I don't know how successful I was in suggesting that I really didn't believe my own argument: that the comfort of her abandoned but still warm room is preferable to chilly air and frost.

Sarge

[secondwind]

You're right, of course. My poem--while seeming to disagree with Williams--actually proves him right. To lie to yourself puts you in a cold, emotionless wasteland, perhaps less painful than accepting, and living with, the regret of lost love but wthout the consolation of memory and truth. I don't know how successful I was in suggesting that I really didn't believe my own argument: that the comfort of her abandoned but still warm room is preferable to chilly air and frost.

Sarge

Pretty successful, for me at least.  The items in the cluttered room and the lost treasures are so lovingly described that it is clear that even the pain they bring is preferable to the cold numbness of emotional anesthesia.

Here's another entry in the lost love category:

An old book on the poisons
of madness, a map
of forest monasteries,
a chronicle brought across
the sea in Sanskrit slokas.
I hold all these
but you have become
a ghost for me.

I hold only your shadow
since those days I drove
your nature away.

A falcon who became a coward.

I hold you the way astronomers
draw constellations for each other
in the markets of wisdom

placing shells
on a dark blanket
saying "these
are the heavens"

calculating the movement
of the great stars

        Michael Ondaatje

[greg]

that the comfort of her abandoned but still warm room is preferable to chilly air and frost.

I prefer the chilly air and frost- the world is much bigger out there and there is much more stuff to explore than some little room. 

[Sergeant Rock]

I prefer the chilly air and frost- the world is much bigger out there and there is much more stuff to explore than some little room. 

Well, when you put it that way...   

Sarge

[secondwind]

I prefer the chilly air and frost- the world is much bigger out there and there is much more stuff to explore than some little room. 

Ha!  Spoken like one who has not yet loved and lost! (That's okay, I think you're still young, right?)  Either that or you're the most disgustingly mentally health person I've ever met!

[greg]

Ha!  Spoken like one who has not yet loved and lost! (That's okay, I think you're still young, right?)  Either that or you're the most disgustingly mentally health person I've ever met!

Young and none of the above, I guess?... 

[WI Dan]

This is a spray the Bird clung to,
   Making it blossom with pleasure,
Ere the high treetop she clung to,
   Fit for her nest and her treasure.
   Oh, what a hope beyond measure
Was the poor spray's, which the flying feet hung to--
So to be singled out, built in, and sung to!

        Browning: From "Misconceptions"

[Saul]

Translation from French of the Song :

Et si tu n existais pas - And if you didn't exist

http://www.youtube.com/v/abfQQ1hzN9M&feature=related

And if you didn't exist,
tell me why I would exist.
Dragging myself through a world without you,
without hope and without regret.

And if you didn't exist,
i would attempt to invent love,
like a painter who sees under his fingers
the colors of the day come to life
and who can't quite believe it.

And if you didn't exist,
tell me for whom would I exist.
The passers-by asleep in my arms,
that I will never love.

And if you didn't exist,
I wouldn't be more than a speck
in the world that comes and goes,
I would feel lost,
I would need you.

And if you didn't exist,
tell me how I would exist.
I could pretend to be me,
but I would not be true to myself.

And if you didn't exist
I think that I would have found
the secret of life, the why
simply to create you
and to look at you.