One Good Poem

One Bare Finger

2012-02-07T10:35:00.000-08:00

Another Lullaby for Insomniacs
By A.E. Stallings

Sleep, she will not linger:
She turns her moon-cold shoulder.
With no ring on her finger,
You cannot hope to hold her.

She turns her moon-cold shoulder
And tosses off the cover.
You cannot hope to hold her:
She has another lover.

She tosses off the cover
And lays the darkness bare.
She has another lover.
Her heart is otherwhere.

She lays the darkness bare.
You slowly realize
Her heart is otherwhere.
There's distance in her eyes.

You slowly realize
That she will never linger,
With distance in her eyes
And no ring on her finger.

One Bankrupting Kiss

2012-01-24T08:25:00.000-08:00

I would love to kiss you.
The price of kissing is your life.
Now my loving is running toward my life shouting,
What a bargain, let's buy it.

--Jelaluddin Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

One Soaked Spirit

2012-01-17T09:50:00.000-08:00

Poets, though,
differ in combustibility.
Those soaked in spirits
catch fire first.

--Miroslav Holub, translated by David Young and Dana Habova

One Misleading Spine

2012-01-03T08:34:00.000-08:00

Had we known the Ton she bore
We had helped the terror—
But she straighter walked for Freight
So be hers the error—

--Emily Dickinson

One Staring Dial

2011-12-06T08:15:00.000-08:00

from Elegy of Fortinbras
By Zbigniew Herbert

...you knew no human thing you did not know even how to breathe

Now you have peace Hamlet you accomplished what you had to
and you have peace The rest is not silence but belongs to me
you chose the easier part an elegant thrust
but what is heroic death compared with eternal watching
with a cold apple in one's hand on a narrow chair
with a view of the ant-hill and the clock's dial

Adieu prince I have tasks a sewer project
and a decree on prostitutes and beggars
I must also elaborate a better system of prisons
since as you justly said Denmark is a prison
I go to my affairs This night is born
a star named Hamlet We shall never meet
what I shall leave will not be worth a tragedy...

--Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott

Two Opposing Moons

2011-11-22T08:21:00.000-08:00

from The Neglected Wife
By Yi Talch'ung

...Soon came the whisper of a silken skirt.
Soon came the perfume of a jasmine flower.
Swiftly for you there rose another moon.

....I think you do not know how cruel you are,
But why was your parting gift to me
Another folding fan?

---Translated by Joan Grigsby

One Sleepy Husband

2011-10-11T04:32:00.000-07:00

A War-Torn Wife
By Chenjerai Hove

This war!
I am tired of a husband
who never sleeps
guarding the home or on call-up,
never sleeping!

Maybe inside himself he says
"I am tired of a wife
who never dies
so I can stop guarding."

One Trembling Dog

2011-09-27T06:09:00.000-07:00

The Promise
By Jane Hirshfield

Stay, I said
to the cut flowers.
They bowed
their heads lower.

Stay, I said to the spider,
who fled.

Stay, leaf.
It reddened,
embarrassed for me and itself.

Stay, I said to my body.
It sat as a dog does,
obedient for a moment,
soon starting to tremble.

Stay, to the earth
of riverine valley meadows,
of fossiled escarpments,
of limestone and sandstone.
It looked back
with a changing expression, in silence.

Stay, I said to my loves.
Each answered,
Always.

One Incinerated Woman

2011-09-13T12:38:00.000-07:00

from Don't Go, Don't Go
By Mirabai

...I would like my own body to turn into a heap of incense and sandalwood and you set a torch to it.
When I've fallen down to gray ashes, smear me on your shoulders and chest. ...

--Version by Robert Bly

One Forgiven Lot

2011-08-23T12:23:00.000-07:00

from A Dialogue of Self and Soul
By W.B. Yeats

I am content to follow to its source
Every event in action or in thought;
Measure the lot; forgive myself the lot!
When such as I cast out remorse
So great a sweetness flows into the breast
We must laugh and we must sing,
We are blest by everything,
Everything we look upon is blest.

Two Tattered Stockings

2011-08-09T12:43:00.000-07:00

from The Light-Gray Soil
By Gjertrud Schnackenberg

...O beggar, I have seen the mound of earth
When all the rivers call their fountains back.
I wore my shoes away, I wore away
The stockings from my feet, seeking the house
Where no beloved person ever died,
No father, mother, husband, wife, or child.
Earth's crust diminishing beneath my feet.
The mantle glimpsed. The churning, iron core.
My hand lies next to me, begging, unheld:
Another earth. Give me another earth.

More

One Poetic Year

2011-07-05T01:59:00.000-07:00

The present year has been, in some respects, the most awful nightmare of anxiety that the mind of man could conceive, but at least it is not dull. --T.S. Eliot

One True Lie

2011-06-28T06:12:00.000-07:00

...poets are almost always wrong about facts. That's because they are not really interested in facts: only in truth: which is why the truth they speak is so true...

--William Faulkner

Zero Integrated Sentimentalists

2011-06-14T19:46:00.000-07:00

Nor has any poet I have read of or heard of or met with been a sentimentalist. The other self, the anti-self or the antithetical self, as one may choose to name it, comes but to those who are no longer deceived, whose passion is reality.

--W.B. Yeats

One Enthusiasmless Dream

2011-05-17T05:46:00.000-07:00

Once
By Nina Cassian

The old rock-climber cries out in his sleep,
Dreaming without enthusiasm
Of a great cliff immeasurably steep,
Or of the sort of yawning chasm,
Now far too deep,
That once, made safe by rashness, he could leap.

--Translated by Richard Wilbur

One Forethoughtful Child

2011-04-12T11:05:00.000-07:00

In childhood I never sowed a seed unless it was perennial—and that is why my garden lasts.

--Emily Dickinson

Two Overyellow Birds

2011-04-05T04:26:00.000-07:00

Yellow Birds
After Yuri of Goguryeo

In yellow sunlight on the golden road
I stand alone.
All, all are mine—rice fields and golden road,
All but the one thing I desire.

In a tree by the road two yellow birds are mating.
Why must they sing so gaily?

--Translated by Joan Grigsby

One Thin Stream

2011-03-29T07:32:00.000-07:00

At the Water Fountain

Just as with eyes raised
The traveler at the well
Drinking water that she pours
Lets it run through his fingers
To make her go on pouring
So she pours the thin stream
Thinner.

--Sanskrit

One Particular Merit

2011-03-29T07:00:00.000-07:00

To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit.

--William Blake

One Ephemeral Hue

2011-03-22T04:39:00.000-07:00

Nothing Gold Can Stay
By Robert Frost

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

One Acid Obol

2011-03-15T20:50:00.001-07:00

from Nike Who Hesitates
By Zbigniew Herbert

....
a solitary youth
he goes down the long tracks
of a war chariot
on a grey road in a grey landscape
of rocks and scattered juniper bushes

...
right now the scale containing his fate
abruptly falls
towards the earth

....Nike hesitates
and at last decides
to remain in that position
which sculptors taught her
...

she understands
that tomorrow at dawn
this boy must be found
with an open breast
closed eyes
and the acid obol of his country
under his numb tongue

--Translated by Czeslaw Milosz

One Bottled Message

2011-03-08T03:55:00.000-08:00

Poetry is the great S.O.S. of loneliness.

--Anna Kamienska

One Incomprehensible Name

2011-03-01T04:59:00.000-08:00

from When I Was a Boy
By Friedrich Holderlin

When I was a boy
A god often rescued me
From the shouts and the rods of men
And I played among trees and flowers
Secure in their kindness

....you delighted the heart in me

Father Helios, and like Endymion
I was your favourite,
Moon. O all

You friendly
And faithful gods
I wish you could know
How my soul has loved you.

Even though when I called to you then
It was not yet with names, and you
Never named me as people do
As though they knew one another

I knew you better
Than I have ever known them.
I understood the stillness above the sky
But never the words of men.

--Translated by David Constantine

Two Pragmatic Loves

2011-02-08T20:39:00.000-08:00

Since I'll only live once
I love both of you.
Since I'll only live once
I offend neither the sunray,
Nor the moonbeam!

If I lived twice
I would have loved you in this life
And loved the other in that life.
Since I only live once,
I have no choice:
I love both of you.
I offend neither the sunray
Nor the moonbeam.

--Abdulla Pashew

Two Blear Eyes

2011-02-01T11:28:00.000-08:00

from Blue Girls
By John Crowe Ransom

....Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail;
And I will cry with my loud lips and publish
Beauty which all our powers shall never establish,
It is so frail.

For I could tell you a story which is true;
I know a lady with a terrible tongue,
Blear eyes fallen from blue,
All her perfections tarnished—yet it is not long
Since she was lovelier than any of you.

One Lazy Poet

2011-01-18T06:44:00.000-08:00

....Sometimes mountains conceal
That
which is beyond the mountains
so the mountains must be moved
but I lack the necessary
technical means
and the strength
and the faith
to move mountains
so you will not see it
ever
I know
and that is why
I write

--Tadeusz Rozewicz ~ Book

One False Apocalypse

2011-01-11T23:29:00.000-08:00

The End of the World
By Miroslav Holub

The bird had come to the very end of its song
and the tree was dissolving under its claws.

And in the sky the clouds were twisting
and darkness flowed through all the cracks
into the sinking vessel of the landscape.

Only in the telegraph wires
a message still
crackled:

C-.-o---m--e. h...o---m--e.
y-.--o---u..- h...a.-v...-e.
a.-s...o---n-.

Book

One Simultaneous Mood

2010-12-28T20:29:00.002-08:00

Her states of mind were not progressive but approximately simultaneous.

--George Whicher on Emily Dickinson

Three Black Robes

2010-11-16T06:06:00.000-08:00

from Binding Song of the Eumenides
By Aeschylus

I have chosen overthrow
of houses, where the Battlegod
grown within strikes near and dear
down. So we swoop upon this man
here. He is strong, but we wear him down
for the blood that is still wet on him.

Men's illusions in their pride under the sky melt
down, and are diminished into the ground, gone
before the onset of our black robes, pulsing
of our vindictive feet against them.

For with a long leap from high
above and dead drop of weight
I bring foot's force crashing down
to cut the legs from under even
the runner, and spill him to ruin.

....All holds. For we are strong and skilled;
we have authority; we hold
memory of evil; we are stern
nor can men's pleading bend us. We
drive through our duties, spurned, outcast
from gods...

...Privilege
primeval yet is mine, nor am I without place
though it be underneath the ground
and in no sunlight and in gloom that I must stand.

--Translated by Richmond Lattimore

One Silent Sheet

2010-09-29T01:03:00.001-07:00

from Compromise
By Akhtar-ul-Iman

...

...People dream and ride the high winds,
then reach a stage when they weep bitterly
and break like branches.
They find loved ones,
the focus of their desires and lives,
then come to hate them
even while loving them still.

I hate her, she despises me.
But when we meet
in the loneliness, the darkness,
we become one whole, like a lump of kneaded clay,
hatred leaves, silence stays,
the silence that covered the earth
after it was created,
and we go on breaking
like branches.

We don't talk about the dreams we once dreamt,
we don't talk about the joys,
we simply go on breaking.

I'm fond of drinking,
she's addicted to smoking,
wrapped in a sheet of silence we cling to each other,
we go on breaking
like tender branches.

--Translated by C.M. Naim and Vinay Dharwadker

One Jammed Highway

2010-09-28T07:04:00.000-07:00

from Snow Is Falling
By Tomas Tranströmer

The funerals keep coming
more and more of them
like the traffic signs
as we approach a city.

--Translated by Robin Fulton

Ten Good Fingers

2010-09-21T00:55:00.000-07:00

from Lullaby

This little girl
only born to
gather wild roses.

Only born to
shake the wild rice loose
with her little fingers.

Only to collect the sap
of young hemlocks
in spring….

This
little girl was
only born to
gather wild roses.

--Tsimshian/Pacific Northwest Indians

One Cornered Room

2010-09-14T00:57:00.001-07:00

from Purdah
By Imtiaz Dharker

…

…Purdah is a kind of safety.
The body finds a place to hide.
The cloth fans out against the skin
much like the earth that falls
on coffins after they put dead men in.

People she has known
stand up, sit down as they have always done.
But they make different angles
in the light, their eyes aslant,
a little sly.

She half-remembers things
from someone else’s life,
perhaps from yours, or mine –
carefully carrying what we do not own:
between the thighs, a sense of sin.

We sit still, letting the cloth grow
a little closer to our skin.
A light filters inward
through our bodies’ walls.
Voices speak inside us,
echoing in the places we have just left.

She stands outside herself,
sometimes in all four corners of a room.
Wherever she goes, she is always
inching past herself…

...

Passing constantly out of her own hands,
into the corner of someone else’s eyes
while the doors keep opening
inward and again
inward.

More

One Tailored Suit

2010-09-07T07:02:00.000-07:00

In the middle of life, death comes
to take your measurements. The visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit
is being sewn on the sly.

--Tomas Tranströmer

One Dispirited Muse

2010-08-17T01:11:00.000-07:00

Why does my Muse only speak when she is unhappy?
She does not, I only listen when I am unhappy
When I am happy I live and despise writing
For my Muse this cannot but be dispiriting.

--Stevie Smith

One Touchy Creature

2010-07-27T02:48:00.000-07:00

The poet...a creature consisting of nothing but antennae and nerves.

--Durs Grunbein

One Long River

2010-07-06T05:14:00.000-07:00

Not to know. Not to remember.
With this one hope:
That beyond the River Lethe, there is memory, healed.

--Czeslaw Milosz

One Wobbly Ladder

2010-05-25T02:19:00.000-07:00

from Song for the Dying

Before you get to the king-tree

Come back

Before you get to the peach-tree

Come back

Before you get to the line of fence

Come back

Before you get to the bushes

Come back

....Before you get to the fire

Come back

Before you get to the middle of the ladder

Come back

--Seminole Indian

One Recidivist Night

2010-05-18T07:04:00.000-07:00

Sleeplessly

I watch over

the spring night—

but no amount of guarding

is enough to make it stay.

--Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield

One Justified Tirade

2010-05-04T07:03:00.000-07:00

Video: Homer Simpson on Walt Whitman

One Polite Fib

2010-04-20T07:02:00.000-07:00

...nothing is more difficult than to talk indifferently or insincerely on the subject of one's craft. The writer, without much effort, can reel off polite humbug about pictures, the painter about books; but to fib about the art one practices is incredibly painful.

--Edith Wharton

One Naked Throat

2010-04-13T07:01:00.000-07:00

John Keats
John Keats
John
Please put your scarf on.

--Seymour Glass

One Instantaneous Toxin

2010-03-23T05:35:00.000-07:00

The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken on an immortal wound--that he will never get over it. ...The proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it, but that we knew at sight that we never could forget it. There was a barb to it and a toxin that we owned to at once.

--Robert Frost

One Undespairing Beak

2010-03-16T22:18:00.000-07:00

five-story house in laleli
By Gisela Kraft

one lies in rags on the street
and his stomach is empty
and he wishes for death

one sits with friends at tea and backgammon
and his mind is empty
and he wishes for death

one sits in a straight-backed chair at a desk
and his bank account is empty
and he wishes for death

one lies in bed staring out to sea
and the place next to him in bed is empty
and he wishes for death

one flies back with food in its beak
and its nest is empty
and only this one says
we should give it another try

Translated by Laura Leichum

One Empty Bed

2010-03-09T05:25:00.000-08:00

The true poet is all the time a visionary and whether with friends or not, as much alone as a man on his death bed.

--W.B. Yeats

One Thunderous Alas

2010-02-16T18:49:00.000-08:00

A long time back when we were first in love
Our bodies were always as one
Later you became my dearest
And I became your dearest alas
And now my beloved lord
And now you are my husband
I am your wife
Our hearts must be hard as the middle of thunder
Now what have I to live for?

--Indian, translated by J. Moussaieff Masson and W.S. Merwin

One False Word

2010-02-09T05:26:00.000-08:00

"Therefore" is a word the poet must not know.

--André Gide

One Heavy Medal

2010-02-02T01:18:00.000-08:00

All human beings should have a medal,
A god cannot carry it, he is not able.

--Stevie Smith

One Wasted Treasure

2010-01-12T18:59:00.000-08:00

I have lived and I have loved;
I have waked and I have slept;
I have sung and I have danced;
I have smiled and I have wept;
I have won and wasted treasure;
I have had my fill of pleasure;
And all these things were weariness,
And some of them were dreariness.
And all these things, but two things,
Were emptiness and pain:
And Love--it was the best of them;
And Sleep--worth all the rest of them.

--Anonymous

One Enthusiastic Crowd

2010-01-05T05:27:00.000-08:00

A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and the cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music... and then people crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again;" that is as much as to say, "May new sufferings torment your soul."

--Soren Kierkegaard

One Fading Power

2009-12-08T05:29:00.000-08:00

The poet...must use his special abilities to disappear.

--Stephen Burt

One Free Flower

2009-12-01T12:47:00.000-08:00

from The Book of Hours
By Rainer Maria Rilke

And so they say: my life, my wife, my child,
my dog, well knowing all that they have styled
their own: life, wife, child, dog, remain
shapes foreign and unknown,
that blindly groping they must stumble on...

...in the beggary of their wandering
they cannot claim a bond with any thing,
but, driven from possessions they have prized,
not by their own belongings recognized,
they can own wives no more than they own flowers
whose life is alien and apart from ours.

--Translated by Babette Deutsch

One Abstract Eyeball

2009-11-24T03:54:00.000-08:00

The Vision of Willie Yeats
By Louise Bogan

Suddenly into my chamber, I certainly would be at a loss to say from where,
A large roomy animal with mad abstract eyes, and considerable concrete hair
Advanced towards me with astronomical slowness, as I sat glued to my Byzantine chair.
While the sizzle of either Mrs. Yeats frying sausages, or sausages frying Mrs. Yeats, slouched up the winding stair.

One Good Letter

2009-11-17T21:38:00.000-08:00

I have conquered, and shall go on conquering.

--William Blake

One Reliable Debtor

2009-11-10T03:54:00.000-08:00

To nothing fitter can I thee compare
Than to the son of some rich penny-father,
Who, having now brought on his end with care,
Leaves to his son all he had heap'd together;
This new-rich novice, lavish of his chest,
To one man gives, doth on another spend,
Then here he riots, yet among the rest
Haps to lend some to one true honest friend.
Thy gifts thou in obscurity dost waste,
False friends thy kindness, born but to deceive thee,
Thy love that is on the unworthy plac'd,
Time hath thy beauty, which with age will leave thee;
Only that little which to me was lent
I give thee back, when all the rest is spent.

--Michael Drayton

One Slight Doom

2009-10-27T21:41:00.000-07:00

The worst thing that being an artist could do to you would be that it would make you slightly unhappy constantly.

--J. D. Salinger

One Fell Impaler

2009-10-20T15:58:00.000-07:00

Fate slew Him, but He did not drop --
She felled -- He did not fall --
Impaled Him on Her fiercest stakes --
He neutralized them all --

She stung Him -- sapped His firm Advance --
But when Her Worst was done
And He -- unmoved -- regarded Her --
Acknowledged Him a Man.

--Emily Dickinson

One Stymied Lobe

2009-10-13T15:59:00.000-07:00

They make you sit up and not think, which is perhaps the real point of poetry.

--Colm Toibin

One Handy Book

2009-10-06T02:17:00.000-07:00

We are happy, we are merry:
We got a rhyming dictionary.

--Bart Simpson

One Broken Blue

2009-09-15T21:26:00.000-07:00

from Love Under House Arrest
By Nizar Qabbani

I ask your leave to go
for the blood I used to think would never turn to water
has turned to water
and the sky whose blue crystal I used to think
could not break...has broken

....and the words
I used to cover you with when you slept
have fled like frightened birds
and left you naked.

Translated by Lena Jayyusi and W.S. Merwin ~ Book

One Clear View

2009-09-08T05:33:00.000-07:00

The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion, all in one.

--John Ruskin

One Floating Shadow

2009-08-18T04:52:00.000-07:00

from Carillon
By Tomas Transtromer

I lie on the bed with my arms outstretched
I am an anchor that has dug itself down
and holds steady the huge shadow
floating up there

the great unknown
that I am a part of
and which is certainly
more important than me.

-Translated by Robin Fulton

One Long Chime

2009-08-04T11:02:00.000-07:00

Gather wood, build the bonfire high
I will give myself
only in bright light

Midnight. You are not here--
these blankets burn me like fire

All night
like a bell and with jewels
I chimed in your arms

Never sleep beside my body
I belong to those
who keep vigil over me

If I strangle that rooster
will you lie longer
in my arms

--Pashto landays

One Defeatable Wall

2009-07-21T11:20:00.000-07:00

The wall is high
but my beloved is tall

--Qahar Asi

One Familiar Smell

2009-07-14T06:28:00.000-07:00

Myth
By Muriel Rukeyser

Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the
roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was
the Sphinx. Oedipus said, "I want to ask one question.
Why didn't I recognize my mother?" "You gave the
wrong answer," said the Sphinx. "But that was what
made everything possible," said Oedipus. "No," she said.
"When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning,
two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered,
Man. You didn't say anything about woman."
"When you say Man," said Oedipus, "you include women
too. Everyone knows that." She said, "That's what
you think."

One Damned Gender

2009-07-07T06:31:00.000-07:00

from Sestina: Altaforte
By Ezra Pound

...And I love to see the sun rise blood-crimson.
And I watch his spears through the dark clash
And it fills my heart with rejoicing
And pries wide my mouth with fast music
When I see him so scorn and defy peace
His lone might 'gainst all darkness opposing....

There's no sound like to swords swords opposing,
No cry like the battle's rejoicing,
When our elbows and swords drip the crimson
And our charges 'gainst The Leopard's rush clash.
May God damn for ever all who cry 'Peace!'

And let the music of the swords make them crimson!
Hell grant soon we hear the swords clash!
Hell blot black for alway the thought 'Peace'!

One Veiled Arm

2009-06-30T05:19:00.000-07:00

from Ghazal XV
By Ghalib

Almost none
of the beautiful faces
come back to be glimpsed for an instant in some flower

once the dust owns them

All day three stars
the Daughters of the Bier
hid in back of the light

then they step forth naked
but their minds are the black night

Sleep comes to him
peace belongs to him
the night is his

over whose arm your hair is spread

--Translated by W.S. Merwin

One Well-Hidden Child

2009-05-26T09:45:00.000-07:00

Revelation
By Robert Frost

We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone really find us out.

'Tis pity if the case require
(Or so we say) that in the end
We speak the literal to inspire
The understanding of a friend.

But so with all--from babes that play
At hide-and-seek to God afar--
So all who hide too well away
Must speak and tell us where they are.

One Calm Sea

2009-05-12T07:20:00.000-07:00

When I was a child I truly loved:
Unthinking love as calm and deep
As the North Sea. But I have lived,
And now I do not sleep.

--John Gardner

One Swift Lily

2009-05-05T17:46:00.000-07:00

from Photograph
By Zbigniew Herbert

...my little boy my Isaac bend your head
just a moment of pain and then you will be
anything you like--a swallow a lily of the valley

More

One Thoughtful Haystack

2009-04-21T23:35:00.000-07:00

The horse's mind
Blends
So swiftly
Into the hay's mind.

---Fazil Husnu Daglarca

One Steely Tap

2009-04-21T11:36:00.000-07:00

from poet in the house
By Nic Sebastian

...you say I choose

what is difficult with a thin steel
dentist’s probe that I tap

and live for echoes
of fissures of

cavities and it’s not like I want
to fix them I just want

to find them

One Absurd World

2009-04-14T09:34:00.000-07:00

Rondelet

I never meant
For you to go. The thing you heard
I never meant
for you to hear. The night you went
away I knew our whole absurd
sweet world had fallen with a word
I never meant.

--Anonymous

One Irritated Creator

2009-04-07T09:43:00.000-07:00

All the great art we know of carries within its compass a guarantee that its creator is not content.

--Clive James

One Surreptitious Pie

2009-03-24T12:01:00.000-07:00

from A Message from the Wanderer
By William Stafford

Today outside your prison I stand
and rattle my walking stick: Prisoners, listen;
you have relatives outside. And there are
thousands of ways to escape.

Years ago, I bent my skill to keep
my cell locked. I had chains smuggled to me
in pies, and shouted my plans to the jailers;
but always, new plans would occur to me,
or the new heavy locks bent the hinges off,
or some stupid jailer would forget
and leave the keys. ...

Nine Fierce Herbs

2009-03-17T10:11:00.000-07:00

from Charm of the Nine Healing Herbs

...On stone in crags
You grow Stime
Fierce you are
You beat back pain
You fight all venoms
So fierce you're called
The grass that defeats the snake

...
Wergulu
Wergulu
A seal bore you up
Over the sea's high ridge
You heal all evil brought
By the nine wicked spirits
You stand strong against pain
You beat down poison
Fierce against the three and the thirty
You broke the demon's claw
You hold off the wicked glance
You break the harmful spells
Of every wicked thing

...
These nine healing herbs
Fight the nine laming demons
And the nine evil poisons
And the nine flying ills
They fight the red poison
The white poison and the purple
They fight the yellow poison
And the green poison
The black poison and the blue
And the brown poison
And the crimson

They fight the worm-boil
And the water-blister
The thorn-blister and thistle-swell
They fight the ice-blister
And swollen bite

...
Only I know the power
Of the stream that clears
And the nine slithering ones know it

Now all the fields bloom
Full of healing herbs
When I blow these ills away
The very salt of the sea disappears
And the waters clear forever

~Anonymous, translated by David Cloutier

One Young Rain

2009-03-10T11:58:00.000-07:00

Sunflower
By Rolf Jacobsen

What sower walked over earth,
which hands sowed
our inward seeds of fire?
They went out from his fists like rainbow curves
to frozen earth, young loam, hot sand,
they will sleep there
greedily, and drink up our lives
and explode it into pieces
for the sake of a sunflower that you haven't seen
or a thistle head or a chrysanthemum.

Let the young rain of tears come.
Let the calm hands of grief come.
It's not all as evil as you think.

~Translated by Robert Bly

One Deaf Language

2009-03-03T12:06:00.000-08:00

Often enough I tried language, often enough I tried song, but they didn't hear you.

--Friedrich Hölderlin

One Venomous Font

2009-02-17T05:52:00.000-08:00

from Parting, Without a Sequel
By John Crowe Ransom

She has finished and sealed the letter
At last, which he so richly has deserved,
With characters venomous and hatefully curved,
And nothing could be better.

But even as she gave it,
Saying to the blue-capped functioner of doom
"Into his hands," she hoped the leering groom
Might somewhere lose and leave it...

More

One Serviceable Body

2009-02-10T07:04:00.000-08:00

Only too often, sadly, a good poet turns into a damned poor keeper of his body, but I believe he is usually issued a highly serviceable one to start out with.

--J.D. Salinger

One Tortured No

2009-02-03T09:29:00.000-08:00

T. S. Eliot, in fact, put it best. When asked if his tortured life as a poet had been worth it, he said, simply, "No."

--Alex Williams (apocryphal)

One Unhorsed Pasture

2009-01-27T09:22:00.000-08:00

Grazing Horses
By Kay Ryan

Sometimes the
green pasture of the mind
tilts abruptly.
The grazing horses
struggle crazily
for purchase
on the frictionless
nearly vertical
surface. Their
furniture-fine
legs buckle
on the incline,
unhorsed by slant
they weren't
designed to climb
and can't.

One Midnight Battlement

2009-01-27T07:27:00.000-08:00

...my Poet—every poet—is an insomniac. My own reads or wanders about our apartment for the best part of most nights. She told me she often feels she would give up every poem she's ever written for one good night's sleep. A friend of mine....tells me he finds it profoundly reassuring that while we ordinary mortals are asleep, there exist lit rooms containing anxious, vigilant souls. A terrible responsibility, he says, devolves upon the poet, that requires her never to be fully awake or asleep: at night, wakeful poets buoy humanity to the surface, to consciousness, preventing our slumbering bulk from sinking too far; during the day, these same poets anchor the madding masses to the depths. The world will end, he once told me, when the final poet awake closes her eyes. Last night I woke up sweating, having dreamed of sinking with the rest of humanity into cold oblivion. Sure enough my Poet was fast asleep beside me—the first deep sleep she'd entered in more than a week. So I knocked a pile of books to the floor, and returned to my blissful slumbers, much comforted by the thought that at least one poet would wander the midnight battlements, keep watch, and preserve us all for one more day.

–Naeem Murr

One Discouraging Fowl

2009-01-20T09:21:00.000-08:00

I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens.

--E. B. White

One Unrealized Woman

2009-01-13T21:03:00.000-08:00

As a woman she would of course have had to be loved, for in being loved the feminine achieves its realization...but on the other hand she was also an artist and had to be able to help herself.

--Rainer Maria Rilke on Clara Westhoff

One Stained-Glass Body

2009-01-06T09:52:00.000-08:00

In this world
love has no color--
but how deeply my body
is stained by yours.

--Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield

One Hand Clapping

2008-12-23T09:13:00.000-08:00

from An Ode to Himself
By Ben Jonson

Where dost thou careless lie
Buried in ease and sloth?
Knowledge that sleeps doth die;
And this Securitie,
It is the common Moth,
That eats on wits, and Arts, and oft destroys them both.

Are all th'Aonian springs
Dried up? lies Thespia waste?
Doth Clarius' Harp want strings,
That not a Nymph now sings?
Or droop they as disgraced,
To see their Seats and Bowers by chatt'ring Pies defaced?

If hence thou silent be,
As 'tis too just a cause,
Let this thought quicken thee:
Minds that are great and free
Should not on fortune pause,
'Tis crown enough to virtue still: her own applause.

What though the greedie Frie
Be taken with false Bayte
Of worded Balladrie,
And thinke it Poesie?
They die with their conceits,
And only pitious scorn, upon their folly waits.

Then take in hand thy Lyre,
Strike in thy proper strain,
With Japhet's line, aspire
Sol's Chariot for new fire,
To give the world again:
Who aided him, will thee, the issue of Jove's brain...

One Lusty Tyrant

2008-12-16T21:00:00.000-08:00

The artistic half of Baxter's nature exerted a lusty dominion over the human half—fed upon its disappointments and grew fat upon its joys and tribulations. This, indeed, is simply saying that the young man was a true artist.

—Henry James

One Familiar Singer

2008-12-09T09:33:00.000-08:00

The Oven Bird
By Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

One Metallic Dessert

2008-12-02T04:47:00.000-08:00

The Divorce
By Hans Magnus Enzenberger

At first it was an imperceptible tremor of the skin--
"Whatever you say"--where the flesh is darkest.
"What's wrong?"--Nothing. Opaque dreams
of embraces, but on the morning after
the other looks different, strangely bony.
Razor-sharp misunderstandings. "That time in Rome--"
I never said that. --Pause. Rapidly beating heart,
a kind of hate, strange. --"That's not the point."
Repetitions. Brilliantly clear the certainty:
everything is wrong from now on. Odorless, in focus
like a passport photo, this unknown person
with the tea glass at the table, eyes staring.
It is no use no use no use:
litany in the brain, a touch of nausea.
End of reproaches. Slowly the room
fills up to the ceiling with guilt.
The plaintive voice is a stranger's, but the shoes
that drop with a crash to the floor, the shoes are not.
The next time, in an empty restaurant,
slow motion, breadcrumbs, they talk about money,
laughing. The dessert tastes of metal.
Two untouchables. Strident rationality.
"Things could be much worse. But at night
the vindictiveness, the noiseless struggle, anonymous
like two bony barristers, two big crabs
in the water. Then the exhaustion. Slowly
the scabs peel off. Another tobacconist,
a new address. Pariahs, awfully relieved.
Shadows getting paler. Here are the papers.
Here are the keys. Here is the scar.

--Translated by Herbert Graf

One Overpoeticized Cow

2008-11-17T09:57:00.000-08:00

"Terence, this is stupid stuff:
You eat your victuals fast enough;
There can't be much amiss, 'tis clear,
To see the rate you drink your beer.
But oh, good Lord, the verse you make,
It gives a chap the belly-ache.
The cow, the old cow, she is dead;
It sleeps well, the horned head:
We poor lads, 'tis our turn now
To hear such tunes as killed the cow."

--A.E. Housman

One Diamond Shackle

2008-11-11T10:38:00.000-08:00

Whoso list to hunt
By Francesco Petrarch

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,
But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

~Translated by Thomas Wyatt

Two Unpolitical Arms

2008-11-04T11:25:00.000-08:00

Politics
By W.B. Yeats

How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!

One Convincing Lie

2008-11-04T11:01:00.000-08:00

We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.

~Pablo Picasso

One Bitten Eyeball

2008-10-28T20:49:00.000-07:00

Spirit Song

spirit in the sky
come down here
right away
bite the world to death

I rise
up to the spirits
magician friends help me
reach the spirits

child child child
spirit
that can bite evil
come to us

and spirit at the bottom of the
earth I'm calling you I
live near you on top
bite our enemies

join your brother from the sky
each bite an eye out
of evil's face
so it can't see us

--Inuit, translated by Stephen Berg

One Dark Silk

2008-10-21T07:45:00.000-07:00

Slowly quietly gold is collected under your command
slowly quietly
Slowly quietly wheat is distributed under your command
slowly quietly
Slowly quietly people's bread is served out under your command
slowly quietly.

With you rapidly silk darkens spoils with you rapidly
Water is tied in knots becomes turbid rapidly with you
With you rapidly is atrophied the history of labor
And with you slowly slowly the name of pain written extensively
comes out on the copper quartz bronze.

-Ilhan Berk, translated by Suat Karantay

One Deep Burrow

2008-10-14T13:40:00.000-07:00

Vietnam
By Wislawa Szymborska

"Woman, what's your name?" "I don't know."
"How old are you? Where are you from?" "I don't know."
"Why did you dig that burrow?" "I don't know."
"How long have you been hiding?" "I don`t know."
"Why did you bite my finger?" "I don't know."
"Don't you know that we won't hurt you?" "I don't know."
"Whose side are you on?" "I don't know."
"This is war, you've got to choose." "I don't know."
"Does your village still exist?" "I don't know."
"Are those your children?" "Yes."

~Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

One Venomed Dart

2008-10-07T12:01:00.000-07:00

from Endymion
By John Keats

There lies a den,
Beyond the seeming confines of the space
Made for the soul to wander in and trace
Its own existence, of remotest glooms.
Dark regions are around it, where the tombs
Of buried griefs the spirit sees, but scarce
One hour doth linger weeping, for the pierce
Of new-born woe it feels more inly smart:
And in these regions many a venom'd dart
At random flies: they are the proper home
Of every ill: the man is yet to come
Who hath not journeyed in this native hell.
But few have ever felt how calm and well
Sleep may be had in that deep den of all.
There anguish does not sting; nor pleasure pall:
Woe-hurricanes beat ever at the gate,
Yet all is still within and desolate.

One Pleasant Experiment

2008-09-30T13:56:00.000-07:00

from Thoughts About the Person from Porlock
By Stevie Smith

...These thoughts are depressing I know. They are depressing.
I wish I was more cheerful, it is more pleasant,
Also it is a duty, we should smile as well as submitting
To the purpose of One Above who is experimenting

With various mixtures of human character which goes best,
All is interesting for him it is exciting, but not for us.
There I go again. Smile, smile, and get some work to do
Then you will be practically unconscious without positively having to go.

One Trembling Dewlap

2008-09-23T19:07:00.000-07:00

Each Moment a White Bull Steps Shining into the World
By Jane Hirshfield

If the gods bring to you
a strange and frightening creature,
accept the gift
as if it were one you had chosen.

Say the accustomed prayers,
oil the hooves well,
caress the small ears with praise.

Have the new halter of woven silver
embedded with jewels.
Spare no expense, pay what is asked,
when a gift arrives from the sea.

Treat it as you yourself
would be treated, brought speechless and naked
into the court of a king.

And when the request finally comes,
do not hesitate even an instant--

stroke the white throat,
the heavy, trembling dewlaps
you'd come to believe were yours,
and plunge in the knife.

Not once
did you enter the pasture
without pause,
without yourself trembling.

That you came to love it,
that was the gift.

Let the envious gods take back what they can.