elkit in wonderland

But All I Can See Is Red Red Red

red poppy power
Originally uploaded by dirk huijssoon.

Poppies in July

Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes that I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed, or sleep! -------------
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,
Dulling and stilling.

But colorless. Colorless.

I dunno, I just felt like posting a Sylvia Plath poem.

I Will Not Eat The Darkness

Pomegranate 1
Originally uploaded by libraryman.

I'll have to give you one more Kunitz poem.

For Proserpine

Our purple tongues that testify
The pomegranate has been broken
Are stained, their roots and buds are stained, with the shy
Fruity pleasure of us, met, spoken.

(I shall remember the days
of my youth and your beautiful new ways.)

In fierce decay I'll find a stripe
Of honey sweetening the tart
Old brain. But shall I know again such ripe
Beauty of the burst, dark heart?

(I'll think of my absurd,
Impossible, pledged, serious word.)

____Stanley Kunitz

I Was Dreaming In My Dreaming

I Dreamed That I Was Old

I dreamed that I was old: in stale declension
Fallen from my prime, when company
Was mine, cat-nimbleness, and green invention,
Before time took my leafy hours away.

My wisdom, ripe with body's ruin, found
Itself tart recompense for what was lost
In false exchange: since wisdom in the ground
Has no apocalypse or pentecost.

I wept for my youth, sweet passionate young thought,
And cozy women dead that by my side
Once lay: I wept with bitter longing, not
Remembering how in my youth I cried.

      Stanley Kunitz, who just died at the age of 100

I'm going to take his Collected Poems to work with me tomorrow and read some more, and remember that Loren Webster of "In A Dark Time" introduced me to Kunitz, and that Liisa sent me the aforementioned Collected Poems. Thanks again, Liisa! I still get a lot of mileage out of this volume. It holds a place of honor on my night stand.

Don't Try To Touch My Heart, It's Darker Than You Think

Rox Populi is celebrating National Poetry Month with an Anne Sexton poem. I will chime in with one of my favorites from Sylvia Plath:

ELM

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? -

Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.

The Janitors of Shadowland Flick Their Brooms At Me

Sorrow like a ceaseless rain
Beats upon my heart.
People twist and scream in pain, -
Dawn will find them still again;
This has neither wax nor wane,
Neither stop nor start.

People dress and go to town;
I sit in my chair.
All my thoughts are slow and brown:
Standing up or sitting down
Little matters, or what gown
Or what shoes I wear.

    Edna St. Vincent Millay

No, I don't feel like that, thank God! But what a great poem - what a powerful, right-on-the-head description of depression. "My thoughts are slow and brown" - I remember exactly what that feels like. And I remember thinking/feeling/being dead certain that this would never change.

The Spanglemonkey says, "You have no idea how close you are to being in one of these beds. No idea. It’s looming just out of your sight always", but I think I have a pretty good idea. It's right there in my peripheral vision - even more so now that I've been reading her dispatches from Fnord -, and it scares the crap out of me. I am very aware of the fact that it's sheer luck and happy coincidences that I am out here in the ... I almost called it "the real world", but it's not, is it?

I Run Off Where The Drifts Get Deeper

I am alone: it is winter.
Originally uploaded by Lynn Morag.

Posted along with the photo, this poem:

"The abode of the nightingale is bare,
Flowered frost congeals in the gelid air,
The fox howls from his frozen lair:
Alas, my loved one is gone,
I am alone:
It is winter.

Once the pink cast a winy smell,
The wild bee hung in the hyacinth bell,
Light in effulgence of beauty fell:
I am alone:
It is winter.

My candle a silent fire doth shed,
Starry Orion hunts o'erhead;
Come moth, come shadow, the world is dead:
Alas, my loved one is gone,
I am alone;
It is winter."

~ Walter de la Mare, 1873 - 1958 ~

Soul Sloshing

I remembered today to look for the English original of the one (German) Walt Whitman snippet I've had quoted in my poetry journal for a long time, and I found it in the Project Gutenberg. It's from Leaves of Grass, unsurprisingly:

I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own
funeral drest in his shroud.

Can I confess I don't like Whitman much? His poetry is much too prosaic for my taste, and includes too many lists. And I like even the above bit much better in German.

On n'oublie rien

Un soir de demi-brume à Londres
Un voyou qui ressemblait à
Mon amour vint à ma rencontre
Et le regard qu'il me jeta
Me fit baisser les yeux de honte

      Guillaume Apollinaire

I Can Stand A Little Rain

And just like that [exhaling sharply over my opening hand], it's ...

OCTOBER

Books litter the bed,
leaves the lawn. It
lightly rains. Fall has
come: unpatterned, in
the shedding leaves.

The maples ripen. Apples
come home crisp in bags.
This pear tastes good.
It rains lightly on the
random leaf patterns.

The nimbus is spread
above our island. Rain
lightly patters on un-
shed leaves. The books
of fall litter the bed.

________ James Schuyler

Found this in the plagiarist poetry archive. I think I should copy it into my poetry journal.

Talking With The Taxman About Poetry

At A Window
Originally uploaded by elkit.

Writing about my handwriting (which is steadily deteriorating, thanks to my increasing keyboard use) and listening to PJ Harvey last night, and trying to pick the next poem for my weekly German poetry series, I peruse the red-cornered, black-bound journal in which I've collected poetry since 1979. I like seeing how my handwriting has changed over the years. This must be from 1979 or 1980, since it's only page 11.

And here is today's handwriting for comparison and forensics.