elkit in wonderland

Let's Do It Like They Do On The Discovery Channel

I posted this last year - let me re-post is because this poem keeps going round and round my brain. I hit the treadmill, and that's what comes up. I still don't know what she means, and I still enjoy the pondering:

Sex Without Love

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the    come to the    God    come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

_____Sharon Olds

[found in the plagiarist poetry archive]

I'm not sure what to think of this, and what she is trying to say. I guess I'll ponder this for a while.
First I thought she was pitying "the ones who make love without love". Then she says they "are the true religious, the purists, the pros" ... is she admiring them, wishing she was one of them? Or is she being sarcastic? And I read the comments on the plagiarist site, and I am amazed at the very different conclusions people come up with - and how convinced they seem they got it right.
Me, I am forever in doubt. But I would much rather keep asking questions than come up with an answer and be done.

12pm: Blogathon, Take Thirteen

Trees In Fog
Originally uploaded by elkit.

I always think "Trees in Fog" is a Sylvia Plath poem ... and then I remember it's "Sheep In Fog". Definitely no sheep here. These trees are at Lighthouse Field in Santa Cruz.

The morning fog is retreating to the ocean, but I'll still give you that poem about the sheep:

The hills step off into whiteness.
People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

The train leaves a line of breath.
O slow
Horse the colour of rust,

Hooves, dolorous bells ----
All morning the
Morning has been blackening,

A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.

They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

[I looked it up here.]

"The far fields melt my heart." Kills me every time I read that line.

So Say Goodbye, It's Independence Day

So I'm in the Bookshop Santa Cruz, and buy a California travel guide titled "Coastal California", and it turns out to be an excellent tome that will come in very handy for me and My Accordeon, because it contains lots of information I knew nothing about, like the entry about a house in Carmel, Tor House, built by "California poet Robinson Jeffers". I'd never heard of man nor mansion. Look him up on the Plagiarist (still one of my favorite poetry sites), and there is "July Fourth By The Ocean":

The continent's a tamed ox, with all its mountains,
Powerful and servile; here is for plowland, here is for park and playground, this helpless
Cataract for power; it lies behind us at heel
All docile between this ocean and the other. If flood troubles the lowlands, or earthquake
Cracks walls, it is only a slave's blunder or the natural
Shudder of a new made slave. Therefore we happy masters about the solstice
Light bonfires on the shore and celebrate our power.
The bay's necklaced with fire, the bombs make crystal fountains in the air, the rockets
Shower swan's-neck over the night water.... I imagined
The stars drew apart a little as if from troublesome children, coldly compassionate;
But the ocean neither seemed astonished nor in awe:
If this had been the little sea that Xerxes whipped, how it would have feared us.

Have a good Independence Day, everybody! Be independent.

The Other Side of Summer

Summer Solstice
--- from Osip Mandelstam

Orioles live in the elms, and in classical verse
the length of the vowels along determines the measure.
Once and once only a year nature knows quantity
stretched to the limit, as in Homer's meter.

O this is a day that yawns like a caesura:
serene from the start, almost painfully slowed.
Oxen browse in the field, and a golden languor
keeps me from drawing a rich, whole note from my reed.

______Stanley Kunitz

Long As I Can See The Light

Like I said, I'm reading slowly these days. Short-attention span reading suits me better, but magazines and weblogs don't always provide enough nourishment. Poetry is good, and I am rediscovering some favorites, like Edna St. Vincent Millay, and I am glad to see that so many schools have information online these days, and provide biographies for poets like her.

If you haven't met, let me introduce you to "First Fig" and "Second Fig".

First Fig

My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light.

Second Fig

Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

My shining palace built upon the sand ... what an image. And wasn't I just talking about the palace of my heart?

Sweet Child of Mine

Ricky invites me to check out his speedo ... oh. Wait. Never mind. Okay, I'm a bit disappointed, but I'll still play along. My second round already, actually. I gave it a first pass from the privacy of my cubicle, but that was far too geeky, and now, sitting on my bed with my laptop on my lap where it belongs, this is what I do:

Grab the closest book to you. Resist the urge to get hold of one of the cooler, intellectual ones! You've gotta be honest. Turn to page 123. Go down five sentences, and then post the next three sentences in your blog. Simple.

The book closest to me is in the nightstand, "The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz". Kunitz, whom I owe to Loren, for which I will always be grateful. Page 123 doesn't have five sentences. How about lines? Let me quote lines 6-8:

That the pretender kills,
Receive your stumbling child
Drunk with the morning-dew

Doesn't really make sense, does it? Here is the whole poem, part 3 of "The Way Down".

Time swings her burning hands.
The blossom is the fruit,
And where I walk, the leaves
Lie level with the root.
My brave god went from me.
I saw him going down
Incorrigibly wild
In a cloud of golden air.
O father in the wood,
Mad father of us all,
King of our antlered wills,
Our candelabrum-pride
That the pretender kills,
Receive your stumbling child
Drunk with the morning-dew
Into your fibrous love
With which creation's strung;
Embrace him, raise him high,
Keeping the old time young,
And hold him through the night
Our best hopes share, as bright,
As peerless as a cock's eye.

I was just thinking about my own pride, in the Accordeon on the way home, listening to Richard Thompson for the seventieth time this week. "Candelabrum-pride", that fits.

But I Was So Much Older Then

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 window, 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 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

Bad Boys, Bad Boys, Watcha Gonna Do?

What a fabulous find! In looking up linkage for the German poem of the week, I come across a dual-language version of Wilhelm Busch's "Max und Moritz", one of the great works of German children's literature. How delightful! And the translation is just as playful and whimsy as the original.

Ah, how oft we read or hear of
Boys we almost stand in fear of!
For example, take these stories
Of two youths, named Max and Moritz,
Who, instead of early turning
Their young minds to useful learning,
Often leered with horrid features
At their lessons and their teachers.

Enjoy ...

Walk Through The Bottomland

"April is the cruellest month", says TS Eliot.

"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain."

I've always liked the beginning of this poem - it rolls of the tongue nicely - but I have never thought of April as cruel, and to be honest, I don't get most of the poem - he always loses me in the bit about the Starnbergersee and the Hofgarten.

I like April. April showers bring May flowers. I've even always liked the proverbial capriciousness of April weather. Today is a good example - started off slightly overcast, then the sun came out for a while, and in the late afternoon it poured rain. Now the day seems to be exhausted - it's probably thrown off its pace from the daylight saving change, just like we are.

Cars Hiss By My Window

Another poem from my "Poem For Byzantium" listings for Joel's poetry meme:

At a Window

Give me hunger,
O you Gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want;
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame;
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger.
But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset
One little, western wandering star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window.
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.

It's always been my favorite Carl Sandburg poem, and I am pleased as punch that I wrote a blogger version during the 2002 Blogathon (although sadly, most of the links have rotted).