elkit in wonderland

Red Blood White Mink

I feel poetic again today. Been thinking about the Emperor Norton and his poetry meme and the poems whose first lines I'd posted. Time to reveal another one. It's a red day today, even though I am wearing green.

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.

This is Sylvia Plath again.
"If my mouth could marry a hurt like that." Whenever I read this poem, that's the one that rings in my mind the longest.

Cry Love

It's another good day for another one of the poems I'd quoted for the Emperor Norton's poetry game.

This is one is by Sylvia Plath, one of my favorite American poets. It is called

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.

Cold As It Gets

I really enjoyed The Emperor Norton's poetry game, and keep pondering the poems whose first lines I'd posted.

Methinks I should just post them all in their entirety. Amuse myself, and contribute to your continuing education and the greater glory of the civilized world. I'll arbitrarily start with the third one from my list because it fits the weather.

A sniffle crouches on the terrace
to catch a victim he can harass.

And suddenly he jumps with vim
upon a man by name of Schrimm.

Paul Schrimm, responding with: „hatchoo,“
is stuck with him the weekend through.

That's Max Knight's brilliant translation of Christian Morgenstern's "Der Schnupfen". Here is lots more.

A Poem For Byzantium

All kinds of great meming going on! I can hardly keep up with the posting. There's the latest Unsconscious Mutterings, there's directions from your childhood home to your current address, and last but certainly not least, from the Emperor Norton, a poetry meme. Hell yeah, I gotta be in on this! Here's how it goes:

Below you will find ten first lines of poems. If you recognize the line, leave it on the list. If you do not recognize the line, then replace it with the first line of a poem that you do know. Highlight your changes in bold.

1. Had we but world enough, and time,
2. I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
3. A sniffle crouches on the terrace
4. Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
5. Little poppies, little hell flames,
6. I, too, sing America
7. April is the cruellest month,
8. Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
9. Give me hunger,
10. Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary

The Emperor Norton recommended poets.org to search the lines - I just did Google searches, and I found them all. (Remember to put the whole line into quotation marks so it'll search it as that exact sequence of words.)

This was trickier than I thought. Most of my favorite English-language poems are fairly obscure, I think, and the first lines of poetry that came to mind were all German ... so what am I going to do? Spread this to my German blog, of course. :-)

Through The Wire Comes Joy And Pain, Through The Wire

Night Call, Collect

Suppose and then suppose and then suppose
That wires on the far-slung telephone black poles
Sopped up the billion-flooded words they heard
Each night all night and saved the sense
And meaning of it all.

Then, jigsaw in the night,
Put all together and
In philosophic phase
Tried words like moron child.

Thus mindless beast
All treasuring of vowels and consonants
Saves up a miracle of bad advice
And lets it filter whisper, heartbeat out
One lisping murmur at a time.

So one night soon someone sits up
Hears sharp bell ring, lifts phone
And hears a voice like Holy Ghost
Gone far in nebulae
That beast upon the wire,
Which with sibilance and savorings
Down continental madnesses of time
Says Hell and O
And then Hell-o.

To such Creation
Such dumb brute lost Electric Beast,
What is your wise reply?

That's by Ray Bradbury. From his Martian Chronicles, if I recall correctly. I've had this in my head for about a week now, I don't know why. Just felt like sharing. (And like listening to Nona Hendryx sing "Through The Wire"; it's on her "Skindiver" album.}

Horse Latitudes

Sheep in Fog

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.

______Sylvia Plath

And It Is Winter, Winter in America

It seems the right weather for this poem today:

Alms

My heart is what it was before,
A house where people come and go;
But it is winter with your love,
The sashes are beset with snow.

I light the lamp and lay the cloth,
I blow the coals to blaze again;
But it is winter with your love,
The frost is thick upon the pane.

I know a winter when it comes:
The leaves are listless on the boughs;
I watched your love a little while,
And brought my plants into the house.

I water them and turn them south,
I snap the dead brown from the stem;
But it is winter with your love,
I only tend and water them.

There was a time I stood and watched
The small, ill-natured sparrows' fray;
I loved the beggar that I fed,
I cared for what he had to say,

I stood and watched him out of sight:
Today I reach around the door
And set a bowl upon the step;
My heart is what it was before,

But it is winter with your love;
I scatter crumbs upon the sill,
And close the window, - and the birds
May take or leave them, as they will.

____Edna St. Vincent Millay

Summer Days, Driftin' Away

I know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year;
And you must welcome from another part
Such noble moods as are not mine, my dear.
No gracious weight of golden fruits to sell
Have I, nor any wise and wintry thing;
And I have loved you all too long and well
To carry still the high sweet breast of Spring.
Wherefore I say: O love, as summer goes,
I must be gone, steal forth with silent drums,
That you may hail anew the bird and rose
When I come back to you, as summer comes.
Else will you seek, at some not distant time,
Even your summer in another clime.

_______Edna St. Vincent Millay

When I Was Young I Knew Everything

I am behind with my poetry postings. As with a lot of other things. Listening to The Verve Pipe's "Freshmen" and The Cure's "Same Deep Water As You" puts me in a Plath mood:

Sheep In Fog

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, colour of rust,

Hoove, 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 straight through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

_____Sylvia Plath

What I really felt like quoting was the "Three Women", but it's too long to fit in here comfortably. Do click on the link to read it - it's one of the Plath pieces I that moves me most. ("Favorite" is just not a fitting word here.)

I Hope I'm Old Before I Die

Part of the wonderful weekend, of which I will tell you more and show you a few pictures over the next few days, was talking about being old, getting older, and living to be 102 (a semi-serious goal of mine, so I can beat my great-grand-aunt's record). This fits in perfectly:

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith, "A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!"

-- Robert Browning