Inspiration: Czeslaw Milosz

Rivers Grow Small

Rivers grow small. Cities grow small. And splendid gardens
show what we did not see there before: crippled leaves and dust.
When for the first time I swam across the lake
it seemed immense, had I gone there these days
it would have been a shaving bowl
between post-glacial rocks and junipers.
The forest near the village of Halina once was for me primeval,
smelling of the last but recently killed bear,
though a ploughed field was visible through the pines.
What was individual becomes a variety of a general pattern.
Consciousness even in my sleep changes primary colors.
The features of my face melt like a wax doll in the fire.
And who can consent to see in the mirror the mere face of man?

From New and Collected Poems (1931-2001) Harper Collins Publishers 2003.

Inspiration: Czeslaw Milosz

A Frivolous Conversation

-My past is a stupid butterfly’s overseas voyage.
My future is a garden where a cook cuts the throat of a rooster.
What do I have, with all my pain and rebellion?

-Take a moment, just one, and when its fine shell,
Two joined palms, slowly opens
What do you see?

-A pearl, a second.

-Inside a second, a pearl, in that star saved from time,
What do you see when the wind of mutability ceases?

-The earth, the sky, and the sea, richly cargoed ships,
Spring mornings full of dew and faraway princedoms.
At marvels displayed in tranquil glory
I look and do not desire for I am content.

Published in King Popiel and Other Poems 1962.

Inspiration: Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Love’s Blindness
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

I have heard of reasons manifold
Why love must needs be blind,
But this the best of all I hold, –
His eyes are in his mind.
What outward form and feature are
He guesseth but in part;
But what within is good and fair
He seeth with the heart.

Published in Love is a Poem (1962), an obscure anthology published by Peter Pauper Press I found in my in-laws’ house over the holidays.

Inspiration: John Suckling

Send Back My Heart
By John Suckling

I prythee send me back my heart,
Since I can not have thine:
For if from yours you will not part,
Why then should’st thou have mine?

Yet now I think on’t, let it lie;
To find it were in vain,
For thou’st a thief in either eye
Would steal it back again.

Why should two hearts in one breast lie,
And yet not lodge together?
Oh Love! where is thy sympathy,
If thus our breasts thou sever?

But love is such a mystery,
I cannot find it out:
For when I think I’m best resolved,
I then am in most doubt.

Then farewell care, and farewell woe,
I will not longer pine;
For I’ll believe I have her heart
As much as she has mine.

Published in Love is a Poem (1962), an obscure anthology published by Peter Pauper Press I found in my in-laws’ house over the holidays. I’d never heard of John Suckling but I enjoyed the simple meter of this poem and the willful delusion at the end.

Inspiration: Amy Lowell

Patterns
By Amy Lowell

I walk down the garden paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden paths.

My dress is richly figured,
And the train
Makes a pink and silver stain
On the gravel, and the thrift
Of the borders.
Just a plate of current fashion,
Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes.
Not a softness anywhere about me,
Only whale-bone and brocade.
And I sink on a seat in the shade
Of a lime tree. For my passion
Wars against the stiff brocade.
The daffodils and squills
Flutter in the breeze
As they please.
And I weep;
For the lime tree is in blossom
And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom.

And the splashing of waterdrops
In the marble fountain
Comes down the garden paths.
The dripping never stops.
Underneath my stiffened gown
Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,
A basin in the midst of hedges grown
So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding,
But she guesses he is near,
And the sliding of the water
Seems the stroking of a dear
Hand upon her.
What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown!
I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground.
All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground.

I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,
And he would stumble after,
Bewildered by my laughter.
I should see the sun flashing from his sword-hilt and the buckles on his shoes.
I would choose
To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths,
A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover,
Till he caught me in the shade,
And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me,
Aching, melting, unafraid.
With the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops,
And the plopping of the waterdrops,
All about us in the open afternoon
I am very like to swoon
With the weight of this brocade,
For the sun sifts through the shade.

Underneath the fallen blossom
In my bosom,
Is a letter I have hid.
It was brought to me this morning by a rider from the Duke.
“Madam, we regret to inform you that Lord Hartwell
Died in action Thursday sen’night.”
As I read it in the white, morning sunlight,
The letters squirmed like snakes.
“Any answer, Madam,” said my footman.
“No,” I told him.
“See that the messenger takes some refreshment.
No, no answer.”
And I walked into the garden,
Up and down the patterned paths,
In my stiff, correct brocade.
The blue and yellow flowers stood up proudly in the sun,
Each one.
I stood upright too,
Held rigid to the pattern
By the stiffness of my gown.
Up and down I walked,
Up and down.

In a month he would have been my husband.
In a month, here, underneath this lime,
We would have broke the pattern;
He for me, and I for him,
He as Colonel, I as Lady,
On this shady seat.
He had a whim
That sunlight carried blessing.
And I answered, “It shall be as you have said.”
Now he is dead.

In Summer and in Winter I shall walk
Up and down
The patterned garden paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
The squills and daffodils
Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow.
I shall go
Up and down,
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed.
And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace
By each button, hook, and lace.
For the man who should loose me is dead,
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,
In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?

Amy Lowell, “Patterns” from The Complete Poetical Works of Amy Lowell. Copyright 1955 by Houghton Mifflin Company, renewed 1983.

Inspiration: Empires

loveletterstoaghost

I have built
an empire of words
carved and excavated
from the bottom
of this place
I call a soul,
and they still
boil and churn
below my lucid skin
waiting to be stacked
against your ears.
They stand stoic
in their line of doubt
and place crowns
on ignorant folly,
and I can’t stop building.
Mortar covers my hands,
sticks to my fingers,
drives grit under my nails,
and the wall towers.
The tips tangle
with the clouds
and create endless shadows
made of memory.
This castle
of lines and phrases
blinds the world from sun,
submerges the flocks in black.
People wade
in my kingdom of letters,
my empire of words,
and you are on your island
in the silence of the light,
your ears the only ones
empty of my voice.

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Inspiration: Diane Ackerman

Antarctica considers her explorers

I

Brash as brash ice, they flock to me
though I chill and defy them;
keen as migrating birds they come,
all white like the kelp goose,
and too hot, too frail, too soft-skinned —
to put it bluntly, too animal —
for my small eternities of ice.

They come to me by water, by sled,
by sky, over seas heaving like frightened children.
I have seen them rip apart the tight skirts
of the rain, and plunge through ice packs
dense as thunder. Yet they come to me
dressed in the plumage of birds —
orange and red — like birds they nest
among twigs and sing songs,
strut, flap their arms in the cold.

They would sooner bare their souls
than their flesh, so they come to me
swathed in fur, down and leather
they strip from lesser beasts,
and walk through my crystal orchards
quilted in tight posses of life —
needing the world’s full bestiary to face
my staggering chasms, my cascading glare.

They come to me during the longest night
they can find, a night elaborate and deep,
with none of the pastel preambles of twilight,
to lie long in my flesh and fill me with fire.
Bringing their starry eyes, their cunning,
their hot blood, their beautiful fever,
they pour like lava through my limbs,
pour slowly, from one shore to the other,
and leave me shaking with unearthly calm.

They are coming now — I feel their pulse
rapid as wings beating at my fingertips,
taste their salty skin, as they sweat hard
under layers of goose down and silk.
Lusty as waterfalls, tough as granite,
they have come to seize me, chaste and sparkling,
with their small arms and huge hearts,
these madmen who yearn like the sun,
torrid, molten, who mood like chameleons,
these fierce dreamers, these bright blades.

As published in Jaguar of Sweet Laughter: New and Selected Poems by vintage Books, 1993.

Inspiration: Louise Glück

Vespers

End of August. Heat
like a tent over
John’s garden. And some things
have the nerve to be getting started,
clusters of tomatoes, stands
of late lilies—optimism
of the great stalks—imperial
gold and silver: but why
start anything
so close to the end?
Tomatoes that will never ripen, lilies
winter will kill, that won’t
come back in spring. Or
are you thinking
I spend too much time
looking ahead, like
an old woman wearing
sweaters in summer;
are you saying I can
flourish, having
no hope
of enduring? Blaze of the red cheek, glory
of the open throat, white,
spotted with crimson.

—-

As published in The Wild Iris, 1992.

Inspiration: Talking To My Son Before Sleep

Radiating Blossom ~ Flowers & Words

“Which is bigger,” he asks me, “the ocean or sky,”
and I want to tell him the heart, which even today
has been practicing vastness, is learning to say yes

in new languages, learning to stretch beyond
the center, beyond the lips, learning to be more moon
and less woman, to reflect light without owning it,

learning to lose whatever it has used before as a measure.
This is the way I want to love: in an idiom stronger
than tongues, I want to love in the way that tides pull

and release, like the moon which holds without touch,
I want to invite the sky to create a bigger space in me
a place spacious enough to hold all the wings

of the passing moment. I want to be buoyant enough
to carry all of love’s weight. “The sky,” I say.
“The sky is bigger, but the ocean is…

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Inspiration: Czeslaw Milosz

Excerpt from “A Treatise on Nature, IV. Nature”.

America for me has the pelt of a raccoon,
Its eyes are a raccoon’s black binoculars.
A chipmunk flickers in a litter of dry bark
Where ivy and vines tangle in the red soil
At the roots of an arcade of tulip trees.
America’s wings are the color of a cardinal,
Its beak is half-open and a mockingbird trills
From a leafy bush in the sweat-bath of the air.
Its line is the wavy body of a water moccasin
Crossing a river with a grass-like motion,
A rattlesnake, a rubble of dots and speckles,
Coiling under the bloom of a yucca plant.