Attack of the Squash People

And thus the people every year
in the valley of humid July
did sacrifice themselves
to the long green phallic god
and eat and eat and eat.
They're coming, they're on us,
the long striped gourds, the silky
babies, the hairy adolescents,
the lumpy vast adults
like the trunks of green elephants.
Recite fifty zucchini recipes!

Zucchini tempura; creamed soup;
sauté with olive oil and cumin,
tomatoes, onion; frittata;
casserole of lamb; baked
topped with cheese; marinated;
stuffed; stewed; driven
through the heart like a stake.

Get rid of old friends: they too
have gardens and full trunks.
Look for newcomers: befriend
them in the post office, unload
on them and run. Stop tourists
in the street. Take truckloads
to Boston. Give to your Red Cross.
Beg on the highway: please
take my zucchini, I have a crippled
mother at home with heartburn.

Sneak out before dawn to drop
them in other people's gardens,
in baby buggies at churchdoors.
Shot, smuggling zucchini into
mailboxes, a federal offense.

With a suave reptilian glitter
you bask among your raspy
fronds sudden and huge as
alligators. You give and give
too much, like summer days
limp with heat, thunderstorms
bursting their bags on our heads,
as we salt and freeze and pickle
for the too little to come.

~ Marge Piercy

The Importance of Being Earnest

Jack: I fear there can be no possible doubt about the matter. This afternoon during my temporary absence in London on an important question of romance, he obtained admission to my house by means of the false pretence of being my brother. Under an assumed name he drank, I’ve just been informed by my butler, an entire pint bottle of my Perrier-Jouet, Brut, ‘89; wine I was specially reserving for myself. Continuing his disgraceful deception, he succeeded in the course of the afternoon in alienating the affections of my only ward. He subsequently stayed to tea, and devoured every single muffin. And what makes his conduct all the more heartless is, that he was perfectly well aware from the first that I have no brother, that I never had a brother, and that I don’t intend to have a brother, not even of any kind. I distinctly told him so myself yesterday afternoon.

~ Oscar Wilde

Having a Coke With You

is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irun, Hendaye, Biaritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Traversa de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I'm with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o'clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it's in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven't gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn't pick the rider
as carefully as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I am telling you about it

~ Frank O'Hara

Modern Library: Writer's Workshop

Productivity is the only path to confidence. The young William Kennedy studied writing with the young Saul Bellow. "Bellow," Kennedy recalls, "also talked about being prodigal. He said that a writer shouldn't be parsimonious with his work, but 'prodigal, like nature.'" Curiously, Chekov once remarked that his brother Aleksandr had "written himself out "by producing not too much, but too little. This is not an empty paradox. Since writing is what generates inspiration-and not the reverse-abundant writing produces abundant inspiration. The two most dangerous enemies of a young writer's productivity are his or her mismanagement of time and an undue vulnerability to self-doubt and self-criticism. Both must be dealt with firmly. Paul Johnson is right: "A bad novel is better than an unwritten novel, because a bad novel can be improved; an unwritten novel is defeat without a battle. A writer as long as he lives faces the difficulty of striking a balance between an overcritical view of his work and complacency. In my view, a young writer should err on the side of complacency while he is writing, then sit in judgment afterwards. He must keep the typewriter going, and watch the pile of blank pages on his right gradually diminish and filled pages on his left arise. Thereby he acquires confidence, and in writing, as in all art, confidence is the beginning of skill."


~ Stephen Koch

Worsening Situation

Like a rainstorm, he said, the braided colors
Wash over me and are no help. Or like one
At a feast who eats not, for he cannot choose
From among the smoking dishes. This severed hand
Stands for life, and wander as it will,
East or west, north or south, it is ever
A stranger who walks beside me. O seasons,
Booths, chaleur, dark-hatted charlatans
On the outskirts of some rural fete,
The name you drop and never say is mine, mine!
Some day I'll claim to you how all used up
I am because of you but in the meantime the ride
Continues. Everyone is along for the ride,
It seems. Besides, what else is there?
The annual games? True, there are occasions
For white uniforms and a special language
Kept secret from the others. The limes
Are duly sliced. I know all this
But can't seem to keep it from affecting me,
Every day, all day. I've tried recreation,
Reading until late at night, train rides
And romance.
One day a man called while I was out
And left this message: "You got the whole thing wrong
From start to finish. Luckily, there's still time
To correct the situation, but you must act fast.
See me at your earliest convenience. And please
Tell no one of this. Much besides your life depends on it."
I thought nothing of it at the time. Lately
I´ve been looking at old-fashioned plaids, fingering
Starched white collars, wondering whether there’s a way
To get them really white again. My wife
Thinks I’m in Oslo- Oslo, France, that is.


~ John Ashberry

Giovanni's Room

I was thinking, when I told Hella that I had loved her, of those days before anything awful, irrevocable, had happened to me, when an affair was nothing more than an affair. Now, from this night, this coming morning, no matter how many beds I find myself in between now and my final bed, I shall never be able to have any more of those boyish, zestful affairs-which are, really, when one thinks of it, a kind of higher, or, anyway, more pretentious masturbation. People are too various to be treated so lightly. I am too various to be trusted. If this were not so I would not be alone in this house tonight. Hella would not be on the high seas. And Giovanni would not be about to perish, sometime between this night and this morning, on the guillotine.

~ James Baldwin

From Asphodel, "That Greeny Flower"

Of asphodel, that greeny flower,

 like a buttercup

   upon its branching stem-

save that it's green and wooden-

 I come, my sweet,

   to sing to you.

We lived long together

 a life filled,

   if you will,

with flowers.  So that

 I was cheered

   when I came first to know

that there were flowers also

 in hell.

   Today

I'm filled with the fading memory of those flowers

 that we both loved,

   even to this poor

colorless thing-

 I saw it

   when I was a child-

little prized among the living

 but the dead see,

   asking among themselves:

What do I remember

 that was shaped

   as this thing is shaped?

while our eyes fill

 with tears.

   Of love, abiding love

it will be telling

 though too weak a wash of crimson

   colors it

to make it wholly credible.

 There is something

   something urgent

I have to say to you

 and you alone

   but it must wait

while I drink in

 the joy of your approach,

   perhaps for the last time.

And so

 with fear in my heart

   I drag it out

and keep on talking

 for I dare not stop.

   Listen while I talk on

against time.

 It will not be

   for long.

I have forgot

 and yet I see clearly enough

   something

central to the sky

 which ranges round it.

   An odor

springs from it!

 A sweetest odor!

   Honeysuckle!  And now

there comes the buzzing of a bee!

 and a whole flood

   of sister memories!

Only give me time,

 time to recall them

   before I shall speak out.

Give me time,

 time.

When I was a boy

 I kept a book

   to which, from time

to time,

 I added pressed flowers

   until, after a time,

I had a good collection.

 The asphodel,

   forebodingly,

among them.

 I bring you,

   reawakened,

a memory of those flowers.

 They were sweet

   when I pressed them

and retained

 something of their sweetness

   a long time.

It is a curious odor,

 a moral odor,

   that brings me

near to you.

 The color

   was the first to go.

There had come to me

 a challenge,

   your dear self,

mortal as I was,

 the lily's throat

   to the hummingbird!

Endless wealth,

 I thought,

   held out its arms to me.

A thousand tropics

 in an apple blossom.

   The generous earth itself

gave us lief.

 The whole world

   became my garden!

But the sea

 which no one tends

   is also a garden

when the sun strikes it

 and the waves

   are wakened.

I have seen it

 and so have you

   when it puts all flowers

to shame.

 Too, there are the starfish

   stiffened by the sun

and other sea wrack

 and weeds.  We knew that

   along with the rest of it

for we were born by the sea,

 knew its rose hedges

   to the very water's brink.

There the pink mallow grows

 and in their season

   strawberries

and there, later,

 we went to gather

   the wild plum.

I cannot say

 that I have gone to hell

   for your love

but often

 found myself there

   in your pursuit.

I do not like it

 and wanted to be

   in heaven.  Hear me out.

Do not turn away.

I have learned much in my life

 from books

   and out of them

about love.

 Death

   is not the end of it.

There is a hierarchy

 which can be attained,

   I think,

in its service.

 Its guerdon

   is a fairy flower;

a cat of twenty lives.

 If no one came to try it

   the world

would be the loser.

 It has been

   for you and me

as one who watches a storm

 come in over the water.

   We have stood

from year to year

 before the spectacle of our lives

   with joined hands.

The storm unfolds.

 Lightning

   plays about the edges of the clouds.

The sky to the north

 is placid,

   blue in the afterglow

as the storm piles up.

 It is a flower

   that will soon reach

the apex of its bloom.

 We danced,

   in our minds,

and read a book together.

 You remember?

   It was a serious book.

And so books

 entered our lives.

The sea!  The sea!

 Always

   when I think of the sea

there comes to mind

 the Iliad

   and Helen's public fault

that bred it.

 Were it not for that

   there would have been

no poem but the world

 if we had remembered,

   those crimson petals

spilled among the stones,

 would have called it simply

   murder.

The sexual orchid that bloomed then

 sending so many

   disinterested

men to their graves

 has left its memory

   to a race of fools

or heroes

 if silence is a virtue.

   The sea alone

with its multiplicity

 holds any hope.

   The storm

has proven abortive

 but we remain

   after the thoughts it roused

to

 re-cement our lives.

   It is the mind

the mind

 that must be cured

   short of death's

intervention,

 and the will becomes again

   a garden.  The poem

is complex and the place made

 in our lives

   for the poem.

Silence can be complex too,

 but you do not get far

   with silence.

Begin again.

 It is like Homer's

   catalogue of ships:

it fills up the time.

 I speak in figures,

   well enough, the dresses

you wear are figures also,

 we could not meet

   otherwise.  When I speak

of flowers

 it is to recall

   that at one time

we were young.

 All women are not Helen,

   I know that,

but have Helen in their hearts.

 My sweet,

   you have it also, therefore

I love you

 and could not love you otherwise.

   Imagine you saw

a field made up of women

 all silver-white.

   What should you do

but love them?

 The storm bursts

   or fades!  it is not

the end of the world.

 Love is something else,

   or so I thought it,

a garden which expands,

 though I knew you as a woman

   and never thought otherwise,

until the whole sea

 has been taken up

   and all its gardens.

It was the love of love,

 the love that swallows up all else,

   a grateful love,

a love of nature, of people,

 of animals,

   a love engendering

gentleness and goodness

 that moved me

   and that I saw in you.

I should have known,

 though I did not,

   that the lily-of-the-valley

is a flower makes many ill

 who whiff it.

   We had our children,

rivals in the general onslaught.

 I put them aside

   though I cared for them.

as well as any man

 could care for his children

   according to my lights.

You understand

 I had to meet you

   after the event

and have still to meet you.

 Love

   to which you too shall bow

along with me-

 a flower

   a weakest flower

shall be our trust

 and not because

   we are too feeble

to do otherwise

 but because

   at the height of my power

I risked what I had to do,

 therefore to prove

   that we love each other

while my very bones sweated

 that I could not cry to you

   in the act.

Of asphodel, that greeny flower,

 I come, my sweet,

   to sing to you!

My heart rouses

 thinking to bring you news

   of something

that concerns you

 and concerns many men.  Look at

   what passes for the new.

You will not find it there but in

 despised poems.

   It is difficult

to get the news from poems

 yet men die miserably every day

   for lack

of what is found there.

 Hear me out

   for I too am concerned

and every man

 who wants to die at peace in his bed

   besides.


~ William Carlos Williams

The Seagull

Nina: Why do you say that you have kissed the ground I walked on? You should kill me rather. [She bends over the table] I am so tired. If I could only rest--rest. [She raises her head] I am a sea-gull--no--no, I am an actress. [She hears ARKADINA and TRIGORIN laughing in the distance, runs to the door on the left and looks through the keyhole] He is there too. [She goes back to TREPLIEFF] Ah, well--no matter. He does not believe in the theatre; he used to laugh at my dreams, so that little by little I became down-hearted and ceased to believe in it too. Then came all the cares of love, the continual anxiety about my little one, so that I soon grew trivial and spiritless, and played my parts without meaning. I never knew what to do with my hands, and I could not walk properly or control my voice. You cannot imagine the state of mind of one who knows as he goes through a play how terribly badly he is acting. I am a sea-gull--no--no, that is not what I meant to say. Do you remember how you shot a seagull once? A man chanced to pass that way and destroyed it out of idleness. That is an idea for a short story, but it is not what I meant to say. [She passes her hand across her forehead] What was I saying? Oh, yes, the stage. I have changed now. Now I am a real actress. I act with joy, with exaltation, I am intoxicated by it, and feel that I am superb. I have been walking and walking, and thinking and thinking, ever since I have been here, and I feel the strength of my spirit growing in me every day. I know now, I understand at last, Constantine, that for us, whether we write or act, it is not the honour and glory of which I have dreamt that is important, it is the strength to endure. One must know how to bear one's cross, and one must have faith. I believe, and so do not suffer so much, and when I think of my calling I do not fear life.


~ Anton Chekhov

Nothing Gold Can Stay

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.


~ Robert Frost

Harrison Bergeron

George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel's cheeks, but she'd forgotten for the moment what they were about.

On the television screen were ballerinas.

A buzzer sounded in George's head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.

"That was a pretty dance, that dance they just did," said Hazel.

"Huh?" said George.

"That dance - it was nice," said Hazel.

1961

~ Kurt Vonnegut

Four Poems for Robin

Siwashing It Out Once in Suislaw Forest


I slept under     rhododendron

All night    blossoms fell

Shivering on a sheet of cardboard

Feet stuck   in my pack

Hands deep    in my pockets

Barely  able    to   sleep.

I remembered    when we were in school

Sleeping together   in a big warm bed

We were     the youngest lovers

When we broke up     we were still nineteen

Now our   friends are married

You teach  school back east

I dont mind     living this way

Green hills   the long blue beach

But sometimes   sleeping in the open

I think back    when I had you.



   A Spring Night in Shokoku-ji


Eight years ago this May

We walked under cherry blossoms

At night in an orchard in Oregon.

All that I wanted then

Is forgotten now, but you.

Here in the night

In a garden of the old capital

I feel the trembling ghost of Yugao

I remember your cool body

Naked under a summer cotton dress.



 An Autumn Morning in Shokoku-ji


Last night watching the Pleiades,

Breath smoking in the moonlight,

Bitter memory like vomit

Choked my throat.

I unrolled a sleeping bag

On mats on the porch

Under thick autumn stars.

In dream you appeared

(Three times in nine years)

Wild, cold, and accusing.

I woke shamed and angry:

The pointless wars of the heart.

Almost dawn. Venus and Jupiter.

The first time I have

Ever seen them close.



        December at Yase


You said, that October,

In the tall dry grass by the orchard

When you chose to be free,

"Again someday, maybe ten years."



After college I saw you

One time. You were strange.

And I was obsessed with a plan.



Now ten years and more have

Gone by: I've always known

      where you were--

I might have gone to you

Hoping to win your love back.

You still are single.



I didn't.

I thought I must make it alone. I

Have done that.



Only in dream, like this dawn,

Does the grave, awed intensity

Of our young love

Return to my mind, to my flesh.



We had what the others

All crave and seek for;

We left it behind at nineteen.



I feel ancient, as though I had

Lived many lives.

And may never now know

If I am a fool

Or have done what my

     karma demands.




~ Gary Snyder

Franny and Zooey

"Well, as I said, the pilgrim-this simple peasant-started the whole pilgrimage to find out what it means in the Bible when it says you're supposed to pray without ceasing. And then he meets this starets-this very advanced religious person I mentioned, the one who'd been studying the 'Philokalia' for years and years and years." Franny stopped suddenly to reflect, to organize. "Well, the starets tells him about the Jesus Prayer first of all. 'Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.' I mean that's what it is. And he explains to him that those are he best words to use when you pray. Especially, the word 'mercy,' because it's such a really enormous word and can mean so many things. I mean it doesn't just have to mean mercy." Franny paused to reflect again. She was no longer looking at Lane's plate but over his shoulder. "Anyway," she went on, "the starets tells the pilgrim that if you keep saying that prayer over and over again-you only have to do it with your lips at first-then what eventually happens, the prayer becomes self-active. Something happens after awhile. I don't know what, but something happens, and the words get synchronized with the person's heartbeats, and then you're actually praying without ceasing. Which has a really tremendous, mystical effect on your whole outlook. I mean that's the whole point of it, more or less. I mean you do it to purify your whole outlook and get an absolutely new conception of what everything's about."

~ J.D. Salinger

The Dry Spell

Waking early
with the warming house
my grandmother knew what to do
taking care not to wake
Da Da she cooked up a storm
in darkness adding silent spices
and hot sauce

to stay cool. She ate later, alone
after the children had been gathered
and made to eat
her red eggs. Da Da rose
late, long after
the roosters had crowed
his name, clearing
an ashy throat
pulling on long
wooly underwear
to make him sweat

even more. The fields have gone
long enough without water
he liked to say, so can I
and when he returned
pounds heavier
from those thirsty fields
he was even cooler
losing each soaked
woolen skin
to the floor, dropping
naked rain in his
wife's earthen arms.

~ Kevin Young

Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

A young man said he wanted to go to bed with Alexandra because she had an interesting mind. He was a cabdriver and she had admired the curly back of his head. Still, she was suprised. He said he would pick her up again in about an hour and half. Because she was fair and a responsible person, she placed between them a barrier of truthful information. She said, I suppose you don't know many middle-aged women.

You don't look so middle-aged to me. I mean, everyone likes what they like. That is, I'm interested in your point of view, your way of life. Anyway, he said, peering into the mirror, your face is nice and your eyebrows are out of sight.

Make it two hours, she said. I'm visiting my father whom I happen to love.

~ Grace Paley

The Door (I)

It is hard going to the door
cut so small in the wall where
the vision which echoes loneliness
brings a scent of wild flowers in a wood.

What I understood, I understand.
My mind is sometime torment,
sometimes good and filled with livelihood,
and feels the ground.

But I see the door,
and knew the wall, and wanted the wood,
and would get there if I could
with my feet and hands and mind.

Lady, do not banish me
for digressions. My nature
is a quagmire of unresolved
confessions. Lady, I follow.

I walked away from myself,
I left the room, I found the garden,
I knew the woman
in it, together we lay down.

Dead night remembers. In December
we change, not multiplied but dispersed,
sneaked out of childhood,
the ritual of dismemberment.

Mighty magic is a mother,
in her there is another issue
of fixture, repeated form, the race renewal,
the charge of the command.

The garden echoes across the room.
It is fixed in the wall like a mirror
that faces a window behind you
and reflects the shadows.

May I go now?
Am I allowed to bow myself down
in the ridiculous posture of renewal,
of the insistence of which I am the virtue?

Nothing for You is untoward.
Inside You would also be tall,
more tall, more beautiful.
Come toward me from the wall, I want to be with You.

So I screamed to You,
who hears as the wind, and changes
multiply, invariably,
changes in the mind.

Running to the door, I ran down
as a clock runs down. Walked backwards,
stumbled, sat down
hard on the floor near the wall.

Where were You.
How absurd, how vicious.
There is nothing to do but get up.
My knees were iron, I rusted in worship, of You.

For that one sings, one
writes the spring poem, one goes on walking.
The Lady has always moved to the next town
and you stumble on after Her.

The door in the wall leads to the garden
where in the sunlight sit
the Graces in long Victorian dresses,
of which my grandmother had spoken.

History sings in their faces.
They are young, they are obtainable,
and you follow after them also
in the service of God and Truth.

But the Lady is indefinable,
she will be the door in the wall
to the garden in sunlight.
I will go on talking forever.

I will never get there.
Oh Lady, remember me
who in Your service grows older
not wiser, no more than before.

How can I die alone.
Where will I be then who am now alone,
what groans so pathetically
in this room where I am alone?

I will go to the garden.
I will be a romantic. I will sell
myself in hell,
in heaven also I will be.

In my mind I see the door,
I see the sunlight before me across the floor
beckon to me, as the Lady’s skirt
moves small beyond it.

for Robert Duncan

~ Robert Creeley

Tender Buttons: Rooms

Something that is an erection is that which stands and feeds and silences a tin which is swelling. This makes no diversion that is to say what can please exaltation, that which is cooking.

A shine is that which when covered changes permission. An enclosure blends with the same that is to say there is blending. A blend is that which holds no mice and this is not because of a floor it is because of nothing, it is not in a vision.

A fact is that when the place was replaced all was left that was stored and all was retained that would not satisfy more than another. The question is this, is it possible to suggest more to replace that thing. This question and this perfect denial does make the time change all the time.

1914

~ Gertrude Stein

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

translated by Stephen Mitchell

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

The Snows of Kilimanjaro

She shot very well this good, this rich bitch, this kindly caretaker and destroyer of his talent. Nonsense. He had destroyed his talent himself. Why should he blame this woman because she kept him well? He had desroyed his talent by not using it, by betrayals of himself and what he believed in, by drinking so much that blunted the edge of his perceptions, by laziness, by sloth, and by snobbery, by pride and by prejudice, by hook and by crook. What was this? A catalogue of old books? What was his talent anyway? It was a talent all right but instead of using it, he had traded on it. It was never what he had done, but always what he could do. And he had chosen to make his living with something else instead of a pen or a pencil. It was strange, too, wasn't it, that when he fell in love with another woman, that woman should always have more money than the last one? But when he no longer was in love, when he was only lying, as to this woman, now, who had the most money of all, who had all the money there was, who had had a husband children, who had taken lovers and been dissatisfied with them, and who loved him dearly as a writer, as a man, as a companion and as a proud possession; it was strange that when he did not love her at all and was lying, that he should be able to give her more for her money than when he had really loved.
We must all but cut out for what we do, he thought. However you make your living is where your talent lies. He had sold vitality, in one form or another, all his life and when your affections are not oo involved you give much better value for the money. He had found that out bu he would never write that, now, either. No, he would not write that, although it was well worth writing.

~ Ernest Hemingway

He Wishes For the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,   
Enwrought with golden and silver light,   
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths   
Of night and light and the half light,   
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;   
I have spread my dreams under your feet;   
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

~ W. B. Yeats

Brokeback Mountain

Ennis Del Mar wakes before five, wind rocking the trailer, hissing in around the aluminum door and window frames. The shirts hanging on a nail shudder slightly in the draft. He gets up, scratching the grey wedge of belly and pubic hair, shuffles to the gas burner, pours leftover coffee in a chipped enamel pan; the flame swathes it in blue. He turns on the tap and urinates in the sink, pulls on his shirt and jeans, his worn boots, stamping the heels against the floor to get them full on. The wind booms down the curved length of the trailer and under its roaring passage he can hear the scratching of fine gravel and sand. It could be bad on the highway with the horse trailer. He has to be packed and away from the place that morning. Again the ranch is on the market and they've shipped out the last of the horses, paid everybody off the day before, the owner saying, "Give em to the real estate shark, I'm out a here," dropping the keys in Ennis's hand. He might have to stay with his married daughter until he picks up another job, yet he is suffused with a sense of pleasure because Jack Twist was in his dream.

The stale coffee is boiling up but he catches it before it goes over the side, pours it into a stained cup and blows on the black liquid, lets a panel of the dream slide forward. If he does not force his attention on it, it might stoke the day, rewarm that old, cold time on the mountain when they owned the world and nothing seemed wrong. The wind strikes the trailer like a load of dirt coming off a dump truck, eases, dies, leaves a temporary silence.

~ Annie Proulx

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent

To lead you to an overwhelming question ...

Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"

Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go

Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time

To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--

(They will say: 'How his hair is growing thin!")

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--

(They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!")

Do I dare

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all--

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then how should I begin

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all--

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it perfume from a dress

That makes me so digress?

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

And should I then presume?

And how should I begin?

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? ...

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

* * *

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Smoothed by long fingers,

Asleep ... tired ... or it malingers,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while,

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

To roll it towards some overwhelming question,

To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"--

If one, settling a pillow by her head

Should say: "That is not what I meant at all;

That is not it, at all."

And would it have been worth it, after all,

Would it have been worth while,

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor--

And this, and so much more?--

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

Would it have been worth while

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

And turning toward the window, should say:

"That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant, at all."

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--

Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

~ T. S. Eliot

Mrs. Dalloway

What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”—was that it?—“I prefer men to cauliflowers”—was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace—Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished—how strange it was!—a few sayings like this about cabbages.

~ Virginia Woolf

I May After Leaving You Walk Quickly Or Maybe Even Run

Rain fell in a post-romantic way.
Heads in the planets, toes tucked

under carpets, that’s how we got our bodies
through. The translator made the sign

for twenty horses backing away from
a lump of sugar. Yes, you.

When I said did you want me
I meant me in the general sense.

The drink we drank was cordial.
In a spoon, the ceiling fan whirled.

The Old World smoked in the fireplace.
Glum was the woman in the ostrich feather hat.

~ Matthea Harvey

Lady Chatterley's Lover

He looked back at her. She saw his eyes, tense and brilliant, fierce, not loving. But her will had left her. A strange weight was on her limbs. She was giving way. She was giving up.

He led her through the wall of prickly trees, that were difficult to come through, to a place where was a little space and a pile of dead boughs. He threw one or two dry ones down, put his coat and waistcoat over them, and she had to lie down there under the boughs of the tree, like an animal, while he waited, standing there in his shirt and breeches, watching her with haunted eyes. But still he was provident — he made her lie properly, properly. Yet he broke the band of her underclothes, for she did not help him, only lay inert.

~ D. H. Lawrence

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a far better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis


~ e e cummings

The Circular Ruins

At first, his dreams were chaotic; then in a short while they became dialectic in nature. The stranger dreamed that he was in the center of a circular amphitheater which was more or less the burnt temple; clouds of taciturn students filled the tiers of seats; the faces of the farthest ones hung at a distance of many centuries and as high as the stars, but their features were completely precise. The man lectured his pupils on anatomy, cosmography, and magic: the faces listened anxiously and tried to answer understandingly, as if they guessed the importance of that examination which would redeem one of them from his condition of empty illusion and interpolate him into the real world. Asleep or awake, the man thought over the answers of his phantoms, did not allow himself to be deceived by imposters, and in certain perplexities he sensed a growing intelligence. He was seeking a soul worthy of participating in the universe.

~ Jorge Luis Borges

Problems with Hurricanes

A campesino looked at the air
And told me:
With hurricanes it's not the wind
or the noise or the water.
I'll tell you he said:
it's the mangoes, avocados
Green plantains and bananas
flying into town like projectiles.

How would your family
feel if they had to tell
The generations that you
got killed by a flying
Banana.

Death by drowning has honor
If the wind picked you up
and slammed you
Against a mountain boulder
This would not carry shame
But
to suffer a mango smashing
Your skull
or a plantain hitting your
Temple at 70 miles per hour
is the ultimate disgrace.

The campesino takes off his hat—
As a sign of respect
toward the fury of the wind
And says:
Don't worry about the noise
Don't worry about the water
Don't worry about the wind—
If you are going out
beware of mangoes
And all such beautiful
sweet things.

~ Victor Hernandez Cruz

Walden

MEANWHILE MY BEANS, the length of whose rows, added together, was seven miles already planted, were impatient to be hoed, for the earliest had grown considerably before the latest were in the ground; indeed they were not easily to be put off. What was the meaning of this so steady and self-respecting, this small Herculean labor, I knew not. I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antæus. But why should I raise them? Only Heaven knows. This was my curious labor all summer — to make this portion of the earth's surface, which had yielded only cinquefoil, blackberries, johnswort, and the like, before, sweet wild fruits and pleasant flowers, produce instead this pulse. What shall I learn of beans or beans of me? I cherish them, I hoe them, early and late I have an eye to them; and this is my day's work. It is a fine broad leaf to look on. My auxiliaries are the dews and rains which water this dry soil, and what fertility is in the soil itself, which for the most part is lean and effete. My enemies are worms, cool days, and most of all woodchucks. The last have nibbled for me a quarter of an acre clean. But what right had I to oust johnswort and the rest, and break up their ancient herb garden? Soon, however, the remaining beans will be too tough for them, and go forward to meet new foes.

~ Henry David Thoreau

CXXIX

Adrift! A little boat adrift!
And night is coming down!
Will no one guide a boat
Unto the nearest town?

So sailors say, on yesterday,
Just as the dusk was brown,
One little boat gave up its strife,
And gurgled down and down.

But angels say, on yesterday,
Just as the dawn was red,
One little boat o'erspent with gales
Retrimmed its masts, redecked its sails
Exultant, onward sped!

~ Emily Dickinson

Tropic of Capricorn

Interwoven with this talk of the other world was the whole body and texture of Lawrence's work. Often, when the park had long been emptied, we were still sitting on a bench discussing the nature of Lawrence's ideas. Looking back on these discussions now I can see how confused I was, how pitifully ignorant of the true meaning of Lawrence's words. Had I really understood, my life could never have taken the course it did. Most of us live the greater part of our lives submerged. Certainly in my own case I can say that not until I left America did I emerge above the surface. Perhaps America had nothing to do with it, but the fact remains that I did not open my eyes wide and full and clear until I struck Paris. And perhaps that was only because I had renounced America, renounced my past.

~ Henry Miller

The Talking Back of Miss Valentine Jones: Poem # One

well I wanted to braid my hair

bathe and bedeck my

self so fine

so fully aforethought for

your pleasure

see:

I wanted to travel and read

and runaround fantastic

into war and peace:

I wanted to

surf

dive

fly

climb

conquer

and be conquered

THEN

I wanted to pickup the phone

and find you asking me

if I might possibly be alone

some night

(so I could answer cool

as the jewels I would wear

on bareskin for you

digmedaddy delectation:)

"WHEN

you comin ova?"

But I had to remember to write down

margarine on the list

and shoepolish and a can of

sliced pineapple in casea company

and a quarta skim milk cause Teresa's

gaining weight and don' nobody groove on

that much

girl

and next I hadta sort for darks and lights before

the laundry hit the water which I had

to kinda keep an eye on be-

cause if the big hose jumps the sink again that

Mrs. Thompson gointa come upstairs

and brain me with a mop don' smell too

nice even though she hang

it headfirst out the winda

and I had to check

on William like to

burn hisself to death with fever

boy so thin be

callin all day "Momma! Sing to me?"

"Ma! Am I gone die?" and me not

wake enough to sit beside him longer than

to wipeaway the sweat or change the sheets/

his shirt and feed him orange

juice before I fall out of sleep and

Sweet My Jesus ain but one can

left

and we not thru the afternoon

and now

you (temporarily) shownup with a thing

you says' a poem and you

call it

"Will The Real Miss Black America Standup?"



                       guilty po' mouth

                       about duty beauties of my

                       headrag

                       boozeup doozies about 

                       never mind

                       cause love is blind



well

I can't use it



and the very next bodacious Blackman

call me queen

because my life ain shit

because (in any case) he ain been here to share it

with me

(dish for dish and do for do and

dream for dream)

I'm gone scream him out my house

be-

cause what I wanted was

to braid my hair/bathe and bedeck my

self so fully be-

cause what I wanted was

your love

not pity

be-

cause what I wanted was

your love

your love

~ June Jordan

The Picture of Dorian Gray

"And beauty is a form of genius-- is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world, like sunlight, or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it. You smile? Ah! when you have lost it you won't smile."

~ Oscar Wilde

Wild Nights!-Wild Nights!

Wild Nights – Wild Nights!
Were I with thee
Wild Nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile – the winds –
To a heart in port –
Done with the compass –
Done with the chart!

Rowing in Eden –
Ah, the sea!
Might I moor – Tonight –
In thee!

~ Emily Dickinson

A Room of One's Own

But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what, has that got to do with a room of one’s own? I will try to explain. When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontës and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow; some witticisms if possible about Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs Gaskell and one would have done. But at second sight the words seemed not so simple. The title women and fiction might mean, and you may have meant it to mean, women and what they are like, or it might mean women and the fiction that they write; or it might mean women and the fiction that is written about them, or it might mean that somehow all three are inextricably mixed together and you want me to consider them in that light. But when I began to consider the subject in this last way, which seemed the most interesting, I soon saw that it had one fatal drawback. I should never be able to come to a conclusion. I should never be able to fulfil what is, I understand, the first duty of a lecturer to hand you after an hour’s discourse a nugget of pure truth to wrap up between the pages of your notebooks and keep on the mantelpiece for ever. All I could do was to offer you an opinion upon one minor point—a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction; and that, as you will see, leaves the great problem of the true nature of woman and the true nature of fiction unsolved. I have shirked the duty of coming to a conclusion upon these two questions—women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems. But in order to make some amends I am going to do what I can to show you how I arrived at this opinion about the room and the money. I am going to develop in your presence as fully and freely as I can the train of thought which led me to think this. Perhaps if I lay bare the ideas, the prejudices, that lie behind this statement you will find that they have some bearing upon women and some upon fiction. At any rate, when a subject is highly controversial—and any question about sex is that—one cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold. One can only give one’s audience the chance of drawing their own conclusions as they observe the limitations, the prejudices, the idiosyncrasies of the speaker. Fiction here is likely to contain more truth than fact. Therefore I propose, making use of all the liberties and licences of a novelist, to tell you the story of the two days that preceded my coming here—how, bowed down by the weight of the subject which you have laid upon my shoulders, I pondered it, and made it work in and out of my daily life. I need not say that what I am about to describe has no existence; Oxbridge is an invention; so is Fernham; ‘I’ is only a convenient term for somebody who has no real being. Lies will flow from my lips, but there may perhaps be some truth mixed up with them; it is for you to seek out this truth and to decide whether any part of it is worth keeping. If not, you will of course throw the whole of it into the waste–paper basket and forget all about it.


~ Virginia Woolf

Why I Am Not A Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" be
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."

"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.

~ Kenneth Koch

The Modern Library Writer's Workshop

Whatever their source, your characters must sand before your mind's eye with the vividness of another being. You must see them, feel the, and care for them as beings apart, distinct from you. This is true even-maybe even especially-of the ones who are based primarily on you. Of the flawed autobiographical fiction I have read, by far the most frequent fault is the failed depiction of the central character. Most novice short stories have some character more or less modeled on their author. Many if not most first novels are at least partly autobiographical. And most such efforts fail simply because the depiction of that prime character is ineffective and dull. It can happen that the peripheral figures are not bad at all; the minor characters, antagonists, foils, and walk-ons may be quite bright and alive. Too bad: They cannot save the day when the autobiographical protagonist is a boring blur. You can't depict what your imagination doesn't see and hear, and most of us see and hear ourselves rather poorly.

~ Stephen Koch

City That Does Not Sleep

In the sky there is nobody asleep.  Nobody, nobody.

Nobody is asleep.

The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.

The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,

and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the 

            street corner

the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the

            stars.



Nobody is asleep on earth.  Nobody, nobody.

Nobody is asleep.

In a graveyard far off there is a corpse

who has moaned for three years

because of a dry countryside on his knee;

and that boy they buried this morning cried so much

it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.



Life is not a dream.  Careful!  Careful!  Careful!

We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth

or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead

            dahlias.

But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;

flesh exists.  Kisses tie our mouths

in a thicket of new veins,

and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever

and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.



One day 

the horses will live in the saloons

and the enraged ants

will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the

            eyes of cows.



Another day

we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead

and still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent boats

we will watch our ring flash and roses spring from our tongue.

Careful!  Be careful!  Be careful!

The men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm,

and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention 

            of the bridge,

or that dead man who possesses now only his head and a shoe,

we must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes

            are waiting,

where the bear's teeth are waiting,

where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,

and the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder.



Nobody is sleeping in the sky.  Nobody, nobody.

Nobody is sleeping.

If someone does close his eyes,

a whip, boys, a whip!

Let there be a landscape of open eyes

and bitter wounds on fire.

No one is sleeping in this world.  No one, no one.

I have said it before.



No one is sleeping.

But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the

            night,

open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight

the lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters.


translated by Robert Bly

~ Frederico Garcia Lorca

The Great Gatsby

And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don't care what it's founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with priviledged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction-Gatbsy, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"-it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No-Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.


~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Marriage

Should I get married? Should I be good?
Astound the girl next door with my velvet suit and faustus hood?
Don't take her to movies but to cemeteries
tell all about werewolf bathtubs and forked clarinets
then desire her and kiss her and all the preliminaries
and she going just so far and I understanding why
not getting angry saying You must feel! It's beautiful to feel!
Instead take her in my arms lean against an old crooked tombstone
and woo her the entire night the constellations in the sky-

When she introduces me to her parents
back straightened, hair finally combed, strangled by a tie,
should I sit with my knees together on their 3rd degree sofa
and not ask Where's the bathroom?
How else to feel other than I am,
often thinking Flash Gordon soap-
O how terrible it must be for a young man
seated before a family and the family thinking
We never saw him before! He wants our Mary Lou!
After tea and homemade cookies they ask What do you do for a living?

Should I tell them? Would they like me then?
Say All right get married, we're losing a daughter
but we're gaining a son-
And should I then ask Where's the bathroom?

O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends
and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded
just wait to get at the drinks and food-
And the priest! he looking at me as if I masturbated
asking me Do you take this woman for your lawful wedded wife?
And I trembling what to say say Pie Glue!
I kiss the bride all those corny men slapping me on the back
She's all yours, boy! Ha-ha-ha!
And in their eyes you could see some obscene honeymoon going on-
Then all that absurd rice and clanky cans and shoes
Niagara Falls! Hordes of us! Husbands! Wives! Flowers! Chocolates!
All streaming into cozy hotels
All going to do the same thing tonight
The indifferent clerk he knowing what was going to happen
The lobby zombies they knowing what
The whistling elevator man he knowing
Everybody knowing! I'd almost be inclined not to do anything!
Stay up all night! Stare that hotel clerk in the eye!
Screaming: I deny honeymoon! I deny honeymoon!
running rampant into those almost climactic suites
yelling Radio belly! Cat shovel!
O I'd live in Niagara forever! in a dark cave beneath the Falls
I'd sit there the Mad Honeymooner
devising ways to break marriages, a scourge of bigamy
a saint of divorce-

But I should get married I should be good
How nice it'd be to come home to her
and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen
aproned young and lovely wanting my baby
and so happy about me she burns the roast beef
and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair
saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf!
God what a husband I'd make! Yes, I should get married!
So much to do! Like sneaking into Mr Jones' house late at night
and cover his golf clubs with 1920 Norwegian books
Like hanging a picture of Rimbaud on the lawnmower
like pasting Tannu Tuva postage stamps all over the picket fence
like when Mrs Kindhead comes to collect for the Community Chest
grab her and tell her There are unfavorable omens in the sky!
And when the mayor comes to get my vote tell him
When are you going to stop people killing whales!
And when the milkman comes leave him a note in the bottle
Penguin dust, bring me penguin dust, I want penguin dust-

Yes if I should get married and it's Connecticut and snow
and she gives birth to a child and I am sleepless, worn,
up for nights, head bowed against a quiet window, the past behind me,
finding myself in the most common of situations a trembling man
knowledged with responsibility not twig-smear nor Roman coin soup-
O what would that be like!
Surely I'd give it for a nipple a rubber Tacitus
For a rattle a bag of broken Bach records
Tack Della Francesca all over its crib
Sew the Greek alphabet on its bib
And build for its playpen a roofless Parthenon

No, I doubt I'd be that kind of father
Not rural not snow no quiet window
but hot smelly tight New York City
seven flights up, roaches and rats in the walls
a fat Reichian wife screeching over potatoes Get a job!
And five nose running brats in love with Batman
And the neighbors all toothless and dry haired
like those hag masses of the 18th century
all wanting to come in and watch TV
The landlord wants his rent
Grocery store Blue Cross Gas & Electric Knights of Columbus
impossible to lie back and dream Telephone snow, ghost parking-
No! I should not get married! I should never get married!
But-imagine if I were married to a beautiful sophisticated woman
tall and pale wearing an elegant black dress and long black gloves
holding a cigarette holder in one hand and a highball in the other
and we lived high up in a penthouse with a huge window
from which we could see all of New York and even farther on clearer days
No, can't imagine myself married to that pleasant prison dream-

O but what about love? I forget love
not that I am incapable of love
It's just that I see love as odd as wearing shoes-
I never wanted to marry a girl who was like my mother
And Ingrid Bergman was always impossible
And there's maybe a girl now but she's already married
And I don't like men and-
But there's got to be somebody!
Because what if I'm 60 years old and not married,
all alone in a furnished room with pee stains on my underwear
and everybody else is married! All the universe married but me!

Ah, yet well I know that were a woman possible as I am possible
then marriage would be possible-
Like SHE in her lonely alien gaud waiting her Egyptian lover
so i wait-bereft of 2,000 years and the bath of life.

~ Gregory Corso

A Home at the End of the World

I could hear my own breathing. This was a hard subject. I had realized by then that I didn't feel what others called "desire." Something was missing in me. I felt love-the strain and heat of it, the animal comfort mixed up with human fear. I felt it for all the Glovers, for Sammi at the bakery, for Dylan when he sang "Baby Blue." But nothing built up in my groin. Nothing quickened, or struggled for release. I'd made a kind of love with Jonathan because he wanted to, and because I'd loved him. I'd had orgasms that passed through me like the spirits of people more devoted to the body than I was. These spirits were pleasant enough in passing but truly gone when hey were gone. After Jonathan left town, I was alone inside myself. This lack was probably what had made i possible for me to live my bakery life in Cleveland; to need no sensations beyond the firs feathers of November snow and the living hiss of a needle touching vinyl.

~ Michael Cunningham

Arbole, Arbole...

Tree, tree
dry and green.

The girl with the pretty face
is out picking olives.
The wind, playboy of towers,
grabs her around the waist.
Four riders passed by
on Andalusian ponies,
with blue and green jackets
and big, dark capes.
"Come to Cordoba, muchacha."
The girl won't listen to them.
Three young bullfighters passed,
slender in the waist,
with jackets the color of oranges
and swords of ancient silver.
"Come to Sevilla, muchacha."
The girl won't listen to them.
When the afternoon had turned
dark brown, with scattered light,
a young man passed by, wearing
roses and myrtle of the moon.
"Come to Granada, muchacha."
And the girl won't listen to him.
The girl with the pretty face
keeps on picking olives
with the grey arm of the wind
wrapped around her waist.

Tree, tree
dry and green.

translated by William Logan

Arbolé, arbolé,

seco y verdí.



La niña del bello rostro

está cogiendo aceituna.

El viento, galán de torres,

la prende por la cintura.

Pasaron cuatro jinetes

sobre jacas andaluzas,

con trajes de azul y verde,

con largas capas oscuras.

"Vente a Córdoba, muchacha."

La niña no los escucha.

Pasaron tres torerillos

delgaditos de cintura,

con trajes color naranja

y espadas de plata antigua.

"Vente a Córdoba, muchacha."

La niña no los escucha.

Cuando la tarde se puso

morada, con lux difusa,

pasó un joven que llevaba

rosas y mirtos de luna.

"Vente a Granada, muchacha."

Y la niña no lo escucha.

La niña del bello rostro

sigue cogiendo aceituna,

con el brazo gris del viento

ceñido por la cintura.

Arbolé, arbolé.

Seco y verdé.

~ Frederico Garcia Lorca

The Great Gatsby

He smiled understandingly-much more than understandingly. It was one of those rare smiles with a quality of eternal reassurance in it, that you may come across four or five times in life. It faced-or seemed to face-the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor. It understood you just so far as you wanted to be understood, believed in you as you would like to believe in yourself and assured you that it had precisely the impression of you that, at your best, you hoped to convey. Precisely at that point it vanished-and I was looking at an elegant young rough-neck, a year or two over thirty, whose elaborate formality of speech just missed being absurd. Some time before he introduced himself I'd got a strong impression that he was picking his words with care.


~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Portrait d'une Femme

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
Great minds have sought you - lacking someone else.
You have been second always. Tragical?
No. You preferred it to the usual thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
One average mind - with one thought less, each year.
Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have floated up.
And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
And takes strange gain away:
Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two,
Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else
That might prove useful and yet never proves,
That never fits a corner or shows use,
Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
Idols and ambergris and rare inlays,
These are your riches, your great store; and yet
For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things,
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep,
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that's quite your own.
Yet this is you.


~ Ezra Pound

A Clean, Well-Lighted Place

"Good night," the other said. Turning off the electric light he continued the conversation with himself, It was the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not a fear or dread, It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all anothing and a man was a nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.

"What's yours?" asked the barman.

"Nada."

"Otro loco mas," said the barman and turned away.

"A little cup," said the waiter.

The barman poured it for him.

"The light is very bright and pleasant but the bar is unpolished,"the waiter said.

The barman looked at him but did not answer. It was too late at night for conversation.

"You want another copita?" the barman asked.

"No, thank you," said the waiter and went out. He disliked bars and bodegas. A clean, well-lighted cafe was a very different thing. Now, without thinking further, he would go home to his room. He would lie in the bed and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, it's probably only insomnia. Many must have it.

~ Ernest Hemingway

Meditations in an Emergency

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French? Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there'll be nothing left with which to venture forth. Why should I share you? Why don't you get rid of someone else for a change? I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love. Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don't I? I'm just like a pile of leaves. However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes--I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless i know there's a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally _regret_ life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they're missing? Uh huh. My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only i had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It's not that I'm curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it's my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has _their_ anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep. Now there is only one man I like to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How best discourage her?) St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How I am to become a legend, my dear? I've tried love, but that holds you in the bosom of another and I'm always springing forth from it like the lotus--the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, "to keep the filth of life away," yes, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse. Destroy yourself, if you don't know! It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you've set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over. Fanny Brown is run away--scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho' She has vexed me by this exploit a little too.--Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her.--I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds."--Mrs. Thrale I've got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I'll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don't want me to go where you go, so I go where you don't want me to. It's only afternoon, there's a lot ahead. There won't be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns. ~ Frank O'hara

Mrs. Dalloway

Quiet descended on her, calm, content, as her needle, drawing the silk smoothly to its gentle pause, collected the green folds together and attached them, very lightly, to the belt. So on a summer's day waves collect, overbalance, and fall; collect and fall; and the whole world seems to be saying "that is all" more and more ponderously, until even the heart in the body which lies in the sun on the beach says too, That is all. Fear no more, says the heart. Fear no more, says the heart, committing its burden to some sea, which sighs collectively for all sorrows, and renews, begins, collects, lets fall. And the body alone listens to the passing bee; the wave breaking; the dog barking, far away barking and barking.


~ Virginia Woolf

From Bones

One week after
Ginsberg's death
get up with
the alarm to
say a special
prayer exactly
at the time
he died 2:39 AM
-tradition says
he'll wake every
7 days
(for 49 days)
at that same time
and realize
he's dead
instead of dream-like
confusion-
at this moment
he can be
told quite
directly how
to liberate
his mind into
clear empty
space
-burning
candles in the
shrine room
reading in
the dim
flickering glow

-he'll be
fine, is fine
all these
prayers-
my way of
grieving


~ Marc Olmsted

This Is the Barbarains

(excerpts)

In the US poetry exists outside the market forces; what results is the agony and the ecstasy, the best and the worst. Some of the poetry was amateurish beyond belief. Some was just dull. Some of it smoked. And some of it was almost too good for words, so good it almost pissed me off. A roomful of ferociously individual voices, the best of whom nevertheless seemed to be swimming in the same direction, if along different routes. It was a poetry of confrontation, subtle and otherwise, sexual, political and moral, a poetry of personal risk, of exposure verging on the indecent. It got me hot.
...But I probably learned more about writing poetry as a journalist than I ever did in a poetry workshop. I took a couple of writing workshops a long time ago, but people are just too goddamned sensitive. Writing features thousands of words long on a deadline, and then raking them over the coals with a hard-nosed line editor on even tighter deadlines, you learn about having a beginning, middle, end, about having a strong lead, about being ruthless with your work; learn how to step back from it and, with a killer's eye, cut out the fat so the gold can gleam. Most writing is cutting. The enemy of feeling is sentiment. Barbarian poetry is about feeling.


~ David Lerner

Safe Sex

If he and she do not know each other, and feel confident
they will not meet again; if he avoids affectionate words;
if she has grown insensible skin under skin; if they desire
only the tribute of another's cry; if they employ each other
as revenge on old lovers or families of entitlement and steel—
then there will be no betrayals, no letters returned unread,
no frenzy, no hurled words of permanent humiliation,
no trembling days, no vomit at midnight, no repeated
apparition of a body floating face-down at the pond's edge

~ Donald Hall

Lady Chatterley's Lover

'The rest? There is no rest. Only to my experience the mass of womenare like this: most of them want a man, but don't want the sex, butthey put up with it, as part of the bargain. The more old-fashionedsort just lie there like nothing and let you go ahead. They don't mindafterwards: then they like you. But the actual thing itself is nothingto them, a bit distasteful. Add most men like it that way. I hate it.But the sly sort of women who are like that pretend they're not. Theypretend they're passionate and have thrills. But it's all cockaloopy.They make it up. Then there's the ones that love everything, every kindof feeling and cuddling and going off, every kind except the naturalone. They always make you go off when you're NOTin the only place youshould be, when you go off.--Then there's the hard sort, that are thedevil to bring off at all, and bring themselves off, like my wife. Theywant to be the active party.--Then there's the sort that's just deadinside: but dead: and they know it. Then there's the sort that puts youout before you really ''come'', and go on writhing their loins tillthey bring themselves off against your thighs. But they're mostly theLesbian sort. It's astonishing how Lesbian women are, consciously orunconsciously. Seems to me they're nearly all Lesbian.''And do you mind?' asked Connie.'I could kill them. When I'm with a woman who's really Lesbian, Ifairly howl in my soul, wanting to kill her.'


~ D.H. Lawrence

Chansons Innocentes: I

In Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracles and it's
spring

when the world is puddle wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettandisabel come dancing

from the hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed

balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee

~ e e cummings