Connect the Poem, Version 6.0

[Royston vasey]

Now, O Now, in this Brown Land
by James Joyce


Now, O now, in this brown land
Where Love did so sweet music make
We two shall wander, hand in hand,
Forbearing for old friendship’ sake
Nor grieve because our love was gay
Which now is ended in this way.

A rogue in red and yellow dress
Is knocking, knocking at the tree
And all around our loneliness
The wind is whistling merrily.
The leaves – they do not sigh at all
When the year takes them in the fall.

Now, O now, we hear no more
The villanelle and roundelay!
Yet will we kiss, sweetheart, before
We take sad leave at close of day.
Grieve not, sweetheart, for anything –
The year, the year is gathering.

[HowardM2]

"Autumn Joy"

The deer stands perfectly still

The long black snake
is a motionless

swirl at the burrow hole
all the morning ready

The sky is blue
this hammock no other than Indra's

net, shining now
in the hum of bees that alights

on the sedum we call
autumn joy

One by one the leaves yellow
loosening their hold

on the mind still in love
with birth and death

You are no different from me
fuel in the bonfire

that reduces the gods of plenty
and poverty to ash

They are one and the same
god, after all

-- Margaret Gibson

[Salli Shepherd]

The Black Snake

When the black snake
flashed onto the morning road,
and the truck could not swerve--
death, that is how it happens.

Now he lies looped and useless
as an old bicycle tire.
I stop the car
and carry him into the bushes.

He is as cool and gleaming
as a braided whip, he is as beautiful and quiet
as a dead brother.
I leave him under the leaves

and drive on, thinking
about death: its suddenness,
its terrible weight,
its certain coming. Yet under

reason burns a brighter fire, which the bones
have always preferred.
It is the story of endless good fortune.
It says to oblivion: not me!

It is the light at the center of every cell.
It is what sent the snake coiling and flowing forward
happily all spring through the green leaves before
he came to the road.

- Mary Oliver

[GreaterMandalaofUselessness]

The Chichimecas

The Chichimecas are in the hills.
They have built a huge bonfire.
I am at my window with a telescope
counting shadows flickering in front of the flames.
There must be at least a thousand Chichimecas
and their many dogs, for they are the dog people.

Maybe there is only one Chichimeca
and his dog pacing back and forth
in front of the fire trying to make me think
that there are one thousand Chichimecas in the hills.

There are Chichimecas in the alley.
They have taken down the street signs
and built another bonfire—STOP, SCHOOL CROSSING,
SLIPPERY WHEN WET, the Chichimecas are showing
a preference for S’s slithering into smoke.

The Chichimecas have broken into the abandoned
train station from one of my poems. The one
where the sound of the plastic tips of my shoelaces
clicks against pavement like lobsters.
They are cooking the lobsters in a steel drum.
After they have devoured the lobsters, they lie down
with their dogs. Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff the dogs.

Sniff, sniff, sniff, sniff the Chichimecas,
for they have found aerosol paint cans
and they are holding rags soaked with paint spray
to their noses. This makes the moon come down.

Chichi mommy, chichi mommy, chant the Chichimecas
as they fall asleep in a pile with their many dogs.
Chichi mommy as they snore and dream that the stars
are dripping milk into their open mouths.


--Richard Garcia
(cross-posted, connecting to "bonfires" in Autumn Joy)

[Salli Shepherd]

The Burning Tree

Last time I had stamina and calluses and a bag of chalk.
It hung from my lumbar like a bunny tail.
Last time I was lighter and the ether better-emptied.
Now blood is so close to my surface I slip off the walls.

Tonight is the night of a massacre I do not look at.
Although I have been to that city of bricks and black blooms.
Therein I kissed a grave a million others kissed.
A woman with a cigarette asked me for fire there and I provided it.
I had been asked for light before but never fire.

Tonight I climb three hundred stairs toward the light of my device.
Maybe we’ll be wartime people leading wartime lives.
Skirmishes have sprung from the heads of lesser gods.

This is the light no one reads by we just stare into it.
We wait for the glyphs that mean it is safe.

-- Ben Ladouceur

[Royston vasey]

Elm
For Ruth Fairlight
by Sylvia Plath


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.

[HowardM2]

"The Geographer"
From the painting by Vermeer

There. Out the window. They are burning the flood fields.
And the light that touches his forehead
is softened by smoke. He is stopped in a long robe,
blue with a facing of pumpkin. In his hand,
the splayed legs of a compass taper to pin tips.

It is noon. Just after dawn, he took
for his errant heart a paper of powdered rhubarb
and stoops to the window now, half in pain, half
in love with the hissing fields:

mile after mile of cane stalks, fattened
with drawn water. Such a deft pirouette, he thinks,
flood pulled up through the bodies of cane, then
water cane burned into steam, and steam like mist
on the fresh fields, sucked dry for the spring planting.

Powdered rhubarb. Like talc on the tongue.
And what of this heart, this blood? Harvey writes
that the washes of pulse do not ebb, do not
flow like the sea, but circle, draw up to the plump heart.
And is that the centering spirit then? Red plum,
red shuffling mole . . . ?

When the flood waters crested, dark coffins
bobbed down through the cane stalks like blunt pirogues.
And then in the drift, one slipper
and the ferreting snouts of radishes.

He touches his sleeve, looks down to his small desk,
pale in its blanket of map, all the hillsides
and carriageways, all the sunken stone walls
reduced to the sweep of a pin tip.
They are burning the flood fields -- such a hissing, hissing,

like a landscape of toads. And is that how blood
circles back in its journey, like water through
the body of the world? And the great flapping fire, then --
opening, withering -- in its single posture
both swelling and fading -- is that the human heart?

--Linda Bierds

[Salli Shepherd]

Self-Portrait as Vincent Van Gogh in the Asylum at Arles

The moths in the orchard squeal
with each pass of the mistral wind.
Yet the reapers and their scythes,
out beyond the pear trees, slay wheat
in sure columns. Christ
must have been made of shocks
of wheat. When they lashed him,
four bundles of fine yellow burst forth
from each welt. And the women,
tarrying as they do now behind the swing
and chuff of the reapers’ blades,
gathered and plaited the stray pieces
of wheat falling from his hips into braids,
long braids that would bind a tattered sail-
cloth over his yellow mouth, yellow feet.
Oh to be bound by one’s own blood
like a burlap sack cinched around the neck
with a leather belt. Father forgive me
for the moths shrieking in the orchard
of my mouth. Forgive the rattle and clatter
of wings inside the blue of my brain.
Even if these iron bars queer a field,
queer a woman standing too close to a reaper’s blade,
a half-moon hung and wholly harsh,
even if this woman, burdened like a spine
carrying a head and a basket of rocks,
forgets the flaw of a well-sharpened tool,
let her not mistake my whimper and warning
for the honk of a goose in heat. Father,
she is not made like our savior,
of straw, of a coarse tender. Nothing will stop
when her blood runs along a furrow.
The sun will not sag with a red scowl.
The field will not refuse water. Father,
I am unsure of what I am—
a fragrant mistral wind or a pile of moths’ heads
at the foot of a pear tree. Father,
give me a scythe. Father, let me decide.

-- Roger Reeves

[Royston vasey]

The Harvest Bow
by Seamus Heaney


As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.

Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks
Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent
Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
I tell and finger it like braille,
Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,

And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall—
You with a harvest bow in your lapel,

Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
Nothing: that original townland
Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser—
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

[merelynn]

Auspice

I find Rome in Ann Arbor
while digging to discover
my next life. I give up

archaeology’s ghost
to a red bird tattooed

along his ribs, black band
inked around wrist.
I know this isn’t

the life I will choose;
therefore I can

desire it. Bent
at the sharp edge,
marble and flex—I fear the lyric

but not the fantastic, the gray
Taurus and the Hampton Inn.

Relics resurface
figure from ground. The hand
in situ makes a long

time coming a new
alterity—Rome’s hills

before names, bird
falling to the palm below.
We crunch fortune

cookies, cache their bits
as Ann Arbor burns behind us.

--Mia Kang

[GreaterMandalaofUselessness]

The Roman Empire

The lady in the park ducks her head when passing me
and veers a little to one side to avoid touching me.

I understand. She only wants to get out of the park alive
with her ageing high-strung Boston terrier,

and I retract my flesh as much as possible
to let her by. We know,

each time a man and woman pass, each
time a man and woman pass each

time a man and woman pass
each other on an empty street,

it is an anniversary—
as if history was a cake made from layer after layer

of women’s bodies, decorated with the purple, battered
faces of dead girls.

A visitor from outer space, observing us
from some hidden vantage place

would guess at some terrible historical event
of which our politeness is the evidence—

the man, attempting to look harmless;
the woman trying not to seem afraid.

Look at that dogwood tree flowering nearby, with a bird in it.

After you. No, after you



- Tony Hoagland