Written by
Rg Gregory |
18
if you want a revolution attack
symbols not systems - the simple forms
that (blithely) give the truth away
tying down millions to their terms
quietly with no one answering back
where the stage is makes the play
keeps actors (meanings) to those norms
stability requires - change tack
(remove the stage) violent storms
will sweep the old regime away
eventually there'll be no going back
once new symbols breed new germs
and strange hopes redesign the day
29
fresh hope stems from a dead conclusion
high art is a fraud - a provider of pap
for suckers happy to give up their own
longings to beauty in a cellophane wrap
spending their rights for a rich illusion
people demean themselves before a throne
but sooner or later have to let the sap
earthed in them rise to a new extrusion
art's not in the show (a lovely touch of clap)
but in the tough fusion of blood and bone
dreams may be soured in the drab confusion
but everywhere's the making of a map
charting today's unimaginable zone
42
what appals me daily is the unintelligence of those
who sit on the commodes of power debowelling scented ****
public- and grammar-school yokels wet-nursed oxbridge bums
(meet them where your own world breathes you'd have the urge to spit)
their great debates are full of puff their insights comatose
but they concoct the standards in their painted kingdom-comes
they pass down the judgments draped in tongues of holy writ
the people are a mass disease an untissued runny nose
disdained (but somehow soared above) as they subscribe their wit
to the culture of the stately tree (and to pilfering its plums)
they've got there by a rancid myth - that a nation's wisdom blows
from the arseholes of the clever (the odiferously fit)
as they guzzle in their spotlit windows tossing off the crumbs
65
far deeper than the wounds on egdon heath
its proud moroseness scales across the time
tinting all after-thought - where hardy gloomed
(wringing ironic bloodtones from sublime)
a host of worms have nibbled through belief
faith-riddled souls have other faiths exhumed
a pagan dissonance has reached for rhyme
a void (dismissed) has sprouted from the wreath
that science laid - a self-inflicted crime
unknifes itself and bleaker hope has bloomed
what hardy touched on sombre egdon heath
the wasted world now touches - midnights prime
the last condition be frugal or be doomed
|
Written by
Sylvia Plath |
It happens. Will it go on? ----
My mind a rock,
No fingers to grip, no tongue,
My god the iron lung
That loves me, pumps
My two
Dust bags in and out,
Will not
Let me relapse
While the day outside glides by like ticker tape.
The night brings violets,
Tapestries of eyes,
Lights,
The soft anonymous
Talkers: 'You all right?'
The starched, inaccessible breast.
Dead egg, I lie
Whole
On a whole world I cannot touch,
At the white, tight
Drum of my sleeping couch
Photographs visit me-
My wife, dead and flat, in 1920 furs,
Mouth full of pearls,
Two girls
As flat as she, who whisper 'We're your daughters.'
The still waters
Wrap my lips,
Eyes, nose and ears,
A clear
Cellophane I cannot crack.
On my bare back
I smile, a buddha, all
Wants, desire
Falling from me like rings
Hugging their lights.
The claw
Of the magnolia,
Drunk on its own scents,
Asks nothing of life.
|
Written by
Rg Gregory |
let's all go to the party friends
where left over bottles and stale ***-ends
are proudly on offer from the last time round
and our hosts believe by a ritual sound
fine spirits will flow and new cellophane wrappers
will tingle the fingers of eligible clappers
let's all ignite at the party friends
and burn with the best of the latest trends
which prove that the world is a running sore
whose plight can't be laid at this party's door
so let us look deep in our empty glasses
and puff short of breath at the weaker classes
whose salvation must lie in a further imbibing
of the rush of hot air this party's prescribing
let's all depart from the party friends
and seek other ways of making amends
for the mess that we're all in up to our noses
let's kick the conviction the party is moses
with tablets worth taking for any condition
while the world holds its breath for the big collision
let's kick off the hangovers all parties swear
is part of the bargain f or breathing free air
and dare to be lost and risk being found
in the springs that are cracking the crust of dead ground
and when we're all shot of the parties friends
maybe then odd beginnings will perk up from dead ends
|
Written by
Philip Levine |
In Lake Forest, a suburb of Chicago,
a woman sits at her desk to write
me a letter. She holds a photograph
of me up to the light, one taken
17 years ago in a high school class
in Providence. She sighs, and the sigh
smells of mouthwash and tobacco.
If she were writing by candlelight
she would now be in the dark, for
a living flame would refuse to be fed
by such pure exhaustion. Actually
she is in the dark, for the man
she's about to address in her odd prose
had a life span of one 125th of a second
in the eye of a Nikon, and then he
politely asked the photographer to
get lost, whispering the request so as
not to offend the teacher presiding.
Those students are now in their thirties,
the Episcopal girls in their plaid skirts
and bright crested blazers have gone
unprepared, though French-speaking, into
a world of liars, pimps, and brokers.
2.7% have died by their own hands,
and all the others have considered
the act at least once. Not one now
remembers my name, not one recalls
the reading I gave of César Vallejo's
great "memoriam" to his brother Miguel,
not even the girl who sobbed and
had to be escorted to the school nurse,
calmed, and sent home in a cab. Evenings
in Lake Forest in mid-December drop
suddenly; one moment the distant sky
is a great purple canvas, and then it's
gone, and no stars emerge; however,
not the least hint of the stockyards
or slaughterhouses is allowed to drift
out to the suburbs, so it's a deathless
darkness with no more perfume than
cellophane. "Our souls are mingling
now somewhere in the open spaces
between Illinois and you," she writes.
When I read the letter, two weeks
from now, forwarded by my publisher,
I will suddenly discover a truth
of our lives on earth, and I'll bless
Mrs. William Settle of Lake Forest
for giving me more than I gave
her, for addressing me as Mr. Levine,
the name my father bore, a name
a man could take with courage
and pride into the empire of death.
I'll read even unto the second page,
unstartled by the phrase "By now
you must have guessed, I am
a dancer." Soon snow will fall
on the Tudor houses of the suburbs,
turning the elegant parked sedans
into anonymous mounds; the winds
will sweep in over the Rockies
and across the great freezing plains
where America first died, winds
so fierce boys and men turn their backs
to them and simply weep, and yet
in all that air the soul of Mrs. William
Settle will not release me, not even
for one second. Male and female,
aged and middle-aged, we ride it out
blown eastward toward our origins,
one impure being become wind. Above
the Middle West, truth and beauty
are one though never meant to be.
|
Written by
Richard Hugo |
for Hank and Nancy
Seven thousand acres of grass have faded yellow
from his cough. These limp days, his anger,
legend forty years from moon to Stevensville,
lives on, just barely, in a Great Falls whore.
Cruel times, he cries, cruel winds. His geese roam
unattended in the meadow. The gold last leaves
of cottonwoods ride Burnt Fork creek away.
His geese grow fat without him. Same old insult.
Same indifferent rise of mountains south,
hunters drunk around the fire ten feet from his fence.
What's killing us is something autumn. Call it
war or fever. You know it when you see it: flare.
Vine and fire and the morning deer come half
a century to sip his spring, there, at the far end
of his land, wrapped in cellophane by light.
What lives is what he left in air, definite,
unseen, hanging where he stood the day he roared.
A bear prowls closer to his barn each day.
Farmers come to watch him die. They bring crude offerings
of wine. Burnt Fork creek is caroling. He dies white
in final anger. The bear taps on his pane.
And we die silent, our last days loaded with the scream
of Burnt Fork creek, the last cry of that raging farmer.
We have aged ourselves to stone trying to summon
mercy for ungrateful daughters. Let's live him
in ourselves, stand deranged on the meadow rim
and curse the Baltic back, moon, bear and blast.
And let him shout from his grave for us.
|
Written by
Philip Levine |
The last of day gathers
in the yellow parlor
and drifts like fine dust
across the face of
the gilt-framed mirror
I ofien prayed to.
An old man's room
without him, a room I
came back to again
and again to steal
cigarettes and loose change,
to open cans of sardines,
to break open crackers
and share what he had.
Something is missing.
The cut glass ashtray
is here and overflowing,
the big bottle of homemade,
the pack of English Ovals,
the new red bicycle deck
wrapped in cellophane
and gold edged, the dishes
crusted with the last snack.
The music is gone. The lilt
of his worn voice broken
with the weight of all
those lost languages --
"If you knew Solly like
I knew Solly, oy oy
oy what a girl." That music
made new each day and absent
forever from the corners
ofrooms like this one
darkening with dusk.
The music a boy would laugh
at until it went out
and days began and ended
without the banging fist,
without the old truths
of blood and water, without
the loud cries of I won,
you lost, without song.
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