Written by
Anne Sexton |
Your daisies have come
on the day of my divorce:
the courtroom a cement box,
a gas chamber for the infectious Jew in me
and a perhaps land, a possibly promised land
for the Jew in me,
but still a betrayal room for the till-death-do-us—
and yet a death, as in the unlocking of scissors
that makes the now separate parts useless,
even to cut each other up as we did yearly
under the crayoned-in sun.
The courtroom keeps squashing our lives as they break
into two cans ready for recycling,
flattened tin humans
and a tin law,
even for my twenty-five years of hanging on
by my teeth as I once saw at Ringling Brothers.
The gray room:
Judge, lawyer, witness
and me and invisible Skeezix,
and all the other torn
enduring the bewilderments
of their division.
Your daisies have come
on the day of my divorce.
They arrive like round yellow fish,
sucking with love at the coral of our love.
Yet they wait,
in their short time,
like little utero half-borns,
half killed, thin and bone soft.
They breathe the air that stands
for twenty-five illicit days,
the sun crawling inside the sheets,
the moon spinning like a tornado
in the washbowl,
and we orchestrated them both,
calling ourselves TWO CAMP DIRECTORS.
There was a song, our song on your cassette,
that played over and over
and baptised the prodigals.
It spoke the unspeakable,
as the rain will on an attic roof,
letting the animal join its soul
as we kneeled before a miracle--
forgetting its knife.
The daisies confer
in the old-married kitchen
papered with blue and green chefs
who call out pies, cookies, yummy,
at the charcoal and cigarette smoke
they wear like a yellowy salve.
The daisies absorb it all--
the twenty-five-year-old sanctioned love
(If one could call such handfuls of fists
and immobile arms that!)
and on this day my world rips itself up
while the country unfastens along
with its perjuring king and his court.
It unfastens into an abortion of belief,
as in me--
the legal rift--
as on might do with the daisies
but does not
for they stand for a love
undergoihng open heart surgery
that might take
if one prayed tough enough.
And yet I demand,
even in prayer,
that I am not a thief,
a mugger of need,
and that your heart survive
on its own,
belonging only to itself,
whole, entirely whole,
and workable
in its dark cavern under your ribs.
I pray it will know truth,
if truth catches in its cup
and yet I pray, as a child would,
that the surgery take.
I dream it is taking.
Next I dream the love is swallowing itself.
Next I dream the love is made of glass,
glass coming through the telephone
that is breaking slowly,
day by day, into my ear.
Next I dream that I put on the love
like a lifejacket and we float,
jacket and I,
we bounce on that priest-blue.
We are as light as a cat's ear
and it is safe,
safe far too long!
And I awaken quickly and go to the opposite window
and peer down at the moon in the pond
and know that beauty has walked over my head,
into this bedroom and out,
flowing out through the window screen,
dropping deep into the water
to hide.
I will observe the daisies
fade and dry up
wuntil they become flour,
snowing themselves onto the table
beside the drone of the refrigerator,
beside the radio playing Frankie
(as often as FM will allow)
snowing lightly, a tremor sinking from the ceiling--
as twenty-five years split from my side
like a growth that I sliced off like a melanoma.
It is six P.M. as I water these tiny weeds
and their little half-life,
their numbered days
that raged like a secret radio,
recalling love that I picked up innocently,
yet guiltily,
as my five-year-old daughter
picked gum off the sidewalk
and it became suddenly an elastic miracle.
For me it was love found
like a diamond
where carrots grow--
the glint of diamond on a plane wing,
meaning: DANGER! THICK ICE!
but the good crunch of that orange,
the diamond, the carrot,
both with four million years of resurrecting dirt,
and the love,
although Adam did not know the word,
the love of Adam
obeying his sudden gift.
You, who sought me for nine years,
in stories made up in front of your naked mirror
or walking through rooms of fog women,
you trying to forget the mother
who built guilt with the lumber of a locked door
as she sobbed her soured mild and fed you loss
through the keyhole,
you who wrote out your own birth
and built it with your own poems,
your own lumber, your own keyhole,
into the trunk and leaves of your manhood,
you, who fell into my words, years
before you fell into me (the other,
both the Camp Director and the camper),
you who baited your hook with wide-awake dreams,
and calls and letters and once a luncheon,
and twice a reading by me for you.
But I wouldn't!
Yet this year,
yanking off all past years,
I took the bait
and was pulled upward, upward,
into the sky and was held by the sun--
the quick wonder of its yellow lap--
and became a woman who learned her own shin
and dug into her soul and found it full,
and you became a man who learned his won skin
and dug into his manhood, his humanhood
and found you were as real as a baker
or a seer
and we became a home,
up into the elbows of each other's soul,
without knowing--
an invisible purchase--
that inhabits our house forever.
We were
blessed by the House-Die
by the altar of the color T.V.
and somehow managed to make a tiny marriage,
a tiny marriage
called belief,
as in the child's belief in the tooth fairy,
so close to absolute,
so daft within a year or two.
The daisies have come
for the last time.
And I who have,
each year of my life,
spoken to the tooth fairy,
believing in her,
even when I was her,
am helpless to stop your daisies from dying,
although your voice cries into the telephone:
Marry me! Marry me!
and my voice speaks onto these keys tonight:
The love is in dark trouble!
The love is starting to die,
right now--
we are in the process of it.
The empty process of it.
I see two deaths,
and the two men plod toward the mortuary of my heart,
and though I willed one away in court today
and I whisper dreams and birthdays into the other,
they both die like waves breaking over me
and I am drowning a little,
but always swimming
among the pillows and stones of the breakwater.
And though your daisies are an unwanted death,
I wade through the smell of their cancer
and recognize the prognosis,
its cartful of loss--
I say now,
you gave what you could.
It was quite a ferris wheel to spin on!
and the dead city of my marriage
seems less important
than the fact that the daisies came weekly,
over and over,
likes kisses that can't stop themselves.
There sit two deaths on November 5th, 1973.
Let one be forgotten--
Bury it! Wall it up!
But let me not forget the man
of my child-like flowers
though he sinks into the fog of Lake Superior,
he remains, his fingers the marvel
of fourth of July sparklers,
his furious ice cream cones of licking,
remains to cool my forehead with a washcloth
when I sweat into the bathtub of his being.
For the rest that is left:
name it gentle,
as gentle as radishes inhabiting
their short life in the earth,
name it gentle,
gentle as old friends waving so long at the window,
or in the drive,
name it gentle as maple wings singing
themselves upon the pond outside,
as sensuous as the mother-yellow in the pond,
that night that it was ours,
when our bodies floated and bumped
in moon water and the cicadas
called out like tongues.
Let such as this
be resurrected in all men
whenever they mold their days and nights
as when for twenty-five days and nights you molded mine
and planted the seed that dives into my God
and will do so forever
no matter how often I sweep the floor.
|
Written by
Charlotte Bronte |
The room is quiet, thoughts alone
People its mute tranquillity;
The yoke put on, the long task done,
I am, as it is bliss to be,
Still and untroubled. Now, I see,
For the first time, how soft the day
O'er waveless water, stirless tree,
Silent and sunny, wings its way.
Now, as I watch that distant hill,
So faint, so blue, so far removed,
Sweet dreams of home my heart may fill,
That home where I am known and loved:
It lies beyond; yon azure brow
Parts me from all Earth holds for me;
And, morn and eve, my yearnings flow
Thitherward tending, changelessly.
My happiest hours, aye ! all the time,
I love to keep in memory,
Lapsed among moors, ere life's first prime
Decayed to dark anxiety.
Sometimes, I think a narrow heart
Makes me thus mourn those far away,
And keeps my love so far apart
From friends and friendships of to-day;
Sometimes, I think 'tis but a dream
I measure up so jealously,
All the sweet thoughts I live on seem
To vanish into vacancy:
And then, this strange, coarse world around
Seems all that's palpable and true;
And every sight, and every sound,
Combines my spirit to subdue
To aching grief, so void and lone
Is Life and Earthso worse than vain,
The hopes that, in my own heart sown,
And cherished by such sun and rain
As Joy and transient Sorrow shed,
Have ripened to a harvest there:
Alas ! methinks I hear it said,
"Thy golden sheaves are empty air."
All fades away; my very home
I think will soon be desolate;
I hear, at times, a warning come
Of bitter partings at its gate;
And, if I should return and see
The hearth-fire quenched, the vacant chair;
And hear it whispered mournfully,
That farewells have been spoken there,
What shall I do, and whither turn ?
Where look for peace ? When cease to mourn ?
'Tis not the air I wished to play,
The strain I wished to sing;
My wilful spirit slipped away
And struck another string.
I neither wanted smile nor tear,
Bright joy nor bitter woe,
But just a song that sweet and clear,
Though haply sad, might flow.
A quiet song, to solace me
When sleep refused to come;
A strain to chase despondency,
When sorrowful for home.
In vain I try; I cannot sing;
All feels so cold and dead;
No wild distress, no gushing spring
Of tears in anguish shed;
But all the impatient gloom of one
Who waits a distant day,
When, some great task of suffering done,
Repose shall toil repay.
For youth departs, and pleasure flies,
And life consumes away,
And youth's rejoicing ardour dies
Beneath this drear delay;
And Patience, weary with her yoke,
Is yielding to despair,
And Health's elastic spring is broke
Beneath the strain of care.
Life will be gone ere I have lived;
Where now is Life's first prime ?
I've worked and studied, longed and grieved,
Through all that rosy time.
To toil, to think, to long, to grieve,
Is such my future fate ?
The morn was dreary, must the eve
Be also desolate ?
Well, such a life at least makes Death
A welcome, wished-for friend;
Then, aid me, Reason, Patience, Faith,
To suffer to the end !
|
Written by
Andrei Voznesensky |
My life, like a rocket, makes a parabola
flying in darkness, -- no rainbow for traveler.
There once lived an artist, red-haired Gauguin,
he was a bohemian, a former tradesman.
To get to the Louvre
from the lanes of Montmartre
he circled around
as far as Sumatra!
He had to abandon the madness of money,
the filth of the scholars, the snarl of his honey.
The man overcame the terrestrial gravity,
The priests, drinking beer, would laugh at his "vanity":
"A straight line is short, but it is much too simple,
He'd better depict beds of roses for people."
And yet, like a rocket, he flew off with ease
through winds penetrating his coat and his ears.
He didn't fetch up to the Louvre through the door
but, like a parabola,
pierced the floor!
Each gets to the truth with his own parameter
a worm finds a crack, man makes a parabola.
There once lived a girl in the neighboring house.
We studied together, through books we would browse.
Why did I leave,
moved by devilish powers
amidst the equivocal
Georgian stars!
I'm sorry for making that silly parabola,
The shivering shoulders in darkness, why trouble her?...
Your rings in the dark Universe were dramatic,
and like an antenna, straight and elastic.
Meanwhile I'm flying
to land here because
I hear your earthly and shivering calls.
It doesn't come easy with a parabola!..
For wiping prediction, tradition, preamble off
Art, History, Love and ?esthetics
Prefer
to take parabolical paths, as it were!
He leaves for Siberia now, on a visit.
.....................................
It isn't so long as parabola, is it?
© Copyright Alec Vagapov's translation
|
Written by
Charlotte Bronte |
LIFE, believe, is not a dream
So dark as sages say;
Oft a little morning rain
Foretells a pleasant day.
Sometimes there are clouds of gloom,
But these are transient all;
If the shower will make the roses bloom,
O why lament its fall ?
Rapidly, merrily,
Life's sunny hours flit by,
Gratefully, cheerily,
Enjoy them as they fly !
What though Death at times steps in
And calls our Best away ?
What though sorrow seems to win,
O'er hope, a heavy sway ?
Yet hope again elastic springs,
Unconquered, though she fell;
Still buoyant are her golden wings,
Still strong to bear us well.
Manfully, fearlessly,
The day of trial bear,
For gloriously, victoriously,
Can courage quell despair !
|
Written by
Margaret Atwood |
What should we have taken
with us? We never could decide
on that; or what to wear,
or at what time of
year we should make the journey
So here we are in thin
raincoats and rubber boots
On the disastrous ice, the wind rising
Nothing in our pockets
But a pencil stub, two oranges
Four Toronto streetcar tickets
and an elastic band holding a bundle
of small white filing cards
printed with important facts.
|
Written by
Anne Sexton |
Good for visiting hospitals or charitable work. Take some time to attend to your health.
Surely I will be disquieted
by the hospital, that body zone--
bodies wrapped in elastic bands,
bodies cased in wood or used like telephones,
bodies crucified up onto their crutches,
bodies wearing rubber bags between their legs,
bodies vomiting up their juice like detergent, Here in this house
there are other bodies.
Whenever I see a six-year-old
swimming in our aqua pool
a voice inside me says what can't be told...
Ha, someday you'll be old and withered
and tubes will be in your nose
drinking up your dinner.
Someday you'll go backward. You'll close
up like a shoebox and you'll be cursed
as you push into death feet first.
Here in the hospital, I say,
that is not my body, not my body.
I am not here for the doctors
to read like a recipe.
No. I am a daisy girl
blowing in the wind like a piece of sun.
On ward 7 there are daisies, all butter and pearl
but beside a blind man who can only
eat up the petals and count to ten.
The nurses skip rope around him and shiver
as his eyes wiggle like mercury and then
they dance from patient to patient to patient
throwing up little paper medicine cups and playing
catch with vials of dope as they wait for new accidents.
Bodies made of synthetics. Bodies swaddled like dolls
whom I visit and cajole and all they do is hum
like computers doing up our taxes, dollar by dollar.
Each body is in its bunker. The surgeon applies his gum.
Each body is fitted quickly into its ice-cream pack
and then stitched up again for the long voyage
back.
|
Written by
D. H. Lawrence |
At evening, sitting on this terrace,
When the sun from the west, beyond Pisa, beyond the mountains of Carrara
Departs, and the world is taken by surprise ...
When the tired flower of Florence is in gloom beneath the glowing
Brown hills surrounding ...
When under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio
A green light enters against stream, flush from the west,
Against the current of obscure Arno ...
Look up, and you see things flying
Between the day and the night;
Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together.
A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches
Where light pushes through;
A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.
A dip to the water.
And you think:
"The swallows are flying so late!"
Swallows?
Dark air-life looping
Yet missing the pure loop ...
A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight
And serrated wings against the sky,
Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,
And falling back.
Never swallows!
Bats!
The swallows are gone.
At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats
By the Ponte Vecchio ...
Changing guard.
Bats, and an uneasy creeping in one's scalp
As the bats swoop overhead!
Flying madly.
Pipistrello!
Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe.
Little lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive;
Wings like bits of umbrella.
Bats!
Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.
Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats!
Not for me!
|
Written by
Dale Harcombe |
The hushed dark hugs the streets.
Somewhere a cat snaps the silence.
Dogs begin to bark, like a pack
moving in for the kill.
Women shrink in their homes.
Shadows slip
through the night and
stars dim their lights
as cars flash past.
When they disappear,
silence, heavy as hate, descends.
Hours stretch like elastic
that finally snaps.
Dawn spreads its stain
over the sky.
Seven years later
young women walk again
through lonely streets.
Screams taunt only those
who remember.
*first published Northern Perspective Vol 17 no 2 – 1994
This poem was included as part of the exhibition in memory of Anita Cobby held at Q theatre in Penrith 2003
|
Written by
Denise Levertov |
Something is very gently,
invisibly, silently,
pulling at me-a thread
or net of threads
finer than cobweb and as
elastic. I haven't tried
the strength of it. No barbed hook
pierced and tore me. Was it
not long ago this thread
began to draw me? Or
way back? Was I
born with its knot about my
neck, a bridle? Not fear
but a stirring
of wonder makes me
catch my breath when I feel
the tug of it when I thought
it had loosened itself and gone.
|
Written by
Amy Lowell |
Bath
The day is fresh-washed and fair, and there is
a smell of tulips and narcissus
in the air.
The sunshine pours in at the bath-room window and
bores through the water
in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It
cleaves the water
into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light.
Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of
the water and dance, dance,
and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir
of my finger
sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot, and the planes
of light
in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white
water,
the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me. The day is
almost
too bright to bear, the green water covers me from the too bright
day.
I will lie here awhile and play with the water and the sun spots.
The sky is blue and high. A crow flaps
by the window, and there is
a whiff of tulips and narcissus in the air.
Breakfast Table
In the fresh-washed sunlight, the breakfast table
is decked and white.
It offers itself in flat surrender, tendering tastes, and smells,
and colours, and metals, and grains, and the white cloth falls over
its side,
draped and wide. Wheels of white glitter in the silver
coffee-pot,
hot and spinning like catherine-wheels, they whirl, and twirl --
and my eyes
begin to smart, the little white, dazzling wheels prick them like
darts.
Placid and peaceful, the rolls of bread spread themselves in the
sun to bask.
A stack of butter-pats, pyramidal, shout orange through the white,
scream,
flutter, call: "Yellow! Yellow! Yellow!" Coffee
steam rises in a stream,
clouds the silver tea-service with mist, and twists up into the
sunlight,
revolved, involuted, suspiring higher and higher, fluting in a thin
spiral
up the high blue sky. A crow flies by and croaks at the
coffee steam.
The day is new and fair with good smells in the air.
Walk
Over the street the white clouds meet, and sheer
away without touching.
On the sidewalks, boys are playing marbles. Glass
marbles,
with amber and blue hearts, roll together and part with a sweet
clashing noise. The boys strike them with black and red
striped agates.
The glass marbles spit crimson when they are hit, and slip into
the gutters
under rushing brown water. I smell tulips and narcissus
in the air,
but there are no flowers anywhere, only white dust whipping up the
street,
and a girl with a gay Spring hat and blowing skirts. The
dust and the wind
flirt at her ankles and her neat, high-heeled patent leather shoes. Tap,
tap,
the little heels pat the pavement, and the wind rustles among the
flowers
on her hat.
A water-cart crawls slowly on the other side of
the way. It is green and gay
with new paint, and rumbles contentedly, sprinkling clear water
over
the white dust. Clear zigzagging water, which smells
of tulips and narcissus.
The thickening branches make a pink `grisaille'
against the blue sky.
Whoop! The clouds go dashing at each
other and sheer away just in time.
Whoop! And a man's hat careers down the street in front
of the white dust,
leaps into the branches of a tree, veers away and trundles ahead
of the wind,
jarring the sunlight into spokes of rose-colour and green.
A motor-car cuts a swathe through the bright air,
sharp-beaked, irresistible,
shouting to the wind to make way. A glare of dust and
sunshine
tosses together behind it, and settles down. The sky
is quiet and high,
and the morning is fair with fresh-washed air.
Midday and Afternoon
Swirl of crowded streets. Shock and
recoil of traffic. The stock-still
brick facade of an old church, against which the waves of people
lurch and withdraw. Flare of sunshine down side-streets. Eddies
of light
in the windows of chemists' shops, with their blue, gold, purple
jars,
darting colours far into the crowd. Loud bangs and tremors,
murmurings out of high windows, whirring of machine belts,
blurring of horses and motors. A quick spin and shudder
of brakes
on an electric car, and the jar of a church-bell knocking against
the metal blue of the sky. I am a piece of the town,
a bit of blown dust,
thrust along with the crowd. Proud to feel the pavement
under me,
reeling with feet. Feet tripping, skipping, lagging,
dragging,
plodding doggedly, or springing up and advancing on firm elastic
insteps.
A boy is selling papers, I smell them clean and new from the press.
They are fresh like the air, and pungent as tulips and narcissus.
The blue sky pales to lemon, and great tongues
of gold blind the shop-windows,
putting out their contents in a flood of flame.
Night and Sleep
The day takes her ease in slippered yellow. Electric
signs gleam out
along the shop fronts, following each other. They grow,
and grow,
and blow into patterns of fire-flowers as the sky fades. Trades
scream
in spots of light at the unruffled night. Twinkle, jab,
snap, that means
a new play; and over the way: plop, drop, quiver, is
the sidelong
sliver of a watchmaker's sign with its length on another street.
A gigantic mug of beer effervesces to the atmosphere over a tall
building,
but the sky is high and has her own stars, why should she heed ours?
I leave the city with speed. Wheels
whirl to take me back to my trees
and my quietness. The breeze which blows with me is fresh-washed
and clean,
it has come but recently from the high sky. There are
no flowers
in bloom yet, but the earth of my garden smells of tulips and narcissus.
My room is tranquil and friendly. Out
of the window I can see
the distant city, a band of twinkling gems, little flower-heads
with no stems.
I cannot see the beer-glass, nor the letters of the restaurants
and shops
I passed, now the signs blur and all together make the city,
glowing on a night of fine weather, like a garden stirring and blowing
for the Spring.
The night is fresh-washed and fair and there is
a whiff of flowers in the air.
Wrap me close, sheets of lavender. Pour
your blue and purple dreams
into my ears. The breeze whispers at the shutters and
mutters
***** tales of old days, and cobbled streets, and youths leaping
their horses
down marble stairways. Pale blue lavender, you are the
colour of the sky
when it is fresh-washed and fair . . . I smell the stars . . . they
are like
tulips and narcissus . . . I smell them in the air.
|