Written by
Charles Simic |
A New Version: 1980
What is that little black thing I see there
in the white?
Walt Whitman
One
Out of poverty
To begin again:
With the color of the bride
And that of blindness,
Touch what I can
Of the quick,
Speak and then wait,
As if this light
Will continue to linger
On the threshold.
All that is near,
I no longer give it a name.
Once a stone hard of hearing,
Once sharpened into a knife.
.
.
Now only a chill
Slipping through.
Enough glow to kneel by and ask
To be tied to its tail
When it goes marrying
Its cousins, the stars.
Is it a cloud?
If it's a cloud it will move on.
The true shape of this thought,
Migrant, waning.
Something seeks someone,
It bears him a gift
Of himself, a bit
Of snow to taste,
Glimpse of his own nakedness
By which to imagine the face.
On a late afternoon of snow
In a dim badly-aired grocery,
Where a door has just rung
With a short, shrill echo,
A little boy hands the old,
Hard-faced woman
Bending low over the counter,
A shiny nickel for a cupcake.
Now only that shine, now
Only that lull abides.
That your gaze
Be merciful,
Sister, bride
Of my first hopeless insomnia.
Kind nurse, show me
The place of salves.
Teach me the song
That makes a man rise
His glass at dusk
Until a star dances in it.
Who are you? Are you anybody
A moonrock would recognize?
There are words I need.
They are not near men.
I went searching.
Is this a deathmarch?
You bend me, bend me,
Oh toward what flower!
Little-known vowel,
Noose big for us all.
As strange as a shepherd
In the Arctic Circle.
Someone like Bo-peep.
All his sheep are white
And he can't get any sleep
Over lost sheep.
And he's got a flute
Which says Bo-peep,
Which says Poor boy,
Take care of your snow-sheep.
to A.
S.
Hamilton
Then all's well and white,
And no more than white.
Illinois snowbound.
Indiana with one bare tree.
Michigan a storm-cloud.
Wisconsin empty of men.
There's a trap on the ice
Laid there centuries ago.
The bait is still fresh.
The metal glitters as the night descends.
Woe, woe, it sings from the bough.
Our Lady, etc.
.
.
You had me hoodwinked.
I see your brand new claws.
Praying, what do I betray
By desiring your purity?
There are old men and women,
All bandaged up, waiting
At the spiked, wrought-iron gate
Of the Great Eye and Ear Infirmery.
We haven't gone far.
.
.
Fear lives there too.
Five ears of my fingertips
Against the white page.
What do you hear?
We hear holy nothing
Blindfolding itself.
It touched you once, twice,
And tore like a stitch
Out of a new wound.
Two
What are you up to son of a gun?
I roast on my heart's dark side.
What do you use as a skewer sweetheart?
I use my own crooked backbone.
What do you salt yourself with loverboy?
I grind the words out of my spittle.
And how will you know when you're done chump?
When the half-moons on my fingernails set.
With what knife will you carve yourself smartass?
The one I hide in my tongue's black boot.
Well, you can't call me a wrestler
If my own dead weight has me pinned down.
Well, you can't call me a cook
If the pot's got me under its cover.
Well, you can't call me a king
if the flies hang their hats in my mouth.
Well, you can't call me smart,
When the rain's falling my cup's in the cupboard.
Nor can you call me a saint,
If I didn't err, there wouldn't be these smudges.
One has to manage as best as one can.
The poppies ate the sunset for supper.
One has to manage as best as one can.
Who stole my blue thread, the one
I tied around my pinky to remember?
One has to manage as best as one can.
The flea I was standing on, jumped.
One has to manage as best as one can.
I think my head went out for a walk.
One has to manage as best as one can.
This is breath, only breath,
Think it over midnight!
A fly weighs twice as much.
The struck match nods as it passes,
But when I shout,
Its true name sticks in my throat.
It has to be cold
So the breath turns white,
And then mother, who's fast enough
To write his life on it?
A song in prison
And for prisoners,
Made of what the condemned
Have hidden from the jailers.
White--let me step aside
So that the future may see you,
For when this sheet is blown away,
What else is left
But to set the food on the table,
To cut oneself a slice of bread?
In an unknown year
Of an algebraic century,
An obscure widow
Wrapped in the colors of widowhood,
Met a true-blue orphan
On an indeterminate street-corner.
She offered him
A tiny sugar cube
In the hand so wizened
All the lines said: fate.
Do you take this line
Stretching to infinity?
I take this chipped tooth
On which to cut it in half.
Do you take this circle
Bounded by a single curved line?
I take this breath
That it cannot capture.
Then you may kiss the spot
Where her bridal train last rustled.
Winter can come now,
The earth narrow to a ditch--
And the sky with its castles and stone lions
Above the empty plains.
The snow can fall.
.
.
What other perennials would you plant,
My prodigals, my explorers
Tossing and turning in the dark
For those remote, finely honed bees,
The December stars?
Had to get through me elsewhere.
Woe to bone
That stood in their way.
Woe to each morsel of flesh.
White ants
In a white anthill.
The rustle of their many feet
Scurrying--tiptoing too.
Gravedigger ants.
Village-idiot ants.
This is the last summoning.
Solitude--as in the beginning.
A zero burped by a bigger zero--
It's an awful licking I got.
And fear--that dead letter office.
And doubt--that Chinese shadow play.
Does anyone still say a prayer
Before going to bed?
White sleeplessness.
No one knows its weight.
What The White Had To Say
For how could anything white be distinct
from or divided from whiteness?
Meister Eckhart
Because I am the bullet
That has gone through everyone already,
I thought of you long before you thought of me.
Each one of you still keeps a blood-stained handkerchief
In which to swaddle me, but it stays empty
And even the wind won't remain in it long.
Cleverly you've invented name after name for me,
Mixed the riddles, garbled the proverbs,
Shook you loaded dice in a tin cup,
But I do not answer back even to your curses,
For I am nearer to you than your breath.
One sun shines on us both through a crack in the roof.
A spoon brings me through the window at dawn.
A plate shows me off to the four walls
While with my tail I swing at the flies.
But there's no tail and the flies are your thoughts.
Steadily, patiently I life your arms.
I arrange them in the posture of someone drowning,
And yet the sea in which you are sinking,
And even this night above it, is myself.
Because I am the bullet
That has baptized each one of your senses,
Poems are made of our lusty wedding nights.
.
.
The joy of words as they are written.
The ear that got up at four in the morning
To hear the grass grow inside a word.
Still, the most beautiful riddle has no answer.
I am the emptiness that tucks you in like a
mockingbird's nest,
The fingernail that scratched on your sleep's
blackboard.
Take a letter: From cloud to onion.
Say: There was never any real choice.
One gaunt shadowy mother wiped our asses,
The same old orphanage taught us loneliness.
Street-organ full of blue notes,
I am the monkey dancing to your grinding--
And still you are afraid-and so,
It's as if we had not budged from the beginning.
Time slopes.
We are falling head over heels
At the speed of night.
That milk tooth
You left under the pillow, it's grinning.
1970-1980
This currently out-of-print edition:
Copyright ©1980 Logbridge-Rhodes, Inc.
An earlier version of White was first published
by New Rivers Press in 1972.
|
Written by
John Wilmot |
Much wine had passed, with grave discourse
Of who fucks who, and who does worse
(Such as you usually do hear
From those that diet at the Bear),
When I, who still take care to see
Drunkenness relieved by lechery,
Went out into St.
James's Park
To cool my head and fire my heart.
But though St.
James has th' honor on 't,
'Tis consecrate to prick and ****.
There, by a most incestuous birth,
Strange woods spring from the teeming earth;
For they relate how heretofore,
When ancient Pict began to whore,
Deluded of his assignation
(Jilting, it seems, was then in fashion),
Poor pensive lover, in this place
Would frig upon his mother's face;
Whence rows of mandrakes tall did rise
Whose lewd tops fucked the very skies.
Each imitative branch does twine
In some loved fold of Aretine,
And nightly now beneath their shade
Are buggeries, rapes, and incests made.
Unto this all-sin-sheltering grove
Whores of the bulk and the alcove,
Great ladies, chambermaids, and drudges,
The ragpicker, and heiress trudges.
Carmen, divines, great lords, and tailors,
Prentices, poets, pimps, and jailers,
Footmen, fine fops do here arrive,
And here promiscuously they swive.
Along these hallowed walks it was
That I beheld Corinna pass.
Whoever had been by to see
The proud disdain she cast on me
Through charming eyes, he would have swore
She dropped from heaven that very hour,
Forsaking the divine abode
In scorn of some despairing god.
But mark what creatures women are:
How infinitely vile, when fair!
Three knights o' the' elbow and the slur
With wriggling tails made up to her.
The first was of your Whitehall baldes,
Near kin t' th' Mother of the Maids;
Graced by whose favor he was able
To bring a friend t' th' Waiters' table,
Where he had heard Sir Edward Sutton
Say how the King loved Banstead mutton;
Since when he'd ne'er be brought to eat
By 's good will any other meat.
In this, as well as all the rest,
He ventures to do like the best,
But wanting common sense, th' ingredient
In choosing well not least expedient,
Converts abortive imitation
To universal affectation.
Thus he not only eats and talks
But feels and smells, sits down and walks,
Nay looks, and lives, and loves by rote,
In an old tawdry birthday coat.
The second was a Grays Inn wit,
A great inhabiter of the pit,
Where critic-like he sits and squints,
Steals pocket handkerchiefs, and hints
From 's neighbor, and the comedy,
To court, and pay, his landlady.
The third, a lady's eldest son
Within few years of twenty-one
Who hopes from his propitious fate,
Against he comes to his estate,
By these two worthies to be made
A most accomplished tearing blade.
One, in a strain 'twixt tune and nonsense,
Cries, "Madam, I have loved you long since.
Permit me your fair hand to kiss";
When at her mouth her **** cries, "Yes!"
In short, without much more ado,
Joyful and pleased, away she flew,
And with these three confounded asses
From park to hackney coach she passes.
So a proud ***** does lead about
Of humble curs the amorous rout,
Who most obsequiously do hunt
The savory scent of salt-swoln ****.
Some power more patient now relate
The sense of this surprising fate.
Gods! that a thing admired by me
Should fall to so much infamy.
Had she picked out, to rub her **** on,
Some stiff-pricked clown or well-hung parson,
Each job of whose spermatic sluice
Had filled her **** with wholesome juice,
I the proceeding should have praised
In hope sh' had quenched a fire I raised.
Such natural freedoms are but just:
There's something generous in mere lust.
But to turn a damned abandoned jade
When neither head nor tail persuade;
To be a whore in understanding,
A passive pot for fools to spend in!
The devil played booty, sure, with thee
To bring a blot on infamy.
But why am I, of all mankind,
To so severe a fate designed?
Ungrateful! Why this treachery
To humble fond, believing me,
Who gave you privilege above
The nice allowances of love?
Did ever I refuse to bear
The meanest part your lust could spare?
When your lewd **** came spewing home
Drenched with the seed of half the town,
My dram of sperm was supped up after
For the digestive surfeit water.
Full gorged at another time
With a vast meal of slime
Which your devouring **** had drawn
From porters' backs and footmen's brawn,
I was content to serve you up
My ballock-full for your grace cup,
Nor ever thought it an abuse
While you had pleasure for excuse -
You that could make my heart away
For noise and color, and betray
The secrets of my tender hours
To such knight-errant paramours,
When, leaning on your faithless breast,
Wrapped in security and rest,
Soft kindness all my powers did move,
And reason lay dissolved in love!
May stinking vapors choke your womb
Such as the men you dote upon
May your depraved appetite,
That could in whiffling fools delight,
Beget such frenzies in your mind
You may go mad for the north wind,
And fixing all your hopes upon't
To have him bluster in your ****,
Turn up your longing **** t' th' air
And perish in a wild despair!
But cowards shall forget to rant,
Schoolboys to frig, old whores to paint;
The Jesuits' fraternity
Shall leave the use of buggery;
Crab-louse, inspired with grace divine,
From earthly cod to heaven shall climb;
Physicians shall believe in Jesus,
And disobedience cease to please us,
Ere I desist with all my power
To plague this woman and undo her.
But my revenge will best be timed
When she is married that is limed.
In that most lamentable state
I'll make her feel my scorn and hate:
Pelt her with scandals, truth or lies,
And her poor cur with jealousied,
Till I have torn him from her breech,
While she whines like a dog-drawn *****;
Loathed and despised, kicked out o' th' Town
Into some dirty hole alone,
To chew the cud of misery
And know she owes it all to me.
And may no woman better thrive
That dares prophane the **** I swive!
|
Written by
Robert Hayden |
(And I, I am no longer of that world)
Naked, he lies in the blinded room
chainsmoking, cradled by drugs, by jazz
as never by any lover's cradling flesh.
Miles Davis coolly blows for him:
O pena negra, sensual Flamenco blues;
the red clay foxfire voice of Lady Day
(lady of the pure black magnolias)
sobsings her sorrow and loss and fare you well,
dryweeps the pain his treacherous jailers
have released him from for a while.
His fears and his unfinished self
await him down in the anywhere streets.
He hides on the dark side of the moon,
takes refuge in a stained-glass cell,
flies to a clockless country of crystal.
Only the ghost of Lady Day knows where
he is.
Only the music.
And he swings
oh swings: beyond complete immortal now.
|
Written by
Victor Hugo |
("Lorsque le regiment des hallebardiers.")
{Bk. XXXI.}
When the regiment of Halberdiers
Is proudly marching by,
The eagle of the mountain screams
From out his stormy sky;
Who speaketh to the precipice,
And to the chasm sheer;
Who hovers o'er the thrones of kings,
And bids the caitiffs fear.
King of the peak and glacier,
King of the cold, white scalps—
He lifts his head, at that close tread,
The eagle of the Alps.
O shame! those men that march below—
O ignominy dire!
Are the sons of my free mountains
Sold for imperial hire.
Ah! the vilest in the dungeon!
Ah! the slave upon the seas—
Is great, is pure, is glorious,
Is grand compared with these,
Who, born amid my holy rocks,
In solemn places high,
Where the tall pines bend like rushes
When the storm goes sweeping by;
Yet give the strength of foot they learned
By perilous path and flood,
And from their blue-eyed mothers won,
The old, mysterious blood;
The daring that the good south wind
Into their nostrils blew,
And the proud swelling of the heart
With each pure breath they drew;
The graces of the mountain glens,
With flowers in summer gay;
And all the glories of the hills
To earn a lackey's pay.
Their country free and joyous—
She of the rugged sides—
She of the rough peaks arrogant
Whereon the tempest rides:
Mother of the unconquered thought
And of the savage form,
Who brings out of her sturdy heart
The hero and the storm:
Who giveth freedom unto man,
And life unto the beast;
Who hears her silver torrents ring
Like joy-bells at a feast;
Who hath her caves for palaces,
And where her châlets stand—
The proud, old archer of Altorf,
With his good bow in his hand.
Is she to suckle jailers?
Shall shame and glory rest,
Amid her lakes and glaciers,
Like twins upon her breast?
Shall the two-headed eagle,
Marked with her double blow,
Drink of her milk through all those hearts
Whose blood he bids to flow?
Say, was it pomp ye needed,
And all the proud array
Of courtly joust and high parade
Upon a gala day?
Look up; have not my valleys
Their torrents white with foam—
Their lines of silver bullion
On the blue hillocks of home?
Doth not sweet May embroider
My rocks with pearls and flowers?
Her fingers trace a richer lace
Than yours in all my bowers.
Are not my old peaks gilded
When the sun arises proud,
And each one shakes a white mist plume
Out of the thunder-cloud?
O, neighbor of the golden sky—
Sons of the mountain sod—
Why wear a base king's colors
For the livery of God?
O shame! despair! to see my Alps
Their giant shadows fling
Into the very waiting-room
Of tyrant and of king!
O thou deep heaven, unsullied yet,
Into thy gulfs sublime—
Up azure tracts of flaming light—
Let my free pinion climb;
Till from my sight, in that clear light,
Earth and her crimes be gone—
The men who act the evil deeds—
The caitiffs who look on.
Far, far into that space immense,
Beyond the vast white veil,
Where distant stars come out and shine,
And the great sun grows pale.
BP. ALEXANDER
|
Written by
Victor Hugo |
("Toujours lui! lui partout!")
{XL., December, 1828.}
Above all others, everywhere I see
His image cold or burning!
My brain it thrills, and oftentime sets free
The thoughts within me yearning.
My quivering lips pour forth the words
That cluster in his name of glory—
The star gigantic with its rays of swords
Whose gleams irradiate all modern story.
I see his finger pointing where the shell
Should fall to slay most rabble,
And save foul regicides; or strike the knell
Of weaklings 'mid the tribunes' babble.
A Consul then, o'er young but proud,
With midnight poring thinned, and sallow,
But dreams of Empire pierce the transient cloud,
And round pale face and lank locks form the halo.
And soon the Caesar, with an eye a-flame
Whole nations' contact urging
To gain his soldiers gold and fame
Oh, Sun on high emerging,
Whose dazzling lustre fired the hells
Embosomed in grim bronze, which, free, arose
To change five hundred thousand base-born Tells,
Into his host of half-a-million heroes!
What! next a captive? Yea, and caged apart.
No weight of arms enfolded
Can crush the turmoil in that seething heart
Which Nature—not her journeymen—self-moulded.
Let sordid jailers vex their prize;
But only bends that brow to lightning,
As gazing from the seaward rock, his sighs
Cleave through the storm and haste where France looms bright'ning.
Alone, but greater! Broke the sceptre, true!
Yet lingers still some power—
In tears of woe man's metal may renew
The temper of high hour;
For, bating breath, e'er list the kings
The pinions clipped may grow! the Eagle
May burst, in frantic thirst for home, the rings
And rend the Bulldog, Fox, and Bear, and Beagle!
And, lastly, grandest! 'tween dark sea and here
Eternal brightness coming!
The eye so weary's freshened with a tear
As rises distant drumming,
And wailing cheer—they pass the pale
His army mourns though still's the end hid;
And from his war-stained cloak, he answers "Hail!"
And spurns the bed of gloom for throne aye-splendid!
H.L. WILLIAMS.
|
Written by
Victor Hugo |
When the Christians were doomed to the lions of old
By the priest and the praetor, combined to uphold
An idolatrous cause,
Forth they came while the vast Colosseum throughout
Gathered thousands looked on, and they fell 'mid the shout
Of "the People's" applause.
On the eve of that day of their evenings the last!
At the gates of their dungeon a gorgeous repast,
Rich, unstinted, unpriced,
That the doomed might (forsooth) gather strength ere they bled,
With an ignorant pity the jailers would spread
For the martyrs of Christ.
Oh, 'twas strange for a pupil of Paul to recline
On voluptuous couch, while Falernian wine
Fill'd his cup to the brim!
Dulcet music of Greece, Asiatic repose,
Spicy fragrance of Araby, Italian rose,
All united for him!
Every luxury known through the earth's wide expanse,
In profusion procured was put forth to enhance
The repast that they gave;
And no Sybarite, nursed in the lap of delight,
Such a banquet ere tasted as welcomed that night
The elect of the grave.
And the lion, meantime, shook his ponderous chain,
Loud and fierce howled the tiger, impatient to stain
The bloodthirsty arena;
Whilst the women of Rome, who applauded those deeds
And who hailed the forthcoming enjoyment, must needs
Shame the restless hyena.
They who figured as guests on that ultimate eve,
In their turn on the morrow were destined to give
To the lions their food;
For, behold, in the guise of a slave at that board,
Where his victims enjoyed all that life can afford,
Death administering stood.
Such, O monarchs of earth! was your banquet of power,
But the tocsin has burst on your festival hour—
'Tis your knell that it rings!
To the popular tiger a prey is decreed,
And the maw of Republican hunger will feed
On a banquet of Kings!
"FATHER PROUT" (FRANK MAHONY)
|
Written by
Victor Hugo |
("Encore si ce banni n'eût rien aimé sur terre.")
{V, iv., August, 1832.}
Too hard Napoleon's fate! if, lone,
No being he had loved, no single one,
Less dark that doom had been.
But with the heart of might doth ever dwell
The heart of love! and in his island cell
Two things there were—I ween.
Two things—a portrait and a map there were—
Here hung the pictured world, an infant there:
That framed his genius, this enshrined his love.
And as at eve he glanced round th' alcove,
Where jailers watched his very thoughts to spy,
What mused he then—what dream of years gone by
Stirred 'neath that discrowned brow, and fired that glistening eye?
'Twas not the steps of that heroic tale
That from Arcola marched to Montmirail
On Glory's red degrees;
Nor Cairo-pashas' steel-devouring steeds,
Nor the tall shadows of the Pyramids—
Ah! Twas not always these;
'Twas not the bursting shell, the iron sleet,
The whirlwind rush of battle 'neath his feet,
Through twice ten years ago,
When at his beck, upon that sea of steel
Were launched the rustling banners—there to reel
Like masts when tempests blow.
'Twas not Madrid, nor Kremlin of the Czar,
Nor Pharos on Old Egypt's coast afar,
Nor shrill réveillé's camp-awakening sound,
Nor bivouac couch'd its starry fires around,
Crested dragoons, grim, veteran grenadiers,
Nor the red lancers 'mid their wood of spears
Blazing like baleful poppies 'mong the golden ears.
No—'twas an infant's image, fresh and fair,
With rosy mouth half oped, as slumbering there.
It lay beneath the smile,
Of her whose breast, soft-bending o'er its sleep,
Lingering upon that little lip doth keep
One pendent drop the while.
Then, his sad head upon his hands inclined,
He wept; that father-heart all unconfined,
Outpoured in love alone.
My blessing on thy clay-cold head, poor child.
Sole being for whose sake his thoughts, beguiled,
Forgot the world's lost throne.
Fraser's Magazine
|