Written by
Allen Ginsberg |
I walked on the banks of the tincan banana dock and sat down under the huge shade of a Southern Pacific locomotive to look for the sunset over the box house hills and cry.
Jack Kerouac sat beside me on a busted rusty iron pole, companion, we thought the same thoughts of the soul, bleak and blue and sad-eyed, surrounded by the gnarled steel roots of trees of machinery.
The only water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that stream, no hermit in those mounts, just ourselves rheumy-eyed and hung-over like old bums on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust--
--I rushed up enchanted--it was my first sunflower, memories of Blake--my visions--Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the past--
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset, crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye--
corolla of bleary spikes pushed down and broken like a battered crown, seeds fallen out of its face, soon-to-be-toothless mouth of sunny air, sunrays obliterated on its hairy head like a dried wire spiderweb,
leaves stuck out like arms out of the stem, gestures from the sawdust root, broke pieces of plaster fallen out of the black twigs, a dead fly in its ear,
Unholy battered old thing you were, my sunflower O my soul, I loved you then!
The grime was no man's grime but death and human locomotives,
all that dress of dust, that veil of darkened railroad skin, that smog of cheek, that eyelid of black mis'ry, that sooty hand or phallus or protuberance of artificial worse-than-dirt--industrial-- modern--all that civilization spotting your crazy golden crown--
and those blear thoughts of death and dusty loveless eyes and ends and withered roots below, in the home-pile of sand and sawdust, rubber dollar bills, skin of machinery, the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car, the empty lonely tincans with their rusty tongues alack, what more could I name, the smoked ashes of some cock cigar, the cunts of wheelbarrows and the milky breasts of cars, wornout asses out of chairs & sphincters of dynamos--all these
entangled in your mummied roots--and you standing before me in the sunset, all your glory in your form!
A perfect beauty of a sunflower! a perfect excellent lovely sunflower existence! a sweet natural eye to the new hip moon, woke up alive and excited grasping in the sunset shadow sunrise golden monthly breeze!
How many flies buzzed round you innocent of your grime, while you cursed the heavens of your railroad and your flower soul?
Poor dead flower? when did you forget you were a flower? when did you look at your skin and decide you were an impotent dirty old locomotive? the ghost of a locomotive? the specter and shade of a once powerful mad American locomotive?
You were never no locomotive, Sunflower, you were a sunflower!
And you Locomotive, you are a locomotive, forget me not!
So I grabbed up the skeleton thick sunflower and stuck it at my side like a scepter,
and deliver my sermon to my soul, and Jack's soul too, and anyone who'll listen,
--We're not our skin of grime, we're not our dread bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we're all golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment-bodies growing into mad black formal sunflowers in the sunset, spied on by our eyes under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision.
|
Written by
Robert Browning |
I.
Oh, what a dawn of day!
How the March sun feels like May!
All is blue again
After last night's rain,
And the South dries the hawthorn-spray.
Only, my Love's away!
I'd as lief that the blue were grey,
II.
Runnels, which rillets swell,
Must be dancing down the dell,
With a foaming head
On the beryl bed
Paven smooth as a hermit's cell;
Each with a tale to tell,
Could my Love but attend as well.
III.
Dearest, three months ago!
When we lived blocked-up with snow,---
When the wind would edge
In and in his wedge,
In, as far as the point could go---
Not to our ingle, though,
Where we loved each the other so!
IV.
Laughs with so little cause!
We devised games out of straws.
We would try and trace
One another's face
In the ash, as an artist draws;
Free on each other's flaws,
How we chattered like two church daws!
V.
What's in the `Times''?---a scold
At the Emperor deep and cold;
He has taken a bride
To his gruesome side,
That's as fair as himself is bold:
There they sit ermine-stoled,
And she powders her hair with gold.
VI.
Fancy the Pampas' sheen!
Miles and miles of gold and green
Where the sunflowers blow
In a solid glow,
And---to break now and then the screen---
Black neck and eyeballs keen,
Up a wild horse leaps between!
VII.
Try, will our table turn?
Lay your hands there light, and yearn
Till the yearning slips
Thro' the finger-tips
In a fire which a few discern,
And a very few feel burn,
And the rest, they may live and learn!
VIII.
Then we would up and pace,
For a change, about the place,
Each with arm o'er neck:
'Tis our quarter-deck,
We are seamen in woeful case.
Help in the ocean-space!
Or, if no help, we'll embrace.
IX.
See, how she looks now, dressed
In a sledging-cap and vest!
'Tis a huge fur cloak---
Like a reindeer's yoke
Falls the lappet along the breast:
Sleeves for her arms to rest,
Or to hang, as my Love likes best.
X.
Teach me to flirt a fan
As the Spanish ladies can,
Or I tint your lip
With a burnt stick's tip
And you turn into such a man!
Just the two spots that span
Half the bill of the young male swan.
XI.
Dearest, three months ago
When the mesmerizer Snow
With his hand's first sweep
Put the earth to sleep:
'Twas a time when the heart could show
All---how was earth to know,
'Neath the mute hand's to-and-fro?
XII.
Dearest, three months ago
When we loved each other so,
Lived and loved the same
Till an evening came
When a shaft from the devil's bow
Pierced to our ingle-glow,
And the friends were friend and foe!
XIII.
Not from the heart beneath---
'Twas a bubble born of breath,
Neither sneer nor vaunt,
Nor reproach nor taunt.
See a word, how it severeth!
Oh, power of life and death
In the tongue, as the Preacher saith!
XIV.
Woman, and will you cast
For a word, quite off at last
Me, your own, your You,---
Since, as truth is true,
I was You all the happy past---
Me do you leave aghast
With the memories We amassed?
XV.
Love, if you knew the light
That your soul casts in my sight,
How I look to you
For the pure and true
And the beauteous and the right,---
Bear with a moment's spite
When a mere mote threats the white!
XVI.
What of a hasty word?
Is the fleshly heart not stirred
By a worm's pin-prick
Where its roots are quick?
See the eye, by a fly's foot blurred---
Ear, when a straw is heard
Scratch the brain's coat of curd!
XVII.
Foul be the world or fair
More or less, how can I care?
'Tis the world the same
For my praise or blame,
And endurance is easy there.
Wrong in the one thing rare---
Oh, it is hard to bear!
XVIII.
Here's the spring back or close,
When the almond-blossom blows:
We shall have the word
In a minor third
There is none but the cuckoo knows:
Heaps of the guelder-rose!
I must bear with it, I suppose.
XIX.
Could but November come,
Were the noisy birds struck dumb
At the warning slash
Of his driver's-lash---
I would laugh like the valiant Thumb
Facing the castle glum
And the giant's fee-faw-fum!
XX.
Then, were the world well stripped
Of the gear wherein equipped
We can stand apart,
Heart dispense with heart
In the sun, with the flowers unnipped,---
Oh, the world's hangings ripped,
We were both in a bare-walled crypt!
XXI.
Each in the crypt would cry
``But one freezes here! and why?
``When a heart, as chill,
``At my own would thrill
``Back to life, and its fires out-fly?
``Heart, shall we live or die?
``The rest.
.
.
.
settle by-and-by!''
XXII.
So, she'd efface the score,
And forgive me as before.
It is twelve o'clock:
I shall hear her knock
In the worst of a storm's uproar,
I shall pull her through the door,
I shall have her for evermore!
|
Written by
Mark Doty |
Over the terminal,
the arms and chest
of the god
brightened by snow.
Formerly mercury,
formerly silver,
surface yellowed
by atmospheric sulphurs
acid exhalations,
and now the shining
thing's descendant.
Obscure passages,
dim apertures:
these clouded windows
show a few faces
or some empty car's
filmstrip of lit flames
--remember them
from school,
how they were supposed
to teach us something?--
waxy light hurrying
inches away from the phantom
smudge of us, vague
in spattered glass.
Then
daylight's soft charcoal
lusters stone walls
and we ascend to what
passes for brightness,
this February,
scumbled sky
above graduated zones
of decline:
dead rowhouses,
charred windows'
wet frames
around empty space,
a few chipboard polemics
nailed over the gaps,
speeches too long
and obsessive for anyone
on this train to read,
sealing the hollowed interiors
--some of them grand once,
you can tell by
the fillips of decoration,
stone leaves, the frieze
of sunflowers.
Desolate fields--open spaces,
in a city where you
can hardly turn around!--
seem to center
on little flames,
something always burning
in a barrel or can
As if to represent
inextinguishable,
dogged persistence?
Though whether what burns
is will or rage or
harsh amalgam
I couldn't say.
But I can tell you this,
what I've seen that
won my allegiance most,
though it was also
the hallmark of our ruin,
and quick as anything
seen in transit:
where Manhattan ends
in the narrowing
geographical equivalent
of a sigh (asphalt,
arc of trestle, dull-witted
industrial tanks
and scaffoldings, ancient now,
visited by no one)
on the concrete
embankment just
above the river,
a sudden density
and concentration
of trash, so much
I couldn't pick out
any one thing
from our rising track
as it arced onto the bridge
over the fantastic
accumulation of jetsam
and contraband
strewn under
the uncompromising
vault of heaven.
An unbelievable mess,
so heaped and scattered
it seemed the core
of chaos itself--
but no, the junk was arranged
in rough aisles,
someone's intimate
clutter and collection,
no walls but still
a kind of apartment
and a fire ribboned out
of a ruined stove,
and white plates
were laid out
on the table beside it.
White china! Something
was moving, and
--you understand
it takes longer to tell this
than to see it, only
a train window's worth
of actuality--
I knew what moved
was an arm,
the arm of the (man
or woman?) in the center
of that hapless welter
in layer upon layer
of coats blankets scarves
until the form
constituted one more
gray unreadable;
whoever
was lifting a hammer,
and bringing it down
again, tapping at
what work
I couldn't say;
whoever, under
the great exhausted dome
of winter light,
which the steep
and steel surfaces of the city
made both more soft
and more severe,
was making something,
or repairing,
was in the act
(sheer stubborn nerve of it)
of putting together.
Who knows what.
(And there was more,
more I'd take all spring
to see.
I'd pick my seat
and set my paper down
to study him again
--he, yes, some days not
at home though usually
in, huddled
by the smoldering,
and when my eye wandered
--five-second increments
of apprehension--I saw
he had a dog!
Who lay half in
half out his doghouse
in the rain, golden head
resting on splayed paws.
He had a ruined car,
and heaps of clothes,
and things to read--
was no emblem,
in other words,
but a citizen,
who'd built a citizen's
household, even
on the literal edge,
while I watched
from my quick,
high place, hurtling
over his encampment
by the waters of Babylon.
)
Then we were gone,
in the heat and draft
of our silver, rattling
over the river
into the South Bronx,
against whose greasy
skyline rose that neoned
billboard for cigarettes
which hostages
my attention, always,
as it is meant to do,
its motto ruby
in the dark morning:
ALIVE WITH PLEASURE.
|
Written by
Robert Louis Stevenson |
WHEN Thomas set this tablet here,
Time laughed at the vain chanticleer;
And ere the moss had dimmed the stone,
Time had defaced that garrison.
Now I in turn keep watch and ward
In my red house, in my walled yard
Of sunflowers, sitting here at ease
With friends and my bright canvases.
But hark, and you may hear quite plain
Time's chuckled laughter in the lane.
|
Written by
Marianne Moore |
Dürer would have seen a reason for living
in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house
on a fine day, from water etched
with waves as formal as the scales
on a fish.
One by one in two's and three's, the seagulls keep
flying back and forth over the town clock,
or sailing around the lighthouse without moving their wings --
rising steadily with a slight
quiver of the body -- or flock
mewing where
a sea the purple of the peacock's neck is
paled to greenish azure as Dürer changed
the pine green of the Tyrol to peacock blue and guinea
gray.
You can see a twenty-five-
pound lobster; and fish nets arranged
to dry.
The
whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt
marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the
star on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so
much confusion.
Disguised by what
might seem the opposite, the sea-
side flowers and
trees are favored by the fog so that you have
the tropics first hand: the trumpet-vine,
fox-glove, giant snap-dragon, a salpiglossis that has
spots and stripes; morning-glories, gourds,
or moon-vines trained on fishing-twine
at the back door;
cat-tails, flags, blueberries and spiderwort,
striped grass, lichens, sunflowers, asters, daisies --
yellow and crab-claw ragged sailors with green bracts -- toad-plant,
petunias, ferns; pink lilies, blue
ones, tigers; poppies; black sweet-peas.
The climate
is not right for the banyan, frangipani, or
jack-fruit trees; or for exotic serpent
life.
Ring lizard and snake-skin for the foot, if you see fit;
but here they've cats, not cobras, to
keep down the rats.
The diffident
little newt
with white pin-dots on black horizontal spaced-
out bands lives here; yet there is nothing that
ambition can buy or take away.
The college student
named Ambrose sits on the hillside
with his not-native books and hat
and sees boats
at sea progress white and rigid as if in
a groove.
Liking an elegance of which
the sourch is not bravado, he knows by heart the antique
sugar-bowl shaped summer-house of
interlacing slats, and the pitch
of the church
spire, not true, from which a man in scarlet lets
down a rope as a spider spins a thread;
he might be part of a novel, but on the sidewalk a
sign says C.
J.
Poole, Steeple Jack,
in black and white; and one in red
and white says
Danger.
The church portico has four fluted
columns, each a single piece of stone, made
modester by white-wash.
Theis would be a fit haven for
waifs, children, animals, prisoners,
and presidents who have repaid
sin-driven
senators by not thinking about them.
The
place has a school-house, a post-office in a
store, fish-houses, hen-houses, a three-masted schooner on
the stocks.
The hero, the student,
the steeple-jack, each in his way,
is at home.
It could not be dangerous to be living
in a town like this, of simple people,
who have a steeple-jack placing danger signs by the church
while he is gilding the solid-
pointed star, which on a steeple
stands for hope.
|
Written by
Jorie Graham |
Today, because I couldn't find the shortcut through,
I had to walk this town's entire inner
perimeter to find
where the medieval walls break open
in an eighteenth century
arch.
The yellow valley flickered on and off
through cracks and the gaps
for guns.
Bruna is teaching me
to cut a pattern.
Saturdays we buy the cloth.
She takes it in her hands
like a good idea, feeling
for texture, grain, the built-in
limits.
It's only as an afterthought she asks
and do you think it's beautiful?
Her measuring tapes hang down, corn-blond and endless,
from her neck.
When I look at her
I think Rapunzel,
how one could climb that measuring,
that love.
But I was saying,
I wandered all along the street that hugs the walls,
a needle floating
on its cloth.
Once
I shut my eyes and felt my way
along the stone.
Outside
is the cashcrop, sunflowers, as far as one can see.
Listen,
the wind rattles in them,
a loose worship
seeking an object,
an interruption.
Sara,
the walls are beautiful.
They block the view.
And it feels rich to be
inside their grasp.
When Bruna finishes her dress
it is the shape of what has come
to rescue her.
She puts it on.
|
Written by
Emile Verhaeren |
Everything that lives about us in the fragile and gentle light, frail grasses, tender branches, hollyhocks, and the shadow that brushes them lightly by, and the wind that knots them, and the singing and hopping birds that swarm riotously in the sun like clusters of jewels,— everything that lives in the fine ruddy garden loves us artlessly, and we—we love everything.
We worship the lilies we see growing; and the tall sunflowers, brighter than the Nadir— circles surrounded by petals of flames—burn our souls through their glow.
The simplest flowers, the phlox and the lilac, grow along the walls among the feverfew, to be nearer to our footsteps; and the involuntary weeds in the turf over which we have passed open their eyes wet with dew.
And we live thus with the flowers and the grass, simple and pure, glowing and exalted, lost in our love, like the sheaves in the gold of the corn, and proudly allowing the imperious summer to pierce our bodies, our hearts and our two wills with its full brightness.
|
Written by
Eugene Field |
Good editor Dana--God bless him, we say--
Will soon be afloat on the main,
Will be steaming away
Through the mist and the spray
To the sensuous climate of Spain.
Strange sights shall he see in that beautiful land
Which is famed for its soap and its Moor,
For, as we understand,
The scenery is grand
Though the system of railways is poor.
For moonlight of silver and sunlight of gold
Glint the orchards of lemons and mangoes,
And the ladies, we're told,
Are a joy to behold
As they twine in their lissome fandangoes.
What though our friend Dana shall twang a guitar
And murmur a passionate strain;
Oh, fairer by far
Than those ravishments are
The castles abounding in Spain.
These castles are built as the builder may list--
They are sometimes of marble or stone,
But they mostly consist
Of east wind and mist
With an ivy of froth overgrown.
A beautiful castle our Dana shall raise
On a futile foundation of hope,
And its glories shall blaze
In the somnolent haze
Of the mythical lake del y Soap.
The fragrance of sunflowers shall swoon on the air
And the visions of Dreamland obtain,
And the song of "World's Fair"
Shall be heard everywhere
Through that beautiful castle in Spain.
|
Written by
Carl Sandburg |
[They picked him up in the grass where he had lain two
days in the rain with a piece of shrapnel in his lungs.
]
COME to me only with playthings now.
.
.
A picture of a singing woman with blue eyes
Standing at a fence of hollyhocks, poppies and sunflowers.
.
.
Or an old man I remember sitting with children telling stories
Of days that never happened anywhere in the world.
.
.
No more iron cold and real to handle,
Shaped for a drive straight ahead.
Bring me only beautiful useless things.
Only old home things touched at sunset in the quiet.
.
.
And at the window one day in summer
Yellow of the new crock of butter
Stood against the red of new climbing roses.
.
.
And the world was all playthings.
|