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[taciturnfriend]

[Harry]

[taciturnfriend]

Some poems by Oswald LeWinter, a man with a complex past and who, as a poet, has been compared to Crane and Rimbaud. His selected poems have recently been published as Ages of Chaos and Fury.


Coming Out

How shall I emerge?
For a chrysalis, too fat,
gay doesn’t suit the look,
below my eyes, a classic
mask of tragedy. I am
no beast but neither
am I elf nor fairy. Fond
as Rabelais of mischief,
the seismic rage of Caliban,
disguised as servility,
bursts the mind's dam
quicker, floods my veins
with bile. Is it envy
that congeals my blood?
Like Narcissus, I am
caught in the shimmer
of my reflection, held
therein by curiosity,
lacking substance, all
liquid, and dissolving
when I stir my self.



Smolensk In A Storm

Hail sashays down the lane,
beats on the panes of the half-
finished house: a lone storm
seeking a place near birches
crackling in the fireplace.

The tablecloth, faded spring
daisies, is mirrored in the vodka,
before each guest, the last toast
lessened. Juri bends over the oval
to refill each large glass.

Mascha waits to ladle out
the borscht, thick with chunks
of venison, steaming from the iron
pot that dominates the center
girdled by bowls of boiled spuds.

It’s two days past Christmas,
but the family has waited to celebrate
a son’s safe return from Chechnya.
Oleg, the swagger he left with gone,
sits sideways, in far-off thoughts

with comrades choking on their blood.
The others understand. Russians know
how war scars souls. It’s in the vodka,
in the fire that courses down throats,
where memories drown, not for long.

Juri remembers his own battles, more
than half a century ago, Donets Basin,
Stalingrad, Berlin, roses of blood
sprouting from exploded breasts.
He downs his glass to burn the past.



Recollections in Turmoil


Here I sit, an old spider, patiently placing word
after word, hoping the whole will hold some meaning,
some basic revelation, some eternal certainty
and the accident of perfection that is finally each life.

All metaphors are caskets in which to bury half-
known feelings we attempt to name, rages intuited,
or loves that ripened slowly like soft cheese we desired
to feast on, despite its bouquet of decay.

I have not lived peacefully! Why should I then be
tranquil when I write poems; pretend the words
I confiscate from abstract decoys in order to possess and
brand them as my own with immediate joy, immediate

despair, and the laughter of a man about to hang,
leave me cool and distant as a star whose light reaches us
long after it has died. No, they are something else,
if you like, dancing partners held with fiercest passion,

and uncertainty as well. Bitch Goddess! I am
your suitor in hand-me-down trousers, your ugly frog
who wishes nothing more than to be changed into the blond
prince of my Jewish dreams by your prized kiss.

I know full well that I may end stiffly spurned, holding
nothing but myself in tired and arthritic hands, on a hard bench
in the ghetto of old age, and yet I keep on rising
every time the quartet in the mind strikes up another tune.

[imaginarylove]

I like those, Darren, especially the second one.

Is that a typo by the way, or does he really spell the name Mascha? The normal form is Masha, diminute of Mariya. (I would also transliterate Yuriy rather than Juri, but that's by-the-by.)

Venison borscht is quite some luxury!

[taciturnfriend]

[Meg]

I Anne Carson.

[imaginarylove]

[imaginarylove]

The Woman of the Species
by Rudyard Kipling
1911

When the Himalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted rends the peasant tooth and nail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

When Nag the basking cobra hears the careless foot of man,
He will sometimes wriggle sideways and avoid it if he can.
But his mate makes no such motion where she camps beside the trail.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

When the early Jesuit fathers preached to Hurons and Choctaws,
They prayed to be delivered from the vengeance of the squaws.
'Twas the women, not the warriors, turned those stark enthusiasts pale.
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Man's timid heart is bursting with the things he must not say,
For the Woman that God gave him isn't his to give away;
But when hunter meets with husband, each confirms the other's tale --
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

Man, a bear in most relations - worm and savage otherwise, --
Man propounds negotiations, Man accepts the compromise.
Very rarely will he squarely push the logic of a fact
To its ultimate conclusion in unmitigated act.

Fear, or foolishness, impels him, ere he lay the wicked low,
To concede some form of trial even to his fiercest foe.
Mirth obscene diverts his anger --- Doubt and Pity oft perplex
Him in dealing with an issue -- to the scandal of The Sex!

But the Woman that God gave him, every fibre of her frame
Proves her launched for one sole issue, armed and engined for the same;
And to serve that single issue, lest the generations fail,
The female of the species must be deadlier than the male.

She who faces Death by torture for each life beneath her breast
May not deal in doubt or pity -- must not swerve for fact or jest.
These be purely male diversions -- not in these her honour dwells.
She the Other Law we live by, is that Law and nothing else.

She can bring no more to living than the powers that make her great
As the Mother of the Infant and the Mistress of the Mate.
And when Babe and Man are lacking and she strides unclaimed to claim
Her right as femme (and baron), her equipment is the same.

She is wedded to convictions -- in default of grosser ties;
Her contentions are her children, Heaven help him who denies! --
He will meet no suave discussion, but the instant, white-hot, wild,
Wakened female of the species warring as for spouse and child.

Unprovoked and awful charges -- even so the she-bear fights,
Speech that drips, corrodes, and poisons -- even so the cobra bites,
Scientific vivisection of one nerve till it is raw
And the victim writhes in anguish -- like the Jesuit with the squaw!

So it cames that Man, the coward, when he gathers to confer
With his fellow-braves in council, dare not leave a place for her
Where, at war with Life and Conscience, he uplifts his erring hands
To some God of Abstract Justice -- which no woman understands.

And Man knows it! Knows, moreover, that the Woman that God gave him
Must command but may not govern -- shall enthral but not enslave him.
And She knows, because She warns him, and Her instincts never fail,
That the Female of Her Species is more deadly than the Male.

[imaginarylove]

I don't know why, but I imagine the above being read in the voice of the late Willie Rushton.

[taciturnfriend]

Ha. Kipling's total mastery of that metre is a joy. I might repost the Tommy Atkins one that snuck into another thread at some point.

In the meantime, something more serious.

To Jesus on His Birthday
Edna St. Vincent Millay

For this your mother sweated in the cold,
For this you bled upon the bitter tree:
A yard of tinsel ribbon bought and sold;
A paper wreath; a day at home for me.
The merry bells ring out, the people kneel;
Up goes the man of God before the crowd;
With voice of honey and with eyes of steel
He drones your humble gospel to the proud.
Nobody listens. Less than the wind that blows
Are all your words to us you died to save.
O Prince of Peace! O Sharon's dewy Rose!
How mute you lie within your vaulted grave.
The stone the angel rolled away with tears
Is back upon your mouth these thousand years.

[Harry]

I ought to have been paying more attention to this thread. Lovely choices, folks.

These two poems have at least one thing in common: they both turn a single word, through using it over and over in so many different contexts, into something of immense power.

Kissing
Dorianne Laux

They are kissing, on a park bench,
on the edge of an old bed, in a doorway
or on the floor of a church. Kissing
as the streets fill with balloons
or soldiers, locusts or confetti, water
or fire or dust. Kissing down through
the centuries under sun or stars, a dead tree,
an umbrella, amid derelicts. Kissing
as Christ carries his cross, as Gandhi
sings his speeches, as a bullet
careens through the air towards a child's
good heart. They are kissing,
long, deep, spacious kisses, exploring
the silence of the tongue, the mute
rungs of the upper palate, hungry
for the living flesh. They are still
kissing when the cars crash and the bombs
drop, when the babies are born crying
into the white air, when Mozart bends
to his bowl of soup and Stalin
bends to his garden. They are kissing
to begin the world again. Nothing
can stop them. They kiss until their lips
swell, their thick tongues quickening
to the budded touch, licking up
the sweet juices. I want to believe
they are kissing to save the world,
but they're not. All they know
is the press and need, these two-legged
beasts, their faces like roses crushed
together and opening, they are covering
their teeth, they are doing what they have to do
to durvive the worst, they are sealing
the hard words in, they are dying
for our sins. In a broken world they are
practising this simple and singular act
to perfection. They are holding
onto each other. They are kissing.

Confessions of a Nude
Nin Andrews

All last night I dreamt we were nude.
Today, even the clouds took the shape of nudes.
My book is A Field Guide to Nudes.
The snow is a landscape of shsdowy nudes.
The zebraed light, the crystal vase,
the trees, the fruit on the sitting-room table,
the silk shirt on the floor,
everything is a nude. But is everything nude?
A flower in winter is a woman nude.
The trees are sillhouettes of nude men,
like you in almost every respect
but a bit more handsome, smooth-muscled
with another name and minty breath . . .
You would have admired him, too, but you were with her,
and she was touching you with her smal nude breasts,
making us instant nudes, snapping the shutter . . .
When you gaze at me like that, I feel completely nude.

Why don't we continue this conversation in the nude?
We could be two nudes ascending the staircase,
two red nudes wandering the empty streets . . .
And the city became a city of nudes.
It was you I wanted, not this stranger.

[imaginarylove]

You are in a lusty mood today, Lodders!

Neither of those poems does much for me, I'm afraid. Mere titillation doth not a poem make.

On the other hand, I love that sonnet Darren cited. In particular, the first four lines, with the contrast between the first and second couplets, and also the final couplet.

I expect you all know this one (continuing the Christmas theme). It's my favourite T.S. Eliot poem. The debt to Tennyson's Ulysses is obvious.

Journey of the Magi

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed,
refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the
terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and
grumbling
And running away, and wanting their
liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the
lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns
unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high
prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all
night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears,
saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a
temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of
vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill
beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped in
away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with
vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for
pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no imformation, and so
we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment
too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say)
satisfactory.

All this was a long time ago, I
remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth,
certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had
seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different;
this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like
Death, our death.
We returned to our places, these
Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old
dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their
gods.
I should be glad of another death.

[imaginarylove]

*bump*

[Meg]

Sure, sure, bump it and don't give us anything to read. I want unsucky holiday poems. I don't seem to know any though. So here is something completely not holiday related.


Tollund Man - Seamus Heaney

I
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.


In the flat country near by
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,


Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,


She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint's kept body,


Trove of the turfcutters'
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.


II


I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate


The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,


Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.
III


Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names
Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out here in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.

[imaginarylove]