Flashcards
Poems for ids
Cards in this deck (22)
- 1Like thousands, I took just pride and more than just, struck matches that brought my blood to a boil; I memorized the tricks to set the river on fire— somehow never wrote something to go back to. Can I suppose I am finished with wax flowers and have earned my grass on the minor slopes of Parnassus…. No honeycomb is built without a bee adding circle to circle, cell to cell, the wax and honey of a mausoleum— this round dome proves its maker is alive; the corpse of the insect lives embalmed in honey, enough for the sweet-tooth bear to desecrate— this open book… my open coffin.Reading Myself; Robert Lowell
- 2The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (/Write/ it!) like disaster.One Art; Elizabeth Bishop
- 3The eyes open to a cry of pulleys, And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple As false dawn. Outside the open window The morning air is all awash with angels. Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses, Some are in smocks: but truly there they are. Now they are rising together in calm swells Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing; Now they are flying in place, conveying The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving And staying like white water; and now of a sudden They swoon down into so rapt a quiet That nobody seems to be there. The soul shrinks From all that it is about to remember, From the punctual rape of every blessed day, And cries, “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry, Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.” Yet as the sun acknowledges With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors, The soul descends once more in bitter love To accept the waking body, saying now In a chaLove Calls Us to the Things of This World; Richard Wilbur
- 4Third Avenue in sunlight. Nature’s error. Already the bars are filled and John is there Beneath a plentiful lady over the mirror He tilts his glass in the mild mahogany air. I think of him when he first got out of college, Serious, thin, unlikely to succeed; For several months he hung around the Village, Boldly T-shirted, unfettered but unfreed. Now he confides to a stranger, “I was first scout, And kept my glimmers peeled till after dark. Our outfit had as its sign a bloody knout, We met behind the museum in Central Park. Of course, we were kids.” But still those savages, War-painted, a flap of leather at the loins, File silently against him. Hostages Are never taken. One summer, in Des Moines, They entered his hotel room, tomahawks Flashing like barracuda. He tried to pray. Three years of treatment. Occasionally he talks About how he almost didn’t get away. Daily the prowling sunlight whets its knife Along the sidewalk. We almost never meet. In the Rembrandt dark he lifts his amber life. My bar is somewhat further down the street.Third Avenue in Sunlight; Anthony Hecht
- 5I thought I was growing wings— it was a cocoon. I thought, now is the time to step into the fire— it was deep water. Eschatology is a word I learned as a child: the study of Last Things; facing my mirror—no longer young, the news—always of death, the dogs—rising from sleep and clamoring and howling, howling, nevertheless I see for a moment that’s not it: it is the First Things. Word after word floats through the glass. Towards me.Seeing for a Moment; Denise Levertov
- 6It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in East Hampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don’t know the people who will feed me I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it and IThe Day Lady Died; Frank O'Hara
- 7Gray whale Now that we are sending you to The End That great god Tell him That we who follow you invented forgiveness And forgive nothing I write as though you could understand And I could say it One must always pretend something Among the dying When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks Empty of you Tell him that we were made On another day The bewilderment will diminish like an echo Winding along your inner mountains Unheard by us And finding its way out Leaving behind it the future Dead And ours When you will not see again The whale calves trying the light Consider what you will find in the black garden And its court The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless Are fore-ordaining as stars Our sacrifices Join you word to theirs Tell him That it is we who are importantFor a Coming Extinction; W S Merwin
- 8I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free. Elsewhere we are as sitting in a place where sunlight Filters down, a little at a time, Waiting for someone to come. Harsh words are spoken, As the sun yellows the green of the maple tree…. So this was all, but obscurely I felt the stirrings of new breath in the pages Which all winter long had smelled like an old catalogue. New sentences were starting up. But the summer Was well along, not yet past the mid-point But full and dark with the promise of that fullness, That time when one can no longer wander away And even the least attentive fall silent To watch the thing that is prepared to happen. A look of glass stops you And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived? Did they notice me, this time, as I am, Or is it postponed again? The children Still at their games, clouds that arise with a swift Impatience in the afternoon sky, then dissipate As limpid, dense twilight comes. Only in that tooting of a horn Down there, for a moment, I thought The great, formal affair was beginning, orchestrated, Its colorsAs One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat; John Ashbery
- 9I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood I have been her kind. I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.Her Kind; Anne Sexton
- 10A woman in the shape of a monster a monster in the shape of a woman the skies are full of them a woman ‘in the snow among the Clocks and instruments or measuring the ground with poles’ in her 98 years to discover 8 comets she whom the moon ruled like us levitating into the night sky riding the polished lenses Galaxies of women, there doing penance for impetuousness ribs chilled in those spaces of the mind An eye, ‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’ from the mad webs of Uranusborg encountering the NOVA every impulse of light explosing from the core as life flies out of us Tycho whispering at last ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’ What we see, we see and seeing is changing the light that shrivels a mountain and leaves a man alive Heartbeat of the pulsar heart sweating through my body The radio impulse pouring in from Taurus I am bombarded yet I stand I have been standing all my life in the direct path of a battery of signals the most accurately transmitted most untranslatable language in the universePlanetarium; Adrienne Rich
- 11I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it— A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen. Peel off the napkin O my enemy. Do I terrify?— The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? The sour breath Will vanish in a day. Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three. What a trash To annihilate each decade. What a million filaments. The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see Them unwrap me hand and foot— The big strip tease. Gentlemen, ladies These are my hands My knees. I may be skin and bone, Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident. The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut As a seashell. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. Dying Is an art, like everything else.Lady Lazarus; Sylvia Plath
- 12Ancient of Days, old friend, no one believes you’ll come back. No one believes in his own life anymore. The moon, like a dead heart, cold and unstartable, hangs by a thread At the earth’s edge, Unfaithful at last, splotching the ferns and the pink shrubs. In the other world, children undo the knots in their tally strings. They sing songs, and their fingers blear. And here, where the swan hums in his socket, where bloodroot And belladonna insist on our comforting, Where the fox in the canyon wall empties our hands, ecstatic for more, Like a bead of clear oil the Healer revolves through the night wind, Part eye, part tear, unwilling to recognize us.Stone Canyon Nocturne; Charles Wright
- 13I is the total black, being spoken from the earth’s inside. There are many kinds of open how a diamond comes into a knot of flame how sound comes into a word, colored by who pays what for speaking. Some words are open like a diamond on glass windows singing out within the passing crash of sun Then there are words like stapled wagers in a perforated book—buy and sign and tear apart— and come whatever wills all chances the stub remains an ill-pulled tooth with a ragged edge. Some words live in my throat breeding like adders. Others know sun seeking like gypsies over my tongue to explode through my lips like young sparrows bursting from shell. Some words bedevil me. Love is a word, another kind of open. As the diamond comes into a knot of flame I am Black because I come from the earth’s inside now take my word for jewel in the open light.Coal; Audre Lorde
- 14When the swordsman fell in Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai in the gray rain, in Cinemascope and the Tokugawa dynasty, he fell straight as a pine, he fell as Ajax fell in Homer in chanted dactyls and the tree was so huge the woodsman returned for two days to that lucky place before he was done with the sawing and on the third day he brought his uncle. They stacked logs in the resinous air, hacking the small limbs off, tying those bundles separately. The slabs near the root were quartered and still they were awkwardly large; the logs from midtree they halved: ten bundles and four great piles of fragrant wood, moons and quarter moons and half moons ridged by the saw’s tooth. The woodsman and the old man his uncle are standing in midforest on a floor of pine silt and spring mud. They have stopped working because they are tired and because I have imagined no pack animal or primitive wagon. They are too canny to call in neighbors and come home with a few logs after three days’ work. They are waiting for me to do something or for the overseer of the Great Lord to cHeroic Simile; Robert Hass
- 15All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of the black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orang-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had toMeditation at Lagunitas; Robert Hass
- 16When the intern listened to the stopped heart I stared at him, as if he or I were wild, were from some other world, I had lost the language of gestures, I could not know what it meant for a stranger to push the gown up along the body of my father. My face was wet, my father’s face was faintly moist with the sweat of his life, the last moments of hard work. I was leaning against the wall, in the corner, and he lay on the bed, we were both doing something, and everyone else in the room believed in the Christian God, they called my father the shell on the bed, I was the only one there who knew he was entirely gone, the only one there to say goodbye to his body that was all he was, I held hard to his foot, I thought of the Eskimo elder holding the stern of the death canoe, I let him out slowly into the physical world. I felt the dryness of his lips under my lips, I felt how even my light kiss moved his head on the pillow the way things move as if on their own in shallow water, I felt his hair rush through my fingers like a wolf’s, the walls shifted, the floor, tThe Feelings; Sharon Olds
- 17It is not the moon, I tell you. It is these flowers lighting the yard. I hate them. I hate them as I hate sex, the man’s mouth sealing my mouth, the man’s paralyzing body— and the cry that always escapes, the low, humiliating premise of union— In my mind tonight I hear the question and pursuing answer fused in one sound that mounts and mounts and then is split into the old selves, the tired antagonisms. Do you see? We were made fools of. And the scent of mock orange drifts through the window. How can I rest? How can I be content when there is still that odor in the world?Mock Orange; Louise Glueck
- 18The girl strapped in the bare mechanical crib does not open her eyes, does not cry out. The glottal tube is taped into her face; bereft of sound, she seems so far away. But a box on the stucco wall, wired to her chest, televises the flutter of her heart— news from the pit—her pulse rapid and shallow, a rising line, except when her mother sings, outside the bars: whenever her mother sings the line steadies into a row of waves, song of the sea, song of the scythe old woman by the well, picking up stones old woman by the well, picking up stones When Orpheus, beating rhythm with a pear against the deck of the armed ship, sang to steady the oars, he borrowed an old measure: broadax striking oak, oak singing back, the churn, the pump, the shuttle sweeping the warp like the waves against the shore they were pulling toward. The men at the oars saw only the next man’s back. They were living a story—the story of desire, the rising line of ships at war or trade. If the sky’s dark fabric was pierced by stars, they didn’t see them; if dolphins leapt from the water, tSong and Story; Ellen Bryant Voigt
- 19My black face fades, hiding inside the black granite. I said I wouldn’t dammit: No tears. I’m stone. I’m flesh. My clouded reflection eyes me like a bird of prey, the profile of night slanted against morning. I turn this way—the stone lets me go. I turn that way—I’m inside the Vietnam Veterans Memorial again, depending on the light to make a difference. I go down the 58,022 names, half-expecting to find my own in letters like smoke. I touch the name Andrew Johnson; I see the booby trap’s white flash. Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse but when she walks away the names stay on the wall. Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s wings cutting across my stare. The sky. A plane in the sky. A white vet’s image flats closer to me, then his pale eyes look through mine. I’m a window. He’s lost his right arm inside the stone. In the black mirror a woman’s trying to erase names: No, she’s brushing a boy’s hairFacing It; Yusef Komunyakaa
- 20In this blue light I can take you there, snow having made me a world of bone seen through to. This is my house, my section of Etruscan wall, my neighbor’s lemontrees, and, just below the lower church, the airplane factory, A rooster crows all day from mist outside the walls. There’s milk on the air, ice on the oily lemonskins. How clean the mind is, holy grave. It is this girl by Piero della Francesca, unbuttoning her blue dress, her mantle of weather, to go into labor. Come, we can go in. It is before the birth of god. No-one has risen yet to the museums, to the assembly line—bodies and wings—to the open air market. This is what the living do: go in. It’s a long way. And the dress keeps opening from eternity to privacy, quickening. Inside, at the heart, is tragedy, the present moment forever stillborn, but going in, each breath is a button coming undone, something terribly nimble-fingered finding all of the stops.San Sepolcro; Jorie Graham
- 211 THE CANE FIELDS There is a parrot imitating spring in the palace, its feathers parsley green. Out of the swamp the cane appears to haunt us, and we cut it down. El General searches for a word; he is all the world there is. Like a parrot imitating spring, we lie down screaming as rain punches through and we come up green. We cannot speak an R— out of the swamp, the cane appears and then the mountain we call in whispers Katalina. The children gnaw their teeth to arrowheads. There is a parrot imitating spring. El General had found his word: perefil. Who says it, lives. He laughs, teeth shining out of the swamp. The cane appears in our dreams, lashed by wind and streaming. And we lie down. For every drop of blood there is a parrot imitating spring. Out of the swamp the cane appears. 2 THE PALACE The word the general’s chosen is parsley. It is fall, when thoughts turn to love and death; the general thinks of his mother, how she died in the fall and he planted her walking cane at the grave and it flowered, each spring stolidly forming four-star blosParsley; Rita Dove
- 22Which is worse—not being myself, for long hours, able to account for my own absence; or not having been, by anyone, asked to—I can’t say. As when the leaves have but to angle in direct proportion to the wind’s force, times its direction, and the mind, whose instinct is to resist any namelessness, calls all of it—leaves, leaves, and the wind’s force— trust, at first, then disregard until, suspecting the truer name is neither of these, it must stop naming. Or as in the days, reportedly, of the gods having dwelled among us—always people invariably not knowing and then (some irreducible odor, an abrupt solidity to the light) only then knowing, but too late, their faces changed forever after by the difficult weight of mere witness, of having none but their own word for it … If mistake, possibly, yet mistake this afternoon seems less a river than a barely contained in spite of everything belief: there’s another ending. In this one, I recognize you— and the recognizing has the effect of slowing down that part of meRevision; Carl Phillips
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- ENLT Poetry/Songs Flashcards on Poems for ids, created by Layne Berry on 11/12/2016.
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- Layne Berry · Dec 2016
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- Apr 6, 2018
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