Poems in Circuit: 1
"I wish I knew why"/ "where before there was only silence"/ "wherever you are is called HERE"/ "Their faces are wings, & their bodies are uncovered"/ "and passed with eyes of stone"/ "Lens of mercies"
I’ve been thinking about the way in which poems reach out to other poems. Not thematically: but at the level of word and image. The strange ways that poems rhyme, that they echo each other. We each have circuits of poems like this in our memories, I think—some we’re more conscious of than others, maybe.
Here’s one circuit of poems that I found kicking about in my mind this Friday. Maybe you’ll hear the same electrical signal that I feel passes from one poem to the other, or maybe you’ll find your own. I’m curious: what poem in your mind continues this circuit? Leave a comment and let’s keep the circuit going!
Venus's-flytraps
by Yusef Komunyakaa
I am five,
Wading out into deep
Sunny grass,
Unmindful of snakes
& yellowjackets, out
To the yellow flowers
Quivering in sluggish heat.
Don't mess with me
'Cause I have my Lone Ranger
Six-shooter. I can hurt
You with questions
Like silver bullets.
The tall flowers in my dreams are
Big as the First State Bank,
& they eat all the people
Except the ones I love.
They have women's names,
With mouths like where
Babies come from. I a five.
I'll dance for you
If you close your eyes. No
Peeping through your fingers.
I don't supposed to be
This close to the tracks.
One afternoon I saw
What a train did to a cow.
Sometimes I stand so close
I can see the eyes
Of men hiding in boxcars.
Sometimes they wave
& holler for me to get back. I laugh
When trains make the dogs
Howl. Their ears hurt.
I also know bees
Can't live without flowers.
I wonder why Daddy
Calls Mama honey.
All the bees in the world
Live in little white houses
Except the ones in these flowers.
All sticky & sweet inside.
I wonder what death tastes like.
Sometimes I toss the butterflies
Back into the air.
I wish I knew why
The music in my head
Makes me scared.
But I know things
I don't supposed to know.
I could start walking
& never stop.
These yellow flowers
Go on forever.
Almost to Detroit.
Almost to the sea.
My mama says I'm a mistake.
That I made her a bad girl.
My playhouse is underneath
Our house, & I hear people
Telling each other secrets.
There Is Music in My Head
by Vievee Francis
where before there was only silence.
Strings being bowed and plucked.
Feet tapping. Hands knead
against a board. A pounding staff.
Call and yelp. Water a-gurgle. There’s
a music in my head like a clearing in the woods.
Do you hear it? Lips on the flute. Winding
through the reeds. I was lost, so lost,
the path too thin to follow. It was dark.
Couldn’t see a damn thing in those pines. But
now the blue-green day brings its sound
of honeysuckle and mushroom. The slim trees
bend and beckon. The naked clover wants
to be touched. Everything clusters and bursts.
The notes scale the hollow. The notes run
to the ridge, then over they fall, water down
the rocks like a laughing, like a laughing.
The bow goes over and under. A fiddling.
A fondling of butterflies in the hint of spring.
The first bee in the clutch of the sweet. I am
singing my way out. I am singing my way out
of the brickyards, from the stones.
Listen for me in the clearing. I can’t keep this
to myself.
Lost
by David Wagoner
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you,
If you leave it you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
To a Wren on Calvary by Larry Levis “Prince Jesus, crush those bastards ...” —Francois Villon, Grand Testament It is the unremarkable that will last, As in Brueghel’s camouflage, where the wren’s withheld, While elsewhere on a hill, small hawks (or are they other birds?) Are busily unraveling eyelashes & pupils From sunburned thieves outstretched on scaffolds, Their last vision obscured by wings, then broken, entered. I cannot tell whether their blood spurts, or just spills, Their faces are wings, & their bodies are uncovered. The twittering they hear is the final trespass. ~ And all later luxuries—the half-dressed neighbor couple Shouting insults at each other just beyond Her bra on a cluttered windowsill, then ceasing it when A door was slammed to emphasize, like trouble, The quiet flowing into things then, spreading its wake From the child’s toy left out on a lawn To the broken treatise of jet-trails drifting above—seem Keel scrapes on the shores of some enlarging mistake, A wrong so wide no one can speak of it now in the town That once had seemed, like its supporting factories That manufactured poems & weaponry, Like such a good idea. And wasn’t it everyone’s? Wasn’t the sad pleasure of assembly lines a replica Of the wren’s perfect, camouflaged self-sufficiency, And of its refusal even to be pretty, Surviving in a plumage dull enough to blend in with A hemline of smoke, sky, & a serene indifference? * The dead wren I found on a gravel drive One morning, all beige above and off-white Underneath, the body lighter, no more than a vacant tent Of oily feathers stretched, blent, & lacquered shut Against the world—was a world I couldn’t touch. And in its skull a snow of lice had set up such An altar, the congregation spreading from the tongue To round, bare sills that had been its eyes, I let It drop, my hand changed for a moment By a thing so common it was never once distracted from The nothing all wrens meant, the one feather on the road. No feeding in the wake of cavalry or kings changed it. Even in the end it swerved away, & made the abrupt Riddle all things come to seem ... irrelevant: The tucked claws clutched emptiness like a stick. And if Death whispered as always in the language of curling Leaves, or a later one that makes us stranger, “Don’t you come near me motherfucker”; If the tang of metal in slang made the New World fertile, Still ... as they resumed their quarrel in the quiet air, I could hear the species cheep in what they said ... Until their voices rose. Until the sound of a slap erased A world, & the woman, in a music stripped of all prayer, Began sobbing, & the man become bystander cried O Jesus. In the sky, the first stars were already faint And timeless, but what could they matter to that boy, blent To no choir, who saw at last the clean wings of indifferent Hunger, & despair? Around him the other petty thieves, With arms outstretched, & eyes pecked out by birds, reclined, Fastened forever to scaffolds which gradually would cover An Empire’s hills & line its roads as far As anyone escaping in a cart could see, his swerving mind On the dark brimming up in everything, the reins Going slack in his hand as the cart slows, & stops, And the horse sees its own breath go out Onto the cold air, & gazes after the off-white plume, And seems amazed by it, by its breath, by everything. But the man slumped behind it, dangling a lost nail Between his lips, only stares at the swishing tail, At each white breath going out, thinning, & then vanishing, For he has grown tired of amazing things.
New Stanzas for Amazing Grace By Allen Ginsberg I dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place Where I was lost alone Folk looked right through me into space And passed with eyes of stone O homeless hand on many a street Accept this change from me A friendly smile or word is sweet As fearless charity Woe workingman who hears the cry And cannot spare a dime Nor look into a homeless eye Afraid to give the time So rich or poor no gold to talk A smile on your face The homeless ones where you may walk Receive amazing grace I dreamed I dwelled in a homeless place Where I was lost alone Folk looked right through me into space And passed with eyes of stone April 2, 1994 Composed at the request of Ed Sanders for his production of The New Amazing Grace, performed November 20, 1994, at the Poetry Project in St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bouwerie
Medusa
by Sylvia Plath
Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs,
Eyes rolled by white sticks,
Ears cupping the sea's incoherences,
You house your unnerving head—God-ball,
Lens of mercies,
Your stooges
Plying their wild cells in my keel's shadow,
Pushing by like hearts,
Red stigmata at the very center,
Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of departure,
Dragging their Jesus hair.
Did I escape, I wonder?
My mind winds to you
Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,
Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous repair.
In any case, you are always there,
Tremulous breath at the end of my line,
Curve of water upleaping
To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,
Touching and sucking.
I didn't call you.
I didn't call you at all.
Nevertheless, nevertheless
You steamed to me over the sea,
Fat and red, a placenta
Paralyzing the kicking lovers.
Cobra light
Squeezing the breath from the blood bells
Of the fuchsia. I could draw no breath,
Dead and moneyless,
Overexposed, like an X-ray.
Who do you think you are?
A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary?
I shall take no bite of your body,
Bottle in which I live,
Ghastly Vatican.
I am sick to death of hot salt.
Green as eunuchs, your wishes
Hiss at my sins.
Off, off, eely tentacle!
There is nothing between us.