Wanda Coleman

In No Time at All 

after John Ashbery

No charges of treason — yet — so the property

 remains untouched if not untaxed.

 And surely bigger banks and asses have been broken

 in half or into, making for happy thieves.

 Timeless hands have made valueless change.

 (Honey, here you are with a toothpick

 when what’s required is a meat cleaver.)

 The TV trays are all set up, dinner’s in the oven,

 There’s raspberry trifle for dessert.

 A robe awaits wearer, hangs limp and ill-formed,

 gathers light and stillness and regrets.

 The logic of wicks made for a proper burn,

 patches of light illuminating the gray,

 the house seems lighter if no less solemn

 now that the departed has returned home.

 The diary contains cries of every color,

 an orchard of thorn and briar and bane.

 The academy of the future has closed doors.

 It is unwilling — books banned, curtains drawn.

 

Wanda Coleman

with Richard Berry& Michelle T. Clinton

 

Watching

the television on 
tv tray by the bedstead, plate of food 
fish odor rising and blue cheese dressing 
the curling upward of smoke 
outside raining 
kids in the bedroom playing, squeals of laughter 
die down as bed time approaches and grabs them 
the television, on 
black and white people moving in fantastic world 
tv tray by the bedstead, plate of food empty 
stale smell of cigarette smoke 
me in bed, watching--waiting 
clock ticks raucous 
boom boom boom bass sound of neighbor's stereo below 
faint voice of woman yelling in apartment next door 
looking at the window, stars break thru the rain 
letting up 
bang bang bang, cops and robbers on television 
the book, open, lays face down beside me 
sleep runs away every time i reach for it 
i am hungry--feeding time at the vagina 
half-naked i hide between sheets 
he lays there with me 32 years dead 
his corpse shows no sign of life 
he can't fool me 
one eye is watching television 

Wanda Coleman

American Sonnet (35)

boooooooo. spooky ripplings of icy waves. this 
umpteenth time she returns--this invisible woman 
long on haunting short on ectoplasm

"you're a good man, sistuh," a lover sighed solongago. 
"keep your oil slick and your motor running."

wretched stained mirrors within mirrors of 
fractured webbings like nests of manic spiders 
reflect her ruined mien (rue wiggles remorse 
squiggles woe jiggles bestride her). oozy Manes spill 
out yonder spooling in night's lofty hour exudes 
her gloom and spew in rankling odor of heady dour

as she strives to retrieve flesh to cloak her bones 
again to thrive to keep her poisoned id alive

usta be young usta be gifted--still black 

Wanda Coleman

Requiem for a Nest 

the winged thang built her dream palace

amid the fine green eyes of a sheltering bough

she did not know it was urban turf

disguised as serenely delusionally rural

nor did she know the neighborhood was rife

with slant-mawed felines and those long-taloned

swoopers of prey. she was ignorant of the acidity & oil

that slowly polluted the earth, and was never

to detect the serpent coiled one strong limb below

following her nature she flitted and dove

for whatever blades twigs and mud

could be found under the humming blue

and created a hatchery for her spawn

not knowing all were doomed

Wanda Coleman

 American Sonnet 51

in my last incarnation i inoculated myself

with oodles of dago red and stumbled into fame

without falling. i worshipped in the temple of Lady Day

and took Coltrane as my wizard. i always wore my mink coat

to the Laundromat and drank pale champagne with my

soft-boiled eggs. i believed King Kong got a raw deal.

i believe great and prolonged sex cured cancer. i believed

in the afterdeath. i was liberator of cough-and-gaggers

from the cages of their spew. i scavenged rusted auto parts,

built a niggah machine, loaded it with atomic amour and

wiped out all purveyors of poverty. . . swapped my pink

pearl for a black sapphire. and then one quincentennial

i rose from the magnificent effluvium of my jazz

to discover my children did not know me

Carla Harryman

 

Note: This prose poem is the first piece from a larger work by Harryman entitled Property.

Source of the text - In the American Tree, edited by Ron Silliman.  Orono, ME: The National Poetry Foundation, 1986, p. 159.

Donald Justice

 

Henry James at the Pacific

-- Coronado Beach, California, March, 1905

In a hotel room by the sea, the Master
Sits brooding on the continent he has crossed.
Not that he foresees immediate disaster,
Only a sort of freshness being lost --
Or should he go on calling it Innocence?
The sad-faced monsters of the plains are gone;
Wall Street controls the wilderness. There's an immense
Novel in all this waiting to be done.
But not, not -- sadly enough -- by him. His
talents,
Such as they may be, want a different theme,
Rather more civilized than this, on balance.
For him now always the recurring dream
Is just the mild, dear light of Lamb House falling
Beautifully down the pages of his calling.

Donald Justice

 

On a Painting by Patient B of the Indepence State Hospital For the Insane

1

These seven houses have learned to face one another,
But not at the expected angles. Those silly brown lumps,
That are probably meant for hills and not other houses,
After ages of being themselves, though naturally slow,
Are learning to be exclusive without offending.
The arches and entrances (down to the right out of sight)
Have mastered the lesson of remaining closed.
And even the skies keep a certain understandable distance,
For these are the houses of the very rich.
2
One sees their children playing with leopards, tamed
At great cost, or perhaps it is only other children,
For none of these objects is anything more than a spot,
And perhaps there are not any children but only leopards
Playing with leopards, and perhaps there are only the spots.
And the little maids that hang from the windows like tongues,
Calling the children in, admiring the leopards,
Are the dashes a child might represent motion by means of,
Or dazzlement possibly, the brilliance of solid-gold houses.
3
The clouds resemble those empty balloons in cartoons
Which approximate silence. These clouds, if clouds they are
(And not the smoke from the seven aspiring chimneys),
The more one studies them the more it appears
They too have expressions. One might almost say
They have their habits, their wrong opinions, that their
Impassivity masks an essentially lovable foolishness,
And they will be given names by those who live under them
Not public like mountains' but private like companions'.

Donald Justice

 

Nostalgia Of The Lakefronts

Cities burn behind us; the lake glitters. 
A tall loudspeaker is announcing prizes; 
Another, by the lake, the times of cruises. 
Childhood, once vast with terrors and surprises, 
Is fading to a landscape deep with distance— 
And always the sad piano in the distance, 


Faintly in the distance, a ghostly tinkling 
(O indecipherable blurred harmonies) 
Or some far horn repeating over water 
Its high lost note, cut loose from all harmonies. 
At such times, wakeful, a child will dream the world, 
And this is the world we run to from the world. 


Or the two worlds come together and are one 
On dark, sweet afternoons of storm and of rain, 
And stereopticons brought out and dusted, 
Stacks of old Geographics, or, through the rain, 
A mad wet dash to the local movie palace 
And the shriek, perhaps, of Kane’s white cockatoo. 
(Would this have been summer, 1942?) 


By June the city always seems neurotic. 
But lakes are good all summer for reflection, 
And ours is famed among painters for its blues, 
Yet not entirely sad, upon reflection. 
Why sad at all? Is their wish so unique— 
To anthropomorphize the inanimate 
With a love that masquerades as pure technique? 


O art and the child were innocent together! 
But landscapes grow abstract, like aging parents. 
Soon now the war will shutter the grand hotels, 
And we, when we come back, will come as parents. 
There are no lanterns now strung between pines— 
Only, like history, the stark bare northern pines. 


And after a time the lakefront disappears 
Into the stubborn verses of its exiles 
Or a few gifted sketches of old piers. 
It rains perhaps on the other side of the heart; 
Then we remember, whether we would or no. 
—Nostalgia comes with the smell of rain, you know.

Donald Justice

Men at Forty

Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be
Coming back to.
At rest on a stair landing,
They feel it
Moving beneath them now like the deck of a ship,
Though the swell is gentle.
And deep in mirrors
They rediscover
The face of the boy as he practices tying
His father's tie there in secret
And the face of that father,
Still warm with the mystery of lather.
They are more fathers than sons themselves now.
Something is filling them, something
That is like the twilight sound
Of the crickets, immense,
Filling the woods at the foot of the slope

Behind their mortgaged houses. 

William Fuller

 Chapter Two

The purpose of this chapter is to familiarize us with key terms and how they apply. Through them we come to know the thing, what’s held inside the thing, and who benefits from their combination. This knowledge is so unlike the knowledge of stalks in winter, their elegiac whimpering, or of earth rising up to your shoe-tops––which correlates with consternation and grievous, though temporary, affliction––that we shut our books and stare at it. Whenever such terms fight for space we should listen to what they have to say. Often their uses are far from clear, but without them how could we conceive of what we lack? If they mystify at first, we slowly come to learn that there’s something precious they pursue, over the mountaintops of thought, still warm from the secret of its birth. And with great conceptual industry we begin to rethink our former views, convincing ourselves that if the means by which we achieve what we desire are flawed or false, the sights they evoke might still be real enough, and could be perfect, the foretaste of a state that flutters through all prior states, bringing them to a close.

James Tate

GOODTIME JESUS

Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He has been dream- 

ing so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it?

A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled 

back, skin falling off. But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beau- 

tiful day. How ‘bout some coee? Don’t mind if I do. Take a little 

ride on my donkey. I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.

William Fuller

 

Morning Sutta

flying limpid bramble drop

verdant nebbe of two tartari startled bright concrete stair

William Fuller

 

Bagatelle

a capacity to exist
and to linger

like a straw hat
inching up a hill

take the case of the person
after it was produced

the notes are thinking
that’s not the tune

suddenly the trees
are disappointed

for they have been
tampered with

in abstracto
by the sky
 

William Fuller

Believe 

Believe 

Do you believe..... 
Or is it all an illusion? 
It's so hard to figure out 
in all this confusion 

Is it a way to control 
the world and its masses? 
is it the word coming down from 
the upper classes? 

Is it a comfort thing 
or are you reaching out for something? 
Maybe when you look they 
are both the same thing? 

So many questions that 
are left unanswered. 
So many half suggestions, 
Tell me who will answer all 
these pressing questions? 

Who is qualified enough to say 
Books, preachers or your own mind. 
Does it come from our deepest fears 
Is it something created by mankind 

Is there something out there 
that needs to be explored 
Is there something there 
that we just can't ignore 
Maybe it's the one thing that 
we've all been waiting for 

Is it the never ending song 
that has been left unsung? 
or are we just remembering 
what we were told when 
In days when we were young? 

The mind plays tricks on you 
in your hour of need 
you look for help 
for the things in life 
you hope that will succeed 
but deep in your heart 
you know there nothing in this life 
that is ever guaranteed 

When you mind is full 
of all this congestion, 
To believe or not to believe 
that is the question 
Look deep into your heart 
and then you may find your 
right direction. 

Anne Carson

from NOX

7.1  I want to explain about the Catullus poem (101). Catullus wrote poem 101 for his brother who died in the Troad. Nothing at all is know of the brother except his death. Catullus appears to have travelled from Verona to Asia Minor to stand at the grave. Perhaps he recited the elegy there. I have loved this poem since the first time I read it in high school Latin class and I have tried to translate it a number of times. Nothing in English can capture the passionate, slow surface of a Roman elegy. No one (even in Latin) can approximate Catullan diction, which at its most sorrowful has an air of deep festivity, like one of those trees that turns all its leaves over, silver, in the wind. I never arrived at the translation I would have liked to do of poem 101. But over the years of working at it, I cam to think of translation as a room, not exactly an unknown room, where one gropes for the light switch. I guess it never ends. A brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.

Joe Bolton

 

PAGE

Here is the page, half darkness, half silence, hoping
To find at last the way to you I could not find.

It contains all my boredom, sickness, and desire,
Those things I said in drunkenness, in rage or love.

Like water, it holds its drowned who are without names.
Like time, it was just a way of passing the time.

It lied now and then—I confess—for your pleasure:
Some misguided aim of overcompensation

For what was not only enough but too much.
Reliance upon language was its undoing…

But someday it will be all that is left of me.
Death bothers its margins like gulls along some shore.

Lee Harwood

with John Ashbery, (1965), photograph by Pierre Martory

FIVE PIECES FOR FIVE PHOTOS

                                                           for Lou Esterman wherever he may be.



1. The Surveyor’s Office at the Custom House, Salem,
where Nathaniel Hawthorne worked 1846-1849.

It’s a dream, an escape of sorts that does work in its fashion – the solitary life, “peace”, and 
no demands. A neat life, marred by an ageing fussiness, the fading of friendships, times of
undeniable loneliness. And yet those days when bright sunlight holds the room and there is
an indescribable quiet.

I know what is in every drawer, on each shelf. Inscribe in the ledger these details?     
Hesitant.     No, let it be.

Outside the door the sound of people running down the stairs

4. Sand Storm Sweeping Over Khartoum, 1906.

“It came out of nowhere,” they say. No, it didn’t. Nothing does.

Clouds suddenly cloak the mountains blown from somewhere, on a wavering spring day. If 
we’d paid attention we’d have guessed it. “The Cloud of Unknowing”, we joke, working by
compass along a now featureless ridge.

But there are those who with clear eyes stare ahead, with some sort of certainty in the world.
T.E. Lawrence blue eyed (courtesy of Peter O’Toole), D.H. Lawrence brown eyed (I guess).
Knowing what they’re after through all the clouds and storms, sand or otherwise.

Such confidence is daunting.
Let them fight on. I’ll hunker down behind this rock, or if you like, for the sake of fiction, this
dune. Wait till it’s blown over, then continue. There’s room in this world for us crafty folk
too. Foxes aren’t daft, nor am I.

Lee Harwood

    Photograph by Edward Lucie-Smith (1970)

Today I got very excited when I read some

poems by Mallarmé and Edwin Denby, and later

in the evening, by F.T. Prince.

I don't get “excited” very often,
but today was an exception;
and the fact I got “excited” was only
increased when I realised two of them – Denby
and Prince – are still alive and are probably
now asleep in their beds in nice apartments.

Ted Berrigan has met Edwin Denby.
I don't know anyone who's met F.T. Prince.
I wish I could meet F.T. Prince;
maybe I will some day, but it will have to be soon
as he must be getting old.

Lee Harwood

The Utopia

The table was filled with many objects 

The wild tribesmen in the hills, 
whose very robes were decorated with designs 
of a strangeness & upsetting beauty 
that went much further than the richly coloured silks embroidered there could ever suggest; . . . 

There were piles of books, yet each one 
was of a different size and binding. 
The leathers were so finely dyed. The blues 
& purples, contrasting with the deceptive simplicity 
of the 'natural' tans. 
And this prism & arrangement of colours 
cannot be set down - the fresh arrangements 
& angles possible can only point through a door 
to the word 'infinite' made of white puffy clouds 
floating high in a blue summer sky; 
this has been written there by a small airplane 
that is now returning to its green landing field. 

The table is very old & made of fine mahogany 
polished by generations of servants. 
And through the windows the summer blue skies 
& white clouds spelling a puffy word. 
And on the table the books & examples 
of embroidery of the wild hill tribesmen 
& many large & small objects - all of which 
could not help but rouse a curiosity. 

There are at times people in this room 
- some go to the table - things are moved - 
but the atmosphere here is always that of quiet & catm 
- no one could disturb this. 
And though the people are the only real threat, 

they are all too well trained and aware 
to ever introduce the least clumsiness 
or disturbing element into the room. 

At times it is hard to believe 
what is before one's eyes - 
there is no answer to this except the room itself, 
& maybe the white clouds seen through the window. 

No one in the house was sure of the frontiers 
& the beautiful atlas gilded and bound with blue silk 
was only of antiquarian interest & quite useless 
for the new questions. The whole situation 
was like a painting within a painting & 
that within another & so on & so on - 
until everyone had lost sight of their original landmarks. 
The heath melted into the sky on the horizon. 
And the questions of definition & contrast 
only brought on a series of fruitless searches 
& examinations that made everyone irritable & exhausted. 

Once the surveyors had abandoned their project 
the objects once more took over. 
It would be false to deny the sigh of relief 
there was when this happened & calm returned. 

The bus bumped down the avenue 
& ahead were the mountains & the woods 
that burst into flower as spring settled. 
The plan & the heavy revolver were all quite in keeping 
with this, despite the apparent superficial 
difference & clash of worlds - 
there was really only one world. 
It wasn't easy - admittedly - & someone 
had to stay behind & ... 
The word in the sky had slowly dissolved 
& was now nowhere to he seen. 
But instead the sun was flooding the whole room 

& everything took on a golden aura 
- this meant we were even aware of the 
band of horsemen now riding through the forest 
that surrounded the valley. 

The many details may appear evasive 
but the purpose of the total was obvious 
& uncompromising