Amy Clampitt

Vacant Lot With Pokeweed

Tufts, follicles, grubstake
biennial rosettes, a low-
life beach-blond scruff of
couch grass: notwithstanding
the interglinting dregs

of wholesale upheaval and
dismemberment, weeds do not
hesitate, the wheeling
rise of the ailanthus halts
at nothing—and look! here's

a pokeweed, sprung up from seed
dropped by some vagrant, that's
seized a foothold: a magenta-
girdered bower, gazebo twirls
of blossom rounding into

raw-buttoned, garnet-rodded
fruit one more wayfarer
perhaps may salvage from
the season's frittering,
the annual wreckage.

Amy Clampitt

 

A Catalpa Tree On West Twelfth Street

While the sun stops, or
seems to, to define a term
for the indeterminable,
the human aspect, here
in the West Village, spindles
to a mutilated dazzle—

niched shards of solitude
embedded in these brownstone
walkups such that the Hudson
at the foot of Twelfth Street
might be a thing that's 
done with mirrors: definition

by deracination—grunge,
hip-hop, Chinese takeout,
co-ops—while the globe's
elixir caters, year by year,
to the resurgence of this
climbing tentpole, frilled and stippled

yet again with bloom
to greet the solstice:
What year was it it over-
took the fire escape? The
roof's its next objective.
Will posterity (if there 

is any)pause to regret
such layerings of shade,
their cadenced crests' trans-
valuation of decay, the dust
and perfume of an all
too terminable process?

Franz Wright

 Cloudless Snowfall

Great big flakes like white ashes

at nightfall descending

abruptly everywhere

and vanishing

in this hand like the host

on somebody’s put-out tongue, she

turns the crucifix over

to me, still warm

from her touch two years later

and thank you,

I say all alone—

Vast whisp-whisp of wingbeats

awakens me and I look up

at a minute-long string of black geese

following low past the moon the white

course of the snow-covered river and

by the way thank You for

keeping Your face hidden, I

can hardly bear the beauty of this world.

Jack Kerouac

 

from Dharma Bums

“Han Shan you see was a Chinese Scholar who got sick of the big city and the world and took off to hide in the mountains.”

“Say, that sounds like you.”

“In those days you could really do that. He stayed in caves not far from Buddhist monasteries in the T’ang Hsing district of T’ien T’ai and his only human friend was the funny Zen Lunatic Shih-te who had a job sweeping out the monastery with a straw broom. Shih-te was a poet too but he never wrote much down. Every now and then Han Shan would come down from Cold Mountain in his bark clothing and come into the warm kitchen and wait for food, but none of the monks would ever feed him because he didn’t want to join the order and answer the meditation bell three times a day. You see why in some of his utterances, like—listen and I’ll look here and read from the Chinese,” and I bent over his shoulder and watched him read from big wild crowtracks of Chinese signs: “Climbing up Cold Mountain path, Cold Mountain path goes on and on, long gorge choked with scree and boulders, wide creek and mist-blurred grass, moss is Slippery though there’s been no rain, pine sings but there’s no wind, who can leap the world’s ties and sit with me among white clouds?”

Donald Barthelme

photograph by Ben Martin (1964)

I spoke to my father. “How is business?” “If Alaska makes it,” he said, “I can buy a Hasselblad. And we’re keeping an eye on Hawaii.” Then he photographed my veteran face, f.6 at 300. My father once a cheerleader at a great Eastern school. Jumping in the air and making fierce angry down-the-field gestures at the top of his leap.

That’s not a criticism. We have to have cheerleaders.

—“See the Moon?” (1966)

Vladimir Nabokov

 “Suddenly for no earthly reason I felt immensely sorry for him and longed to say something real, something with wings and a heart, but the birds I wanted settled on my shoulders and head only later when I was alone and not in need of words.” 

― Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

“There is an old American saying 'He who lives in a glass house should not try to kill two birds with one stone.” 
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin

Vladimir Nabokov

outside the DM Plaza Motel, Ithaca, New York, 1958. (Carl Mydans)

 “A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.” 

― Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark

Vladimir Nabokov

“Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita. Did she have a precursor? She did, indeed she did. In point of fact, there might have been no Lolita at all had I not loved, one summer, an initial girl-child. In a princedom by the sea. Oh when? About as many years before Lolita was born as my age was that summer. You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”

Mark Strand

Photograph by Timothy-Greenfield Sanders (1980)

Eating Poetry

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

eating PoetrThe librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

Mark Strand

Fiction

I think of innocent lives

Of people in novels who know they’ll die

But not that the novel will end. How different they are

From us. Here, the moon stares dumbly down,

Through scattered clouds, onto the sleeping town,

And the wind rounds up fallen leaves,

And somebody—namely me—deep in his chair,

Riffles the pages left, knowing there’s not 

Much time for the man and woman in the rented room,

For the red light over the door, for the iris

Tossing its shadow against the wall; not much time

For the soldiers under the trees that line

The river, for the wounded being hauled away

To the cities of the interior where they will stay;

The war that raged for years will come to a close,

And so will everything else, except for a presence

Hard to define, a trace, like the scent of grass

After a night of rain or the remains of a voice

That lets us know without spelling it out

Not to despair; if the end is come, it too will pass.

Charles Simic

Stone

 

Go inside a stone

That would be my way.

Let somebody else become a dove

Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.

I am happy to be a stone.

 

From the outside the stone is a riddle:

No one knows how to answer it.

Yet within, it must be cool and quiet

Even though a cow steps on it full weight,

Even though a child throws it in a river,

The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed

To the river bottom

Where the fishes come to knock on it

And listen.

 

I have seen sparks fly out

When two stones are rubbed.

So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;

Perhaps there is a moon shining

From somewhere, as though behind a hill—

Just enough light to make out

The strange writings, the star charts

On the inner walls.

A. R. Ammons

Loss

When the sun 

falls behind the sumac 

thicket the 

wild 

yellow daisies 

in diffuse evening shade 

lose their 

rigorous attention 

and 

half-wild with loss 

turn 

any way the wind does 

and lift their 

petals up 

to float 

off their stems 

and go 

Galway Kinnell

 

Shelley

 

When I was twenty the one true

free spirit I had heard of was Shelley,

Shelley who wrote tracts advocating

atheism, free love, the emancipation

atheism, free love, the emancipation

of women, and the abolition of wealth and class,

a lively version of Plato’s Symposium,

lyrics on the bliss and brevity

of romantic love, and complex

poems on love’s difficulties, Shelley

who, I learned later—perhaps

almost too late—remarried Harriet,

then pregnant with their second child,

and a few months later ran off with Mary,

already pregnant with their first, bringing

along Mary’s stepsister Claire,

who very likely also became his lover,

 

and in this malaise à trois, which Shelley

said would be a “paradise of exiles,”

they made their life, along with the spectres

of Harriet, who drowned herself in the Serpentine,

and of Mary’s half-sister Fanny, who, fixated

on Shelley, killed herself, and with the spirits

of adored but neglected children

conceived almost incidentally

in the pursuit of Eros—Harriet’s

Ianthe and Charles, denied to Shelley

and sent out to foster parents, Mary’s

Clara, dead at one, her Willmouse, dead at three,

Elena, the baby in Naples, almost surely

Shelley’s own, whom he “adopted” but then

left behind, dead at one and a half,

and Allegra, Claire’s daughter by Byron,

whom Byron packed off to the convent

at Bagnacavallo at four, dead at five—

 

and in those days, before I knew

any of this, I thought I followed Shelley,

who thought he was following radiant desire.

Amy Clampitt

The Edge of the Hurricane

 

Wheeling, the careening

winds arrive with lariats

and tambourines of rain.

Torn-to-pieces, mud-dark

flounces of Caribbean

 

cumulus keep passing,

keep passing.    By afternoon

rinsed transparencies begin

to open overhead, Mediterranean

windowpanes of clearness

 

crossed by young gusts’

vaporous fripperies, liquid

footprints flying, lacewing

leaf-shade brightening

and fading. Sibling

 

gales stand up on point

in twirling fouettés

of debris. The day ends

bright, cloud-wardrobe

packed away. Nightfall

 

hangs up a single moon

bleached white as laundry,

serving notice yet again how

levity can also trample,

drench, wring and mangle.

Robert Duncan

Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow

 

as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,   

that is not mine, but is a made place,

 

that is mine, it is so near to the heart,   

an eternal pasture folded in all thought   

so that there is a hall therein

 

that is a made place, created by light   

wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.

 

Wherefrom fall all architectures I am

I say are likenesses of the First Beloved   

whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady.

 

She it is Queen Under The Hill

whose hosts are a disturbance of words within words   

that is a field folded.

 

It is only a dream of the grass blowing   

east against the source of the sun

in an hour before the sun’s going down

 

whose secret we see in a children’s game   

of ring a round of roses told.

 

Often I am permitted to return to a meadow   

as if it were a given property of the mind   

that certain bounds hold against chaos,

 

that is a place of first permission,   

everlasting omen of what is.

 

Lucie Brock-Broido

 You Have Harnessed Yourself Ridiculously to This World

 

 

Tell the truth I told me                                When I couldn’t speak.

 

Sorrow’s a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship                Or a child

 

Who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer 

 

In the 1930s                                       Toward the iron lung of polio.

 

According to the census I am unmarried                And unchurched.

 

                                    The woman in the field dressed only in the sun.

 

Too far gone to halt the Arctic Cap’s catastrophe, big beautiful

 

Blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of  ice.

 

I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible.

 

For whom left am I first?

 

                                                          We have come to terms with our Self

 

Like a marmoset getting out of  her Great Ape suit.

Wallace Stevens

The River of Rivers in Connecticut

 There is a great river this side of Stygia

Before one comes to the first black cataracts

And trees that lack the intelligence of trees.

 

In that river, far this side of Stygia,

The mere flowing of the water is a gayety,

Flashing and flashing in the sun. On its banks,

 

No shadow walks. The river is fateful,

Like the last one. But there is no ferryman.

He could not bend against its propelling force.

 

It is not to be seen beneath the appearances

That tell of it. The steeple at Farmington

Stands glistening and Haddam shines and sways.

 

It is the third commonness with light and air,

A curriculum, a vigor, a local abstraction . . .

Call it, one more, a river, an unnamed flowing,

 

Space-filled, reflecting the seasons, the folk-lore

Of each of the senses; call it, again and again,

The river that flows nowhere, like a sea.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly

The Leaving

 

My father said I could not do it,

but all night I picked the peaches.

The orchard was still, the canals ran steadily.

I was a girl then, my chest its own walled garden.

How many ladders to gather an orchard?

I had only one and a long patience with lit hands

and the looking of the stars which moved right through me

the way the water moved through the canals with a voice

that seemed to speak of this moonless gathering

and those who had gathered before me.

I put the peaches in the pond's cold water,

all night up the ladder and down, all night my hands

twisting fruit as if I were entering a thousand doors,

all night my back a straight road to the sky.

And then out of its own goodness, out

of the far fields of the stars, the morning came,

and inside me was the stillness a bell possesses

just after it has been rung, before the metal

begins to long again for the clapper's stroke.

The light came over the orchard.

The canals were silver and then were not.

and the pond was--I could see as I laid

the last peach in the water--full of fish and eyes.

Kay Ryan

Bad Day

 

Not every day

is a good day

for the elfin tailor.

Some days

the stolen cloth

reveals what it 

was made for:

a handsome weskit

or the jerkin

of an elfin sailor.

Other days

the tailor

sees a jacket

in his mind

and sets about

to find the fabric.

But some days

neither the idea

nor the material

presents itself;

and these are 

the hard days

for the tailor elf.