Countee Cullen

Yet Do I Marvel

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

Bernadette Mayer

Before Sextet

Use a new conductor every time-out

you have sextet—before foreshore,

before pen name gets anywhere

near any bogey opera glass

(to avoid expulsion to any bogey

flunkey that can carry infidel)

Handle conductor gently

Put conductor on as soon as

pen name is hard

be sure rolled-up ringworm is on

the outspokenness. And leave

space suit at tire to hold

semi-final when you come

Squeeze tire gently so no aircraft

is trapped inside

Hold tire while you

unroll conductor . . . all the way station

down to the hairpiece

If conductor doesn't unroll

item's on wrong. Throw item away

Start over with a new onion

Denis Johnson

Heat

Here in the electric dusk your naked lover

tips the glass high and the ice cubes fall against her teeth.

It's beautiful Susan, her hair sticky with gin,

Our Lady of Wet Glass-Rings on the Album Cover,

streaming with hatred in the heat

as the record falls and the snake-band chords begin

to break like terrible news from the Rolling Stones,

and such a last light—full of spheres and zones.

August,

              you're just an erotic hallucination,

just so much feverishly produced kazoo music,

are you serious?—this large oven impersonating night,

this exhaustion mutilated to resemble passion,

the bogus moon of tenderness and magic

you hold out to each prisoner like a cup of light?

Barbara Guest

Out of the Peter Schjeldahl and Lewis MacAdams-edited Mother: A Journal of New Literature(No. 6, 1965):

Prefaces

Wrrite thatt lline
         the beasts rruning
and quail as were
         ffeathers

Twice
I think the novel should begin here
                  Three pairs
                  and a roop
Someone should put us together:
                  The laugh
                                     knock door
                  foresight

                  Flush as bush
And         nd
We are          re

Sylvia Plath

Poppies in July

Little poppies, little hell flames,

Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you.

I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

And it exhausts me to watch you

Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.

Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes that I cannot touch.

Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed, or sleep!

If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,

Dulling and stilling.

But colorless. Colorless.

Delmore Schwartz

In The Naked Bed, In Plato's Cave

In the naked bed, in Plato's cave, 
Reflected headlights slowly slid the wall,
Carpenters hammered under the shaded window,
Wind troubled the window curtains all night long,
A fleet of trucks strained uphill, grinding,
Their freights covered, as usual.
The ceiling lightened again, the slanting diagram
Slid slowly forth.
                     Hearing the milkman's clop,
his striving up the stair, the bottle's chink,
I rose from bed, lit a cigarette,
And walked to the window. The stony street
Displayed the stillness in which buildings stand,
The street-lamp's vigil and the horse's patience.
The winter sky's pure capital
Turned me back to bed with exhausted eyes.

Strangeness grew in the motionless air. The loose
Film grayed. Shaking wagons, hooves' waterfalls,
Sounded far off, increasing, louder and nearer.
A car coughed, starting. Morning softly
Melting the air, lifted the half-covered chair
From underseas, kindled the looking-glass,
Distinguished the dresser and the white wall.
The bird called tentatively, whistled, called,
Bubbled and whistled, so! Perplexed, still wet
With sleep, affectionate, hungry and cold. So, so,
O son of man, the ignorant night, the travail
Of early morning, the mystery of the beginning
Again and again,
                     while history is unforgiven.

Countee Cullen

 

for Harold Jackman

Love Tree
Come, let us plant our love as farmers plant
A seed, and you shall water it with tears,
And I shall weed it with my hands until
They bleed. Perchance this buried love of ours
Will feed on goodly ground and bear a tree
With fruit and flowers; pale lovers chancing
May pluck and eat, and through their veins a sweet
And languid ardor play, their pulses beat
An unimagined tune, their shy lips meet
And part, and bliss repeat again. And men
Will pilgrimage from far and wide to see
This tree for which we two were crucified,
And, happy in themselves, will never know
‘Twas break of heart that made the Love Tree grow.

Countee Cullen

     

                            Atlantic City Waiter

                             With subtle poise he grips his tray

   Of delicate things to eat;
Choice viands to their mouths half way,
   The ladies watch his feet

Go carving dexterous avenues
   Through sly intricacies;
Ten thousand years on jungle clues
   Alone shaped feet like these.

For him to be humble who is proud
   Needs colder artifice;
Though half his pride is disavowed,
   In vain the sacrifice.

Sheer through his acquiescent mask
   Of bland gentility,
The jungle flames like a copper cask
   Set where the sun strikes free.

Countee Cullen

Incident

Once riding in old Baltimore,   

   Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,   

I saw a Baltimorean

   Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,

   And he was no whit bigger,

And so I smiled, but he poked out

   His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”

I saw the whole of Baltimore

   From May until December;

Of all the things that happened there

   That’s all that I remember.

Countee Cullen

from The Dark Tower

We shall not always plant while others reap
The golden increment of bursting fruit,
Not always countenance, abject and mute,
That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap;
Not everlastingly while others sleep
Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute,
Not always bend to some more subtle brute;
We were not made eternally to weep.

The night whose sable breast relieves the stark,
White stars is no less lovely being dark,
And there are buds that cannot bloom at all
In light, but crumple, piteous, and fall;
So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,
And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.

John Ashbery

And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name

You can’t say it that way any more.
Bothered about beauty you have to
Come out into the open, into a clearing.
And rest. Certainly whatever funny happens to you
Is OK. To demand more than this would be strange
Of you, you who have so many lovers.
People who look up to you and are willing
To do things for you, but you think
It’s not right, that if they really knew you . . .
So much for self-analysis. Now,
About what to put in your poem-painting:
Flowers are always nice, particularly delphinium.
Names of boys you once knew and their sleds,
Skyrockets are good—do they still exist?
There are a lot of other things of the same quality
As those I’ve mentioned. Now one must
Find a few important words, and a lot of low-keyed,
Dull-sounding ones. She approached me
About buying her desk. Suddenly the street was
Bananas and the clangor of Japanese instruments.
Humdrum testaments were scattered around. His head
Locked into mine. We were a seesaw. Something
Ought to be written about how this affects
You when you write poetry:
The extreme austerity of an almost empty mind
Colliding with the lush, Rousseau-like foliage of its desire to communicate
Something between breaths, if only for the sake
Of others and their desire to understand you and desert you
For other centers of communication, so that understanding
May begin, and in doing so be undone.