Raymond Carver

 

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Raymond Carver

 from Feathers

I tell her I fell in

love with her because of her hair. I tell her I might stop loving her if she cut it. Sometimes I call her “Swede.” She could pass for a Swede. Those times together in the evening she’d brush her hair and we’d wish out loud for things we didn’t have. We wished for a new car, that’s one of the things we wished for. And we wished we could spend a couple of weeks in Canada. But one thing we didn’t wish for was kids. The reason we didn’t have kids was that we didn’t want kids. Maybe sometime, we said to each other. But right then, we were waiting. We thought we might keep on waiting. Some nights we went to a movie. Other nights we just stayed in and watched TV. Sometimes Fran baked things for me and we’d eat whatever it was all in a sitting.

Raymond Carver

from Cathedral

I stared some more at the cathedral before the picture flipped off into the countryside. There was no use. I turned to the blind man and said, “To begin with, they’re very tall.” I was looking around the room for clues. “They reach way up. Up and up. Toward the sky. They’re so big, some of them, they have to have these supports. To help hold them up, so to speak. These supports are called buttresses. They remind of viaducts, for some reason. But maybe you don’t know viaducts, either? Sometimes the cathedrals have devils and such carved into the front. Sometimes lords and ladies. Don’t ask me why this is,” I said.

He was nodding. The whole upper part of his body seemed to be moving back and forth.

“I’m not doing so good, am I?” I said.

He stopped nodding and leaned forward on the edge of the sofa. As he listened to me, he was running his fingers through his beard. I wasn’t getting through to him, I could see that. But he waited for me to go on just the same. He nodded, like he was trying to encourage me. I tried to think what else to say. “They’re really big,” I said. They’re massive. They’re built of stone. Marble, too, sometimes. In those olden days, when they built cathedrals, men wanted to be close to God. In those olden days, God was an important part of everyone’s life. You could tell this from their cathedral-building. 

Robert Duncan

from

A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar

I

The light foot hears you and the brightness begins
god-step at the margins of thought,
      quick adulterous tread at the heart.   
Who is it that goes there?
      Where I see your quick face
notes of an old music pace the air,   
torso-reverberations of a Grecian lyre.

In Goya’s canvas Cupid and Psyche   
have a hurt voluptuous grace
bruised by redemption. The copper light   
falling upon the brown boy’s slight body
is carnal fate that sends the soul wailing   
up from blind innocence, ensnared   
      by dimness
into the deprivations of desiring sight.

But the eyes in Goya’s painting are soft,
diffuse with rapture absorb the flame.
Their bodies yield out of strength.
      Waves of visual pleasure
wrap them in a sorrow previous to their impatience.

A bronze of yearning, a rose that burns   
      the tips of their bodies, lips,
ends of fingers, nipples. He is not wingd.   
His thighs are flesh, are clouds
      lit by the sun in its going down,
hot luminescence at the loins of the visible.

      But they are not in a landscape.   
      They exist in an obscurity.

The wind spreading the sail serves them.
The two jealous sisters eager for her ruin
      serve them.
That she is ignorant, ignorant of what Love will be,   

      serves them.
The dark serves them.
The oil scalding his shoulder serves them,
serves their story. Fate, spinning,
      knots the threads for Love.

Jealousy, ignorance, the hurt . . . serve them.

Raymond Carver

 

Bicycles, Muscles, Cigarettes

begins: It had been two days since Evan Hamilton had stopped smoking
and it seemed to him that everything he'd said and thought for the two
days somehow suggested cigarettes. He looked at his hands under
the kitchen light. He sniffed his knuckles and his fingers.

"I can smell it," he said,

And ends with a single sentence:
Hamilton left the door open then he thought the better of it and
closed it halfway.

---What a lovely, maybe uncomplicated, close. Not what we wanted,
but what we get. A good simple end to a good simple story.

Jack Spicer

John Latta's quote:

Jack Spicer, out of After Lorca (1957):

When I translate one of your poems and I come across words I do not understand, I always guess at their meanings. I am inevitably right. A really perfect poem (no one yet has written one) could be perfectly translated by a person who did not know one word of the language it was written in. A really perfect poem has an infinitely small vocabulary.
      It is very difficult. We want to transfer the immediate object, the immediate emotion to the poem—and yet the immediate always has hundreds of its own words clinging to it, short-lived and tenacious as barnacles. And it is wrong to scrape them off and substitute others. A poet is a time mechanic not an embalmer . . .
      Most of my friends like words too well. They set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection—as if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences. Others pick up words from the streets, from their bars, from their offices and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, “See what I have collected from the American language. Look at my butterflies, my stamps, my old shoes!”

Bernadette Mayer

After Catullus and Horace

only the manners of centuries ago can teach me
how to address you my lover as who you are
O Sestius, how could you put up with my children
thinking all the while you were bearing me as in your mirror it doesn't matter anymore if spring wreaks its fiery

or lamblike dawn on my new-found asceticism, some joke I wouldn't sleep with you or any man if you paid me
and most of you poets don't have the cash anyway
so please rejoin your fraternal books forever

while you miss in your securest sleep Ms. Rosy-fingered dawn who might've been induced to digitalize a part of you
were it not for your self-induced revenge of undoneness
it's good to live without a refrigerator! why bother

to chill the handiwork of Ceres and of Demeter?
and of the lonesome Sappho. let's have it warm for now.

Bernadette Mayer

for: max and alyssa

malyyssax worelish
tomorrow we'll see the lightbulb in schenectady,
go to gems farms in schodack, then on to howe caverns, then to see the wayne thiebaud show at the clark
where we'll stop to notice the melting ice sculpture
then excellent spinach sap soup at the thai restaurant
in williamstown, a brief stop at the octagonal museum, on to northampton to see the smith college art museum & greenhouse where we'll see a green heron

it would be nice to be able to walk today
so we could go to opus 40 in saugerties
followed by a dinner of oysters & mussels at the bear then on to check out the sheep at the sheepherding inn where we're able to buy riccotta cheese
which means twice-baked, with which we're able
to make a pizza with fresh figs gotten from the berry farm

war what is it good for? absolutely nothing

Bernadette Mayer

Incandescent War Poem Sonnet

Even before I saw the chambered nautilus 
I wanted to sail not in the us navy 
Tonight I'm waiting for you, your letter 
At the same time his letter, the view of you 
By him and then by me in the park, no rhymes 
I saw you, this is in prose, no it's not 
Sitting with the molluscs & anemones in an 
Empty autumn enterprise baby you look pretty 
With your long eventual hair, is love king? 
What's this? A sonnet? Love's a babe we know that 
I'm coming up, I'm coming, Shakespeare only stuck 
To one subject but I'll mention nobody said 
You have to get young Americans some ice cream 

In the artificial light in which she woke 

Bernadette Mayer

[Sonnet] You jerk you didn't call me up

You jerk you didn't call me up

I haven't seen you in so long

You probably have a fucking tan

& besides that instead of making love tonight

You're drinking your parents to the airport

I'm through with you bourgeois boys

All you ever do is go back to ancestral comforts

Only money can get—even Catullus was rich but

Nowadays you guys settle for a couch

By a soporific color cable t.v. set

Instead of any arc of love, no wonder

The G.I. Joe team blows it every other time

Wake up! It's the middle of the night

You can either make love or die at the hands of the Cobra Commander

Bernadette Mayer

ABOUT THE WORD DIVINATION

The furtive fig does figure like a fiction
INTO THE PIZZAS OF futurity, but it’s a non-fiction fig!
going well with fungus & gorgonzola
& a figment of lovage & fiddlehead ferns
………………a fraction of
there’s somethng fishy in Denmark
in the fiduciary field, i tend to fidget
i think i have fibromyalgia or something
so i take Flomax 2c a day to find my savior
but i’m sorry to say, we have no finch sock
………this calendar year, which is the field
………guide to the fancy of my fortune

SUPPLE TRILLIUM LOVELORN LOUTS

The opposite of sonnet is tennos, eh?
Two sonnets would be owt tennoses, three
would be eerth, etc. When you land in the land
of the sonnet, watch out for the barbed wire of
conclusions. There are no warming signs. The
whole area might be full of thorns, so you will know
not to enter, or even reform. I’m just saying
a sonnet is like a little room, just big enough for a
bear cub. He or she can’t even turn around in it.
If a sonnet is injured, you’ll have to carry it
on a stretcher. Be careful of the couplet
or tail. If it is a baby sonnet, you can bring
it home.

Bernadette Mayer

We Eat Out Together

My heart is a fancy place
Where giant reddish-purple cauliflowers
& white ones in French & English are outside
Waiting to welcome you to a boat
Over the low black river for a big dinner
There’s alot of choice among the foods
Even a tortured lamb served in pieces
En croute on a plate so hot as a rack
Of clouds blown over the cold filthy river
We are entitled to see anytime while we
Use the tablecovers to love each other
Publicly dishing out imitative luxuries
To show off poetry’s extreme generosity
Then home in the heart of a big limousine