terribly

Anne Carson

 Poems
Nov 192010
 
Walks for Girls and Boys
for RC

1. Huron River

We walked by the river its arms all gold
in winter sun like tin.
Workshops of afternoon hummed along elsewhere.
We noted ice at the shore
and ice on plants
and ice from the light fixtures under the railway bridge exploding –
Squid, you said.
Time toppled past us.
There were no trains, no sunset.
Geese lapped at an edge, eyes inward on their sunk city.

2. The Pool in Winter

Walking to the pool in winter I think of you.
And sway on them (thoughts) in the water too, blue, ablaze, you,
who once asked me
Do you ever swim really fast?
and I, wanting to be great to you,
said Oh Yes, busily and pretended to laugh.
The pool has a deep clear sky like a marsh.
Bright as tongues is every light.
So I go on, my life goes, a few lies, a sweep of love, lap
after lap, ordinary motion and something else sent
past vast glass out of sight.

3. Chicago

Shrieks (white) and shades (suede) of dirty cold.
I walked down Montrose to the shore of the lake.
Past a shut Park Bait Shop and a boat
named Temperance II,
boat named Mr Bright Eye,
mud-knobbed fields,
rusted-out barbecue from medieval times.
Dog on the beach cavorting bleakly.
Lake is as ugly as a motel room.
Walls don’t meet. Stains sag. One angel yawns in a horny heaven.
Against north wind I struggle back to where I was warm when I woke.
On the teapot a note from you about breathing.

4. Wild Sex

I walked to a coast.
The moon was in tumult.
It reminded me of of walking down the alley where (you pointed) the pile of bricks
used to be,
in the days when hookers came in from the street
and built a bit of wall there
to take their tricks behind.
Each morning Dave (landlord) unbuilt the wall.
He never put rise bricks anywhere else, like
inside.
In reminded me of a feeling of ‘sudden school’ I get
whenever men mention hookers
casually.
It reminded me of the word glissando.

August Kleinzahler

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

Anniversary

You’d figure the hawk for an isolate thing,
commanding the empyrean,
taking his ease in the thermals and wind
until that retinal flick, the plunge and shriek –
cruelly perfect at what he is.
With crepe myrtle igniting the streets
and flowering pansy underfoot
I’d get out there just after dawn each day,
before the sun made it over the mesquite and honey locust.
Cliff swallows rocketed low over grass,
dragonflies darted above:
every day, on the heels of first birdsong, juice-heads
sleeping rough by the culvert.
Before the heat,
before the ebb and flow of cicada whirr swallowed the world,
when the crepe myrtle was still in bloom,
when it was the flowering pansies’ time in the park and untended lots,
and still a touch of cool in the air.
I remember once, a red-tail perched close by
on a branch or utility pole.
Maybe he came down for a better look,
but I think it was so that I might better see him,
who reigned over these few acres and beyond
and what it was about him so overmastering.
An ugly sheen encouraged some gold in his russet mantle.
His belly was white.
Look at me, he seemed to be insisting.
Behold, a pure wild heartless thing,
beautiful and horrible, nothing in-between.
I one day saw him tearing at his prey:
he was in the crook of a tree, low and close at hand,
fixed on it, drunk with it, mercilessly at it,
the sound like a cleaver tearing through meat,
cruelly what he was, nothing else.
But on another day, not long after, I heard him,
perched high on a branch, calling out,
crying out in distress, piteously,
kee-eeee-arrr, kee-eeee-arrr
a harsh, descending sound, and unrelenting,
kee-eeee-arrr kee-eeee-arrr,
panicked or wounded, terrible in his dismay,
until, suddenly, from some other corner of sky
another hawk flew down to join him,
not right there on the same branch but on another, close by.
And soon after that, off they flew together,
drifting, spiralling, higher and higher
in partnered loops, wheeling and diving,
enraptured by all they were, were able to do,
not as separate beings, but as two.

Selections from the X-Files

 Orts
Nov 192010
 

For the first time I feel time like a heartbeat, the seconds pumping in my breast like a reckoning; the numinous mysteries that once seemed so distant and unreal threatening clarity in the presence of a truth entertained not in youth, but only in its passage. I feel these words as if their meaning were weight being lifted from me, knowing that you will read them and share my burden as I have come to trust no other. That you should know my heart, look into it, finding there the memory and experience that belong to you, that are you, is a comfort to me now as I feel the tethers loose and the prospects darken for the continuance of a journey that began not so long ago, and which began again with a faith shaken and strengthened by your convictions. If not for which I might never have been so strong now as I cross to face you and look at you incomplete, hoping that you will forgive me for not making the journey with you.
Scully’s monologue from “Momento Mori”

Life…is like a box of chocolates. A cheap, thoughtless, perfunctory gift that no one ever asks for. Unreturnable because all you get back is another box of chocolates. So, you’re stuck with mostly undefinable whipped mint crap, mindlessly wolfed down when there’s nothing else to eat while you’re watching the game. Sure, once in a while you get a peanut butter cup or an English toffee but it’s gone too fast and the taste is fleeting. In the end, you’re left with nothing but broken bitsfilled with hardened jelly and teeth shattering nuts, which if you are desperate enough to eat leaves nothing but an empty box of useless brown paper wrappers.
Cancer Man’s monologue from “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man”

Opening Lines

  • The Truth is Out There
  • Resist Or Serve
  • Fight The Future
  • Believe The Lie
  • I Want to Believe
  • Believe to Understand
  • Everything Dies
  • Trust No One
  • Deny Everything
  • Deceive Inveigle Obfuscate
  • Apology is Policy
  • E Pur Si Muove
  • Amor Fati
  • All Lies Lead to the Truth
  • Nothing Important Happened Today
  • The End
  • Dio Ti Ama

    • Three Rilke Translations by Seamus Heaney

     Poems
    Nov 192010
     

    published in London Review of Books, May 5 2005

    Rilke: The Apple Orchard

    Come just after the sun has gone down, watch
    This deepening of green in the evening sward:
    Is it not as if we’d long since garnered
    And stored within ourselves a something which

    From feeling and from feeling recollected,
    From new hope and half-forgotten joys
    And from an inner dark infused with these,
    Issues in thoughts as ripe as windfalls scattered

    Under trees here like trees in a Dürer woodcut –
    Pendent, pruned, the husbandry of years
    Gravid in them until the fruit appears –
    Ready to serve, replete with patience, rooted

    in the knowledge that no matter how above
    Measure or expectation, all must be
    Harvested and yielded, when a long life willingly
    Cleaves to what’s willed and grows in quiet resolve.

    Rilke: After the Fire

    Early autumn morning hesitated,
    Shying at newness, an emptiness behind
    Scorched linden trees still crowding in around
    The moorland house, now just one more wallstead

    Where youngsters in a pack from god knows where
    Went rip-roaring wild and yelled and wrecked.
    Yet all of them fell silent when he appeared,
    The son of the place, and with along forked stick

    Dragged an out of shape old can or kettle
    From under hot, charred, half-consumed house-beams;
    And then, like one with a doubtful tale to tell,
    Turned to the others present, at great pains

    To make them realise what had stood so.
    For now that it was gone, it all seemed
    Far stranger: more fantastical than Pharaoh.
    And he was changed: as from a far-off land.

    Rilke: Roman Campagna

    Out of the sluggish, clogged-up city, which
    Would rather sleep on, undisturbed, and dream
    of its soaring baths, the road to the fever marsh –
    The Appian tomb-road – heads past each last farm

    And farmhouse, out under the malign
    Gaze of windows that fasten on its back,
    Unnerving it, driving it, ram-stam, on
    Until, imploring, out of breath, in panic

    And with a quick look backwards, to make sure
    The windows have stopped watching, it entrusts
    Its emptiness to the skies. And as the far

    Aqueducts come striding up, alerted,
    The skies that have absorbed its emptiness
    Now substitute their own. Which will outlast it.

    Philip Larkin – Aubade

     Poems
    Nov 192010
     


    I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
    Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
    In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
    Till then I see what’s really always there:
    Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
    Making all thought impossible but how
    And where and when I shall myself die.
    Arid interrogation: yet the dread
    Of dying, and being dead,
    Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

    The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
    —The good not done, the love not given, time
    Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because
    An only life can take so long to climb
    Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
    But at the total emptiness for ever,
    The sure extinction that we travel to
    And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
    Not to be anywhere,
    And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

    This is a special way of being afraid
    No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
    That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
    Created to pretend we never die,
    And specious stuff that says No rational being
    Can fear a thing it will not feel    , not seeing
    That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,
    No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
    Nothing to love or link with,
    The anaesthetic from which none come round.

    And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
    A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
    That slows each impulse down to indecision.
    Most things may never happen: this one will,
    And realisation of it rages out
    In furnace-fear when we are caught without
    People or drink. Courage is no good:
    It means not scaring others. Being brave
    Lets no one off the grave.
    Death is no different whined at than withstood.

    Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
    It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
    Have always known, know that we can’t escape,
    Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.
    Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
    In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
    Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
    The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
    Work has to be done.
    Postmen like doctors go from house to house.