Anne Carson – On Discovering at Dinner that Adam Zagajewski and I Share a Birthday

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

metals talking among themselves, metals that first meet above the earth..

Adam Zagajewski, Another Beauty

I thought about it walking home.

One ot chose relentlessly clear midwest II idnights frozen all the way up to a half
moon loose in hers team in blueblack vastness. Silent silent. Agnostic night.
No blackbirds.
Share a birthday! –

were we

negatives lying side by side in the developer’s tray while certain weird red minutes
drained away? Or loitering together in that lobby in heaven where June 21st souls
all gather to wait
and Adam and I

[avoiding Sartre]

ducked to a corner to talk about scansion. He mentioned, as always, Catullus.
I would have liked a cup of tea. This was shortly
after the big bang.
Microwaves

hissed past us

like bad radio stations. There was a desolation here and there in our minds.
Knives were singing, Adam made a note about this. A philosopher (not Sartre)
stood in a knot of disciples
expounding

the difference between

[two concepts that must be distinguished]. Most wore shaggy furs or sheepskins,
the philosopher a heavy sweater. ‘It will be warmer after we’re born,’
I said to Adam
and he said,

‘Of this I am not sure.’

Rabindranath Tagore – Unending Love

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times,
In life after life, in age after age forever.
My spell-bound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms

In life after life, in age after age forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together,
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:

You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount
At the heart of time love of one for another.
We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell –
Old love, but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you,
The love of all man’s days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life,
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours –
And the songs of every poet both past and forever.

Robert Graves – 2 Poems

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

A LOVER SINCE CHILDHOOD

Tangled in thought am I,
Stumble in speech do I?
Do I blunder and blush for the reason why?
Wander aloof do I,
Lean over gates and sigh,
Making friends with the bee and the butterfly?

If thus and thus I do,
Dazed by the thought of you,
Walking my sorrowful way in the early dew,
My heart cut through and through
In this despair for you,
Starved for a word or look will my hope renew;

Give then a thought for me
Walking so miserably,
Wanting relief in the friendship of flower or tree;
Do but remember, we
Once could in love agree,
Swallow your pride, let us be as we used to be.

THE THIEVES

Lovers in the act dispense
With such meum-tuum sense
As might warningly reveal
What they must not pick or steal,
And their nostrum is to say:
‘I and you are both away.’
After, when they disentwine
You from me and yours from mine,
Neither can be certain who
Was that I whose mine was you.
To the act again they go
More completely not to know.
Theft is theft and raid is raid
Though reciprocally made.
Lovers, the conclusion is
Doubled sighs and jealousies
In a single heart that grieves
For lost honour among thieves.

John Donne – The Sun Rising

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.

Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think ?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th’ Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left’st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw’st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, “All here in one bed lay.”

She’s all states, and all princes I ;
Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour’s mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world’s contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that’s done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.

Gabriel Levin – Jerome

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

<em>for Shimon Sandbank</em>

Walled in by the desert, he had no patience
for the solitary rigours of monks in rags
and, notwithstanding the brushwork of pinched
flesh-tints (the wasting away and slag
of self-immolation) displayed on canvas and panel,
the barometer of his affections drew him
elsewhere and turned him into a pupil
of Hebrew, “this language of hissing and grim
aspirates”. But I see him as Antonello
da Messina – who brought to Venice the secrets
of oil glazing – saw him: in the airiness
of his study, where the play of light mellows
chapter and verse, propped on his desk,
on which he trains his mind in muted bliss.
– He who’d pleaded, “Step out, I beg you, a little
from your body,” scrapes back his chair
and treads three steps down, while the peaceable
lion pads in the cloister with nowhere
to go, lost in a perspective that fools the eye
and bids the heart to linger in the domed
mansion, at noon-tide, amid the cries
of swifts, glimpsed through the high windows,
seeding the air. To live and move
under the veritable Bethlehem skies, and thrust
the hand into the flame translating the Good
Book for everyman, and day by day to prove
how words might heave and break the crust,
the hard Judean soil, and serve as food.