Anne Carson – Triple Sonnet of the Plush Pony

 Poems
Nov 192010
 
I

Do you think of your saliva as a personal possession or as something you can sell?
What about tears? What about semen? Linguists tell
us to use the terms alienable and inalienable
to make this distinction intelligible.
E.g. English speakers call both blood and faeces alienable on a normal day
but saliva, sweat, tears and bowels they do not give away.
Bananas and buttocks, in Papua New Guinea, belong to the inalienable class
while genitalia and skin of banana are not held onto nearly so fast.

Such thinking will affect how a word like rape is defined
or how sorcerers aim their spells or how you feel in your mind
when you address animals. Of course cows and cats,
sheep, pigs, donkeys, dogs and rats
depend on their owner to keep or dispose.
But your pony you cannot sensibly classify with those.

II

Another thee.
A summer’s day.
Double vantage me.
Never to repay.
And Will in overplus.
Making addition thus –
your pony is all these to you – and more:
he can detect the smell of danger

and will not take you through a door
if there is doom or pain there.
So at the end of his life if you want to sell him for meat
you’ll have to change the pronoun with which you greet
at dawn his shaggy head,
at dawn his shaggy head.

III

A body in the dawn.
A body in the cold.
A body its breath.
Its breath a plume.
A dance a plume.
A dance not thou.
A thou, not thee.
Thou, breath.

There stands.
Breath, plume.
How cold is.
A dawn is.
How still stands.
Thy breath.

After a flight

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

Eugenio Montale
(translated from the Italian by Jonathan Galassi)

There were birches, stands of them, to hide
the hospital where someone suffering
from too much love of life was bored
hanging between everything and nothing.
A cricket chanted, perfectly in key
with the therapeutic plan,
and the cuckoo you’d already heard
more economically in Indonesia.
There were birches, a Swiss nurse.
three or four half-wits in the courtyard.
an album of exotic birds, a phone,
some chocolates on the nightstand.
And I was there, of course, and other nuisances,
trying to provide the kind of cheer
you would have overwhelmed us with, if only
we’d had eyes to see. I had them.

I cannot breathe without you:
Keats to Fanny Brawne,
whom he wrested from oblivion. It’s strange
my case, if you’ll permit, is different:
I breathe much better when you’re not around.
Nearness brings us moments to remember.
but not the way they happened:
as we imagined them, like smelling salts
for the future, just in case,
or medicated vinegar (but no one faints today
over trifles like a shattered heart).
It’s these hoarded facts that take the blow,
but add the corpse and the scaffolding won’t hold.
I won’t try to explain. I know that if you read me
you believe that you contributed
the impetus I needed, and the rest
(as long as it’s not silence) matters little.

These are the first and last sections of Montale’s last great “story-poem” from the late 1960s and concerns the old poet’s infatuation with a beautiful, emotionally unstable younger woman. The complete translation is in Eugenio Montale, Selected Poems, translated by Jonathan Galassi, Charles Wright, and David Young, edited by David Young, Oberlin College Press, 2004).

C. K. Williams – Marina

 Poems
Nov 192010
 


As I’m reading Tsvetayeva’s essays,
“Art in the Light of Conscience,”
stunning- “Art, a series of answers
to which there are no questions” –
a tiny insect I don’t recognize
is making its way across my table.
It has lovely transparent wings
but for some reason they drag behind
as it treks the expanse of formica,
and descends into a crack.

“To each answer before it evaporates,
our question”: composed in Paris
during the difficult years of exile.
But which of her years weren’t?
This at least was before the husband,
a spy, an assassin, went back,
then she, too, with her son,
to the Soviet madhouse, back.
“This being outgalloped by answers
is inspiration.” Outgalloped!

Still lugging its filigreed train,
the insect emerges: fragile, distracted,
it can’t even trace a straight line
but it circumnavigates the table.
Does it know it’s back where it began?

Still, it perseveres, pushing
courageously on, one inch, another.
“Art.. a kind of physical world
of the spiritual… A spiritual world
of the physical… almost flesh.”

One daughter, dying, at three,
of hunger, the other daughter,
that gift of a sugar-cube,
in her mouth, drenched in blood…
“A poet is an answer… not to the blow,
but a quivering of the air.”
The years of wandering,
the weary return, husband betrayed,
arrested, daughter in a camp…
“The soul is our capacity for pain.”

When I breathe across it,
the bug squats, quakes, finally flies.
And couldn’t she have flown again,
again have been flown? Couldnt she,
noose in her hand, have proclaimed,
“I am Tsvetayeva,” and then not?
No, no time now for “then not.”
But “Above poet, more than poet…”
she’d already said it, already sung it:
Air finished. Firmament now.”

Anne Carson – XX. So The Hall Door Shuts Again And All Noise Is Gone

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

my pulse grew less and less

JOHN KEATS
“Ode on Indolence,” line 17

XX. So The Hall Door Shuts Again And All Noise Is Gone

In the effort to find one’s way among the contents of memory
(Aristotle emphasizes)
a principal of association is helpful—
“passing rapidly from one step to the next.
For instance from milk to white,
from white to air,
from air to damp,
after which one recollectes autumn supposing one is trying to recollect
that season.”
Or supposing,
fair reader,
you are trying to recollect not autumn but freedom,
a principal of freedom
the existed between two people, small and savage
as principals go—but what are the rules for this?
As he says,
folly may come into fashion.
Pass then rapidly
from one step to the next,
for instance from nipple to hard,
from hard to hotel room,
from hotel room

to a phrase found in a letter he wrote in a taxi one day he passed
his wife
walking
on the other side of the street and she did not see him, she was—
so ingenious are the arrangements of the state of flux we call
our moral history are they not almost as neat as mathematical
propositions except written on water—
on her way to the courthouse
to file papers for divorce, a phrase like
how you tasted between your legs.
After which by means of this wholly divine faculty, the
“memory of words and things,”
one recollects
freedom.
Is it I? cries the soul rushing up.
Little soul, poor vague animal:
beware this invention “always useful for learning and life”
as Aristotle say, Aristotle who
had no husband,
rarely mentions beauty
and was likely to pass rapidly from wrist to slave when trying
to recollect wife.

From The Beauty of the Husband

Andrew Marvell – To His Coy Mistress

 Poems
Nov 192010
 


Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love would grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time’s winged chariot rushing near:
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vaults, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust:
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,
Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball,
And tear our pleasure with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.