Mary Oliver – The Swan

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air –
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A shrill dark music – like the rain pelting the trees – like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds –
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life?

Mary Magdalene notes

 Book Notes
Nov 192010
 

[From MetaFilter] ABC program examining the life of Mary Magdalene and her role in Jesus’ life as possible wife. The Mary-as-whore idea was debunked some time ago, but is it possible that she was made into a whore by the church to explain her intimacy with Jesus? The novel The da Vinci Code, on which this ABC program was based, explores the relationship between da Vinci and a secret society protecting the blood line of Christ, who according to some theories fathered children with his wife, Mary Magdalene. If you look at the Last Supper, the figure to the right of Jesus is so clearly a woman, and it is possible that the Holy Grail that gathered the blood of Christ is a metaphor for Magdalene’s womb carrying Jesus’ children. And according to Magdalene’s apocryphal gnostic gospel, she knew secrets that Jesus kept from the apostles.

e.e. cummings – i carry your heart with me

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart )i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

William Logan – 2 poems

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

The Hedgehog in His Element

Miserable, bullying, armed to the teeth,
like a Sherman tank forced out of the brush
or St Sebastian bristlng with his arrows.

Spring in Odd Weather

Not the dampness of opportunity, perhaps;
nor an irritating jumble of stimuli, choreographed

by some renegade Balanchine; nor
the particular razory liaison of May rain,

enough to muzzle the tits in the greening hedge;
nor the lofty bloat of ruined cloud

stalking the placid rape fields, which still
awaited an eighteenth-century painter

who had failed to show; no, these, not even
these could account for the whicker of spring chill,

the Commerce that muzzled her admirers in Art,
though above the fens, on the raw silhouette

of a hill – tentative, protracted, new-risen with weeds
like Iron Age spears – you stood your watch,

staring out in something like astonishment,
a porcelain doll blank in its own immortal gaze.

August Kleinzahler – 2 poems

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

Goddess

Well now, it really is you,
and after how many months?
I had ceased keeping track.
No, not given up, never that.
I should die if that were true.
But still – was it some affront?
You’ve never been this cruel.

Distracted? To be sure;
even you can’t begrudge me this:
a father, friend, another friend.
Death’s visits threatened never to end.
I know better than to implore,
complain, or like some schoolchild, wish.
Unvisited I do not live, I endure.

Portrait of My Mother in January

Mother dozes in her chair,
awakes a while and reads her book,
then dozes off again.
Wind makes a rush at the house
and, like a tide, recedes. The trees are sear.

Afternoons are the most difficult.
They seem to have no end,
no end and no one there.
Outside the trees do their witchy dance.
Mother grows smaller in her chair.