terribly

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.

Carl Sandberg – Our Prayer of Thanks

Poems

Nov 192010

Chicago Poems. 1916.

For the gladness here where the sun is shining at evening on the weeds at the river,
Our prayer of thanks.

For the laughter of children who tumble barefooted and bareheaded in the summer grass,
Our prayer of thanks.

For the sunset and the stars, the women and the white arms that hold us,
Our prayer of thanks.

God,
If you are deaf and blind, if this is all lost to you,
God, if the dead in their coffins amid the silver handles on the edge of town, or the reckless dead of war days thrown unknown in pits, if these dead are forever deaf and blind and lost,
Our prayer of thanks.

God,
The game is all your way, the secrets and the signals and the system; and so for the break of the game and the first play and the last.
Our prayer of thanks.

Marshall McLuhan – Understanding Me: Lectures and Interviews.

Book Notes

Nov 192010

All the world exists to end in a book. -Mallarme.

Marshall McLuhan essay on the “Future of the Book” given as a lecture in 1972: “In both the industrial and electric ages Nature is superceded by Art. Thus the future of the book is nothing less than to be the means of surpassing Nature itself. The material world is to be etherealized and encapsulated in a book whose characters will possess all the formulas for the knowledge and recreation of Being.”

“When the book and its author can mount the back of another medium like radio or TV or satellite, the scale of operation both in time and in space seems to abolish the difference between the microscopic and macroscopic.”

“If print drove Montaigne to minute self-investigation and self-portrayal, may we not expect the book of the electric age to turn this perspective on patterns of corporate human energy and association?”

Elizabeth Bishop – One Art

Poems

Nov 192010

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Seamus Heaney – The Birch Grove

Poems

Nov 192010

At the foot of a garden, in earshot of river water,
In a corner walled off like the baths or bake-house
Of an unroofed abbey or broken-floored Roman villa,
They have planted their birch grove. Planted it recently only
But already each morning it puts forth in the sun
Like their own long grown-up selves, the white of the bark
As suffused and cool as the white of the satin nightdress
She bends and straightens up in, pouring tea,
Sitting across from where he dandles a sandal
On his big time-keeping foot, as bare as an abbot’s.
Red brick and slate, plum tree and apple retain
Their credibility, a CD of Bach is making the rounds
Of the common or garden air. Above them a jet trail
Tapers and waves like a willow wand or a taper.
“If art teaches us anything,” he says, trumping life
With a quote, “it’s that the human condition is private.”