The Moon and the Yew Tree
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs at my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumey spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky —
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.
The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness —
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness — blackness and silence.
— Sylvia Plath
somewhere i have never travelled – e.e.cummings
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers
you open always petal by petal myself as spring opens
(touching skilfully, misteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending,
nothing we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility; whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain has such small hands
(I first heard it in Hannah and Her Sisters)
The Two, W. H. Auden
You are the town and we are the clock.
We are the guardians of the gate in the rock
The Two
On your left and on your right
In the day and in the night,
We are watching you.
Wiser not to ask just what has occurred
To them who disobeyed our word;
To those
We were the whirlpool, we were the reef,
We were the formal nightmare, grief
And the unlucky rose.
Climb up the crane, learn the sailor’s words
When the ships from the islands laden with birds
Come in
Tell your stories of fishing and other men’s wives:
The expansive moments of constricted lives
In the lighted inn.
But do not imagine we do not know
Nor that what you hide with such care won’t show
At a glance
Nothing is done, nothing is said,
But don’t make the mistake of believing us dead:
I shouldn’t dance.
We’re afraid in that case you’ll have a fall.
We’ve been watching you over the garden wall
For hours.
The sky is darkening like a stain
Something is going to fall like rain
And it won’t be flowers.
When the green field comes off like a lid
Revealing what was much better hid:
Unpleasant.
And look, behind you without a sound
The woods have come and are standing round
In deadly crescent.
The bolt is sliding in its groove,
Outside the window is the black removers van.
And now with sudden swift emergence
Comes the women in dark glasses and the humpbacked surgeons
And the scissor man.
This might happen any day
So be careful what you say
Or do.
Be clean, be tidy, oil the lock,
Trim the garden, wind the clock,
Remember the Two.
Just three stanzas from “Sunday Morning”
She says, “I am content when wakened birds,
Before they fly, test the reality
Of misty fields, by their sweet questionings;
But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields
Return no more, where, then, is paradise?”
There is not any haunt of prophecy,
Nor any old chimera of the grave,
Neither the golden underground, nor isle
Melodious, where spirits gat them home,
Nor visionary south, nor cloudy palm
Remote on heaven’s hill, that has endured
As April’s green endures; or will endure
Like her remembrance of awakened birds,
Or her desire for June and evening, tipped
By the consummation of the swallow’s wings.
5
She says, “But in contentment I still feel
The need of some imperishable bliss.”
Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths,
The path sick sorrow took, the many paths
Where triumph rang its brassy phrase, or love
Whispered a little out of tenderness,
She makes the willow shiver in the sun
For maidens who were wont to sit and gaze
Upon the grass, relinquished to their feet.
She causes boys to pile new plums and pears
On disregarded plate. The maidens taste
And stray impassioned in the littering leaves
….
She hears, upon that water without sound,
A voice that cries, “The tomb in Palestine
Is not the porch of spirits lingering.
It is the grave of Jesus, where he lay.”
We live in an old chaos of the sun,
Or old dependency of day and night,
Or island solitude, unsponsored, free,
Of that wide water, inescapable.
Deer walk upon our mountains, and the quail
Whistle about us their spontaneous cries;
Sweet berries ripen in the wilderness;
And, in the isolation of the sky,
At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make
Ambiguous undulations as they sink,
Downward to darkness, on extended wings.
—Wallace Stevens
The wayfarer,
Perceiving the pathway to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
“Ha,” he said,
“I see that none has passed here
In a long time.”
Later he saw that each weed
Was a singular knife.
“Well,” he mumbled at last,
“Doubtless there are other roads.”
– Stephen Crane
For the longest time, I thought this passage from Sophistication by Sherwood Anderson, was a poem. In the movie Heaven Help Us the character, Dani read this passage to her father. I had no idea where it came from, I didn’t think to check the end titles untill I was much older. During that time I built a mythology around the poem that made me feel so naked and vulnerable.
In that high place
in the darkness
the two oddly sensitive human atoms
held each other
tightly and waited.
In the mind
of each was
the same thought.
“I have come to this lonely place
and here is this other,”
Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory —
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken
Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heap’d for the beloved’s bed;
And so thy thoughts when thou are gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.
— Percy Bysshe Shelley
Been trying to correct this for ages: it’s “and so thy thoughts when thou art gone.” I should’ve known better than to shag the first link off Google.
an original piece.
(forgive the presumption).
why november?
escape into the beautiful
a pattern matching perfectly
a major chord, a minor fifth
an answered wish, a melody
a stitch (or two) invisible
to warm a collar line.
easy gossip over tea
or heated talk of politics
a scent, a memory,
a color so like calico
and all we do for hunger’s sake
such as the sudden ache
to swing across eternity
and never break the silence
of identity or grief’s escape.
november for its old familiar things
exotic fragrance, box of leaves
its wildest longing and a hint of blue
to dance because it’s dangerous
and toast each brazen risk
till all the sunlight is consumed
and we escape into the beautiful.
the muse apprentice guild
fun stuff!
Tried to post this just after Anarch‘s Shelley poem, but …
Art thou pale for weariness
Of climbing heaven, and gazing on the earth,
Wandering companionless
Among the stars that have a different birth,—
And ever-changing, like a joyless eye
That finds no object worth its constancy?
— Shelley
xanax, keep on keeping on. I’m guessing you’re referring to this (probably mispunctuated) Emily Dickinson poem?
As imperceptibly as Grief
The Summer lapsed away-
-Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like Perfidy-
-A Quietness distilled,
As Twilight long begun,
Or Nature, spending with herself
Sequestered Afternoon-
-The Dusk drew earlier in-
-The Morning foreign shone-
-A courteous, yet harrowing Grace,
As Guest who would be gone-
-And thus, without a Wing,
Or service of a Keel,
Our Summer made her light escape
Into the Beautiful.
“I’m guessing you’re referring to this (probably mispunctuated) Emily Dickinson poem?”
rilkefan: Not consciously… but, in some parallel dimension of my brain, probably. My 4-year old daughter is currently working on a poem called The Heart of a Potato. When she finishes I’ll post it. (And, if it’s good enough, I may just steal it!).
When she finishes I’ll post it. (And, if it’s good enough, I may just steal it!).
Do it quick! Any older and she might remember the theft for the rest of your life…
Since we have a full month, I wonder if we could spare a thread for light verse. I could just post something, I know, but I hate to break the tone.
To The Shade of Po Chü-I
The work is heavy. I see
bare branches laden with snow.
I try to comfort myself
with thought of your old age.
A girl passes, in a red tam,
the coat above her quick ankles
snow smeared from running and falling –
Of what shall I think now
save of death the bright dancer?
-W. C. Williams
Lady Lazarus
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—–
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?——-
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The Peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot ——
The big strip tease.
Gentleman , ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.
It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.
It’s the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
‘A miracle!’
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart—
It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair on my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—-
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Sylvia Plath