My washed rags flap on a serious grey sunset.
Suppertime, a colder wind.
Leaves huddle a bit.
Kitchen lights come on.
Little spongy mysteries of evening begin to nick open.
Time to call mother.
Let it ring.
Six.
Seven.
Eight—she
lifts the receiver, waits.
Down the hollow distances are they fieldmice that scamper so drily.
.
Anne Carson, 2006
It was a Maine lobster town –
each morning boatloads of hands
pushed off for granite
quarries on the islands,
and left dozens of bleak
white frame houses stuck
like oyster shells
on a hill of rock,
and below us, the sea lapped
the raw little match-stick
mazes of a weir,
where the fish for bait were trapped.
Remember? We sat on a slab or rock.
From this distance in time,
it seems the color
of iris, rotting and turning purpler,
but it was only
the usual gray rock
turning the usual green
when drenched by the sea.
The sea drenched the rock
at our feet all day,
and kept tearing away
flake after flake.
One night you dreamed
you were a mermaid clinging to a wharf-pile,
and trying to pull
off the barnacles with your hands. Read the rest of this entry »
(On the train from Rome to Paris, 1950, the year when Pius XII
defined the dogma of Mary’s bodily assumption)
Reading how even the Swiss had thrown the sponge
in once again and Everest was still
unscaled, I watched our Paris Pullman lunge
mooning across the fallow Alpine snow.
O bella Roma! I saw our stewards go
forward on tipotoe banging on their gongs.
Man changed to landscape. Much against my will,
I left the City of God where it belongs.
There the skirt-mad Mussolini unfurled
The eagle of Caesar. He was one of us
Only, pure prose. I envy the conspicuous
Waste of our grandparent on their grand tours –
Long-haired Victorian sages accepted the universe,
While breezing on their trust funds through the world.
When the Vatican made Mary’s Assumption dogma,
The crowds at San Pietro screamed Papa.
The Holy Father dropped his shaving glass,
And listened. His electric razor purred,
His pet canary chirped on his left hand.
The lights of science couldn’t hold a candle
To Mary risen – at one miraculous stroke,
Angel wing’d, gorgeous as a jungle bird! Read the rest of this entry »
Maybe my limbs are made
mostly for decoration,
like the way I feel about
persimmons. You can’t
really eat them. Or you
wouldn’t want to. If you grab
the soft skin with your fist
it somehow feels funny,
like you’ve been here
before and uncomfortable,
too, like you’d rather
squish it between your teeth
impatiently, before spitting
the soft parts back up
to linger on the tongue like
burnt sugar or guilt.
For starters, it was all
an accident, you cut
the right branch
and a sort of light
woke up underneath,
and the inedible fruit
grew dark and needy.
Think crucial hanging.
Think crayon orange.
There is one low, leaning
heart-shaped globe left
and dearest, can you
tell, I am trying
to love you less.
Ada Limón, 2009 Read the rest of this entry »
I teach my friend, a fisherman gone blind, to cast
true left, right or center and how far
between lily pads and the fallen cedar.
Darkness is precious, how long will darkness last?
Our bait, worms, have no professors, they live
in darkness, can be taught fear of light.
Cut into threes even sixes they live
separate lives, recoil from light.
He tells me, “I am seldom blind
when I dream, morning is anthracite,
I play blind man’s bluff,
I cannot find myself,
my shoe, the sink,
tell time, but that’s spilled milk and ink,
the lost and found I cannot find.
I can tell the difference between a mollusk and a whelk,
a grieving liar and a lemon rind.”
Laughing, he says, “I still hope the worm will turn,
pink, lank and warm, dined
out on apples of good fortune.
Books have a faintly legible smell.
Divorced from the sun, I am a kind
of bachelor henpecked by the night.
Sometimes I use my darkness well -
in the overcast and sunlight of my mind.
I can still wink, sing, my eyes are songs.”
Darkness is precious, how long will darkness last?
He could not fish, he could not walk, he fell
in his own feces. He wept. He died where he fell.
The power of beauty to right all wrongs
is hard for me to sell.
.
.
Stanley Moss, 2009
God washed his womb in the ocean.
All things that lived in or above the sea
rejoiced that they were there.
The sand under the rocks,
the driftwood trees rejoiced.
The living, those who called to their kind,
the lucky ones, rejoiced.
When I was young and prodigal,
I dived into God’s womb and the ocean.
God spoke to me as I swam
through a thousand reflections,
his face and my face touched
like Mary’s cheek on the cheek of her deposed son.
God washed across my face. My face was in him.
From time to time I spit him out as I swam.
I came out of his womb dripping. I felt clean.
I knew God was cold and wet wilderness.
Shivering, I dried God off me with a towel
then I hung him on a clothesline to dry.
God and the towel seemed happy and laughing,
flapping in the wind without commandments.
From the shore I could see the horizon:
he was washing his womb in the ocean
after a day of love, before his gala night.
Stanley Moss, 2009
There was an apple tree in the yard –
this would have been
forty years ago — behind,
only meadows. Drifts
of crocus in the damp grass.
I stood at that window:
late April. Spring
flowers in the neighbor’s yard.
How many times, really, did the tree
flower on my birthday,
the exact day, not
before, not after? Substitution
of the immutable
for the shifting, the evolving.
Substitution of the image
for relentless earth. What
do I know of this place,
the role of the tree for decades
taken by a bonsai, voices
rising from the tennis courts –
Fields. Smell of the tall grass, new cut.
As one expects of a lyric poet.
We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.
Louise Glück, 1996.
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Derek Walcott, 1976.
Read the rest of this entry »
Il blog della Round Robin segnala l’interessante operazione di trascrizione letteraria di un autore inedito nordamericano, Elmer Hemingway. Qui di seguito la biografia ricostruita attraverso i suoi stessi appunti diaristici.
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Scrittore eclettico e paranoico, Elmer Hemingway ha vissuto una vita all’insegna della paura e della fuga.
Nasce nel 1918 a New York. La madre, irlandese immigrata nei primi anni del secolo, era insegnante di lettere mentre il padre, americano di nascita, era titolare di un negozio di tabacchi a Brooklyn. Il vero nome non è conosciuto, di nessuno, poiché il diario che è stato recuperato insieme agli scritti parla ben poco dei genitori e di se stesso ed è scritto in prima persona, senza nome, e si riferisce al “padre” e alla “madre” limitandosi ai consueti appellativi.
Intorno al 1936 comincia a lavorare in modo discontinuo con il padre, continuando a prendere lezioni di scrittura dalla madre le cui storie dei grandi romanzieri lo affascinano sin da piccolo.
Nel 1940 il padre viene ricoverato in seguito ad un incidente nella sua tabaccheria, preda di fiamme che in seguito si sapranno di origine dolosa. Read the rest of this entry »
