Headpiece Filled With Straw

Parsley

by Rita Dove

1. The Cane Fields

There is a parrot imitating spring
in the palace, its feathers parsley green.  
Out of the swamp the cane appears

to haunt us, and we cut it down. El General  
searches for a word; he is all the world  
there is. Like a parrot imitating spring,

we lie down screaming as rain punches through  
and we come up green. We cannot speak an R—
out of the swamp, the cane appears

and then the mountain we call in whispers Katalina.
The children gnaw their teeth to arrowheads.  
There is a parrot imitating spring.

El General has found his word: perejil.
Who says it, lives. He laughs, teeth shining  
out of the swamp. The cane appears

in our dreams, lashed by wind and streaming.  
And we lie down. For every drop of blood  
there is a parrot imitating spring.
Out of the swamp the cane appears.


2. The Palace

The word the general’s chosen is parsley.  
It is fall, when thoughts turn
to love and death; the general thinks
of his mother, how she died in the fall
and he planted her walking cane at the grave  
and it flowered, each spring stolidly forming  
four-star blossoms. The general

pulls on his boots, he stomps to
her room in the palace, the one without  
curtains, the one with a parrot
in a brass ring. As he paces he wonders  
Who can I kill today. And for a moment  
the little knot of screams
is still. The parrot, who has traveled

all the way from Australia in an ivory  
cage, is, coy as a widow, practising  
spring. Ever since the morning  
his mother collapsed in the kitchen  
while baking skull-shaped candies  
for the Day of the Dead, the general  
has hated sweets. He orders pastries  
brought up for the bird; they arrive

dusted with sugar on a bed of lace.  
The knot in his throat starts to twitch;  
he sees his boots the first day in battle  
splashed with mud and urine
as a soldier falls at his feet amazed—
how stupid he looked!— at the sound
of artillery. I never thought it would sing  
 the soldier said, and died. Now

the general sees the fields of sugar  
cane, lashed by rain and streaming.  
He sees his mother’s smile, the teeth  
gnawed to arrowheads. He hears  
the Haitians sing without R’s
as they swing the great machetes:  
Katalina, they sing, Katalina,

mi madle, mi amol en muelte. God knows  
his mother was no stupid woman; she  
could roll an R like a queen. Even  
a parrot can roll an R! In the bare room  
the bright feathers arch in a parody  
of greenery, as the last pale crumbs
disappear under the blackened tongue. Someone

calls out his name in a voice
so like his mother’s, a startled tear
splashes the tip of his right boot.
My mother, my love in death.
 The general remembers the tiny green sprigs  
men of his village wore in their capes  
to honor the birth of a son. He will
order many, this time, to be killed

for a single, beautiful word.

 

NOTES: On October 2, 1937, Rafael Trujillo (1891-1961), dictator of the Dominican Republic, ordered 20,000 blacks killed because they could not pronounce the letter “r” in perejil, the Spanish word for parsley.

Rita Dove, “Parsley” from Museum (Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1983). Copyright © 1983 by Rita Dove.

Source: Museum (1983)

The Player Piano

By Randall Jarrell

I ate pancakes one night in a Pancake House
Run by a lady my age. She was gay.
When I told her that I came from Pasadena
She laughed and said, "I lived in Pasadena
When Fatty Arbuckle drove the El Molino bus."

I felt that I had met someone from home.
No, not Pasadena, Fatty Arbuckle.
Who's that? Oh, something that we had in common
Like -- like -- the false armistice. Piano rolls.
She told me her house was the first Pancake House

East of the Mississippi, and I showed her
A picture of my grandson. Going home --
Home to the hotel -- I began to hum,
"Smile a while, I bid you sad adieu,
When the clouds roll back I'll come to you."

Let's brush our hair before we go to bed,
I say to the old friend who lives in my mirror.
I remember how I'd brush my mother's hair
Before she bobbed it. How long has it been
Since I hit my funnybone? had a scab on my knee?

Here are Mother and Father in a photograph,
Father's holding me.... They both look so young.
I'm so much older than they are. Look at them,
Two babies with their baby. I don't blame you,
You weren't old enough to know any better;

If I could I'd go back, sit down by you both,
And sign our true armistice: you weren't to blame.
I shut my eyes and there's our living room.
The piano's playing something by Chopin,
And Mother and Father and their little girl

Listen. Look, the keys go down by themselves!
I go over, hold my hands out, play I play --
If only, somehow, I had learned to live!
The three of us sit watching, as my waltz
Plays itself out a half-inch from my fingers.

 

Found on The Wondering Minstrels

Sumer Is Icumen In

Middle English

Sumer is icumen in,
Lhude sing cuccu!
Groweþ sed and bloweþ med

And springþ þe wde nu,
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteþ after lomb,
Lhouþ after calue cu.
Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ,
Murie sing cuccu!
Cuccu, cuccu, wel þu singes cuccu;

Ne swik þu nauer nu.

Pes:

Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu.

Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu nu!

  

Modern English

Summer has come in,
Loudly sing, Cuckoo!
The seed grows and the meadow
blooms
And the wood springs anew,
Sing, Cuckoo!
The ewe bleats after the lamb
The cow lows after the calf.
The bullock stirs, the stag farts,
Merrily sing, Cuckoo!
Cuckoo, cuckoo, well you sing,
cuckoo;
Don't you ever stop now,


Sing cuckoo now. Sing, Cuckoo.
Sing Cuckoo. Sing cuckoo now!

  

Ezra Pound parody

Winter is icumen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damm you; Sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,
So 'gainst the winter's balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing goddamm,
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

Sumer Is Icumen In - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A Noiseless, Patient Spider

By Walt Whitman

A noiseless, patient spider,
I mark'd, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark'd how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them--ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,--seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form'd--till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.

 

Link: Twitlonger: A Noiseless, Patient Spider by Walt Whitman

This Was Once a Love Poem

by Jane Hirshfield

  

This was once a love poem,
before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short,
before it found itself sitting,
perplexed and a little embarrassed,
on the fender of a parked car,
while many people passed by without turning their heads.

It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement.
It remembers choosing these shoes,
this scarf or tie.

Once, it drank beer for breakfast,
drifted its feet
in a river side by side with the feet of another.

Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,
dropping its head so the hair would fall forward,
so the eyes would not be seen.

IT spoke with passion of history, of art.
It was lovely then, this poem.
Under its chin, no fold of skin softened.
Behind the knees, no pad of yellow fat.
What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall.
An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks.

The longing has not diminished.
Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat,
the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.

Yes, it decides:
Many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots.
When it finds itself disquieted
by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
it will touch them—one, then another—
with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.

  

Link: This Was Once a Love Poem - Poets.org - Poetry, Poems, Bios & More.

The Black Swan

by Randall Jarrell

When the swans turned my sister into a swan
I would go to the lake, at night, from milking:
The sun would look out through the reeds like a swan,
A swan's red beak; and the beak would open
And inside there was darkness, the stars and the moon.

Out on the lake, a girl would laugh.
"Sister, here is your porridge, sister,"
I would call; and the reeds would whisper,
"Go to sleep, go to sleep, little swan."
My legs were all hard and webbed, and the silky

Hairs of my wings sank away like stars
In the ripples that ran in and out of the reeds:
I heard through the lap and hiss of water
Someone's "Sister . . . sister," far away on the shore,
And then as I opened my beak to answer

I heard my harsh laugh go out to the shore
And saw - saw at last, swimming up from the green
Low mounds of the lake, the white stone swans:
The white, named swans . . . "It is all a dream,"
I whispered, and reached from the down of the pallet

To the lap and hiss of the floor.
And "Sleep, little sister," the swans all sang
From the moon and stars and frogs of the floor.
But the swan my sister called, "Sleep at last, little sister,"
And stroked all night, with a black wing, my wings.

Link: N.C. Arts Council - Press Release: In Memoriam
Mary Jarrell (May 2, 1914 – July 30, 2007).

With Mary Jarrell's passing, those of us who love the art of poetry should take time to meditate on what she did during the years after her husband's death to preserve his legacy as one of our most "necessary" poets and critics. I say necessary because, without Randall Jarrell, American poetry, not to mention North Carolina's literary heritage, would have been the lesser. I know my own literary education would have been diminished. By the time I arrived at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Mr. Jarrell had died, but my professors did not let his poetry die. A handful of his poems still haunt me in ways that only the greatest poets' work does. “Field and Forest,” “Black Swan,” and “Cinderella,” for example, are part of my poetic hardcore, and his essays on poetry helped form my early critical perspective.

[...]

Here, to show why she worked so hard to preserve her husband's legacy as poet, is one of my favorite poems, “The Black Swan.” Randall Jarrell is best known for his much anthologized “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner,” but this poem is one that I carry always in my poet's imagination.
—Kathryn Stripling Byer

Sleeping Out at Easter

By James Dickey

All dark is now no more.
The forest is drawing a light.
All Presences change into trees.
One eye opens slowly without me.
My sight is the same as the sun’s,
For this is the grave of the king,
When the earth turns, waking a choir.
All dark is now no more.

Birds speak, their voices beyond them.
A light has told them their song.
My animal eyes become human
As the Word rises out of the darkness
Where my right hand, buried beneath me,
Hoveringly tingles, with grasping
The source of all song at the root.
Birds speak, their voices beyond them.

Put down those seeds in your hand.
These trees have not yet been planted.
A light should come round the world,
Yet my army blanket is dark,
That shall sparkle with dew in the sun.
My magical sheperd’s cloak
Is not yet alive on my flesh.
Put down those seeds in your hand.

In your palm is the secret of waking.
Unclasp your purple-nailed fingers
And the woods and the sunlight together
Shall spring, and make good the world.
The sounds in the air shall find bodies,
And a feather shall drift from the pine-top
You shall feel, with your long-buried hand.
In your palm is the secret of waking,

For the king’s grave turns him to light.
A woman shall look through the window
And see me here, huddled and blazing.
My child, mouth open, still sleeping,
Hears the song in the egg of a bird.
The sun shall have told him that song
Of a father returning from darkness,
For the king’s grave turns you to light.

All dark is now no more.
In your palm is the secret of waking.
Put down those seeds in your hand;
All Presences change into trees.
A feather shall drift from the pine-top.
The sun shall have told you this song,
For this is the grave of the king;
For the king’s grave turns you to light.

Link: One Poet's Notes: James Dickey: "Sleeping Out at Easter".

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -

By Emily Dickinson

My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -
In Corners - till a Day
The Owner passed - identified -
And carried Me away -

And now We roam in Sovereign Woods -
And now We hunt the Doe -
And every time I speak for Him -
The Mountains straight reply -

And do I smile, such cordial light
Upon the Valley glow -
It is as a Vesuvian face
Had let its pleasure through -

And when at Night - Our good Day done -
I guard My Master's Head -
'Tis better than the Eider-Duck's
Deep Pillow - to have shared -

To foe of His - I'm deadly foe -
None stir the second time -
On whom I lay a Yellow Eye -
Or an emphatic Thumb -

Though I than He - may longer live
He longer must - than I -
For I have but the power to kill,
Without--the power to die--

Link: My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun -.

Advice to writers

By Billy Collins

Even if it keeps you up all night,
wash down the walls and scrub the floor
of your study before composing a syllable.

Clean the place as if the Pope were on his way.
Spotlessness is the niece of inspiration.

The more you clean, the more brilliant
your writing will be, so do not hesitate to take
to the open fields to scour the undersides
of rocks or swab in the dark forest
upper branches, nests full of eggs.

When you find your way back home
and stow the sponges and brushes under the sink,
you will behold in the light of dawn
the immaculate altar of your desk,
a clean surface in the middle of a clean world.

From a small vase, sparkling blue, lift
a yellow pencil, the sharpest of the bouquet,
and cover pages with tiny sentences
like long rows of devoted ants
that followed you in from the woods.

Link: Sailing alone around the room: new ... - Google Books.

Something Ezra Pound once said

"A Retrospect" and "A Few Don'ts" by Ezra Pound : Poetics Essay : Learning Lab : The Poetry Foundation.

So I don't often put too much stock in the unnecessary complications for poetry introduced by this crazy old anti-Semite, but today was just needing to read this bit, and in reading it, wanted to excerpt some bits of it that spoke to me again, many years after first encountering the ideas.

Ach. Does he really think poetry advances like colonialist scholarship, "advancing" from the known and building "new knowledge," new poetry, without any redundancy to the poetry that has gone before? Granted, a dialogue with the past is always assumed, but even scholarship does not operate in that sort of straight line, Royal Society and the Enlightenment ideas be damned.

Disciplinary hidey holes create all kinds of blind spots in scholarship, where scholars in different disciplines run in parallel to each other all the time, reinventing wheel after wheel. The "project of knowledge-making" (the system of citations that academia is built on) goes as much backward as it goes forward.

As Classics and Philosophydepartments are eliminated as not-making-enough-profit for modern state universities deprived of federal and state money, they will go even further backward.

All of this post-dates Pound, he of the dense and difficult, the footnoted and obscure, the dude who thought dense allusions would force people to read the original texts instead of driving them away from poetry altogether (T.S. Eliot gets most of the credit/blame for this, but I think Pound should share it equally).

So here, Pound rolls on with the idea that he's building on what has gone before, like the project of knowledge-making, a project of poetry-making, if you will. I still don't agree with that logic, but I do like thinking about what he has to say here, deep in the document:

“A Retrospect” and “A Few Don’ts” (1918)

"A Retrospect" and "A Few Don'ts" by Ezra Pound : Poetics Essay : Learning Lab : The Poetry Foundation.

Page 4

[...]

CREDO

Rhythm.—I believe in an “absolute rhythm,” a rhythm, that is, in poetry which corresponds exactly to the emotion or shade of emotion to be expressed. A man’s rhythm must be interpretative, it will be, therefore, in the end, his own, uncounterfeiting, uncounterfeitable.

Symbols.—I believe that the proper and perfect symbol is the natural object, that if a man use “symbols” he must so use them that their symbolic function does not obtrude; so that a sense, and the poetic quality of the passage, is not lost to those who do not understand the symbol as such, to whom, for instance, a hawk is a hawk.

Technique.—I believe in technique as the test of a man’s sincerity; in law when it is ascertainable; in the trampling down of every convention that impedes or obscures the determination of the law, or the precise rendering of the impulse.

Form.—I think there is a “fluid” as well as a “solid” content, that some poems may have form as a tree has form, some as water poured into a vase. That most symmetrical forms have certain uses. That a vast number of subjects cannot be precisely, and therefore not properly rendered in symmetrical forms.

[Of the bits here, the thoughts on Form are what still draws me. I'm not sure about some of his other attachments to absolutes or perfections or naturalness. I'm not sure I believe such things exist, but I am of another time, and out of time, certain thoughts become anachronistic, like reading Victorian diction and such.]

The Second Coming

By William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Link: Yeats - The Second Coming.

The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower

by Dylan Thomas

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

Link: The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower by Dylan Thomas.

The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog

by Alicia Suskin Ostriker

To be blessed
said the old woman
is to live and work
so hard
God's love
washes right through you
like milk through a cow

To be blessed
said the dark red tulip
is to knock their eyes out
with the slug of lust
implied by
your up-ended
skirt

To be blessed
said the dog
is to have a pinch
of God
inside you
and all the other dogs
can smell it

"The Blessing of the Old Woman, the Tulip, and the Dog" by Alicia Suskin Ostriker, from The Book of Seventy. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. Clipped from today's Writer's Almanac [newsletter@americanpublicmedia.org]

He fumbles at your soul

By Emily Dickinson

He fumbles at your Soul
As Players at the Keys
Before they drop full Music on --
He stuns you by degrees --
Prepares your brittle Nature
For the Ethereal Blow
By fainter Hammers -- further heard --
Then nearer -- Then so slow
Your Breath has time to straighten --
Your Brain -- to bubble Cool --
Deals -- One -- imperial -- Thunderbolt --
That scalps your naked Soul --

When Winds take Forests in the Paws --
The Universe -- is still --

Link: He fumbles at your spirit

Ozymandius

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert... Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
My name is Ozymandius, King of Kings,
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Link: Ozymandius