Beautiful Cynicism III » Silly goofball pomes

small hands

beautiful cynic — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 18:37:33 +0000

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 will easily unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) 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 which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color 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

-e e cummings (1931)

Childhood comfort

beautiful cynic — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:07:49 +0000

Photo: robt via Flickr

It has a personality of its own;
is a character (like that old drunk Lacoste,
exhaling amber, and toppling on his pins);
it is alive; individual; and no less
an identity than those about it. And
it is tradition. Centuries have been flicked
from its arcs, alternatively flicked and pinned.
It rolls with the gait of St. Malo. It is act

and symbol, symbol of this static folk
which moves in segments, and returns to base, -
a sunken pendulum: invoke, revoke;
loosed yon, leashed hither, motion on no space.
O, like some Anjou ballad, all refrain,
which turns about its longing, and seems to move
to make a pleasure out of repeated pain,
its music moves, as if always back to a first love.

A.M. Klein, The Rocking Chair

Haunting

beautiful cynic — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 06:45:46 +0000

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.

-Emily Dickinson

Number ten

beautiful cynic — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 23:20:48 +0000

I want to tell you what hills are like in October
when colors gush down mountainsides
and little streams are freighted with a caravan of leaves,
I want to tell you how they blush and turn in fiery shame
and joy,
how their love burns with flames consuming and terrible
until we wake one morning and woods are like a smoldering
plain –

a glowing caldron full of jewelled fire;
the emerald earth a dragon’s eye
the poplars drenched with yellow light
and dogwoods blazing bloody red.
Travelling southward earth changes from gray rock to green velvet

Margaret Walker

Earth Day (belated)

beautiful cynic — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 17:46:29 +0000

Photo: sacramento365.com

O nature! I do not aspire
To be the highest in thy choir,–
To be a meteor in thy sky,
Or comet that may range on high;
Only a zephyr that may blow
Among the reeds by the river low;
Give me thy most privy place
Where to run my airy race.

In some withdrawn, unpublic mead
Let me sigh upon a reed,
Or in the woods, with leafy din,
Whisper the still evenng in:
Some still work give me to do,–
Only–be it near to you!

For I’d rather be thy child
And pupil, in the forest wild,
Than be the king of men elsewhere,
And most sovereign slave of care;
To have one moment of thy dawn,
Than share the city’s year forlorn.

Henry David Thoreau

Remembrance

beautiful cynic — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 10:18:24 +0000

Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer.

     to give up customs one barely had time to learn,
     not to see roses and other promising Things in terms of a human future;
     no longer to be what one was in infinitely anxious hands;
     to leave even one’s own first name behind,
     forgetting it as easily as a child abandons a broken toy.
Strange to no longer desire one’s desires.
Strange to see meanings that clung together once, floating away in every direction.
And being dead is hard work and full of retrieval before one can gradually feel a trace of eternity.
Though the living are wrong to believe in the too-sharp distinctions which
     they themselves have created.
Angels (they say) don’t know whether it is the living they are moving among, or the dead.
The eternal torrent whirls all ages along in it, through both realms forever,
     and their voices are drowned out in its thunderous roar.

In the end, those who are carried off early no longer need us:

   they are weaned from earth’s sorrows and joys,
   as gently as children outgrow the soft breasts of their mothers.
But we, who do need such great mysteries,
   we for whom grief is so often the source of our spirit’s growth -:
   could we exist without them?

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies: The First Elegy (excerpt)

Intimations of Immortality

beautiful cynic — Wed, 21 May 2008 00:31:54 +0000

Photo: allposters.fr

What though the radiance
which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass,
of glory in the flower,
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.

William Wordsworth, Splendour in the Grass (excerpt)

A sort of solitude

beautiful cynic — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 23:49:35 +0000

Photo: clcookphoto.com

Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,
let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.
Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart
fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,
or an ill-tempered string. Let my joyfully streaming face
make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise
and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights
of anguish. Why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you,
inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering,
lose myself
in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though
they are really
seasons of us, our winter-
enduring foliage, ponds, meadows, our inborn landscape
where birds and reed-dwelling creatures are at home.

High overhead, isn’t half of the night sky standing
above the sorrow in us, the disquieted garden?
Imagine that you no longer walked through your grief grown wild,
no longer looked at the stars through the jagged leaves
of the dark tree of pain, and the enlarging moonlight
no longer exalted fate’s ruins so high
that among them you felt like the last of some anceint race.
Nor would smiles any longer exist,
the consuming smiles
of those you lost over there – with so little violence,
once they were past, did they purely enter your grief.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Tenth Elegy [original version], excerpt

The best medicine…

beautiful cynic — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 01:22:44 +0000

Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.

Do not take away the rose,
the lance flower that you pluck,
the water that suddenly
bursts forth in joy,
the sudden wave
of silver born in you.

My struggle is harsh and I come back
with eyes tired
at times from having seen
the unchanging earth,
but when your laughter enters
it rises to the sky seeking me
and it opens for me all
the doors of life.

My love, in the darkest
hour your laughter
opens, and if suddenly
you see my blood staining
the stones of the street,
laugh, because your laughter
will be for my hands
like a fresh sword.

Next to the sea in the autumn,
your laughter must raise
its foamy cascade,
and in the spring, love,
I want your laughter like
the flower I was waiting for,
the blue flower, the rose
of my echoing country.

Laugh at the night,
at the day, at the moon,
laugh at the twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy
boy who loves you,
but when I open
my eyes and close them,
when my steps go,
when my steps return,
deny me bread, air,
light, spring,
but never your laughter
for I would die.

Pablo Neruda, Your Laughter

Underneath the apple-tree

beautiful cynic — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 15:12:50 +0000

Photo: applejournal.com

A scent of ripeness from over a wall.
And come to leave the routine road
And look for what had made me stall,
There sure enough was an apple tree
That had eased itself of its summer load,
And of all but its trivial foliage free,
Now breathed as light as a lady’s fan.
For there there had been an apple fall
As complete as the apple had given man.
The ground was one circle of solid red.

May something go always unharvested!
May much stay out of our stated plan,
Apples or something forgotten and left,
So smelling their sweetness would be no theft.

Robert Frost, Unharvested

Undoubtedly

beautiful cynic — Thu, 13 Sep 2007 01:12:03 +0000

Photo: oiseaux.net

If ignorance is bliss, Father said,
shouldn’t you be looking blissful?
You should check to see if you have
the right kind of ignorance. If you’re
not getting the benefits that most people
get from acting stupid, then you should
go back to what you always were -
being too smart for your own good.

Hal Sirowitz, The Benefits of Ignorance

Nothing Is Lost

beautiful cynic — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 21:47:35 +0000

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.

Noël Coward

Sonnet XVII: Love

beautiful cynic — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 05:36:37 +0000

I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

Pablo Neruda

A Canadian in Paris

beautiful cynic — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 23:11:28 +0000

Looking for Sartre
and Simone de Beauvoir
at the Café Deux Maggots
looking for Voltaire
in bookstalls along the Seine
looking for Van Gogh
to say I loved him
finding only fleas
racing round my midsection
stomach upset from the water
turning over and over
every half hour
drinking only wine

Rounding a corner suddenly
to confront Audrey Hepburn
(which is nice confronting)
and her new husband Mel Ferrer
I had read in English papers
they were on their honeymoon
and had a kind of glow
that marks some newlyweds
it was like finding a story
on the Paris sidewalk

At the Louvre
moving from painting to painting
I began to lose the sense of reality
from these larger-than-life
people and places
expecting to see Pierre Bonnard
sneaking in to retouch his paintings
when the guard wasn’t looking
and me acting suspiciously

Before you speak to someone
they look at you knowingly
betrayed without a word
into being a foreigner
and thought American
- at least half of Paris
sitting somewhere
in front of street cafés
old men playing chess
other old men
searching for cigarette butts
old men wise as encyclopedias
old women who once knew Casanova

I want so much to be in love here
but no one to be in love with
and finding an emotion
shimmering like a pearl
lost near the Arc de Triomphe
by a despairing lover
it’s copyright and belongs
to someone else
I left it there
in the gutter shimmering

A room near the Metro
with the noise of trains
a vibration in your bones
of such intensity
it sucks you out of bed
dreaming of Marie Antoinette
and Eleanor of Aquitaine
in a castle the size of Alberta
joining the other scared passengers
clutching their transfers
and wake up sleepwalking

Before leaving Canada
I’d stayed with Irving Layton
a man so positive of himself
he’d exposed all my negatives
and in this most glamorous city
in the world I wandered
around not knowing who I was
tramping the Rue Pigalle
and Montmartre
at the Tuilleries and Odéon
making notes for poems
pretending to be a writer
then returning to London
back to Canada
- and after a long time
finally beginning to understand
the man in my head was me

Al Purdy, To Paris Never Again

Presence/absence

beautiful cynic — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 19:15:57 +0000

Is it thy will thy image should keep open
My heavy eyelids to the weary night?
Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,
While shadows, like to thee, do mock my sight?
Is it thy spirit that thou send’st from thee
So far from home, into my deeds to pry,
To find out shames and idle hours in me,
The scope and tenour of thy jealousy?
O, no! thy love, though much, is not so great:
It is my love that keeps mine eye awake;
Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat,
To play the watchman ever for they sake:
For thee watch I whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,
From me far off, with others all too near.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet #61