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| the spacing of that last poem is incorrect.
i do not know how to fix it for this website
so imagine that it looks right?
the last four lines of part one are spaced as a staircase coming down and out
the last line of part two completes the line before by being pushed to the end | | |
| i have not left anything on the web here for a long time...
but today i randomly saw a request, so here is something.
Nights, Lights and Insects
(Two Views with Turns)
Cicada-Song
While insects were saying things and taking them back
he walked aloft along avenues of a zeppelin-
city, blowing up, in pastel rooms as thick as
cushions. As individuate. We had all let go
so the rooms took off, block by shape, as from a knife
or crumbing, invisible hand—Le Corbusier’s…
Lego-tenements let their wakes, there wakes surreal
sky, itself, a pyramid of buoys. Under-
stand-ably light, — if it were sum-mer, it were day.
HURRICANE TRUNKS, FOUND FOUNDATION FOUNDERED RU(I)(N)E:
WHITE GENEALOGIES WERE BRAINSTORM-DIAGRAMS.
Being night, he walks by dark and lit rooms, whose still
form are houses, and plaster all of a colour.
And there is no such city, except, when the streetlamps
in their counterpoint zip up the towns and the street-
hinge, like a tunnel too close, sings broad mapped fabric
up from the sewers of the collective nowhere,
nonconscious, smotheringly ‘round a street urchin—
NonNothing!, not, and it lifts off as if a breeze.
And this unbuggable world (so suddenly full
of bugs,
and diseases
and joy)
drops summerly…
Understudy
With the unforgettable blackness of that night
the stars turned out to be absent-minded-absurd,
Too dark complex in their light, so the empty orbit
of order had to be filled in, having been understood.
Think Heavens! A loose net of narcissistic insects,
which, in persuading bioluminescence—shifts
Just over the world, like a skin,
unwonderful.
("think heavens" should be in italics)
(Le Corbusier is a central figure in modernist archistecture,
his were the apartment buildings of the french riots in 2005
he dreamed of paving down paris and putting up i think 11 x like highrises which would function entirely internally, stores, municpal politics, everything inside, only the monuments would be left of that once gothic metropolis, in little gardens for endless visiting
he was also influenced by surrealism early in his career
there is much much more to say about him that i do not know)
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| sense I can not write, here's something to fill the blog with...
A Piece Of The Storm
For Sharon Horvath
From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,
A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed.
That's all There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral. No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
"It's time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening."
Mark Strand | | |
| (I'm going to try and write a poem-collage. a series of images in different sets, and humbly ask for your assistance. This is a "study" for the first image, comparing skyscrapers to stubs of trees. I beseech you to tell me what you think.)
Rain in the City
1. A Leveled Forest
Bark petrified so far
as to sheen like steely glass.
The scabbard of a lost sword.
You can count a tree’s age in circles
of reinforced concrete.
You can approximate its productivity
in the pulp of its core.
But what did it produce?
A shower of bills, post-it-notes
and signage statements. A few flowering
office romances. The autumn
of divorce. A branching spring.
A breaking winter. A mission. A
vision. A poem?
Where are the leaves
that were swept
off the street?
(the rewrite)
Rain in the City
I. Skyscraper
An abandoned silo on a blank sky.
An artic boot sealed in frost.
The wide stub of an elder pine
its one-time rock, so far petrified,
as to sheen like steel or glass.
A mountain under the ocean.
The scabbard of a lost sword,
with shadows asleep around it.
The leg of an unfinished table.
A stubborn, lower-case ‘i,’
anxious to be dotted, by the moon.
(...) | | |
| (...)
Questions
grey hulls of clouds drip a light rain,
as their misty oars sweep the streets
and white-tipped sails tame the sun
leaving, in wake, that jet-blue slate.
to what sure victory do they sail to?
and to what glorious coming home?
(...) | | |
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