national poetry month, day nine: robert haas

A Story about the Body

The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my breasts." The radiance that he had carried around in his belly and chest cavity -- like music -- withered very quickly, and he made himself look at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals were on top; the rest of the bowl -- she must have swept them from the corners of her studio -- was full of dead bees.

Soul, the body's guest,

Upon a thankless arrant!

Fear not to touch the best;

The truth shall be thy warrant:

Go, since I needs must die,

And give the world the lie.

 

Say to the court it glows

And shines like rotten wood;

Say to the church it shows

What's good, and doth no good:

If court and church reply,

Then give them both the lie.

 

Tell potentates they live

Acting by others' action,

Not loved unless they give,

Not strong but by a faction.

If potentates reply,

Give potentates the lie.

 

Tell men of high condition

That manage the estate,

Their purpose is ambition,

Their practice only hate:

And if they make reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell them that brave it most,

They beg for more by spending,

Who, in their greatest cost,

Seek nothing but commending:

And if they make reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell zeal it wants devotion;

Tell love it is but lust;

Tell time it is but motion;

Tell flesh it is but dust:

And wish them not reply,

For thou must give the lie.

 

Tell age it daily wasteth;

Tell honor how it alters;

Tell beauty how she blasteth;

Tell favor how she falters:

And as they shall reply,

Give every one the lie.

 

Tell wit how much it wrangles

In tickle points of niceness;

Tell wisdom she entangles

Herself in over-wiseness:

And when they do reply,

Straight give them both the lie.

 

Tell physic of her boldness;

Tell skill it is pretension;

Tell charity of coldness;

Tell law it is contention:

And as they do reply,

So give them still the lie.

 

Tell fortune of her blindness;

Tell nature of decay;

Tell friendship of unkindness;

Tell justice of delay:

And if they will reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell arts they have no soundness,

But vary by esteeming;

Tell schools they want profoundness,

And stand too much on seeming:

If arts and school reply,

Give arts and school the lie.

 

Tell faith it fled the city;

Tell how the country erreth;

Tell manhood shakes off pity;

Tell virtue least preferreth:

And if they do reply,

Spare not to give the lie.

 

So when thou hast, as I

Commanded thee, done blabbing,--

Although to give the lie

Deserves no less than stabbing,--

Stab at thee, he that will,

No stab the soul can kill.

Read more at http://www.poetry-archive.com/r/the_lie.html#VpGrdcM6Yei9BiIC.99

Haas, Robert. "A Story about the Body". Essential Pleasures. Pinsky, Robert, Ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. 270.

national poetry month, day eight: sam hamill

What the Water Knows

What the mouth sings, the soul must learn to forgive.
A rat’s as moral as a monk in the eyes of the real world.
Still, the heart is a river
pouring from itself, a river that cannot be crossed.

It opens on a bay
and turns back upon itself as the tide comes in,
it carries the cry of the loon and the salts
of the unutterably human.

A distant eagle enters the mouth of a river
salmon no longer run and his wide wings glide
upstream until he disappears
into the nothing from which he came. Only the thought remains.

Lacking the eagle’s cunning or the wisdom of the sparrow,
where shall I turn, drowning in sorrow?
Who will know what the trees know, the spidery patience
of young maple or what the willows confess?

Let me be water. The heart pours out in waves.
Listen to what the water says.
Wind, be a friend.
There’s nothing I couldn’t forgive.

Hamill, Sam. "What the Water Knows". The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. Berg, Stephen, David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsang, Eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. 235.

national poetry month, day seven: a. r. ammons

The City Limits

When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider

that birds' bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest

swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening; when you consider
the abundance of such resource as illuminates the glow-blue

bodies and gold-skeined wings of flies swarming the dumped
guts of a natural slaughter or the coil of shit and in no
way winces from its storms of generosity; when you consider

that air or vacuum, snow or shale, squid or wolf, rose or lichen,
each is accepted into as much light as it will take, then
the heart moves roomier, the man stands and looks about, the

leaf does not increase itself above the grass, and the dark
work of the deepest cells is of a tune with May bushes
and fear lit by the breadth of such calmly turns to praise.

Soul, the body's guest,

Upon a thankless arrant!

Fear not to touch the best;

The truth shall be thy warrant:

Go, since I needs must die,

And give the world the lie.

 

Say to the court it glows

And shines like rotten wood;

Say to the church it shows

What's good, and doth no good:

If court and church reply,

Then give them both the lie.

 

Tell potentates they live

Acting by others' action,

Not loved unless they give,

Not strong but by a faction.

If potentates reply,

Give potentates the lie.

 

Tell men of high condition

That manage the estate,

Their purpose is ambition,

Their practice only hate:

And if they make reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell them that brave it most,

They beg for more by spending,

Who, in their greatest cost,

Seek nothing but commending:

And if they make reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell zeal it wants devotion;

Tell love it is but lust;

Tell time it is but motion;

Tell flesh it is but dust:

And wish them not reply,

For thou must give the lie.

 

Tell age it daily wasteth;

Tell honor how it alters;

Tell beauty how she blasteth;

Tell favor how she falters:

And as they shall reply,

Give every one the lie.

 

Tell wit how much it wrangles

In tickle points of niceness;

Tell wisdom she entangles

Herself in over-wiseness:

And when they do reply,

Straight give them both the lie.

 

Tell physic of her boldness;

Tell skill it is pretension;

Tell charity of coldness;

Tell law it is contention:

And as they do reply,

So give them still the lie.

 

Tell fortune of her blindness;

Tell nature of decay;

Tell friendship of unkindness;

Tell justice of delay:

And if they will reply,

Then give them all the lie.

 

Tell arts they have no soundness,

But vary by esteeming;

Tell schools they want profoundness,

And stand too much on seeming:

If arts and school reply,

Give arts and school the lie.

 

Tell faith it fled the city;

Tell how the country erreth;

Tell manhood shakes off pity;

Tell virtue least preferreth:

And if they do reply,

Spare not to give the lie.

 

So when thou hast, as I

Commanded thee, done blabbing,--

Although to give the lie

Deserves no less than stabbing,--

Stab at thee, he that will,

No stab the soul can kill.

Read more at http://www.poetry-archive.com/r/the_lie.html#VpGrdcM6Yei9BiIC.99

Ammons, A. R.. "The City Limits". Essential Pleasures. Pinsky, Robert, Ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2009. 64.

national poetry month, day six: don coles

How We All Swiftly

My God how we all swiftly, swiftly

unwrap our lives, running from

one rummaged secret to the next

like children among their birthday stuff --

a shout, a half-heard gasp here

and for a while bliss somewhere else

when the one thing we asked for all year

is really there and practically as perfect

as we knew it would be. Those beckoning passes

into what's ahead: first words, the run

without a fall, a bike, those books,

a girl whose nakedness is endless in our bed,

and a few public stunts with results that

partly please us. And on we go, my God how

restlessly among glimpsed profiles turning and

undarkening towards us as we reach them -- praiseworthy

the ones who'll press on with this, press on

so long and so often wrong, hoping to prove

some of the children right.

 

Coles, Don. "How We All Swiftly" Modern Canadian Poets: An Anthology of Poems in English. Jones, Evans and Todd Swift, eds. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2010. 89.

an anne carson gem (national poetry month bonus)

God’s Handiwork

The best way to insult God
is to damage your uniqueness,
which God has worked on.

Carson, Anne. "God's Handiwork". The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. Berg, Stephen, David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsang, Eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. 105.