This is probably

my favorite love poem. Written by a scientist by vocation who does poetry on the side (!). I love the last four stanzas especially.

Love

Two thousand cigarettes.
A hundred miles
from wall to wall.
An eternity and a half of vigils
blanker than snow.

Tons of words
old as the tracks
of a platypus in the sand.

A hundred words we didn't write.
A hundred pyramids we didn't build.

Sweepings.
Dust.

Bitter
as the beginning of the world.

Believe me when I say
it was beautiful.

-Miroslav Holub

I love this.

It's sort of cloudy and makes me think of antiseptic.

Falling

You're pressing your fingers against the sky,
asking Jesus if he sees how close those trees are.
You don't believe in Jesus. A stewardess takes everything
sharp that could hurt you: plastic cups, prayer beads.
All of her omelets are gone. You're watching your window
like television--a show about the suburbs, those stubborn lives.
Whole families relax and look lovely at home.
You're folding your hands around the armrests,
feeling the vague sadness of the stewardess's voice.
There are no clouds today above the boxwoods.
You could live in a world so solidly blue.

-Lesley Dauer

So I've decided

that I'm going to start posting in here again, because keeping good poetry to myself feels selfish.

Worry

Say you want to sing right now,
over and over, the name of an old lover.
Aren't you afraid the neighbors will hear
your voice shaking a little, the way you shook
in that lover's arms, the night you started
losing one another? If you were me, you felt
a lessening no talking could lessen, a sense
the motel television made sense just then,
with its wash of poorly adjusted color
lighting the room. Between leaving
for more ice and forcing a toast
to the future, plastic glasses patting
and sloshing, you thought, "This
is what we're entitled to."

If, unlike me, you had pulled the curtains open,
overhead lights might have glinted
off the balcony railing for you
and exposed the courtyard, the shutdown
fountain. The two of you might have danced
down there, slowly and close. The two of you
might have rescued something beautiful.
If you were me, you wouldn't sing
that name either. You'd worry
about the neighbors. You'd worry like I do.

-Aaron Anstett

This is so beautiful it makes me want to cry.

Dear Marianela,

I hope you read this, because my phone is, as usual, out of service, and I want to say that those poems are wonderful. I'm posting "since feeling is first" here, so it'll be more easily accessible for me in the future. Thank you for showing them to me.

since feeling is first

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all the flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

- e. e. cummings

Also for the

rapture.

I'm reposting this

poem for the rapture tomorrow.

Your Blinded Hand

Suppose that
            everything that greens and grows
should blacken in one moment, flower and branch.
I think that I would find your blinded hand.
Suppose that your cry and mine were lost among numberless cries
            in a city of fire when the earth is afire,
I must still believe that somehow I would find your blinded hand.
            Through flames everywhere
            consuming earth and air
I must believe that somehow, if only one moment were offered,
    I would
            find your hand.
I know as, of course, you know
            the immeasurable wilderness that would exist
            in the moment of fire.
But I would hear your cry and you'd hear mine and each of us
     would find
            the other's hand.
                         We know
            that it might not be so.
                          But for this quiet moment, if only for this
                             moment,
and against all reason,
            let us believe, and believe in our hearts,
            that somehow it would be so.
            I'd hear your cry, you mine--
                         And each of us would find a blinded hand.

-Tennessee Williams

I have a

really intimidatingly large amount of chemistry to do tonight, so I'm updating my blog instead. I really want a donut. I blame you, Carolyn. And ramen. Yesterday, I bought some balogna and salami, but I don't really feel like eating it anymore.

Again, the Body

When you spend many hours in a room alone
you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself--
that is the problem of the body, not that it is moral
but that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught us
do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it,
from scratching off the juicy scab? Today I bit
a thick hangnail and thought of Schneebaum,
who walked four days into the jungle
and stayed for the kindness of the tribe--
who would have thought cannibals would be so tender?
This could be any life: the vegetation is thick
and when there is an opening you follow
down its tunnel until one night you find yourself
walking as on any night, though of a sudden your beloved
friends are using their stone blades
to split the skulls of other men. Gore everywhere,
though the chunk I ate was bland;
it was only when I chewed too far and bled
that the taste turned satisfyingly salty.
How difficult to be in a body,
how easy to be repelled by it,
eating one-sixth of the human heart.
Afterward, the hunters rested
their heads on each other's thighs
while the moon shone on the river
for the time it took to cross the wedge of sky
making its gash through the trees . . .

- Lucia Perillo

Incredible. ". . . that is the problem of the body, not that it is mortal / but that it is mortifying."

I absolutely cannot

wait for school to be over. You have no idea. You think you want to be out as badly as I do. You don't.

Instead of doing stuff now, I'm going to make a list of things I want to do this summer. No promises I'll actually do any of them.

1) Read books. Read lots of books.
2) Write at least one short story.
3) Improve my poetry skillz.
4) Improve my sketching skillz.
5) Study Roman/Greek mythology (sit in on class?).
6) Sleep
7) Research a lot a lot.
8) Take the bus to D.C.
9) Watch Parks and Recreation.

That's all I can think of right now.

This poem is happy.

Happiness
 

So early it's still almost dark out.

I'm near the window with coffee,

and the usual early morning stuff

that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend

walking up the road

to deliver the newspaper.

They wear caps and sweaters,

and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.

They are so happy

they aren't saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take

each other's arm.

It's early in the morning,

and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.

The sky is taking on light,

though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute

death and ambition, even love,

doesn't enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on

unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,

any early morning talk about it.


-Raymond Carver

I read somewhere

of some poet talking about poetry and how to read it. "Poems just mean what they say," he said. I don't know what I think about that.

Bio lab is over. Thank goodness.

New Year's Eve

However busy you are, you should still reserve

One evening a year for thinking about your double,

The man who took the curve on Conway Road

Too fast, given the icy patches that night,

But no faster than you did; the man whose car

When it slid through the shoulder

Happened to strike a girl walking alone

From a neighbor's party to her parents' farm,

While your car struck nothing more notable
Than a snowbank.

One evening for recalling how soon you transformed

Your accident into a comic tale

Told first at a body shop, for comparing

That hour of pleasure with his hour of pain

At the house of the stricken parents, and his many

Long afternoons at the Lutheran graveyard.

If nobody blames you for assuming your luck

Has something to do with your character,

Don't blame him for assuming that his misfortune

Is somehow deserved, that justice would be undone

If his extra grief was balanced later

By a portion of extra joy.

Lucky you, whose personal faith has widened 

To include an angel assigned to protect you

From the usual outcomes of heedless moments.
But this evening consider the angel he lives with,

The stern enforcer who drives the sinners

Out of the Garden with a flaming sword

And locks the gate.

-Carl Dennis

I have almost

officially decided that I don't want to be pre-med anymore. My new ideal is just becoming a really great researcher and writing while I wait for experiments to run. It fits better, I think.

A Hundred Bolts of Satin

All you

have to lose

is one

connection

and the mind

uncouples

all the way back.

It seems

to have been 

a train. 

There seems

to have been

a track.

The things

that you

unpack

from the

abandoned cars

cannot sustain

life: a crate of

tractor axles,

for example,

a dozen dozen

clasp knives,

a hundred 

bolts of satin--

perhaps you

specialized 

more than

you imagined.

-Kay Ryan

Procrastination means more

poetry. So does getting my New Yorker in the mail.

The Long Up

You can see the
land flattening out
near the top. The
long up you've faced
is going to stop.
Your eyes feast
on space instead
of pitch as though
you'd been released.
The measured pace
you've kept corrupts
with fifty yards
to do--fifty
times as hard
against the blue.

-Kay Ryan

Nothing like a

good poetry reading to make you feel completely inferior. But now I have a new book and an autograph, and a beautiful poem to share.

Paper Anniversary

A forgiving spring and now July's heat. You can almost see
the grass growing. In the mornings, white-throated sparrows take turns
flying through the spray of lawn sprinklers up and down
the street. Our driveway bends around an ancient pin oak--you tell me
it is a willow oak, Quercus phellos, but I will keep calling it
what I have always heard it called. This is how names work:
they come about somehow and stay if they stay. We are still
unpacking, finding resting places for the belongings we brought
to this old house, the silverware and wedding china, odd pieces
of furniture, cartons of papers and books, the heaviest things
to move. It has been the season of discovering the yard's plantings,
blooming in their time to speak what we'll take as a welcome. The azaleas
announced themselves to us as pink or white, solving that mystery
before coloring the lawn with discarded flowers. You were happy for a week
when you discovered the peonies languishing and neglected
beside the one good section of fence on the property and could hardly wait
until their lavish blooms shamelessly came open. The hydrangeas, you say,
have their color decided for them by the soil's subtle chemistry.
You brought in panicles of blossoms mostly the tint of a day-sky's blue
in a cooler season, but also shaded with tincture of iodine and a wash of rust
to complicate the hue. All of this is news to me. Every flower
has at least two names. Butterfly bush, summer lilac, something in Latin
I would have to look up. Since we moved in, you have been arranging
cut flowers from the yard in what vases we have, the widemouth jar
I found in the crawl space, a beaded white stem vase handed down
from somebody's grandmother, the blue bottle vase I paid a few dollars for
at a secondhand shop, purple iris against the parchment-colored walls, a spray
of narcissus on the dresser. Le Corbusier said, "The plan proceeds from within
to without; the exterior is the result of an interior." Outside, on this narrow city lot
a sense of order arises as I take up the chain saw and clear away a decade's worth
of mimosa volunteers and wild cherry trees. I can see the plan that someone laid out
before us, hollies in a line below the dining room window, the bulbs arrayed
around the house's corner and in a long bed beside the garage, a declivity in the lawn
where a flowering tree must have stood. In early summer a single surprise lily
emerged two feet tall overnight with a trumpet flower. We will make our revisions.
I prune the ivy and pull it from where it has climbed the window screens.
The massive oak, seventy years old, planted the year the house went up,
has endured as long as anything on this street. We should stop worrying
what to call things. Something will come to us, a phrase that holds
a like meaning for you as it does for me. I've found the place where the soul goes
when it is set loose from the body. I do not know the word for it.

-Bobby Caudle Rogers

I really just

post poems here, because in the time that it takes me to type them out, I feel like I get them a lot better.

There's a poetry reading tonight. Everyone should go. Hodges, 7 P.M.

This one is unsettling.

On An East Wind From The Wars

The wind came in for several thousand miles all night
and changes the close lie of your hair this morning. It
has brought well-travelled sea-birds who forget
their passage, singing. Old songs from the old
battle- and burial-grounds seem new in new lands.
They have to do with spring as new in seeming as
the old air idling in your hair in fact. So new,
so ignorant of any weather not your own,
you like it, breathing in a wind that swept
the battlefields of their worst smells, and took the dead
unburied to the potter's field of air. For miles
they sweetened on the sea-spray, the foul washed off,
and what is left is spring to you, love, sweet,
the salt blown past your shoulder luckily. No
wonder your laugh rings like a chisel as it cuts
your children's new names in the tombstone of thin air.

-Alan Dugan

So this blog

has basically just become a collection of all the poems I like. I'm ok with that.

Credit to Mark for showing me this.

When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be

When I have fears that I may cease to be
   Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
   Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
   Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
   Their shadows, with the magic hour of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
   That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
   Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

-John Keats

Katie showed me

this poem, and I think it is wonderful, so I am sharing it with all of you (Marianela, Babz)!

Vertigo

Mind led body
to the edge of a precipice.
They stared in desire
at the naked abyss.
If you love me, said mind,
take that step into silence.
If you love me, said body,
turn and exist.

-Anne Stevenson

I just keep reading it, again and again. It it delicious.

Most days, I

just don't really have anything to say. I have good poems to share, though. So that is what I shall do. Writing in verse is so hard to do.

This poem was in the latest New Yorker, and I like it a lot, though I'm not entirely sure I get it completely:

Rat Wheel, Dementia, Mont Saint Michel

My last god's a theodicy glutton, a good-evil gourmet--
peacock and plague, gene-junk; he gobbles it down.
Poetry, violence; love, war--his stew of honey and thorn.

For instance, thinks theodicy-god: Mont Saint Michel.
Sheep, sand, steeple honed sharp as a spear. And inside,
a contraption he calls with a chuckle the rat wheel.

Thick timber three metres around, two persons across,
into which prisoners were inserted to trudge, toil,
hoist food for the bishop and monks; fat bishop himself.

The wheel weighs and weighs. You're chained in; you toil.
Then they extract you. Where have your years vanished?
What difference? says theodicy-god. Wheel, toil: what difference?

theodicy-god has evolved now to both substance and not.
With handy metaphysical blades to slice brain meat from mind.
For in minds should be voidy wings choiring, not selves.

This old scholar, for instance, should have to struggle to speak,
should not remember his words, paragraphs, books:
that garner of full-ripened grain must be hosed clean.

Sometimes as the rat wheel is screaming, theodicy-god
considers whether to say he's sorry: That you can't speak,
can't remember your words, paragraphs, books.


Sorry, so sorry. Blah, his voice thinks instead, blah.
He can't do it. Best hope instead they'll ask him again
as they always do for forgiveness. But what if they don't?

What might have once been a heart feels pity, for itself, though,
not the old man with no speech--for him and his only scorn.
Here in my rat wheel, my Mont Saint Michel, my steeple of scorn.

-C.K. Williams

"against all reason,"

This poem does not apply to my life in the slightest, but still, it's beautiful.

Your Blinded Hand

Suppose that
            everything that greens and grows
should blacken in one moment, flower and branch.
I think that I would find your blinded hand.
Suppose that your cry and mine were lost among numberless cries
            in a city of fire when the earth is afire,
I must still believe that somehow I would find your blinded hand.
            Through flames everywhere
            consuming earth and air
I must believe that somehow, if only one moment were offered,
    I would
            find your hand.
I know as, of course, you know
            the immeasurable wilderness that would exist
            in the moment of fire.
But I would hear your cry and you'd hear mine and each of us
     would find
            the other's hand.
                         We know
            that it might not be so.
                          But for this quiet moment, if only for this
                             moment,
and against all reason,
            let us believe, and believe in our hearts,
            that somehow it would be so.
            I'd hear your cry, you mine--
                         And each of us would find a blinded hand.

-Tennessee Williams

Thank God For

the promise of spring. Or, in this case, actually spring! Jubilee!


Happy World Poetry Day, readers (Marianela, Babz)! So today, I post a spring poem to celebrate. I couldn't find the one I was thinking of, so we'll have to settle for this. Still good, though.


A Light exists in Spring


A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period --
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay --

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.


-Emily Dickinson (not the cat)

So much for

posting everyday this break. That obviously didn't work out. My streak of productivity lasted a grand total of two days. It was going quite strong until it was met with the daunting prospects of doing chemistry. I just  spent like five seconds trying to figure out if you spelled "met" like "meat" or "met." My brain on break is not doing ok.


I don't have the patience for paintings. I'm not a bad artist, but I don't have the patience to actually sit/stand there and make something--especially something creative. I'm a copier, at best.


Ramblings. None of this probably makes any sense. I can't think.


The problem is that I don't actually care all that much about doing, well, anything. There is nothing that I feel a drive for. Not even writing. There are things that I appreciate and there are things that I enjoy, but, at the end of the day, I don't appreciate or enjoy them enough to spontaneously do them. I don't have any passions--not any lasting passions, anyway. I'd really rather just sit or sleep. So I just pursue things that people tell me I'm good at doing. 


And that, my friends, is the cold, naked truth. 


Unless I'm PMSing. Then I care about everything.


The Second Coming


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? 


-William Butler Yeats

I need someone

to keep me from spending money for the rest of the year. Seriously. All I do at home is eat, sleep, and spend money. This is baaaad.

I've decided that I'm not going to bed tonight until I finish Uncle Tungsten. I've got about 200 pages left. Doable.

I really, really, really love Borges. I react to his poems the same way that I react to T.S. Eliot's, and that's saying something. Plus, we share a fascination with dust.

Maybe I'll start posting a poem a day. It's more for me than anything, though, 'cause it'll force me to read a poem a day. Hmm. Readers (Marianela, Babz), what do you think?

Remorse for Any Death

Free of memory and hope,
unlimited, abstract, almost future,
the dead body is not somebody: It is death.
Like the God of the mystics, whom they insist has no attributes,
the dead person is no one everywhere,
is nothing but the loss and absence of the world.
We rob it of everything,
we do not leave it one color, one syllable:
Here is the yard which its eyes no longer take up,
there is the sidewalk where it waylaid its hope.
It might even be thinking
what we are thinking.
We have divided among us, like thieves,
the treasure of nights and days.

-Jorge Luis Borges