"Second Person" by Rae Armantrout

Second Person

Lemons, lanterns

hang late

into the evening.

But you are known

for your voluptuous retreat,

for leaving

your absence

on the air,

illicit, thin.

I know

you think

I wonder

if you think

of me.

This reflection

spins,

a bead on a string.

I can take it with me.

Source of the text - Rae Armantrout, Money Shot.  Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011, page 32.

TJB: You-niverse. The personal address, and I-thou nature of lyric poetry, forms some of the subject of this lyric. “I wonder if you wonder.”

"Riprap" by Gary Snyder

Riprap

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
                 placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
                 in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
                 riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
                 straying planets,
These poems, people,
                 lost ponies with
Dragging saddles—
                 and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
                 four-dimensional
Game of Go.
                 ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
                 a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
                 with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
                 all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

Source of the text - Gary Snyder, Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems.  San Francisco: Four Seasons Foundation, 1969, page 30.

TJB: Ars poeticobble. A poem is figured as a walkable, manmade trail; the reader as a horse led across steep terrain; words as volcanic rocks.

Poem 6, by Ōtomo no Yakamochi, from the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu

Poem 6, by Ōtomo no Yakamochi, from the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu (One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each)

Poem 6, in calligraphy in the hand of Abbot Genchin circa 1660 CE

Poem 6, in modern Japanese characters

Poem 6 transliteration into Roman alphabet

Kasasagi no
wataseru hashi ni
oku shimo no
shiroki wo mireba
yo zo fukenikeru



Poem 6, translated by Peter McMillan

How the night deepens.

As lovers part

a white ribbon of frost

is stretched along

the Bridge of Magpie Wings.

Source of the text (all versions listed above) - One Hundred Poets, One Poem Each: A Translation of the Ogura Hyakunin Isshu, translated and edited by Peter McMillan.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, pages 8, 116, 156.

TJB: Good tidings. Whether it’s a literal frost-covered bridge separating lovers or, say, the Milky Way, the images are elegant in simplicity.

Riddle 4 from The Exeter Book

 Riddle 4 from The Exeter Book

 

[Image of Riddle 4 from Folio 102v of The Exeter Book]

Source of the image: Chambers, R. W., M. Förster, and R. Flower, eds. The Exeter Book of Old English Poetry. London: P. Lund, Humphries & Co., Ltd., 1933, folio 102v.

[Text of Riddle 4 in Anglo Saxon]

Ic sceal þragbysig     þegne minum,
hringum hæfted,     hyran georne,
min bed brecan,     breahtme cyþan
þæt me halswriþan     hlaford sealde.
Oft mec slæpwerigne     secg oðþe meowle 
gretan eode;     ic him gromheortum
winterceald oncweþe.     Wearm lim
gebundenne bæg     hwilum bersteð;
se þeah biþ on þonce     þegne minum,
medwisum men,     me þæt sylfe,
þær wiht wite,     ond wordum min
on sped mæge     spel gesecgan.

Source of the text in Anglo Saxon - George Philip Krapp and Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, eds., The Exeter Book, Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records vol. III (New York: Columbia University Press, 1936), page 183.

[English translation by Phyllis Levin]

Busy from Time to Time, in Rings

Busy from time to time, in rings
bound, I shall obey my servant eagerly,
break my bed and suddenly call out
that my lord has given me a neck-collar.
Often a man or a maid will greet me,
sleepweary; grim-hearted, I give
a winter-cold answer.  A warm limb
sometimes bursts the bound ring,
which is pleasing to my servant,
a feeble-minded man; to me, as well,
if you'd like to know, and if my words
ring true my story may be told.

Source of the text in English translation - The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, edited by Greg Delanty and Michael Matto.  New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011, p. 74-75.

TJB: Ring a bell? With so many possible interpretations, what answer? Bell, plough, dick—who knows? Is it a riddle if there’s not one inevitable answer?

"Nessie Wants to Watch Herself Doing It" by Patricia Lockwood

Nessie Wants to Watch Herself Doing It

Doing what, I don’t know, being alive. The green

of her is a scum on the surface, she would like

to look at herself. Should I have a memory?

she wonders. Of mother washing my frogskin

in muddy water? I do not have that memory.

My near-transparent frogskin? Mother washing

it with mud to keep it visible? I do not have that

memory, almost, almost. Warmblooded though

she knows for a fact, and spontaneously generated

from the sun on stone, and one hundred vertebrae in every

wave of the lake, as one hundred vertebrae in every wave

of her. All of her meat blue rare blue rare, a spot

on her neck that would drive her wild if anyone ever

touched it, and the tip of her tail ends with -ness and

-less. So far all she knows of the alphabet is signs

that say NO SWIMMING.

                      So far all she knows is her whereabouts.

Has great HATRED for the parochial, does the liver

of the lake. Would like to go to universe . . . al . . . ity?

           She has heard there is a good one in Germany.

They stay up all night drinking some black sludge,

and grow long beards rather than look at them-

selves, and do thought experiments like: if I am not

in Scotland, does Scotland even exist? What do I look

like when no one is looking? She would listen to them

just as hard as she could with the mud-sucking holes

in her head—and they, she thinks, would listen back,

with their ears so regularly described as seashell.

The half of her that is underwater would like to be

under a desk, the head of her that is underwater

would like to be fully immersed.

                                             I will be different there,

she thinks, with a powerful wake ahead of me.

When will the thinkers come for me. Visited only

here by believers. Is so deep-sea-sick of believers.

When will the thinkers come for me here, where

the green stretches out before me, and I am my own

front lawn. The green is a reflective green, a green

in the juicy shadows of leaves—a bosky even green—

a word I will learn to use, and use without self-

consciousness, when at last I go to Germany. I have

holed myself away here, sometimes I am not here

at all, and I feel like the nice clean hole in the leaf

                      and the magnifying glass above me.

She looks to the believers on the shore. A picture

                      it would last longer! shouts Nessie.

Does NOT believe photography can rise to the level

of art, no matter how much rain falls in it, as levels

of the lake they rose to art when Nessie dipped

her body in it. Nessie wants to watch herself doing

it. Doing what, I don’t know, being alive. The lake

bought one Nessie and brought her home. She almost

died of loneliness until it gave her a mirror. The lake

could be a mirror, thinks Nessie. Would be perfectly

                                                       still if I weren’t in it.

Source of the text - Patricia Lockwood, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals.  New York: Penguin Poets, 2014, pages 26-27.

TJB: Cryptid jitter. Not desiring to be a big fish in a small pond, orphan Nessie sweetly yearns for education in idealism & continental philosophy.

"He Marries the Stuffed-Owl Exhibit at the Indiana Welcome Center" by Patricia Lockwood

He Marries the Stuffed-Owl Exhibit
at the Indiana Welcome Center

He marries her mites and the wires in her wings,

he marries her yellow glass eyes and black centers,

he marries her near-total head turn, he marries

            the curve of each of her claws, he marries

the information plaque, he marries the extinction

            of this kind of owl, he marries the owl

that she loved in life and the last thought of him

in the thick of her mind

            just one inch away from the bullet, there,

                                            he marries the moths

who make holes in the owl, who have eaten the owl

almost all away, he marries the branch of the tree

that she grips, he marries the real-looking moss

and dead leaves, he marries the smell of must

that surrounds her, he marries the strong blue

            stares of children, he marries nasty smudges

of their noses on the glass, he marries the camera

that points at the owl to make sure no one steals her,

so the camera won’t object when he breaks the glass

while reciting some vows that he wrote himself,

he screams OWL instead of I’LL and then ALWAYS

LOVE HER, he screams HAVE AND TO HOLD

and takes hold of the owl and wrenches the owl

away from her branch

                      and he covers her in kisses and the owl

thinks, “More moths,” and at the final hungry kiss,

“That must have been the last big bite, there is no more

of me left to eat and thank God,” when he marries

the stuffing out of the owl and hoots as the owl flies out

under his arm, they elope into the darkness of Indiana,

Indiana he screams is their new life and WELCOME.

They live in a tree together now, and the children of

Welcome to Indiana say who even more than usual,

and the children of Welcome to Indiana they wonder

where they belong. Not in Indiana, they say to themselves,

the state of all-consuming love, we cannot belong in Indiana,

            as night falls and the moths appear one by one, hungry.

Source of the text – Patricia Lockwood, Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals.  New York: Penguin Poets, 2014, pages 7-8.

TJB: Hoosier epithalamium. In a litany bursting with life, a funny, insane blazon, the poet describes a man marrying a stuffed owl. Far cry from Jack & Diane.

"Funny You Should Ask" by Anne Carson

FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK

How was your trip to New York?

Well,

we stayed at R’s. He was away. Asked us to not use the sheets—quite 

reasonably,

he has no laundry and who likes coming home to an unclean

bed?

Instructed to bring sheets, we forgot. But try to sleep slightly

above

the sheets, C with his chronic cough, I my insomnia. Wandering 3 a.m. 

bedroom

to kitchen I find no teapot, scald myself on the kettle. C still coughing, 

racked, almost in

tears. Chronic means no one can help. I blunder about, spilling

things

on the floor. Pick up a book I’d thought to read on the plane.

“Hölderlin’s

Madness: Chronicle of a Dwelling Life, 1806-1843,” by Giorgio

Agamben.

It begins with Agamben’s exegesis of Hölderlin’s critique of

Fichte’s

understanding of the sentence “I am I.” All three have much to

say

about this sentence, for “I am I,” with its exhilarating syntax and

salty

relation of subject to object, does not dispel anyone’s tears or

blunder,

yet it makes a sort of refuge. Admittedly, I don’t quite know who

Fichte

is and have to look up Selbstbewusstsein, but still, there is a

staving

off of terribleness. To think. This saving thing. This useless thing.

Night

passes, C finally sleeps, Agamben goes on struggling with Hölderlin’s 

critique

of Fichte till dawn. My skull sways. “I am I” remains

unclarified.

It occurs to me I’ve spent too much of my life staring at someone else’s 

sentences

in a rebar dawn, measuring my insomnia against their

snap-brim

thoughts. Have I proved a worthy struggler with Agamben’s

exegesis

of Hölderlin’s critique of Fichte? Not

really.

My mind is

smallish.

Then again, this book of Agamben’s was sent me by a former

student,

whose life was changed when he read “ . . . in lovely blue . . . ”

(Hölderlin,

fragment of a hymn). So (changed) was mine, years ago, I now recall. And 

really,

what more can I ask, whoever I am, of a night on a trip to

New York?

Source of the text - The New Yorker, December 11, 2023, pages 46-47.

TJB: Answering the 1st line’s question, the poet wrestles with the same philosophical sentence—I am I—as her subject’s subject’s subject. I had to gts.

"Compass" by Jorge Luis Borges

[Original Spanish text]

UNA BRUJULA

A Esther Zemborain de Torres

Todas las cosas son palabras del

Idioma en que Alguien o Algo, noche y día,

Escribe esa infinita algarabía

Que es la historia del mundo.  En su tropel

Pasan Cartago y Roma, yo, tú, él,

Mi vida que no entiendo, esta agonía

De ser enigma, azar, criptografía

Y toda la discordia de Babel.

Detrás del nombre hay lo que no se nombra;

Hoy he sentido gravitar su sombra

En esta aguja azul, lúcida y leve,

Que hacia el confín de un mar tiende su empeño,

Con algo de reloj visto en un sueño

Y algo de ave dormida que se mueve.

[English translation by Richard Wilbur]

COMPASS

To Esther Zemborain de Torres

All things are words of some strange tongue, in thrall

To Someone, Something, who both day and night

Proceeds in endless gibberish to write

The history of the world.  In that dark scrawl

Rome is set down, and Carthage, I, you, all,

And this my being which escapes me quite,

My anguished life that’s cryptic, recondite,

And garbled as the tongues of Babel’s fall.

Beyond the name there lies what has no name;

Today I have felt its shadow stir the aim

Of this blue needle, light and keen, whose sweep

Homes to the utmost of the sea its love,

Suggestive of a watch in dreams, or of

Some bird, perhaps, who shifts a bit in sleep.

Source of the text - Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems 1923-1967, edited by Norman Thomas di Giovanni. [New York]: Delacorte Press, 1972, pages 96-97.

TJB: This Italian sonnet, Neoplatonistic to the core, sees the fallenness of things, larger truth hiding beyond; & a compass as the metaphor to point us there.

"the rites for Cousin Vit" by Gwendolyn Brooks

the rites for Cousin Vit

Carried her unprotesting out the door.

Kicked back the casket-stand.  But it can't hold her,

That stuff and satin aiming to enfold her,

The lid's contrition nor the bolts before.

Oh oh.  Too much.  Too much.  Even now, surmise,

She rises in the sunshine.  There she goes,

Back to the bars she knew and the repose

In love-rooms and the things in people's eyes.

Too vital and too squeaking.  Must emerge.

Even now she does the snake-hips with a hiss,

Slops the bad wine across her shantung, talks

Of pregnancy, guitars and bridgework, walks

In parks or alleys, comes haply on the verge

Of happiness, haply hysterics.  Is.

Source of the text - Gwendolyn Brooks, Selected Poems.  New York: Harper Perennial, 2006, page 58.

TJB: Lust for life. This envelope sonnet, of a woman so vital that death can’t contain her, finds its true spirit in rhyme, alliteration, & internal rhyme.

"I have a gentil cok," anonymous Middle English lyric

I have a gentil cok,
    Croweth me day;
He doth me risen erly,

    My matins for to say.

I have a gentil cok,

    Comen he is of gret;

His comb is of red corel,

    His tayel is of jet.

I have a gentil cok

    Comen he is of kinde;

His comb is of red corel,

    His tail is of inde.

His legges ben of asor,

    So gentil and so smale;

His spores arn of silver white,

    Into the worte-wale.

His eynen arn of cristal,

    Loken all in aumber;

And every night he percheth him

    In min ladyes chaumber.

Editors' Notes:

  gentil - noble

  Comen he is of gret - He comes of a great family.

  Comen he is of kinde - He is of good lineage.

  inde - indigo

  asor - azure

  spores - spurs

  worte-wale - root of cock's spur

  eynen - eyes

  loken - set

Source of the text - Middle English Lyrics: A Norton Critical Edition, selected and edited by Maxwell S. Luria and Richard L. Hoffman.  New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1974, page 77.

TJB: Gentle dick energy; double-entendre as a source of poetic power. In short iambics, the poem gives us a fabulous, near-deadpan blazon of a rooster.