"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.
  
  
  
 

"Obituary" by A.K. Ramanujan

OBITUARY

Father, when he passed on,

left dust

on a table full of papers,

left debts and daughters,

a bedwetting grandson

named by the toss

of a coin after him,

a house that leaned

slowly through our growing

years on a bent coconut

tree in the yard.

Being the burning type,

he burned properly

at the cremation

as before, easily

and at both ends,

left his eye coins

in the ashes that didn’t

look one bit different,

several spinal discs, rough,

some burned to coal, for sons

to pick gingerly

and throw as the priest

said, facing east

where three rivers met

near the railway station;

no longstanding headstone

with his full name and two dates

to hold in their parentheses

everything he didn’t quite

manage to do himself,

like his caesarian birth

in a brahmin ghetto

and his death by heart-

failure in the fruit market.

But someone told me

he got two lines

in an inside column

of a Madras newspaper

sold by the kilo

exactly four weeks later

to streethawkers

who sell it in turn

to the small groceries

where I buy salt,

coriander,

and jaggery

in newspaper cones

that I usually read

for fun, and lately

in the hope of finding

these obituary lines.

And he left us

a changed mother

and more than

one annual ritual.

Source of the text – Ten Twentieth-Century Indian Poets, edited by R. Parthasarathy.  Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1976, pages 106-107.

TJB: Reused elegy. An ode to a father’s incomplete life in 3 parts: what he left behind; the handling of his remains; & his obit, as used by spice merchants.
 
 
 
 

"I never saw a Moor" by Emily Dickinson

(1) [Poem as written by the poet on a fragment of stationery]

(2) [Text from Franklin's variorum edition]

I never saw a Moor.
I never saw the Sea -

Yet know I how the Heather looks

And what a Billow be - 

I never spoke with God

Nor visited in Heaven - 

Yet certain am I of the spot

As if the Checks were given - 



Source of the text - (1) Emily Dickinson Archive: An Open Access Website for the Manuscripts of Emily Dickinson, http://edickinson.org, Amherst Manuscript # A 237, page 1. (2) The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Variorum Edition, Volume II, edited by Ralph W. Franklin. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 756.

TJB: Billow-talk; epistemology in quatrains.  As a proof that God exists, this is wanting; as a verse-assertion of faith, well, fine. What is a billow?
 
 
 

from "Writing is an Aid to Memory" by Lyn Hejinian

I.

apple is shot nod

                         ness seen know it around saying

                                     think for a hundred years

   but and perhaps utter errors direct the point to a meadow

                                 rank fissure up on the pit

arts are several branches of life

                     little more science is brought where great

                         need is required

                           out becomes a bridge of that name

                in the painting is a great improvement

   bit ink up on the human race

and return if the foot goes back

              in the trunks of trees behoove a living thing

                                       wedge war common saw

           hard by that length of time the great demand is

                                    very dear

ashes in water

                                 that might be a slip of architecture

                                 think was reduced to an improper size

   blocks to interest who can visit

                                         variations on ideas are now full

                             problems

           from a point of increasing

at only as to four or we who nine

a little grace familiar with simple limbs and the sudden

                                reverse



Source of the text - Lyn Hejinian, Writing is an Aid to Memory.  Berkeley, CA: The Figures, 1978.

TJB:  High strung—composed at phrase-level, stripped of connective tissue, metaphors mixed, shot through with unresolved tension, & a tree-meadow motif.
  
  
  

From "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World" by Galway Kinnell

The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ 

into the New World

                  Was diese kleine Gasse doch für ein Reich an sich war . . .

       1

pcheek pcheek pcheek pcheek pcheek

They cry. The motherbirds thieve the air

To appease them. A tug on the East River

Blasts the bass-note of its passage, lifted

From the infra-bass of the sea. A broom

Swishes over the sidewalk like feet through leaves.

Valerio’s pushcart Ice Coal Kerosene

Moves       clack

                                clack

                                             clack

On a broken wheelrim. Ringing in its chains

The New Star Laundry horse comes down the street

Like a roofleak whucking into a pail.

At the redlight, where a horn blares,

The Golden Harvest Bakery brakes on its gears,

Squeaks, and seethes in place. A propane-

gassed bus makes its way with big, airy sighs.

Across the street a woman throws open

Her window.

She sets, terribly softly,

Two potted plants on the windowledge

                        tic              tic

And bangs shut her window.

A man leaves a doorway tic toc tic toc tic toc tic hurrah toc splat

        on Avenue C tic etc and turns the corner.

Banking the same corner

A pigeon coasts 5th Street in shadows,

Looks for altitude, surmounts the rims of buildings,

And turns white.

The babybirds pipe down. It is day.

Source of the text – Galway Kinnell, The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ Into the New World: Poems 1953-1964.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002, pages 67-68.

TJB: Street sonics. In Section I of a long poem, the poet sets the stage with a series of meticulously described/enacted sounds heard on Avenue C.
  
  
  

"Left-Wife Goose" by Sharon Olds

Left-Wife Goose

Hoddley, Poddley, Puddles and Fogs,

Cats are to Marry the Poodle Dogs;

Cats in Blue Jackets and Dogs in Red Hats,

What Will Become of the Mice and Rats?

       Had a trust fund, had a thief in,

       Had a husband, could not keep him.

Fiddle-Dee-Dee, Fiddle-Dee-Dee,

The Fly Has Left the Humble-Bee.

They Went to the Court, and Unmarried Was She:

The Fly Has Left the Humble-Bee.

       Had a sow twin, had a reap twin,

       Had a husband, could not keep him.

In Marble Halls as White as Milk,

Lined with a Skin as Soft as Silk,

Within a Fountain Crystal-Clear,

A Golden Apple Doth Appear.

No Doors There Are to This Stronghold

Yet Robbers Break In and Steal the Gold.

       Had an egg cow, had a cream hen,

       Had a husband, could not keep him.

Formed Long Ago, Yet Made Today,

Employed While Others Sleep;

What Few Would Like to Give Away,

Nor Any Wish to Keep.

       Had a nap man, had a neap man,

       Had a flood man, could not keep him.

Ickle, Ockle, Blue Bockle,

Fishes in the Sea.

If You Want a Left Wife,

Please Choose Me.

       Had a safe of 4X sheepskin,

       Had a brook brother, could not keep him.

Inter, Mitzy, Titzy, Tool,

Ira, Dura, Dominee,

Oker, Poker, Dominocker,

Out Goes Me.

       Had a lamb, slung in keepskin,

       Had some ewe-milk, in it seethed him.

There Was an Old Woman Called Nothing-at-All,

Who Lived in a Dwelling Exceedingly Small;

A Man Stretched His Mouth to the Utmost Extent,

And Down at One Gulp House and Old Woman Went.

       Had a rich pen, had a cheap pen,

       Had a husband, could not keep him.

Put him in this nursery shell,

And here you keep him very well.

Source of the text – Sharon Olds, Stag’s Leap.  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012, pages 34-35.

TJB: With the diction, doggerel, nonce-words, & rhythm of nursery rhyme, this poem enacts failed attempts to make sense of transience—life, marriage.