"My galley charged with forgetfulness" by Sir Thomas Wyatt

My galley charged with forgetfulness
Thorough sharp seas in winter nights doth pass
'Tween rock and rock; and eke mine enemy, alas,
That is my lord, steereth with cruelness;
And every oar a thought in readiness
As though that death were light in such a case.
An endless wind doth tear the sail apace
Of forced sighs and trusty fearfulness.
A rain of tears, a cloud of dark disdain
Hath done the weared cords great hinderance,
Wreathed with error and eke with ignorance.
The stars be hid that led me to this pain.
Drowned is reason that should me comfort
And I remain despairing of the port.


Source of the text - Sir Thomas Wyatt, Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems, edited by R.A. Rebholz.  London: Penguin Books, 1997, p. 81.

TJB: Translation? I’m almost losing it, the bitch’s trying to drive me over the edge, I can’t think straight. But see how nicely he says it.

"Johnie Armstrong," anonymous ballad

Johnie Armstrong



1  THERE dwelt a man in faire Westmerland,
        Ionnë Armestrong men did him call,
    He had nither lands nor rents coming in,
        Yet he kept eight score men in his hall.

2  He had horse and harness for them all,
        Goodly steeds were all milke-white;
    O the golden bands an about their necks,
        And their weapons, they were all alike.

3  Newes then was brought unto the king
        That there was sicke a won as hee,
    That livëd lyke a bold out-law,
        And robbëd all the north country.

4  The king he writt an a letter then,
        A letter which was large and long;
    He signëd it with his owne hand,
        And he promised to doe him no wrong.

5  When this letter came Ionnë untill,
        His heart it was as blythe as birds on the tree:
    ‘Never was I sent for before any king,
        My father, my grandfather, nor none but mee.

6  ‘And if wee goe the king before,
        I would we went most orderly;
    Every man of you shall have his scarlet cloak,
        Laced with silver laces three.

7  ‘Every won of you shall have his velvett coat,
        Laced with sillver lace so white;
    O the golden bands an about your necks,
        Black hatts, white feathers, all alyke.’

8  By the morrow morninge at ten of the clock,
        Towards Edenburough gon was hee,
    And with him all his eight score men;
        Good lord, it was a goodly sight for to see!

9  When Ionnë came befower the king,
        He fell downe on his knee;
    ‘O pardon, my soveraigne leige,’ he said,
        ‘O pardon my eight score men and mee!’

10  ‘Thou shalt have no pardon, thou traytor strong,
          For thy eight score men nor thee;
      For to-morrow morning by ten of the clock,
          Both thou and them shall hang on the gallow-tree.’

11  But Ionnë looke’d over his left shoulder,
          Good Lord, what a grevious look looked hee!
      Saying, Asking grace of a graceles face —
          Why there is none for you nor me.

12  But Ionnë had a bright sword by his side,
          And it was made of the mettle so free,
      That had not the king stept his foot aside,
          He had smitten his head from his faire boddë.

13  Saying, Fight on, my merry men all,
          And see that none of you be taine;
      For rather then men shall say we were hange’d,
          Let them report how we were slaine.

14  Then, God wott, faire Eddenburrough rose,
          And so besett poore Ionnë rounde,
      That fowerscore and tenn of Ionnës best men
          Lay gasping all upon the ground.

15  Then like a mad man Ionnë laide about,
          And like a mad man then fought hee,
      Untill a falce Scot came Ionnë behinde,
          And runn him through the faire boddee.

16  Saying, Fight on, my merry men all,
          And see that none of you be taine;
      For I will stand by and bleed but awhile,
          And then will I come and fight againe.

17  Newes then was brought to young Ionnë Armestrong,
          As he stood by his nurses knee,
      Who vowed if ere he live’d for to be a man,
          O the treacherous Scots revengd hee’d be.


Source of the text - English and Scottish Popular Ballads, edited from the collection of Francis James Child by Helen Child Sargent and George Lyman Kittredge. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1904, pp. 413-415.

TJB: Rule-of-law as thuggery-tragedy; still, this border-reiver song spends its energy on costume, headcount, time of day & transmission of news.

 

 

 

 

"Cézanne" by Gertrude Stein

CEZANNE

    The Irish lady can say, that to-day is every day. Caesar can
say that every day is to-day and they say that every day is as
they say.

    In this way we have a place to stay and he was not met
because he was settled to stay. When I said settled I meant
settled to stay. When I said settled to stay I meant settled to

stay Saturday. In this way a mouth is a mouth. In this way if

in as a mouth if in as a mouth where, if in as a mouth where

and there. Believe they have water too. Believe they have that

water too and blue when you see blue, is all blue precious

too, is all that that is precious too is all that and they meant

to absolve you. In this way Cézanne nearly did nearly in this

way Cézanne nearly did nearly did and nearly did. And was

I surprised. Was I very surprised. Was I surprised. I was sur-

prised and in that patient, are you patient when you find

bees. Bees in a garden make a specialty of honey and so does

honey. Honey and prayer. Honey and there. There where

the grass can grow nearly four times yearly.

 
Source of the text - Gertrude Stein, Writings 1903-1932.  New York: The Library of America, 1998, p.494.

TJB: Cubist dualistic. It has great grammar & rhythm via short vowels, repetition & many rhymes on day, blue, he & there; so how can it not mean?

 

 

 

 

"Renunciation" by Kazim Ali

Renunciation

The books were all torn apart, sliced along the spines
Light filled all the openings that she in her silence renounced

Still: her handwriting on the papers remembered us to her
The careful matching of the papers’ edges was a road back

One night Muhummad was borne aloft by a winged horse
Taken from the Near Mosque to the Far Mosque

Each book likens itself to lichen,
stitching softly to tree trunks, to rocks

what was given into the Prophet’s ears that night:
A changing of directions—now all the scattered tribes must pray:

Wonder well foundry, well sunborn, sundered and sound here
Well you be found here, foundered and found

 
Source of the text - Kazim Ali, The Far Mosque.  Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 2005.

TJB: What gets renounced here in this glimmer-lyric glancing at two narratives? Books, perhaps (akin to prophecy); love; or an older religion.

"The Part of Me That's O" by Tory Dent

The Part of Me That's O


What assembles a locus for understanding cracks at the foundation,
a fountainhead of a troll's facade, against which all means of identification
flee, Haitians from their homeland, or become troll-like in appearance
as I regard my face distort accordingly, my pink hair, a shock of radioactivity,
my flattened nose desensitized to olfactory tethering, my red eyes like a rat's,
panicked and immoral.  But inside the werewolf I am the same, though smaller,
diminishing inside the bell jar of this werewolf body.
I experience the tumult of my isolation like a kicking fetus
who accelerates its growth on a trajectory of delineation,
becomes more, not less, ambiguous in gender, its limbs more
a blur of purely molecular congruency than the aestheticized flesh,
than the Giorgione cameo that wavers in lakeside twilight,
profane by virtue of what it lacks in profanity,
a purity superimposed upon a purity like a testudo
forming a bulletproof sky which ultimately fails to protect,
as art fails, to provide shelter from the mammal in us:
from the carnivorous, the banal, the rupturous, the pitiful.
There will be no birthing, but a series of swallowings
until gaunt from longing I will have settled into a state of impoverishment
normalized finally by some property of physics that adapts
the disassociated to the hemisphere: like E. coli in water, I will live.
My erotic impulses curtailed so many times that in ringlets they will lie
like sheaved hair, as fertilizer fulfilling its wishes
by fulfilling the wishes of others
for which I will not receive pleasure
for which I will not be responsible
for which I will always be rendered impotent by this surveillant privilege.


Source of the text - Tory Dent, Black Milk: Poems.  Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY, Sheep Meadow Press, 2005, p. 33.

TJB: This chant uses long phrases, fifty-cent words & tight cinematic images to utter a cry of life coming from the person within a failing body.

"Hello," by Oliver De La Paz

Hello,

Hello, constellation—my other face
as suburbia explodes at dawn.

Windy hello, my blown-away papers,
        sheets radiating like dandelion seeds.

Hello, silo's gleaming tin saying, breathe as I pass along the highway.
        Shiny hello.

Guard at the halfway house disappearing for an hour, hello.
        I missed the light off your sunglasses.

Hello, footfall on sand tilting the earth's axis, its darkening arch.

My blue blanket, childhood bleached in the yard—hello.

My crickets playing their hairs: tchick tchick,
        like some dying machine—hello.

Hello, hirsute walking away from the circus tent,
        your eyes flickering in the afternoon like wild butane lighters,

My curtain to a darkroom letting me see a fingernail of red light—
        I think of bathing in hotels. Hello hotels,
        sunshine, and complimentary coffee.

Perfume on a hot day. Hello Cecelia from sixth grade
        who had worn no underwear for Social Studies. . . I was at the
            desk behind you
        when you turned and froze me with your teeth.

Colder than hello, my saxophone—I don't play.

My jazz of hard liquor. My drunk, hello,
        who approaches my car saying, "You are shameless, you are
            shameless."
        Meanwhile, the sunlight off broken glass is everywhere.

Hello shame. Hello and thanks. My devilish . . . with her spiky heels.
        Been long.

Hello sadness, beautiful, beautiful.

Hello, hat on the bed struck by a sunbeam
        serving as a symbol as the rattle of the gravel trucks
        returns you to the world.

Hello again, Cecelia, your mouth shut
        after seeing your lover pour gasoline on his hands. Hello
            hunger.

Hello, my hunger, angry at yourself. Hello, yourself.

Hello to myself who has no moonlight. Moonlight spangled hello.

My God, hello. You left your wallet and your keys. Where are you
        going without them? You can’t go far. Not far at all.


Source of the text - Poetry 30: Thirtysomething American Thirtysomething Poets, edited by Dan Crocker and Gerry La Femina.  DuBois, PA: Mammoth Books, 2005.

TJB: Associative aubade. The poet starts this good-humored litany greeting specific & concrete things then moves more interior & ends in prayer.

"Peter" by Marianne Moore

PETER


          Strong and slippery,
built for the midnight grass-party
confronted by four cats, he sleeps his time away—
the detached first claw on the foreleg corresponding
to the thumb, retracted to its tip; the small tuft of fronds
or katydid-legs above each eye numbering all units
in each group; the shadbones regularly set about the mouth
to droop or rise in unison like porcupine-quills.
He lets himself be flattened out by gravity,
as seaweed is tamed and weakened by the sun,
compelled when extended, to lie stationary.
Sleep is the result of his delusion that one must
do as well as one can for oneself,
sleep—epitome of what is to him the end of life.
Demonstrate on him how the lady placed a forked stick
on the innocuous neck-sides of the dangerous southern snake.
One need not try to stir him up; his prune-shaped head
and alligator-eyes are not party to the joke.
Lifted and handled, he may be dangled like an eel
or set up on the forearm like a mouse;
his eyes bisected by pupils of a pin's width,
are flickeringly exhibited, then covered up.
May be? I should have said might have been;
when he has been got the better of in a dream—
as in a fight with nature or with cats, we all know it.
Profound sleep is not with him a fixed illusion.
Springing about with froglike accuracy, with jerky cries
when taken in hand, he is himself again;
to sit caged by the rungs of a domestic chair
would be unprofitable—human. What is the good of hypocrisy?
It is permissible to choose one's employment,
to abandon the nail, or roly-poly,
when it shows signs of being no longer a pleasure,
to score the nearby magazine with a double line of strokes.
He can talk but insolently says nothing. What of it?
When one is frank, one's very presence is a compliment.
It is clear that he can see the virtue of naturalness,
that he does not regard the published fact as a surrender.
As for the disposition invariably to affront,
an animal with claws should have an opportunity to use them.
The eel-like extension of trunk into tail is not an accident.
To leap, to lengthen out, divide the air, to purloin, to pursue.
To tell the hen: fly over the fence, go in the wrong way
in your perturbation—this is life;
to do less would be nothing but dishonesty.



 
Source of the text - Marianne Moore, Complete Poems.  New York: Penguin Books, 1981, pp. 43-44.

TJB: Cat fancy. Each word from the master observer is as exact in both meaning & clipped consonant-sound as its eel-like subject is inscrutable.

 

 

 

 

"Feeding the Compost Heap" by Alberto Ríos

FEEDING THE COMPOST HEAP


Dried teas and sweet peels, shriveling rinds and still-wet fruit—
The compost gatherings speak something to the day and whimper

In the night, alive with their odd congress, this meeting of sours,
Blackness, citrus yellows, coffee grounds, hard sticks and green

Leaves half-brown, onion skins and onion itself, apple and orange
Seeds, pear stems and cut grass, old pomegranates and carrot.

What I eat, that heap has eaten.  What I like, it gets, but less of.
It drinks rooibos and Ceylonese teas, French roast coffee—it drinks,

It tastes them, too.  But in this way, it does not understand me.
What I don't like, it receives much of, and must think the worst of me.

It chokes where I choked, but I did not finish the meal it faces now,
The meal its dinner and breakfast, its lunch for weeks, for months.

It thinks me curious in my likes, and does not understand my dislikes,
Which are its world, those bits the makers of its great, beating, old

Prunish heart, half skin, half rot, something alive, purpling at its core,
Making something, keeping something, struggling, slow with slow.

A white rabbit of vapors emerges every now and then out of the bin,
A chuff of suddenness, a quick wheeze, a long-leap sigh that lingers.

I have watched this heap as if it were a child growing.  From stiff hay,
Sprouting thick and unbendable, to spiderweb moved by my breath.

Nuanced by the slightest breeze, my walking by, by my hand,
That slight shiver every time.  From stiff hay to moving web,

Bristle to wisp, bone to chalk: I have watched it grow smaller, away
From the shapes of things, into something else—an opposite child.

It lays a warm hand on the cool brow of me, heating things up.
Making a mulch, a loam, a darkness that says, We'll start again.



Source of the text - Alberto Rios, The Dangerous Shirt.  Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2009, pp. 39-40.

TJB: Eco ode. The bemused poet uses long lines & the muted sing-song prose of lyrical realism to personify his bemused & childlike compost heap.

"Mira Is Mad with Love," attributed to Mirabai

Mira Is Mad with Love


O friends, I am mad with love, and no one sees.
My mattress is thorns, is nails:
The Beloved spreads open his bedding elsewhere.
How can I sleep? Andonment scorches my heart.
Only those who have felt the knife can measure the
     wound's deepness.
Only the jeweler knows the nature of the lost jewel.
I have lost him—
Anguish takes me from door to door, but no doctor
     answers.
Mira calls her Lord: O Dark One, only you can heal
     this pain.


Source of the text - Mirabai: Ecstatic Poems.  Versions by Robert Bly and Jane Hirshfield.  Boston: Beacon Press, 2004, p. 38.  This poem was translated by Jane Hirshfield.

TJB: Ecstatic static. Mira’s sensual-ascetic love for Krishna bursts from her song in crisp sensual images. How can her God/Beloved be absent?

"Hymn of Zeus," lines 160-182 from Agamemnon by Aeschylus

"Hymn of Zeus," lines 160-182 from Agamemnon
[spoken by Chorus of old men]

Original Greek text:

Text translated by Richmond Lattimore:

Zeus: whatever he may be, if this name
pleases him in invocation,
thus I call upon him.
I have pondered everything
yet I cannot find a way,
only Zeus, to cast this dead weight of ignorance
finally from out my brain.

He who in time long ago was great,
throbbing with gigantic strength,
shall be as if he never were, unspoken.
He who followed him has found
his master, and is gone.
Cry aloud without fear the victory of Zeus,
you will not have failed the truth:

Zeus, who guided men to think,
who has laid it down that wisdom
comes alone through suffering.
Still there drips in sleep against the heart
grief of memory; against
our pleasure we are temperate
From the gods who sit in grandeur
grace comes somehow violent.



Source of the text in Greek - Aeschylus, The Agememnon of Aeschylus: A Revised Text and a Translation, by William W. Goodwin.  Boston: Ginn & Company, 1906, pp.13-15.

Source of the translated text - Aeschylus I: Oresteia, Translated and with an Introduction by Richmond Lattimore.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953, pp. 39-40.

TJB: RFK’s favorite. Zeus is praised (incomparable, victorious & insistent on us suffering) best by the drips-sleep-heart-memory image sequence.