"The Swing" by Don Paterson

The Swing

The swing was picked up for the boys, 

for the here-and-here-to-stay

and only she knew why it was

I dug so solemnly

I spread the feet two yards apart

and hammered down the pegs

filled up the holes and stamped the dirt

around its skinny legs

I hung the rope up in the air

and fixed the yellow seat

then stood back that I might admire

my handiwork complete

and saw within its frail trapeze

the child that would not come

of what we knew had two more days

before we sent it home

I know that there is nothing here

no venue and no host

but the honest fulcrum of the hour

that engineers our ghost

the bright sweep of its radar-arc

is all the human dream

handing us from dark to dark

like a rope over a stream

But for all the coldness of my creed

for all those I denied

for all the others she had freed

like arrows from her side

for all the child was barely here

and for all that we were over

I could not weigh the ghosts we are

against those we deliver

I gave the empty seat a push

and nothing made a sound

and swung between two skies to brush

her feet upon the ground

Source of the text – Don Paterson, Rain: Poems.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009, p. 6-7.

TJB: The absence of a child fills up the swing. Song-iambics & ballad verse sound child-like here; we hear the speaker’s grief, deeply sublimated.

  

  

  

"On Sitting Down to Write I Decide Instead to Go to Fred Herko's Concert" by Diane Di Prima

ON SITTING DOWN TO WRITE
I DECIDE INSTEAD
TO GO TO FRED HERKO’S CONCERT


As water, silk,
the quiver of fish
or the long cry of goose
              or some such bird
              I never heard
your orange tie
a sock in the eye
              as Duncan
              might forcibly note
are you sitting under the irregular drums
of Brooklyn Joe Jones
(in a loft which I know to be dirty
& probably cold)
or have you scurried already
                        hurried already
uptown
on a Third Avenue Bus
toward smelly movies & crabs I’ll never get
and you all perfumed too
as if they’d notice



O the dark caves of obligation
into which I must creep
                        (alack)
like downstairs & into a coat
O all that wind
Even Lord & Taylor don’t quite keep out
that wind
and that petulant vacuum
I am aware of it
sucking me into Bond Street
into that loft
              dank
              rank
I draw a blank
at the very thought
                        Hello
I came here
              after all



Dec 1963


Source of the text - Diane Di Prima, Freddie Poems. Point Reyes: Eidolon Editions, 1974.


TJB: Beat elegy. With doggerel rhyme, archaisms, & ‘70s slang, the poem starts in haiku mode, & moves reluctantly to the streets toward the dance.

  

  

  

"Tichborne's Lament" by Chidiock Tichborne

Tichborne’s Lament


My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain.
The day is gone, and yet I saw no sun;
And now I live, and now my life is done.

The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung.
The fruit is dead, and yet the leaves are green.
My youth is gone, and yet I am but young.
I saw the world, and yet I was not seen.
My thread is cut, and yet it was not spun;
And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death, and found it in my womb.
I looked for life, and saw it was a shade.
I trod the earth, and knew it was my tomb;
And now I die, and now I am but made.
The glass is full, and now the glass is run;
And now I live, and now my life is done.

Source of the text - Sixteenth Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, edited by Gordon Braden.  Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005, page 407.

TJB: Come at the Queen, you best not miss. The poet, at the gallows, spits this little wonder, made of declarative paradoxes, caesurae, & easy rhymes.

  

  

  

"The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants" by Emily Dickinson

(1) [Poem as written by the poet on the inside of an envelope]

(2) [Poem as it appears in the Franklin reading edition]

The Mushroom is the Elf of Plants -
At Evening, it is not
At Morning, in a Truffled Hut
It stop opon a Spot

As if it tarried always
And yet it's whole Career
Is shorter than a Snake's Delay -
And fleeter than a Tare -

'Tis Vegetation's Juggler -
The Germ of Alibi -
Doth like a Bubble antedate
And like a Bubble, hie -

I feel as if the Grass was pleased
To have it intermit -
This surreptitious Scion
Of Summer's circumspect.

Had Nature any supple Face
Or could she one contemn -
Had Nature an Apostate -
That Mushroom - it is Him!

Sources of the text - (1) The Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson's Envelope Poems, edited by Marta L. Werner and Jen Bervin.  New York: New Directions, 2013.  (2) The Poems of Emily Dickinson: Reading Edition, edited by Ralph W. Franklin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998, p. 631.

TJB: Shroom ode. The poet, this time a lighthearted mycologist-bard, gives us her 13 ways of looking at a fungus, using psychotropic syntax.

  

  

  

"The Doubt of Future Foes" by Queen Elizabeth I

The Doubt of Future Foes, Circa 1571

[Headed] Verses made by the queen's majesty


The doubt of future foes 

Exiles my present joy
And wit me warns to shun such snares 

As threatens mine annoy.

For falsehood now doth flow

And subjects’ faith doth ebb,
Which should not be if reason ruled 

Or wisdom weaved the web.

But clouds of joys untried 

Do cloak aspiring minds
Which turns to rage of late repent 

By changèd course of winds.

The top of hope supposed 

The root of rue shall be

And fruitless all their grafted guile, 

As shortly ye shall see.

Their dazzled eyes with pride, 

Which great ambition blinds,
Shall be unsealed by worthy wights 

Whose foresight falsehood finds.

The daughter of debate 

That discord aye doth sow
Shall reap no gain where former rule 

Still peace hath taught to know.

No foreign banished wight 

Shall anchor in this port:
Our realm brooks no seditious sects—

Let them elsewhere resort.

My rusty sword through rest 

Shall first his edge employ
To pull their tops who seek such change 

Or gape for future joy.
                    Vivat Regina


Source of the text - Elizabeth I: Collected Works, Edited by Leah S. Marcus, Janel Mueller, and Mary Beth Rose.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000, pages 133-134.


TJB: Royal rap. In lilting ballad verse, the queen says ‘protect ya neck’ to Mary Stuart & threatens to get medieval on her ass if Mary pops off.

  

  

  

"Pied Beauty" by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Pied Beauty


Glory be to God for dappled things—
    For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
        For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim:
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
    Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and 

            plough;

        And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.


All things counter, original, spare, strange;
    Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
        With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
                            Praise him.

Source of the text - Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, now first published, Edited with notes by Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate.  London: Humphrey Milford, 1918, page 30.

TJB: Beauty mark. In this, the ultimate naming-poem, trochees, spondees, & alliteration are among the dappled things for which we are to praise “him.”

  

  

  

"The Twa Corbies," anonymous ballad

 THE TWA CORBIES.

1  As I was walking all alane,
    I heard twa corbies making a mane;
    The tane unto the t’other say,
    ‘Where sall we gang and dine to-day?’

2  ‘In behint yon auld fail dyke,
    I wot there lies a new-slain knight;
    And naebody kens that he lies there,
    But his hawk, his hound, and his lady fair.

3  ‘His hound is to the hunting gane,
    His hawk, to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
    His lady’s ta’en another mate,
    So we may mak our dinner sweet.

4  ‘Ye’ll sit on his white hause-bane,
    And I’ll pike out his bonny blue een;
    Wi ae lock o his gowden hair
    We’ll theek our nest when it grows bare.

5  ‘Mony a one for him makes mane,
    But nane sall ken where he is gane;
    Oer his white banes, when they are bare,
    The wind sall blaw for evermair.’

Source of the text - The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, edited by Francis James Child, Volume I, Part I. Boston: Houghton Mifflin and Company, 1882, page 253.

TJB: A man & a woman & a blackbird are one. This call-response ballad is lovely, dark & deep but how does the t’other corbie know all this, anyway?

  

  

  

"Saint Francis and the Sow" by Galway Kinnell

SAINT FRANCIS AND THE SOW

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing 

        beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.




Source of the text - Galway Kinnell, Mortal Acts, Mortal Words.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980, page 9.

TJB: No pig in a poke. In one long Aristotelian sentence grown from within, we hear an epic simile of St Francis reteaching the sow about her beauty.

  

  

  

"New Rule" by Anne Carson

NEW RULE

A New Year’s white morning of hard new ice.
High on the frozen branches I saw a squirrel jump and skid.
Is this scary? he seemed to say and glanced

down at me, clutching his branch as it bobbed
in stiff recoil—or is it just that everything sounds wrong today?
The branches

clinked.
He wiped his small cold lips with one hand.
Do you fear the same things as

I fear? I countered, looking up.
His empire of branches slid against the air.
The night of hooks?

The man blade left open on the stair?
Not enough spin on it, said my true love
when he left in our fifth year.

The squirrel bounced down a branch
and caught a peg of tears.
The way to hold on is

afterwords
so
clear.

Source of the text - Anne Carson, Men in the Off Hours.  New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 2000, page 12.

TJB: In this post-ice-storm colloquy of poet & squirrel, sprung with active verbs—skid, bob, clink—the poet sees, too late, how to hold on in flux.

  

  

  

"For Malcolm, A Year After" by Etheridge Knight

FOR MALCOLM, A YEAR AFTER



Compose for Red a proper verse;
Adhere to foot and strict iamb;
Control the burst of angry words
Or they might boil and break the dam.
Or they might boil and overflow
And drench me, drown me, drive me mad.
So swear no oath, so shed no tear,
And sing no song blue Baptist sad.
Evoke no image, stir no flame,
And spin no yarn across the air.
Make empty anglo tea lace words—
Make them dead white and dry bone bare.

Compose a verse for Malcolm man,
And make it rime and make it prim.
The verse will die — as all men do —
but not the memory of him!
Death might come singing sweet like C,
Or knocking like the old folk say,
The moon and stars may pass away,
But not the anger of that day.

Source of the text - Etheridge Knight, Born of a Woman: New and Selected Poems.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1980, page 67.

TJB: Formal verse as anger management.  In simple, elegant octosyllabic couplets, the poet admonishes himself to make the elegy proper, empty, prim.