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Thursday, April 22, 2004


‘SPRING’

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'Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful.
Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.
He who knows has no wide learning; he who has wide learning does not know'


Lao Tzu- Tao Te Ching

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Max Winter-Pechvogel- our louche and hard-shouldered doorkeeper has collapsed/ -Inside-dazed and sleepless at 5.30 AM- I enter my secluded studio- as far removed from the limelight as Walter Wriston’s maxim ‘Cash is king- especially when the wind blows’/ -Outside- a twin cylinder motorcycle revs up- remotely a trush -otherworldly- follows up- balanced effortlessly on an ecstatic aural arc/ -Dissonants reign my ungroomed shack- an in-house twister rampage of work in progress- I’m watching as slowly gyrating shadows- architectural and dissolute- plaster the walls/ -Outside sketchy Spring- elusive backpacker/ quirky/ angry/ nocturnal/ - migrates from city to city- trailing numbed residents stunned in vindicative stupor/ -Standing by the window- fully awake- I pull up the blinds- A News Radio flash report blurts out: ‘-Yesterday-Shaman Siamese twins- ‘I come with the Water’ -‘I come with the Fire’- have been seperated successfully’/ -Mystified- I’m looking for clues extending beyond the fertile blast of impending- magnificent May../ Sitting down at my desk.-compassionate once again- I’m attempting to write a young man’s book-

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6 P O E M S

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SPRING

Green-shadowed people sit, or walk in rings,
Their children finger the awakened grass,
Calmly, a cloud stands, calmly a bird sings,
And, flashing like a dangled looking-glass,
Sun lights the balls that bounce, the dogs that bark,
The branch-arrested mist of leaf, and me,
Threading my pursed-up way across the park,
An indigestible sterility.

Spring, of all seasons most gratuitous,
Is fold of untold flower, is race of water,
Is earth’s most multiple, excited daughter;

And those she has least use for see her best,
Their paths grown craven and circuitous,
Their visions mountain-clear, their needs immodest.


-Philip Larkin-

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‘UNDER A SPLENDID CHESTNUT TREE’

Under a splendid chestnut tree
The rector clenched his fists
And swore that God exists,
Clamping his features stiff with certainty.

Twenty-five steps to the pond and ten to the hedge,
And his resolution had wilted round the edge,
Leaving him tilting a blind face to the sky,
Asking to die:
‘To die, dear God, before a scum of doubt
Smear the whole universe, and smudge it out.’
Meanwhile the bees fumbled among the flowers,
The gardener smoked, the children poked about,
The cat lay on the baker’s roof for hours.


Just then (but miles away) there knelt
A corpse-faced undergrad
Convinced that he was bad:
His soul was just a sink of filth, he felt.

Hare’s eyes, staring across his prayer-locked hands,
Saw, not a washstand-set, but mammary glands;
All boyhood’s treasure-trove, a hortus siccus
Of tits and knickers,
Baited his unused sex like tsetse flies,
Till maddened, it charged out without disguise
And made the headlines. But the Gothic view
Was pricked with lamps and boy’s street-distant cries,
Where chestnut-burrs dropped, bounced, and split in two.

Thus at the end of Shady Lane
A spinster eyed a fir
That meant to fall on her.
Watching it crouch and straighten and crouch again,

Her bright and childless eyes screwed up with dread.
And in the north a workman hugged his bed,
Hating the clouds, the stained unsightly breath
Of carious death.
Down centuries of streets they sit and listen
Where children chalk out games and gas-lights glisten,
Taking both voices in old arguments,
One plate, one cup, laid in the same position
For the departed lodger, innocence.


-Philip Larkin-

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Both poems from: Philip Larkin- Collected Poems- Faber & Faber

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SUNRISE

Sober I rode into the bran new dawn,
With steady hand grasping the single rein,
New-shod new-shrived and all but newly born
Over the smiling grandiloquent plain.

Surcingleless as heaven ran my steed
And true to heaven rose my simple song,
Ah, the years behind seemed lost, and lost the deed,
As pommel and stirrups unheeded I cantered along.

-But what cactuses are these on every hand,
Wild dogs and spectres, all enveloping?
And came again into that evening land,

Galloping, galloping, galloping-

Bound to that unrelenting fatuous horse
Whose eyes are lidless and whose name, remorse.


-Malcolm Lowry-

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THE WOUNDED BAT

…on a summer’s afternoon, hot
and in the dusty path a bat,
with injured membrane and little hands,
a meeting that would have knocked young Aeschylus flat,
its red mouth helpless, like a mouse or cat,
a buzzing, like a buzzer, electric,
pathetic crepitation in the path.
She hooked to the twig, I laid her in the shade
With compassion, yet with blind terror
Praying that not too soon
Death might care to do for me as much.


-Malcolm Lowry-

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Both poems from: Selected Poems of Malcolm Lowry- City Light Books

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THE DRUNKEN FISHERMAN

Wallowing in this bloody sty,
I cast for fish that pleased my eye
(Truly Jehovah’s bow suspends
no pots of gold to weight its ends);
Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout
Rose to my bait. They flopped about
My canvas creel until the moth
Corrupted its unstable cloth.

A calendar to tell the day;
A handkerchief to wave away
The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm
Pouching a bottle in one arm;
A whiskey bottle full of worms;
And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms
To mete the worm whose molten rage
Boils in the belly of old age?

Once fishing was a rabbit’s foot-
O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot,
Let suns stay in or suns stay out:
Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale’s spout-
The fisher’s fluent and obscene
Catches kept his conscience clean.
Children, the raging memory drools
Over the glory of past pools.

Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls
Its bloody waters into holes;
A grain of sand inside my shoe
Mimics the moon that might undo
Man and creation too; remorse,
Stinking, has puddled up its source;
Here tantrums trash to a whale’s rage.
This is the pot-hole of old age.

Is there no way to cast my hook
Out of this dynamited brook?
The Fisher’s sons must cast about
When shallow waters peter out,
I will catch Christ with a greased worm,
And when the Prince of Darkness stalks
My bloodstream to its Stygian term…
On water the Man-Fisher walks.


-Robert Lowell-

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TO SPEAK OF WOE THAT IS IN MARRIAGE


‘The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open
Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor’s edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust…
It’s the injustice…he is so unjust-
Whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.
My only thought is how to keep alive.
What makes him tick? Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh…
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant.’


-Robert Lowell-

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Both poems from: Selected Poems by Robert Lowell – Farrar, Strauss & Giroux

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posted by Walter at 4/22/2004