I still believe that D. H. Lawrence, who is buried in the U.S. if I remember right, always wrote better about whatever country he happened to be in at the time than the people who lived there.

"G-9" by Tim Dlugos. Here's a link: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55132/g-9

This is the ending, my favorite part! He wrote it while he was dying of AIDS. I find it extremely powerful.

Quote:Helena Hughes, Tibetan
Buddhist, tells me that
there are three stages in death.
The first is white, like passing
through a thick but porous wall.
The second stage is red;
the third is black; and then
you’re finished, ready
for the next event. I’m glad
she has a road map, but I don’t
feel the need for one myself.
I’ve trust enough in all
that’s happened in my life,
the unexpected love
and gentleness that rushes in
to fill the arid spaces
in my heart, the way the city
glow fills up the sky
above the river, making it
seem less than night. When
Joe O’Hare flew in last week,
he asked what were the best
times of my New York years;
I said “Today,” and meant it.
I hope that death will lift me
by the hair like an angel
in a Hebrew myth, snatch me with
the strength of sleep’s embrace,
and gently set me down
where I’m supposed to be,
in just the right place.

Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold 

The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;-  on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

i think i've already posted this, but it never hurts to remind yourself how it's done.


I’ve Dreamed Of You So Much — Robert Desnos

I've dreamed of you so much that you're losing your reality.
Is it already too late for me to embrace your living and breathing body and to kiss that mouth which is the birthplace of that voice so dear to me?

I've dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown accustomed to lying crossed upon my own chest in a desperate attempt to encircle your shadow, might not be able to unfold again to 
embrace the contours of your body. 
And coming face-to-face with the actual incarnation of what has haunted me and ruled me and dominated my life for so many days and years might very well turn me into a shadow.

Oh equilibriums of the emotional scales!

I've dreamed of you so much that it might be too late for me to ever wake up again.
I sleep on my feet, body confronting all the usual phenomena of life and love, and yet when it comes to you, the only being on the planet who matters to me now, I can no more touch your face and lips than I can those of the next random passerby.

I've dreamed of you so much, have walked and talked and slept so much with your phantom presence that perhaps the only thing left for me to do now is to become a phantom among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadowythan that shadow which moves and will go on moving, stepping lightly and joyfully across the sundial of your life.

^^^ It makes me want to keep reading, I don't know the poem so I'll see how it holds up for me. The ending is super.

.....what’d he say?.

Karawane by Hugo Ball

jolifanto bambla o falli bambla
großiga m'pfa habla horem
egiga goramen
higo bloiko russula huju
hollaka hollala
anlogo bung
blago bung blago bung
bosso fataka
ü üü ü
schampa wulla wussa olobo
hej tatta gorem
eschige zunbada
wulubu ssubudu uluwu ssubudu
–umf
kusa gauma
ba–umf

ODE TO THE TAMPON by SHARON OLDS

 
Inside-out clothing;
queen’s robe;
white-jacketed worker who clears the table
prepared for the feast which goes uneaten;
hospital orderly; straitjacket
which takes, into its folded wings,
the spirit of the uncapturable one;
soldier’s coat;
dry dock for the boat not taken;
seeker of the red light of stars
which have ceased to be before we see them;
bloodhound;
unhonored one; undertaker;
secret-keeper;
you who in the cross-section diagram,
before the eyes of a girl child,
glide into potential space,
out of the second-stage rocket’s cardboard cylinder,
up beyond the atmosphere,
where no one has gone before;
you who began life as a seed in topsoil,
you who blossomed into the air like steam from a whale’s blow-hole,
you who were compressed into a dense calyx,
nib which dips into a forty-year river;
mute calligrapher—we write you here.

Beautiful Death by Stephen Phillips

Why dreadest thou the calm process of death?

To miss thy wife’s illuminating smile?

No more to proudly touch thy child’s bright hair?

To leave this glorying green, this flashing sun?

Yet Death is full of leisure, and of light;
       
Of compensations and of huge amends.

Since all the dead do for the living toil,

Assisting, bathing, in the air, the earth;

A shower their sympathy draws from the ground,

Delicious kindness from the soil exhaled.
       
 
Blind shall I be and good, dumb and serene:

I shall not blame, nor question; I shall shine

Diffused and tolerant, luminous and large.

No longer shall I vex, but live my life

In solaces, caresses, and in balms,
       
Nocturnal soothings and nutritious sighs.

The unhappy mind an odour shall be breathed;

I shall be sagely blown, flung with design,

Assist this bland and universal scheme,

Industrious, happy, sweet, delicious, dead!

The Sadness of Clothes

When someone dies, the clothes are so sad. They have outlived
their usefulness and cannot get warm and full.
You talk to the clothes and explain that he is not coming back

as when he showed up immaculately dressed in slacks and plaid jacket
and had that beautiful smile on and you'd talk.
You'd go to get something and come back and he'd be gone.

You explain death to the clothes like that dream.
You tell them how much you miss the spouse
and how much you miss the pet with its little winter sweater.

You tell the worn raincoat that if you talk about it,
you will finally let grief out. The ancients etched the words
for battle and victory onto their shields and then they went out

and fought to the last breath. Words have that kind of power
you remind the clothes that remain in the drawer, arms stubbornly
folded across the chest, or slung across the backs of chairs,

or hanging inside the dark closet. Do with us what you will,
they faintly sigh, as you close the door on them.
He is gone and no one can tell us where.

~Emily Fragos

Taken from the Poetry Foundation website. Read this 3 years ago, iirc.

Autobiography in the Year 1952
BY YEHUDA AMICHAI
TRANSLATED BY BENJAMIN HARSHAV
My father built a great worry around me like a dock
Once I left it before I was finished
And he remained with his great, empty worry.
And my mother—like a tree on the shore
Between her arms outstretched for me.

And in '31 my hands were merry and small
And in '41 they learned to use a rifle
And when I loved my first love
My thoughts were like a bunch of colored balloons
And the girl's white hand clutched them all
With a thin string—and then let them fly.

And in '51 the movement of my life
Was like the movement of many slaves rowing a ship,
And the face of my father like the lantern at the end of a parting
       train,
And my mother closed all the clouds in her brown closet.
And I climbed up my street,
And the twentieth century was the blood in my veins,
Blood that wanted to go out to many wars,
Through many openings.
It pounds on my head from inside
And moves in angry waves to my heart.

But now, in the spring of '52, I see
More birds have returned than left last winter.
And I return down the slope of the mountain
To my room where the woman's body is heavy
And full of time.

(12-22-2017, 07:07 AM)shemthepenman Wrote:  i think i've already posted this, but it never hurts to remind yourself how it's done.


I’ve Dreamed Of You So Much — Robert Desnos

I've dreamed of you so much that you're losing your reality.
Is it already too late for me to embrace your living and breathing body and to kiss that mouth which is the birthplace of that voice so dear to me?

I've dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown accustomed to lying crossed upon my own chest in a desperate attempt to encircle your shadow, might not be able to unfold again to 
embrace the contours of your body. 
And coming face-to-face with the actual incarnation of what has haunted me and ruled me and dominated my life for so many days and years might very well turn me into a shadow.

Oh equilibriums of the emotional scales!

I've dreamed of you so much that it might be too late for me to ever wake up again.
I sleep on my feet, body confronting all the usual phenomena of life and love, and yet when it comes to you, the only being on the planet who matters to me now, I can no more touch your face and lips than I can those of the next random passerby.

I've dreamed of you so much, have walked and talked and slept so much with your phantom presence that perhaps the only thing left for me to do now is to become a phantom among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadowythan that shadow which moves and will go on moving, stepping lightly and joyfully across the sundial of your life.

http://monsieurcocosse.blogspot.com/2014...-1944.html

(01-31-2018, 12:31 AM)RiverNotch Wrote:  

(12-22-2017, 07:07 AM)shemthepenman Wrote:  i think i've already posted this, but it never hurts to remind yourself how it's done.


I’ve Dreamed Of You So Much — Robert Desnos

I've dreamed of you so much that you're losing your reality.
Is it already too late for me to embrace your living and breathing body and to kiss that mouth which is the birthplace of that voice so dear to me?

I've dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown accustomed to lying crossed upon my own chest in a desperate attempt to encircle your shadow, might not be able to unfold again to 
embrace the contours of your body. 
And coming face-to-face with the actual incarnation of what has haunted me and ruled me and dominated my life for so many days and years might very well turn me into a shadow.

Oh equilibriums of the emotional scales!

I've dreamed of you so much that it might be too late for me to ever wake up again.
I sleep on my feet, body confronting all the usual phenomena of life and love, and yet when it comes to you, the only being on the planet who matters to me now, I can no more touch your face and lips than I can those of the next random passerby.

I've dreamed of you so much, have walked and talked and slept so much with your phantom presence that perhaps the only thing left for me to do now is to become a phantom among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadowythan that shadow which moves and will go on moving, stepping lightly and joyfully across the sundial of your life.

http://monsieurcocosse.blogspot.com/2014...-1944.html

Interesting. I love the last phrase of the version shem posted, the sundial. It's interesting that the edit ends on a more passive note, as it would.

Abandoned Farmhouse

He was a big man, says the size of his shoes
on a pile of broken dishes by the house;
a tall man too, says the length of the bed
in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,
says the Bible with a broken back
on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;
but not a man for farming, say the fields
cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.

A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall
papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves
covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,
says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.
Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves
and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.
And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.
It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.

Something went wrong, says the empty house
in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields
say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars
in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.
And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard
like branches after a storm—a rubber cow,
a rusty tractor with a broken plow,
a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.

by Ted Kooser

^^^That's a heavy hitter.

(11-30-2017, 12:58 AM)homer1950 Wrote:  One of my favorites
Dover Beach, by Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; - on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Aegean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Such a strong finish.

Glass

In every bar there’s someone sitting alone and absolutely absorbed
by whatever he’s seeing in the glass in front of him,
a glass that looks ordinary, with something clear or dark
inside it, something partially drunk but never completely gone.
Everything’s there: all the plans that came to nothing,
the stupid love affairs, and the terrifying ones, the ones where actual happiness
opened like a hole beneath his feet and he fell in, then lay helpless
while the dirt rained down a little at a time to bury him.
And his friends are there, cracking open six-packs, raising the bottles,
the click of their meeting like the sound of a pool cue
nicking a ball, the wrong ball, that now edges, black and shining,
toward the waiting pocket. But it stops short, and at the bar the lone drinker
signals for another. Now the relatives are floating up
with their failures, with cancer, with plateloads of guilt
and a little laughter, too, and even beauty—some afternoon from childhood,
a lake, a ball game, a book of stories, a few flurries of snow
that thicken and gradually cover the earth until the whole
world’s gone white and quiet, until there’s hardly a world
at all, no traffic, no money or butchery or sex,
just a blessed peace that seems final but isn’t. And finally
the glass that contains and spills this stuff continually
while the drinker hunches before it, while the bartender gathers
up empties, gives back the drinker’s own face. Who knows what it looks like;
who cares whether or not it was young once, or ever lovely,
who gives a shit about some drunk rising to stagger toward
the bathroom, some man or woman or even lost
angel who recklessly threw it all over—heaven, the ether,
the celestial works—and said, Fuck it, I want to be human?
Who believes in angels, anyway? Who has time for anything
but their own pleasures and sorrows, for the few good people
they’ve managed to gather around them against the uncertainty,
against afternoons of sitting alone in some bar
with a name like the Embers or the Ninth Inning or the Wishing Well?
Forget that loser. Just tell me who’s buying, who’s paying;
Christ but I’m thirsty, and I want to tell you something,
come close I want to whisper it, to pour
the words burning into you, the same words for each one of you,
listen, it’s simple, I’m saying it now, while I’m still sober,
while I’m not about to weep bitterly into my own glass,
while you’re still here—don’t go yet, stay, stay,
give me your shoulder to lean against, steady me, don’t let me drop,
I’m so in love with you I can’t stand up.

-- Kim Addonizio

I've Tasted My Blood

If this brain’s over-tempered
consider that the fire was want
and the hammers were fists.
I’ve tasted my blood too much
to love what I was born to.

But my mother’s look
was a field of brown oats, soft-bearded;
her voice rain and air rich with lilacs:
and I loved her too much to like
how she dragged her days like a sled over gravel.

Playmates? I remember where their skulls roll!
One died hungry, gnawing grey perch-planks;
one fell, and landed so hard he splashed;
and many and many
come up atom by atom
in the worm-casts of Europe.

My deep prayer a curse.
My deep prayer the promise that this won’t be.
My deep prayer my cunning,
my love, my anger,
and often even my forgiveness
that this won’t be and be.
I’ve tasted my blood too much
to abide what I was born to.

-- Milton Acorn

You turned me on to her poetry. I like her voice, clarity, and her subjects are wonderful. "Onset" was quite impressive.

(03-27-2018, 06:59 AM)Todd Wrote:  Glass
-- Kim Addonizio

(03-30-2018, 12:17 PM)danny_ Wrote:  You turned me on to her poetry. I like her voice, clarity, and her subjects are wonderful. "Onset" was quite impressive.

(03-27-2018, 06:59 AM)Todd Wrote:  Glass
-- Kim Addonizio

Glad to hear it! Onset is a good one of hers (especially the opening where she takes a dim view on Spring. It sort of reminds me in tone to Gluck's Mock Orange).