Sea go dark, dark with wind,
Feet go heavy, heavy with sand,
Thoughts go wild, wild with the sound
Of iron on the old shed swinging, clanging:
Go dark, go heavy, go wild, go round,
Dark with the wind,
Heavy with the sand,
Wild with the iron that tears at the nail
And the foundering shriek of the gale.
Wild Iron by Allen Curnow (1911-2001)
I now know why the frog population is reducing.
I recieved a comment from a Percy the Frog who stated that it loved Lesbians
I suppose I am leaping to this conclusion but if these frogs are croaking by the pond it could be caused by this sexual revolution which is leaving the poor neglected males to blow up their throats and disappear in a puff of sorry male hood
Soaking and tilting the woods, a storm
too late in the year to be named
drew offshore for the Maritimes, and I went out
walking the wrack line for whatever
rarity might have churned up-
a boat handpump once, workable after
I knocked the dried sand from it,
and once an albatross
driven broken-winged over the dunes,
which I found in the white mat of itself days later
and verified by its four-inch tubenose.
Where the river has shifted its bed
like a whipcrack in an eon of slow motion
between two high dunes, I came on
a patch of ground that water and wind
had cleared as smoothly as a glove
sweeps snow off a windshield.
It looked like wet asphalt on forty feet
of road lightly sanded. I dared not walk on it,
but stood to its side, seeing it was
a stretch of peat with horseshoe patterns
among wheel tracks, and larger hooves,
probably of oxen, then a few boot prints:
whoever had driven those wagonloads of fish
pitchforked off the trapboats in the river,
and the carts piled with salt hay,
would have ridden, mostly, adding weight
to impressions the peat took and kept.
Orlando Shaw or Phil Ryder, I might have
guessed, names on an old map, though few are
remembered by name here, more by their
back-and-forth traffic on cart roads
from cellar hole to cellar hole,
paths to the kettle ponds, a hillside midden
of sea-clam shells, and in layers the next
anonymous wind tucks back into the berm.
Brendan Galvin
Ocean Effects
Louisiana State University Press
Copyright ©2007 by Brendan Galvin.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Once, two spoons in bed,
now tined forks
across a granite table
and the knives they have hired.
Ballistics
Random House
Pale youth with burning gaze, I give you three commandments now: Follow the first: don't live by the present, The future is a poet's only place. Second, remember: feel for no one, Love yourself without bounds. Safeguard the third: worship art, Art alone, without thought or goal. Pale youth with embarrassed gaze! If you follow my three commandments, I'll die in peace, a defeated warrior, Knowing I leave a poet behind. 15 July 1896'''
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What was the point of it? The stoned life, the chased, snorted, shot life. Some low comedy with a cast of strangers. Time squashed flat. The 1001 names of heroin chewed like language. Nothing now to know or remember but the dirty taste of it, and the names: snuff, Death, a little taste, H-pronounce it etch-, sugar, brownstone, scag, the SHIT, ghoda gaadi, #4 china, You-Know, garad, god, the gear, junk, monkey blow, the law, the habit, material, cheez, heroin. The point? It was the wasted time, which comes back lovely sometimes, a ghost sense say, say that hard ache taste back in your throat, the warm heroin drip, the hit, the rush, the whack, the stone. You want it now, the way it lays you low, flattens everything you know to a thin white line. I'm saying, I know the pull of it: the skull rings time so beautiful, so low you barely hear it. Itch this blind toad taste. When you said, "I mean it, we live like stones," you broke something in me only heroin could fix. The thick sweet amaze of heroin, helpless its love, its know- ledge of the infinite. Why push the stone back up the hill? Why not leave it with the time- keep, asleep at the bar? Try a little taste of something sweet that a sweet child will adore, low in the hips where the aches all go. Allow me in this one time and I'll give you heroin, just a taste to replace the useless stuff you know. Some say it comes back, the time, to punish you with the time you killed, leave you stone sober, unknowing, the happiness chemical blown from your system, unable to taste the word heroin without wanting its stone one last time. |
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© 2008, Jeet Thayil From: These Errors Are Correct Publisher: Tranquebar (EastWest and Westland), Delhi, 2008 |
