[a stanza from John Ashbery; and I leave out numbers for one day, all hell breaks loose: today's about a 5.]
...
No, scars. You forgot to pack
some. The world will live
without them and we must scurry to dream up
some other identical crisis. First it's men and
then it's me, that stayed nights
in a box, sometimes. Sometimes we were up and
sometimes we were down. It takes one of us to
reposition us and by that time danger has worn the day
down to its nub. It's best not to be
here. But if we linger after waters and cents
nothing is then too obtuse for the clime, the time
and all we travelled backward for: one good image,
the rest fenced off.
...
("The Great Bridge Game of Life," _Hotel Lautreamont_, 1992)
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3 comments:
[somewhere i have never travelled]
somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain, has such small hands
ee cummings
love you brother
Touche! I have been trumped by ee cummings on chemo day, and I concede the point. Remember though that where cummings' universe often fits nicely into tightly wrapped candy papers, to be rattled at the moon, Ashbery's simply spreads out lazily like, he would say, the malarial badlands of the day. But you got me today..... great poem. --Mr. Jones
and i am bareft (sp) of any knowledge of poems. alas everyone trumped me. but my heart/salads are with you.
tossing salads
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