Favorite Poems (One of)
Here's one of my favorite poems. It's by Robert Creeley, and one of the reasons why I love it is (more than anything else) its ability to surprise me. After so many years.
I KNOW A MAN
As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, -- John, I
sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what
can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, but a goddamn big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ's sake, look
out where yr going.
Again.... What's YOUR favorite?
posted by slowmotion @ 2:07 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Here's another one of mine. although i don't think the line cuts will appear well, so I'll just mark them with slashes:
Meditation at Lagunitas
Robert Haas
All the new thinking is about loss./
In this it resembles the old thinking./
The idea, for example, that each particular erases/
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-/
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk/
of that black birch is, by his presence,/
some tragic falling off from a first world/
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,/
because there is in this world no one thing/
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,/
a word is elegy to what it signifies./
We talked about it late last night and in the voice/
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone/
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,/
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,/
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman/
I made love to and I remembered how, holding/
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,/
I felt a violent wonder at her presence/
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river/
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,/
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish/
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her./
Longing, we say, because desire is full/
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her./
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,/
the thing her father said that hurt her, what/
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous/
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing./
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,/
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry./
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