Poetry--Life's Panacea
"Unless we see or hear phenomena or things from within the things themselves, we shall never succeed in recording them in our hearts." ---Basho
On this page I will put some of my favorite poems--tearful, joyous, lovey-dovey, well-known, and not so well-known...but all good in my opinion. The word "panacea" means a cure-all or remedy for anything. As you can see, I believe poetry is a panacea for all life's ills. For now, the poems will be arranged in alphabetical order by the poet's last name. Enjoy!
Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
Lately, I've become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelops me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for a bus--
Things have come to that.
And now, each night I count the stars,
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted
I count the holes they leave.
Nobody sings anymore.
And then last night, I tiptoed up
To my daughter's room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there...
Only she on her knees,
Peeking into her own clasped hands.
---Imamu Amiri Baraka
A Family Man Ponders the Pistol Nebula
The baby is under his eyelids,
18 pounds of sleepless nights.
The wife is ivy stuck to his skin.
He lurches along, pockets full
Of worries and fears and things to do,
Each one a stone
Clapping against the next.
But the sky, after last night's rains,
Is so blue that he pauses, thinks--
It's not like paint or water
Or anything else I might choose.
It's blue in the first, invented way.
And somehow that triggers
Something he read about a star
Which burns a million times
Brighter than the sun.
It's out there, he thinks,
And here I stand on a beachball
Floating in space. It's out there,
And just to know such a thing,
To be aware, makes me alive.
God, he thinks (as if he had forgotten),
I exist.
---Tim Bascom
That Man
Oh days given over to a fruitless
insistence on forgetting the personal history
of a minor poet from the bottom
of the world, to whom the stars or fate
granted a body that leaves behind no child
and blindness, which is a shadow and a prison,
and old age, which is death's day breaking,
and fame, which no one ever deserves
and the habit of contriving lines of verse
and an old fondness for encyclopedias
and for maps some artist's delicate hand has drawn
and for slender ivory and an incurable
longing to have Latin back and fragmentary
memories of Geneva and Edinburgh
and dates and names that slip the mind
and a fondness for the Orient, which peoples
of the miscellaneous Orient do not share
and glimmers of hope for what tomorrow may bring
and an overuse of etymology
and the iron beat of Saxon syllables
and the moon that never ceases to surprise
and that bad habit, Buenos Aires,
and the taste of grapes, of water
and of cocoa, sweetness out of Mexico,
and certain coins and an hourglass
and who, one afternoon like all the rest,
settles for these lines.
---Jorge Luis Borges (Translated from the Spanish)
For Jane
225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.
is this how it works?
in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.
when you left
you took almost
everything.
I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.
what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.
---Charles Bukowski
To Ellen
Oh! might I kiss those eyes of fire,
A million scarce would quench desire;
Still would I steep my lips in bliss,
And dwell an age on every kiss;
Nor then my soul should sated be,
Still would I kiss and cling to thee:
Nought should my kiss from thine dissever,
Still would we kiss, and kiss for ever;
E'en though the number did exceed
The yellow harvest's countless seed;
To part would be a vain endeavour,
Could I desist?--ah! never--never.
---Lord Byron
And Kneeling At The Edge Of The Transparent Sea I Shall Shape For Myself A New Heart From The Salt And Mud
A wife is in the grip of being.
Easy to say, Why not give up on this?
But let's suppose your husband and a certain dark woman
like to meet at a bar in early afternoon.
Love is not conditional.
Living is very conditional.
The wife positions herself in an enclosed veranda across the street.
Watches the dark woman
reach out to touch his temple as if filtering something onto it.
Watches him
bend slightly toward the woman then back. They are both serious.
Their seriousness wracks her.
People who can be serious together, it goes deep.
They have a bottle of mineral water on the table between them
and two glasses.
No inebriants necessary!
When did he develop
this puritan new taste?
A cold ship
moves out of harbor somewhere way inside the wife
and slides off toward the flat gray horizon,
not a bird not a breath in sight.
---Anne Carson
Jonah's Flight To Tarshish
His mail, mostly bills, was already being forwarded
and each day his new landlady expected his arrival.
To welcome him, she had painted the spare room,
bought a bed and dresser, nothing exceptional--
a comfortable chair because, from what she heard,
he liked to read. As a widow with grown children
she looked forward to this respectable gentleman
with settled habits who might help about the house,
hammer the random nail, even carry the groceries,
and was it wrong to hope for a greater intimacy,
a companion to share her long evenings? Going out
each morning to sweep the walk, she'd gaze past
her gate toward the sea. Oh, the waves, the waves--
how they rush forward and retreat as if they've just
heard a story, which they have chosen not to repeat.
---Stephen Dobyns
Petra
My laughter
is the crackle
of kindling
at midnight, the moon,
my white goat caught
on a thorn.
You are a man on his knees
peeking through a keyhole
when the door is open. Heaven
is my tent-roof
hung by a rope from the sky.
Sleep with me,
I am sweet tea, I am these
red seeds
on a white plate.
Don't let your heart
be a bird that starves
with food in its cage!
---Martin Edmunds
Acquainted With The Night
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain--and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
But not to call me back or say good-by;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
---Robert Frost
Across the Fields...
Across the sky, the clouds move,
Across the fields, the wind,
Across the fields the lost child
Of my mother wanders.
Across the street, leaves blow,
Across the trees, birds cry--
Across the mountains, far away,
My home must be.
---Hermann Hesse
For the Sleepwalkers
Tonight I want to say something wonderful
for the sleepwalkers who have so much faith
in their legs, so much faith in the invisible
arrow carved into the carpet, the worn path
that leads to the stairs instead of the window,
the gaping doorway instead of the seamless mirror.
I love the way that sleepwalkers are willing
to step out of their bodies into the night,
to raise their arms and welcome the darkness,
palming the blank spaces, touching everything.
Always they return home safely, like blind men
who know it is morning by feeling shadows.
And always they wake up as themselves again.
That's why I want to say something astonishing
like: Our hearts are leaving our bodies.
Our hearts are thirsty black handkerchiefs
flying through the trees at night, soaking up
the darkest beams of moonlight, the music
of owls, the motion of wind-torn branches.
And now our hearts are thick black fists
flying back to the glove of our chests.
We have to learn to trust our hearts like that.
We have to learn the desperate faith of sleep-
walkers who rise out of their calm beds
and walk through the skin of another life.
We have to drink the stupefying cup of darkness
and wake up to ourselves, nourished and surprised.
---Edward Hirsch
Contents Of A Minute
The woman across the hall
is dying. She talks herself into death
with a low rapid jumble.
A rich African voice is talking
over hers. It speaks of green
as in pastures; still, as in waters.
A high clamor of geese falls
through the dusk, taking a flock south.
Geese are gone. And the woman.
Elsewhere, the wind
blows in from left field.
---Josephine Jacobsen
Grief
You cannot row it away, not
this sorrow,
you cannot drape it
over sand dunes hoping
it will blow into
the atmosphere, not
this sorrow,
you cannot wrap it around
a deep sea diver's waist
and drop it into
the bowels of the sea,
not this sorrow,
and the slow sound of the word
sorrowsorrowsorrow
begins a keening cry
soft and solid, loud
and languorous
stretching pain until
it begins to wear thin in spots,
and the tears that watered rain
forests now collect in lakes, and
beside these reflective waters
those who know this sorrow
plant a tree,
a magnificent tree.
---Ruth Ann Meyers Kulp
Lost Brains
He felt as if his brains
were jumping out of his head.
It had begun when he saw her
flirting with another man
at a party. The man was a
nobody who liked to pick up
girls. She swore that no one
else meant anything to her.
But when it happened again,
this time in a crowded bar,
his head started spinning
and he knew that his brain
was going to jump out through
his ears. Without her he would
become a nobody too.
---James Laughlin
Circles
These are rocks he loved when he was alive
And how alive he was, like the sun this afternoon
Making mica gleam on the cold face of granite
And giving walls a long shadow across the grass
In the dead of winter, when he'd come from abroad
Like the sun emerging now from behind that cloud
To flood this dark lake water with golden light,
So that I still believe in him as in the sun,
And expect him to reappear as winter passes,
The telephone ringing some stormy night, his voice
Calmly announcing the day he's planning to cross
Back into our lives with so much news to tell
Of where he has been since he died, though I know
It's only a dream, so vivid it makes me cry
"Tony, it's you! What the hell made you play
This trick on us? Thank God you're alive and well!"
Which cannot be, though the sun breaks through
All the clouds on the lake where I cast his ashes
And a heron rose from these rocks like a ghost
In three wide circles ascending who knows where.
---Richard Murphy
The Purpose of Altar Boys
Tonio told me at catechism
the big part of the eye
admits good, and the little
black part is for seeing
evil--his mother told him
who was a widow and so
an authority on such things.
That's why at night
the black part gets bigger.
That's why kids can't go out
at night, and at night
girls take off their clothes
and walk around their
bedrooms or jump on their
beds or wear only sandals
and stand in their windows.
I was the altar boy
who knew about these things,
whose mission on some Sundays
was to remind people of
the night before as they
knelt for Holy Communion.
To keep Christ from falling
I held the metal plate
under chins, while on the thick
red carpet of the altar
I dragged my feet
and waited for the precise
moment: plate to chin
I delivered without expression
the Holy Electric Shock,
the kind that produces
a really large swallowing
and makes people think.
I thought of it as justice.
But on other Sundays the fire
in my eyes was different,
my mission somehow changed.
I would hold the metal plate
a little too hard
against those certain same
nervous chins, and I
I would look
with authority down
the tops of white dresses.
---Alberto Rios
The Partial Explanation
Seems like a long time
Since the waiter took my order.
Grimy little luncheonette,
The snow falling outside.
Seems like it's grown darker
Since I last heard the kitchen door
Behind my back
Since I last noticed
Anyone pass on the street.
A glass of ice water
Keeps me company
At this table I chose myself
Upon entering.
And a longing,
Incredible longing
To eavesdrop
On the conversation
Of cooks.
---Charles Simic
Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
---Dylan Thomas
New Face
I have learned not to worry about love;
but to honor its coming
with all my heart.
To examine the dark mysteries
of the blood
with headless heed and
swirl,
to know the rush of feelings
swift and flowing
as water.
The source appears to be
some inexhaustible
spring
within our twin and triple
selves;
the new face I turn up
to you
no one else on earth
has ever
seen.
---Alice Walker
A Drinking Song
Wine comes in at the mouth
And love comes in at the eye,
That's all we know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you, and I sigh.
---William Butler Yeats
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