"Off and on I have written out a poem called 'Grandmother's Glass Eye' which should be about the problem of writing poetry. The situation of my grandmother strikes me as rather like the situation of the poet: the difficulty of combining the real with the decidedly un-real; the natural with the unnatural; the curious effect a poem produces of being as normal as sight and yet as synthetic, as artificial, as a glass eye."
... thanks to the heroic Jeannie Vanasco for sending this.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
My Last Poem by Manuel Bandeira
I would like my last poem thus
That it be gentle saying the simplest and least intended things
That it be ardent like a tearless sob
That it have the beauty of almost scentless flowers
The purity of the flame in which the most limpid diamonds are consumed
The passion of suicides who kill themselves without explanation.
- translation from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Bishop
Note: In 1951, poet Elizabeth Bishop received a $2,500 travel grant to circumnavigate Latin American. She landed in Santos, Brazil that fall, intending to stay two weeks, she lived there fifteen years.
That it be gentle saying the simplest and least intended things
That it be ardent like a tearless sob
That it have the beauty of almost scentless flowers
The purity of the flame in which the most limpid diamonds are consumed
The passion of suicides who kill themselves without explanation.
- translation from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Bishop
Note: In 1951, poet Elizabeth Bishop received a $2,500 travel grant to circumnavigate Latin American. She landed in Santos, Brazil that fall, intending to stay two weeks, she lived there fifteen years.
James Linville will be...
I'll be posting admired poems, and thoughts on poetry, here again soon.
JSL
JSL
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
The Glass Eye by Jeannie Vanasco
I.
Massaging his iris, a dab of brown, in a soapy film,
cleaning my father’s eye in my palm
while he lies between the silver rails of his bed:
this is what the end looks like.
He is dying in what used to be the living room
in a rented bed in a house on the corner of a street.
I am here trying to hold onto him
but all I can hold is his eye.
This is what the end sounds like:
the white hum of his breathing machine
underneath his last words, you’re beautiful.
For the next two days, my father says nothing.
I say everything I can. I make promises
while his hospice nurses move in and out,
whispering.
I run photographs along the rails of his bed,
scenes he may have forgotten:
reading a book to me
despite the white patch over his eye;
clutching me on his lap
and looking off somewhere as if he knew this was coming.
In almost every scene he is looking at me and never at the camera.
It makes it difficult to choose his obituary photo.
I mean to write an obituary but it keeps coming out all wrong.
I write these things that don’t belong: (11/1/2002)
II.
The open slits in the Venetian blinds
let in horizontal strips of light that dress him.
His white bald head
(leaned into the coal-black pinhole lens)
looks like the white of his eye.
On the topmost floor of St. John's Hospital,
my father wears a paper gown open in the back,
ripping at the edges like my coloring book.
A circle of surgical lights shines overhead
while a thin doctor stoops over him.
Her glasses swing against her chest
as she leans cautiously into my father,
prodding his eye with a wand of light.
What does she see in there?
Does the eye look sick?
From underneath a metal tray sliding with needles
and shiny pointed tools,
I draw what I hear my father say he sees behind the lens:
“A pond, a farmhouse, rolling hills.
A child playing in a field of weeds.”
I draw big brown mounds of land for hills,
mounds like the enormous anthills crushed
into the slats of the hospital sidewalk by some boy I saw.
I add a circle for a pond and draw a duck
because there had to have been a duck—
not behind the lens but in the pond—
and I color the farmhouse green
because I would like to see a green farmhouse
and I would like for my father to see
what I see. (5/4/1989)
III.
A vision, he sees a vision before him,
hovering above his bed. I stand before the vision,
trying to block whatever it is that is frightening him,
but he looks through me as if I don’t exist. (11/2/2002)
IV.
The farmhouse and the hills and the pond
and the girl disappear.
“I don’t see nothing. There’s nothing there,” says my father.
He peers into the lens machine with his left eye
as the doctor asked, but the girl has disappeared.
How does my father see nothing?
How am I to draw nothing?
Am I disappearing like the girl?
Squeezing my lids shut,
I can’t figure out what color nothing is.
I try covering my lids with my hands and things darken.
I open my eyes and scan through my crayons emptied on the floor.
None of them match the nothing I saw.
I look down at my blank piece of paper and that doesn’t look like nothing.
It looks like something, like untouched paper.
I can’t draw what the eye sees.
I tell my mom I want a crayon the color of nothing,
but she never answers and leaves the room. (5/4/1989)
V.
On a tiny floral saucer next to his bed, his eye sits, unseeing
as the four men empty the living room of him,
carrying his body into the winter morning. (11/3/2002)
VI.
I should draw a picture of myself in case I disappear
but what would that matter, how would he see the picture
If he can’t see even me?
So I draw my father’s face as I see it
in case he disappears.
Dragging the yellow crayon across the page,
I try to capture all the lines stretched across his forehead,
but my picture looks wrong, too flat. So I crumple the paper
and hand it to him and say the wrinkles in the paper
are for the wrinkles in his face and he laughs but he starts to cry too.
A nurse pulls me back and says—
spoken as an order, not as a question—
why don’t you wait in the waiting room
like a good little girl, but I ignore her
and continue drawing pictures in new colors.
I draw one of her, fire spewing out of her ears,
her nostrils, her hands. I press the fire so hard
it breaks the paper. I never give her this
but put it on my father’s lap instead.
He laughs and tells me to be a good little girl and I listen. (5/4/1989)
VII.
Where did the men take him?
They say they are waiting
for the hard November ground to break
before they bury my father.
So where is he now? (11/4/2002)
VIII.
I would like to see my father,
I tell the nurse,
but she says the doctors are working on him.
She says not to push her. That’s not nice.
She says he will be OK soon. What about his old eye,
I ask. What will they do with it? Where will it go?
I want to hold on to it, I say, but she says that would be impossible. (5/4/1989)
IX.
It all blurs together. Is this how he saw the world?
X.
There is no breathing machine, no lens to look through now.
Everything is gone except the picture of him
hanging in a frame above his rented bed
being wheeled out of our home.
His crinkled portrait faces me.
It looks more like him than the photos do.
This should have been in his obituary.
I meant to tell him this in a letter
I meant to drop into his coffin before it closed.
I keep writing him more, addressing them nowhere,
crumpling them like the picture
because it was selfish,
is selfish to assume my letters change anything.
And what did this picture do but remind him
of how little time we had together?
How it must have tormented him all these years.
Was my picture of him the last thing he saw,
was the vision there to guide him,
or was there nothing?
All this I think of as I take his picture from the wall
and run my fingers over the wrinkles of his face
and with the sweeps of a black crayon, I
un-draw him. (11/5/2002)
Posted to UL by James Scott Linville
Massaging his iris, a dab of brown, in a soapy film,
cleaning my father’s eye in my palm
while he lies between the silver rails of his bed:
this is what the end looks like.
He is dying in what used to be the living room
in a rented bed in a house on the corner of a street.
I am here trying to hold onto him
but all I can hold is his eye.
This is what the end sounds like:
the white hum of his breathing machine
underneath his last words, you’re beautiful.
For the next two days, my father says nothing.
I say everything I can. I make promises
while his hospice nurses move in and out,
whispering.
I run photographs along the rails of his bed,
scenes he may have forgotten:
reading a book to me
despite the white patch over his eye;
clutching me on his lap
and looking off somewhere as if he knew this was coming.
In almost every scene he is looking at me and never at the camera.
It makes it difficult to choose his obituary photo.
I mean to write an obituary but it keeps coming out all wrong.
I write these things that don’t belong: (11/1/2002)
II.
The open slits in the Venetian blinds
let in horizontal strips of light that dress him.
His white bald head
(leaned into the coal-black pinhole lens)
looks like the white of his eye.
On the topmost floor of St. John's Hospital,
my father wears a paper gown open in the back,
ripping at the edges like my coloring book.
A circle of surgical lights shines overhead
while a thin doctor stoops over him.
Her glasses swing against her chest
as she leans cautiously into my father,
prodding his eye with a wand of light.
What does she see in there?
Does the eye look sick?
From underneath a metal tray sliding with needles
and shiny pointed tools,
I draw what I hear my father say he sees behind the lens:
“A pond, a farmhouse, rolling hills.
A child playing in a field of weeds.”
I draw big brown mounds of land for hills,
mounds like the enormous anthills crushed
into the slats of the hospital sidewalk by some boy I saw.
I add a circle for a pond and draw a duck
because there had to have been a duck—
not behind the lens but in the pond—
and I color the farmhouse green
because I would like to see a green farmhouse
and I would like for my father to see
what I see. (5/4/1989)
III.
A vision, he sees a vision before him,
hovering above his bed. I stand before the vision,
trying to block whatever it is that is frightening him,
but he looks through me as if I don’t exist. (11/2/2002)
IV.
The farmhouse and the hills and the pond
and the girl disappear.
“I don’t see nothing. There’s nothing there,” says my father.
He peers into the lens machine with his left eye
as the doctor asked, but the girl has disappeared.
How does my father see nothing?
How am I to draw nothing?
Am I disappearing like the girl?
Squeezing my lids shut,
I can’t figure out what color nothing is.
I try covering my lids with my hands and things darken.
I open my eyes and scan through my crayons emptied on the floor.
None of them match the nothing I saw.
I look down at my blank piece of paper and that doesn’t look like nothing.
It looks like something, like untouched paper.
I can’t draw what the eye sees.
I tell my mom I want a crayon the color of nothing,
but she never answers and leaves the room. (5/4/1989)
V.
On a tiny floral saucer next to his bed, his eye sits, unseeing
as the four men empty the living room of him,
carrying his body into the winter morning. (11/3/2002)
VI.
I should draw a picture of myself in case I disappear
but what would that matter, how would he see the picture
If he can’t see even me?
So I draw my father’s face as I see it
in case he disappears.
Dragging the yellow crayon across the page,
I try to capture all the lines stretched across his forehead,
but my picture looks wrong, too flat. So I crumple the paper
and hand it to him and say the wrinkles in the paper
are for the wrinkles in his face and he laughs but he starts to cry too.
A nurse pulls me back and says—
spoken as an order, not as a question—
why don’t you wait in the waiting room
like a good little girl, but I ignore her
and continue drawing pictures in new colors.
I draw one of her, fire spewing out of her ears,
her nostrils, her hands. I press the fire so hard
it breaks the paper. I never give her this
but put it on my father’s lap instead.
He laughs and tells me to be a good little girl and I listen. (5/4/1989)
VII.
Where did the men take him?
They say they are waiting
for the hard November ground to break
before they bury my father.
So where is he now? (11/4/2002)
VIII.
I would like to see my father,
I tell the nurse,
but she says the doctors are working on him.
She says not to push her. That’s not nice.
She says he will be OK soon. What about his old eye,
I ask. What will they do with it? Where will it go?
I want to hold on to it, I say, but she says that would be impossible. (5/4/1989)
IX.
It all blurs together. Is this how he saw the world?
X.
There is no breathing machine, no lens to look through now.
Everything is gone except the picture of him
hanging in a frame above his rented bed
being wheeled out of our home.
His crinkled portrait faces me.
It looks more like him than the photos do.
This should have been in his obituary.
I meant to tell him this in a letter
I meant to drop into his coffin before it closed.
I keep writing him more, addressing them nowhere,
crumpling them like the picture
because it was selfish,
is selfish to assume my letters change anything.
And what did this picture do but remind him
of how little time we had together?
How it must have tormented him all these years.
Was my picture of him the last thing he saw,
was the vision there to guide him,
or was there nothing?
All this I think of as I take his picture from the wall
and run my fingers over the wrinkles of his face
and with the sweeps of a black crayon, I
un-draw him. (11/5/2002)
Posted to UL by James Scott Linville
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Retribution by Nicole Burdette
I.
He turned around like Orpheus and fire was everywhere
I can’t remain here he said
Clumsy and hell-bent
He gave her chocolates wrapped in white
And paced in small spaces
It’s a tough racquet – confessing
As a wolf rises in the heart
He won’t escape his father’s sins this time around
Or his brother’s
Walking down hereditary roads reluctant and slow
It’s an incandescence that only blood knows
Distant like he was for all his success and sorrow
He closes his eyes, with their white Irises
There’s hardly a soul left in eyes that blue
He swears he’ll put his hand in the fire for her
He reads the Greeks define truth
As ”what is not forgotten”
And listens to what’s false
Like twigs broken on a trail
A voice distracts him
He says good-bye and - looks back
As the fog lowers on the other side of the world
Plunged into the water, down fast – helpless, lightless
Down an isle of cypress
Trailed by the furies, who so loudly follow him
He begs them to remember;
“I once led sailors to their destination safely
I drown out the temptation of sirens
I knew the seas”
Now across the ocean that reaches far east
He walks across this eternal prairie
And remembers the fruits of the desert; apricots, roses and peaches
And riding in an elevator in Monterey
A dove-drawn picture flooded with memory and cunning desire
II.
At home visitors come home in from the rain
He’s praying for Dutch courage
Standing under a stoic flag
Why is his devotion so numb?
He remembers the night she sent him into a storm
These supposed Eden’s ride like waves under him
Captured by lust and bedeviled by simpatico
He finds he can not hide this anymore than a fugitive
Can hide himself
The scene changes again
Further down – past the volcano
Are oxcarts and dirty, closed gates
The crowds have had the romance beaten out of them
They mill on the cobblestones
Plaintive and damaged
It was never a question of character
He’d always find what was distinguished in what other people overlooked
But this cloud that hovered tonight, boy
Was surely the shadow of the world
The royal palms and bent coconut palms swung and snapped
Only the paper weights – whose use had seemed minimal
Before, decorative at best
now saved all he had left
He usually picked words
And saved them for another time
Words like ambrosia or deterred
At a loss of words so often
He found it best to do the other thing
And chips fall where they may
Like the genetic creasing of a Stetson hat
Dirty and trampled on – a gift from a relative
Then there’s words again
The ones he’d actually put down
And ones he spoke
He even spoke her words sometimes
It was getting hard to know the difference
III.
Old letters just left
To love like that, sloppy, and have it spill over –
To divulge like that and vanish
Letters, in a box, in a closet, in an attic, in the sky
He didn’t like to be buried like that
The forest was not far off but full of erotic suspicion
Better to watch the towering abandonment of the surf
As it piles up on the beach
It’s been a pilgrimage (defined in 1750 as)
A ‘confused voyage of devotion’
He’d not have altitude sickness this time
He’d grown used to the heights
And surrendered to the falls
He knew humanity could not be objective
And that he had survived the waste
And extravagance of his own tolerance
After a lifetime of black dogs – retribution came
Like an obedient rebel
Even the scholar of fainting American meadows
is witness
He stands behind a heavy door
The wild honeysuckle perfume is potent
It drowns out the mixture of passionflowers and orchids
Even the hummingbirds from Brazil
Or the hours in the afternoon playing chess
Against his infant thoughts of locusts and mulberries
Behind the grove of oak and beeches
He’s living a noble lie; the nobility of impulse
Which was always as chaotic as the void surrounding him
His Olympian detachment –
His crudeness worthy of a turbulent sky
He’d have to exercise courtliness to understand savagery
He had loved
Out there among the Dutch elms and mango trees of exile
He knew, as Einstein said, that
“The moon exists even if no one is watching it”
Posted with the author's permission
He turned around like Orpheus and fire was everywhere
I can’t remain here he said
Clumsy and hell-bent
He gave her chocolates wrapped in white
And paced in small spaces
It’s a tough racquet – confessing
As a wolf rises in the heart
He won’t escape his father’s sins this time around
Or his brother’s
Walking down hereditary roads reluctant and slow
It’s an incandescence that only blood knows
Distant like he was for all his success and sorrow
He closes his eyes, with their white Irises
There’s hardly a soul left in eyes that blue
He swears he’ll put his hand in the fire for her
He reads the Greeks define truth
As ”what is not forgotten”
And listens to what’s false
Like twigs broken on a trail
A voice distracts him
He says good-bye and - looks back
As the fog lowers on the other side of the world
Plunged into the water, down fast – helpless, lightless
Down an isle of cypress
Trailed by the furies, who so loudly follow him
He begs them to remember;
“I once led sailors to their destination safely
I drown out the temptation of sirens
I knew the seas”
Now across the ocean that reaches far east
He walks across this eternal prairie
And remembers the fruits of the desert; apricots, roses and peaches
And riding in an elevator in Monterey
A dove-drawn picture flooded with memory and cunning desire
II.
At home visitors come home in from the rain
He’s praying for Dutch courage
Standing under a stoic flag
Why is his devotion so numb?
He remembers the night she sent him into a storm
These supposed Eden’s ride like waves under him
Captured by lust and bedeviled by simpatico
He finds he can not hide this anymore than a fugitive
Can hide himself
The scene changes again
Further down – past the volcano
Are oxcarts and dirty, closed gates
The crowds have had the romance beaten out of them
They mill on the cobblestones
Plaintive and damaged
It was never a question of character
He’d always find what was distinguished in what other people overlooked
But this cloud that hovered tonight, boy
Was surely the shadow of the world
The royal palms and bent coconut palms swung and snapped
Only the paper weights – whose use had seemed minimal
Before, decorative at best
now saved all he had left
He usually picked words
And saved them for another time
Words like ambrosia or deterred
At a loss of words so often
He found it best to do the other thing
And chips fall where they may
Like the genetic creasing of a Stetson hat
Dirty and trampled on – a gift from a relative
Then there’s words again
The ones he’d actually put down
And ones he spoke
He even spoke her words sometimes
It was getting hard to know the difference
III.
Old letters just left
To love like that, sloppy, and have it spill over –
To divulge like that and vanish
Letters, in a box, in a closet, in an attic, in the sky
He didn’t like to be buried like that
The forest was not far off but full of erotic suspicion
Better to watch the towering abandonment of the surf
As it piles up on the beach
It’s been a pilgrimage (defined in 1750 as)
A ‘confused voyage of devotion’
He’d not have altitude sickness this time
He’d grown used to the heights
And surrendered to the falls
He knew humanity could not be objective
And that he had survived the waste
And extravagance of his own tolerance
After a lifetime of black dogs – retribution came
Like an obedient rebel
Even the scholar of fainting American meadows
is witness
He stands behind a heavy door
The wild honeysuckle perfume is potent
It drowns out the mixture of passionflowers and orchids
Even the hummingbirds from Brazil
Or the hours in the afternoon playing chess
Against his infant thoughts of locusts and mulberries
Behind the grove of oak and beeches
He’s living a noble lie; the nobility of impulse
Which was always as chaotic as the void surrounding him
His Olympian detachment –
His crudeness worthy of a turbulent sky
He’d have to exercise courtliness to understand savagery
He had loved
Out there among the Dutch elms and mango trees of exile
He knew, as Einstein said, that
“The moon exists even if no one is watching it”
Posted with the author's permission
Sunday, June 10, 2007
On sad suburban afternoons of autumn by Reginald Gibbons
On sad suburban afternoons of autumn,
the piercings, leather and tattoos that bought
these bungalows from mixing bowls and golf
barbeque and drink beer, watch football, eat,
laugh like ponies--everything has changed
and not a lot except which music blares
through the meat-scented smoke and streaks of sun.
Big motorcyles drip dark staining oil
where Oldsmobiles once waited between breakdowns.
Slightly aslant on windows are the self-
adhesive souvenirs of stadium concerts
by rockers getting osteoporosis;
T-shirts advertise five-pointed leaves;
kids are neglected in the age-old ways,
unkempt and shrieking as they run--or older,
buy their own weed, sneak drinks, ditch school and fuck.
In front yards, back yards, alleys and dead ends
may all these signs convince the distant gods--
or Fate, or The Fates, an absent "G-d," a Christ
somewhere or other, not right here, an Allah
with gnashing prophets, or a great magician,
or the chance events that can destroy a life--
that there's no need to bring down any more
than customary miseries and brief
illusions of good luck on such old, young,
different, same, frail creatures of a day.
first appeared in Ontario Review #62
republished with author's permission
the piercings, leather and tattoos that bought
these bungalows from mixing bowls and golf
barbeque and drink beer, watch football, eat,
laugh like ponies--everything has changed
and not a lot except which music blares
through the meat-scented smoke and streaks of sun.
Big motorcyles drip dark staining oil
where Oldsmobiles once waited between breakdowns.
Slightly aslant on windows are the self-
adhesive souvenirs of stadium concerts
by rockers getting osteoporosis;
T-shirts advertise five-pointed leaves;
kids are neglected in the age-old ways,
unkempt and shrieking as they run--or older,
buy their own weed, sneak drinks, ditch school and fuck.
In front yards, back yards, alleys and dead ends
may all these signs convince the distant gods--
or Fate, or The Fates, an absent "G-d," a Christ
somewhere or other, not right here, an Allah
with gnashing prophets, or a great magician,
or the chance events that can destroy a life--
that there's no need to bring down any more
than customary miseries and brief
illusions of good luck on such old, young,
different, same, frail creatures of a day.
first appeared in Ontario Review #62
republished with author's permission
Thursday, June 7, 2007
6 by Catullus, translated by Peter Green
Flavius, that sweetie of yours (Catullus speaking)
must be totally inelegant and unsmart-
you couldn't keep quiet otherwise, you'd tell me.
Fact is, it's just some commonplace consumptive
tart you're mad for, and you blush to say so.
Look, your nights aren't solitary: silence
won't help out when your own bedroom shouts it--
stinking Syrian perfume, all those garlands,
both your pillows, on each side of the bed, all
rumpled, and the gimcrack bedstead shaken
into sharp creaking, loud perambulation!
It's no good, no good at all, your saying
nothing. Why? You wouldn't look so fucked out
if you weren't up to some inept adventure.
So, whatever you've got there, nice or awful,
tell us! I'm after you, man, and your lovebird,
want to ensky you both in witty poems.
posted with permission of the translator
must be totally inelegant and unsmart-
you couldn't keep quiet otherwise, you'd tell me.
Fact is, it's just some commonplace consumptive
tart you're mad for, and you blush to say so.
Look, your nights aren't solitary: silence
won't help out when your own bedroom shouts it--
stinking Syrian perfume, all those garlands,
both your pillows, on each side of the bed, all
rumpled, and the gimcrack bedstead shaken
into sharp creaking, loud perambulation!
It's no good, no good at all, your saying
nothing. Why? You wouldn't look so fucked out
if you weren't up to some inept adventure.
So, whatever you've got there, nice or awful,
tell us! I'm after you, man, and your lovebird,
want to ensky you both in witty poems.
posted with permission of the translator
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