dugthings: Things I Dig, Mostly Poems

Passsa la nave mia colma d'obli . . .
-- Petrarch

Despite the dreams and yearnings that lie drowned,
The flotsam of desire, the fearful straits,
The capsized hope, the passion gone aground,
The tides too treacherous to navigate,
You lift your gaze each time love reappears
Like an ocean liner gliding through the dark.
Without a thought you rush down to the pier
And climb aboard and once again embark,
And stand upon the deck ablaze with light,
And raise your glass beneath the glittering stars,
And watch the harbor slowly fade from sight,
Not caring where you're going, or how far --
Knowing the odds are slim that you'll survive,
Yet never having felt quite so alive.

I want it

82. SOWHATDOYOUKNOW

I HAVE A PET TURTLE
AND I KEEP IT IN A SMALL
CONTAINER IN MY BATHROOM.

LIKE A GOLDFISH.

AND I WONDER IF THAT'S WRONG.

PEOPLE TELL ME, "WELL, HE'S NOT A FISH."
AND I SAY, "WELL, YOU'RE NOT A TURTLE."
AND I FEEL SMUG AND CLEVER BUT
IT'S PROBABLY KILLING MY TURTLE.

I HOPE HE'S OKAY.

Happiness

There's just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Schubert died. Cried all night.

Spring passes
and one remembers one's innocence
Summer passes
and one remembers one's exuberance
Autumn passes
and one remembers one's reverence
Winter passes
and one remembers one's perseverance.

There is the season that never passes,
And that is the season of glass.

26. Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.

It hovers in dark corners
before the lights are turned on,
it shakes sleep from its eyes
and drops from mushroom gills,
it explodes in the starry heads
of dandelions turned sages,
it sticks to the wings of green angels
that sail from the tops of maples.

It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
it lives in each earthworm segment
surviving cruelty,
it is the motion that runs the tail of a dog,
it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
of the child that has just been born.

It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.

It is the serum which makes us swear
not to betray one another;
it is in this poem, trying to speak.

William Butler Yeats
To An Isle In The Water


Shy one, shy one,
Shy one of my heart,
She moves in the firelight
Pensively apart.

She carries in the dishes,
And lays them in a row.
To an isle in the water
With her would I go.

She carries in the candles,
And lights the curtained room,
Shy in the doorway
And shy in the gloom;

As shy as a rabbit,
Helpful and shy.
To an isle in the water
With her would I fly.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8myK93FqbYc&feature=related

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVr4jhNMeeY 

It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.

Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.

That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books -

Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life. 

Oh, Marcia, 
I want your long blonde beauty
to be taught in high school,
so kids will learn that God
lives like music in the skin
and sounds like a sunshine harpsicord.
I want high school report cards 
to look like this:

Playing with Gentle Glass Things
A

Computer Magic
A

Writing Letters to Those You Love
A

Finding out about Fish
A

Marcia's Long Blonde Beauty
A+!

cultivated chrysanthemums
wither
first

Cat stands at the fridge,
Cries loudly for milk.
But I've filled her bowl.
Wild cat, I say, Sister,
Look, you have milk.
I clink my fingernail
Against the rim. Milk.
With down and liver,
A word I know she hears.
Her sad miaow. She runs
To me. She dips
In her whiskers but
Doesn't drink. As sometimes
I want the light on
When it is on. Or when
I saw the woman walking
toward my house and
I thought there's Frances.
Then looked in the car mirror
To be sure. She stalks
The room. She wants. Milk
Beyond milk. World beyond
This one, she cries.

"...In a related vein is the story of Charles, a small octopus who was the subject of an experiment to see whether invertebrates could learn conditioned tasks as vertebrates do. With two others, Albert and Bertram, each housed in a small tank, Charles was to be trained to pull a switch so that a light went on, and then swim to the light to be rewarded with a minute piece of fish. Albert and Bertram learned to perform this task and Charles seemed at first to be doing the same. But then Charles rebelled. He began anchoring himself to the side of the tank and yanking on the lever so fiercely that he eventually broke it. Instead of waiting under the light to receive his smidgen of fish, Charles reached out of the water, grabbed the light, and dragged it into the tank. Finally, he took to floating at the top of the tank, with his eyes above the surface, accurately squirting water at the experimenters. "The variables responsible for the maintenance and strengthening of the lamp-pulling and squirting behavior in this animal were not apparent," the experimenter noted primly.

Climb Mount Fuji,
O snail,
but slowly, slowly.

Basho

Even in Kyoto
hearing the cuckoo's cry --
I long for Kyoto.

I Need To Be More French. Or Japanese.
Beth Ann Fennelly

Then I wouldn’t prefer the California wine,
its big sugar, big fruit rolling down my tongue,
a cornucopia spilled across a tacky tablecloth.
I’d prefer the French, its smoke and rot.
Said Cézanne: Le monde—c’est terrible!
Which means, The world—it bites the big weenie.
People sound smarter in French.
The Japanese prefer the crescent moon to the full,
prefer the rose before it blooms.
Oh, I have been to the temples of Kyoto,
I have stood on the Pont Neuf, and my eyes,
they drank it in, but my taste buds
shuffled along in the beer line at Wrigley Field.
It was the day they gave out foam fingers.
I hereby pledge to wear more gray, less yellow
of the beaks of baby mockingbirds,
that huge yellow yawping open on wobbly necks,
trusting something yummy will be dropped inside,
soon. I hereby pledge to be reserved.
When the French designer learned
I didn’t like her mockups for my book cover,
she sniffed, They’re not for everyone. They’re
subtle. What area code is 662 anyway? I said,
Mississippi, sweetheart. Bet you couldn’t find it
with a map. Okay: I didn’t really. But so what
if I’m subtle as May in Mississippi, my nose
in the wine-bowl of this magnolia bloom, so what
if I’m mellow as the punch-drunk bee.
If I were Japanese I’d write about magnolias
in March, how tonal, each bud long as a pencil,
sheathed in celadon suede, jutting from a cluster
of glossy leaves. I’d end the poem before anything
bloomed, end with rain swelling the buds
and the sheaths bursting, then falling to the grass
like a fairy’s castoff slippers, like candy wrappers,
like spent firecrackers. Yes, my poem
would end there, spent firecrackers.
If I were French, I’d capture post-peak, in July,
the petals floppy, creased brown with age,
the stamens naked, stripped of yellow filaments.
The bees lazy now, bungling the ballet, thinking
for the first time about October. If I were French,
I’d prefer this, end with the red-tipped filaments
scattered on the scorched brown grass,
and my poem would incite the sophisticated,
the French and the Japanese readers—
because the filaments look like matchsticks,
and it’s matchsticks, we all know, that start the fire.

God Says Yes To Me
Kaylin Haught

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where you picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

In The Desert
Stephen Crane

In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, "Is it good, friend?"
"It is bitter – bitter," he answered,
"But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart."