Strand, Mark – Poem of the Spanish Poet

 

In a hotel room somewhere in Iowa an American poet, tired of his poems, tired of being an American poet, leans back in his chair and imagines he is a Spanish poet, an old Spanish poet, nearing the end of his life, who walks to the Gadalquivir and watches the ships, gray and ghostly in the twilight, slip downstream. The little waves, approaching the grassy bank where he sits, whisper something he can’t quite hear as they curl and fall. Now what does the Spanish poet do? He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a notebook, and writes:

Black fly, black fly
Why have you come

Is it my new shirt
My new white shirt

With buttons of bone
Is it my suit

My dark blue suit
Is it because

I lie here alone
Under a willow

Cold as stone
Black fly, black fly

How good you are
To come to me now

How good you are
To visit me here

Black fly, black fly

To wish me goodbye

MARK STRAND

Reposted from motionpoems.com

Wunderlich, Mark – White Fur

 
 
In the town of my childhood, little of note ever happened
so when the albino deer was found drowned in the slough

having been driven onto the punky ice by dogs,
the game warden brought the dead beast to the school.

I might have been seven or maybe six years old.
I suppose we were made to line up—

since that is how we were moved from place to place—
and were directed out the industrial doors

to admire the animal sprawled in the back of a truck.
We gathered around it, its whiteness a world

bled of distinction, its eyes pink and drying
in the prairie air. We were told we could touch it

and these many years since that March day, I can still
see my hand, pink and small, buried into the white fur

of the buck’s neck, crackling with static
and coming to life with the electric surge

that animates all things. Later, the buck
would be mounted and placed in a glass case in the bank,

which is where the town kept things that were precious.
Behind it, the art teacher rendered the bluffs in oils

with the fussy hand of a miniaturist, and the buck
remains there today, in perpetual imitation of itself.

Mark Wunderlich

Reposted from Motionspoems

Merwin, W.S. – Antique Sound

 

There was an age when you played the records

with ordinary steel needles which grew blunt

and damaged the grooves or with more expensive

stylus tips said to be tungsten or diamond

which wore down the records and the music receded

but a friend and I had it on persuasive authority

that the best thing was a dry thorn of the right kind

and I knew where to find one of those off to the left

of the Kingston Pike in the shallow swale

that once had been forest and had grown back

into a scrubby wilderness alive with

an earthly choir of crickets blackbirds finches

crows jays the breathing of voles raccoons

rabbits foxes the breeze in the thickets

the thorn bushes humming a high polyphony

all long gone since to improvement but while

that fine dissonance was in tune we rode out

on bicycles to break off dry thorn branches

picking the thorns and we took back the harvest

and listened to Beethoven’s Rassoumoffsky

Quartets echoed from the end of a thorn.

W. S. Merwin

Reposted from motion poems

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (text of 1834)
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

Read by Richard Burton and other actors

Text is here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173253