two poems by Ariana Reines


Blue Palestine

Only one grass whistles out the tooth of my horse
And the moon drops fast behind the fences
And the wheat lolls back
And waits for death

I could see the sea from where I was
My mesh hat shone blue

The jagged cheek of Gibraltar
Solid, sucked in the mouth and never melting
Where my dog’s warm underleg soothes the whetstone
I speak of it thusly
I say it thusly
I lisp its name into the curl of wall stained dark in the impression of
        my mouth

Only one grass whistles out the tooth of my horse
And the moon bends back
And the wheat lolls back
And opens its stomach
And waits for death

I soak it in my black water
It seethes in bags I have hung up among the rafters
It seethes in bags of amber and jasper transfusions
Flower liquids in cellophane pouches
Streaked with goo clots of plastic soldier sun

When the pitcher is poured out the length of my tongue
And ten vats of grease ignite in unison

Only one grass whistles out the tooth of my horse
A too-tight phylactory
The moon bending back
The wheat lolling back
Scrollboxes clattering on the stone
Jugs of gasoline and jugs of sand

I threw my coat on the sea
The velvet sea
My coat spread
My coat spread
It was the blue of the top of the column of milk
Its soaked embroidery
It was the ditty two winds whined into the anus of night
Skating along the floor of the brook
Are leaves and ice. Devolving on the brook floor
It is only one little one. One blue shard of pale Palestine.
The wineskins are pricked
Goats’ udders banged sore
Where mica lodges in the mucus house

Where my velvet is sucked down
Where the cheek blows thick with sleep to be brushed by the sea
Blue Palestine
Wrung swan neck in oil
Tasseling dirty day with rocks that fly and fly and fall and fall and
        fall.

The moon bends back
And the wheat lolls back

A cracker whitens on the tongue of the hanged man
My velvet is sucked down the sea
The sea wall is chipped blue
The clock of Palestine
Gulls’ salt beaks
Iron drums soldered shut and stuffed with salt cod
An anvil of rammed earth in the form of a baby belly button
Hair raised on the hat of the imperatrix
Embossed forever in her brass annal

No grass screams against the foot of my horse
No rock whinnies down the side of the sea
No scroll staves off the reeds quivering in my rib wall
And no algaes quiver
And no frogs belch out the tablet over the song of my purchase of
        night
Blue Palestine
Red sucker bloody on the bib of the world
Blue Palestine
Ice tray soaked in solid sun

———————————————————————–

Beauty

            Je suis belle, ô mortels! comme un rêve de pierre
           (Baudelaire)

These poisoned sensations have to be
Accepted if they’re to be
Overcome. Looking
Up calories on my phone

Not that I’m counting 
Don’t even like numbers
It’s something vestigial
It comes in bad minutes

To teach my body something’s in control
Something little & unholy, wrong idea
Of information, chiseling a transparent minute
Into myself with the afterimage of a form

If I did this kind of thing
On the bigger machine it’d be
Worse. Worse
Things than this are bombing

The world. A terrible
Fate is coming to power tomorrow. I’m reading
The early poems of Sherman Alexie. Desolation
Of secular life. I remember the luxury of speculating

All mystical traditions grew up
In the souls of a disciplined few
Turned in on themselves while under
Occupation by tyrants. That was then. This

Morning I could see one comfort: to become rock
Hard. Could imagine one comfort:
To have become rock. I had no
Imagination. I had his. I had theirs. “Formalism

& grammar are ways to be thin…” masochism
Merely thought of, the idea of a calorie
Most boring way to feel womanly doing itself to me
This morning I was panicking, burning, I was desperate

Scanning the body of my bedfellow
Its beautiful cheeks & chin
& long smooth abdomen
My silence growing fat like an old fruit

Still making me sick
It makes me sick I longed
For the wrong thing
I longed for death. I dreamed of stone

sent by hand

19 January 2017

Two more poems by Denise Levertov


The Springtime

The red eyes of rabbits   
aren’t sad. No one passes
the sad golden village in a barge
any more. The sunset   
will leave it alone. If the   
curtains hang askew   
it is no one’s fault.
Around and around and around
everywhere the same sound   
of wheels going, and things   
growing older, growing   
silent. If the dogs
bark to each other
all night, and their eyes   
flash red, that’s
nobody’s business. They have   
a great space of dark to   
bark across. The rabbits   
will bare their teeth at   
the spring moon.

—————————————————————-

Seeing for a Moment

I thought I was growing wings—
it was a cocoon.

I thought, now is the time to step   
into the fire—
it was deep water.

Eschatology is a word I learned
as a child: the study of Last Things;

facing my mirror—no longer young,
         the news—always of death,
         the dogs—rising from sleep and clamoring   
                and howling, howling,

nevertheless
I see for a moment   
that’s not it: it is   
the First Things.

Word after word
floats through the glass.   
Towards me.

Scotophili

In the Annals of Everlasting,
I saw your eyes shining
like forest jewels
that I had forgotten how to ponder.

In the Book of No More,
were your words
which would not leave
me when I woke.

For a time I put the books away.
The annals stood unconsulted.
The wind ripped each day away as it passed
leaving me to see each morning anew.

The sun grew and grew.
What joy!
And every morning, I approached
the grasses and we shared in prayer.

Yet still I knew.
How starkly it stood –
that absence by my side
with which you used to play pretend.

And now the trees looked sickly and hidden.
The hissing fury of untouched shadows,
and how they grew and grew
as I pretended I could not see them.

Some Nanao Sakaki poems

If you have time to chat,
Read books.
If you have time to read books,
Walk into mountain, desert and ocean.
If you have time to walk,
Sing a song and dance.
If you have time to dance,
Sit quietly,
You lucky, happy idiot.

Soil for the legs
Axe for the hands
Flower for the eyes
Bird for the ears
Mushroom for the nose
Smile for the mouth
Song for the lungs
Sweat for the skin
Wind for the mind.

In the morning
After taking cold shower
– what a mistake –
I look at the mirror.

There, a funny guy,
Grey hair, white beard, wrinkled skin,
– what a pity –
Poor, dirty, old man,
He is not me, absolutely not.

Land and life
Fishing in the ocean
Sleeping in the desert with stars
Building a shelter in the mountains
Farming the ancient way
Singing with coyotes
Singing against nuclear war –
I’ll never be tired of life.

Now I’m seventeen years old,
Very charming young man.
I sit quietly in lotus position,
Meditating, meditating for nothing.

Suddenly a voice comes to me:
“To stay young,
To save the world,
Break the mirror.”

---

Upon the blooming plum twig
         a warbler
               wipes his muddy feet

How lovely
         through the torn paper window
                — the Milky Way

Grasshopper, good singer!
         Take care of my tomb
                when I die

---

LET’S EAT STARS

Believe me, children!
God made
Sky for airplanes
Coral reefs for tourists
Farms for agrichemicals
Rivers for dams
Forests for golf courses
Mountains for ski resorts
Wild animals for zoos
Trucks and cars for traffic tragedies
Nuclear power plants for ghost dance.
Don’t worry, children!
The well never dries up.
Look at the evening glow!
Sunflowers in the garden.
Red dragonflies in the air.
A small child starts singing:
“Let’s eat stars?”
“Let’s eat stars!”

Two Poems by Denise Levertov

The Prayer

At Delphi I prayed
to Apollo
that he maintain in me
the flame of the poem

and I drank of the brackish
spring there, dazed by the
gong beat of the sun,
mistaking it,

as I shrank from the eagle’s
black shadow crossing
that sky of cruel blue,
for the Pierian Spring—

and soon after
vomited my moussaka
and then my guts writhed
for some hours with diarrhoea

until at dusk
among the stones of the goatpaths
breathing dust
I questioned my faith, or

within it wondered
if the god mocked me.
But since then, though it flickers or
shrinks to a

blue bead on the wick,
there’s that in me that
burns and chills, blackening
my heart with its soot,

flaring in laughter, stinging
my feet into a dance, so that
I think sometimes not Apollo heard me
but a different god.




The Secret

Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.

I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me

(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even

what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,

the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,

and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that

a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines

in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for

assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.

These Poems, She Said
by Robert Bringhurst


These poems, these poems,
these poems, she said, are poems
with no love in them. These are the poems of a man   
who would leave his wife and child because   
they made noise in his study. These are the poems   
of a man who would murder his mother to claim   
the inheritance. These are the poems of a man   
like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not   
comprehend but which nevertheless
offended me. These are the poems of a man
who would rather sleep with himself than with women,   
she said. These are the poems of a man
with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s   
hands, woven of water and logic
and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These   
poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant   
as elm leaves, which if they love love only   
the wide blue sky and the air and the idea
of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,   
and not a beginning. Love means love
of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.   
These poems, she said….
                                             You are, he said,
beautiful.
                  That is not love, she said rightly.

From Look by Solmaz Sharif:


SAFE HOUSE

SANCTUARY where we don’t have to

SANITIZE hands or words or knives, don’t have to use a

SCALE each morning, worried we take up too much space. I

SCAN my memory of baba talking on

SCREEN answering a question (how are you?) I would ask and ask from
behind the camera, his face changing with each repetition as he tried to
watch the football game. He doesn’t know this is the beginning of my

SCRIBING life: repetition and change. A human face at the seaport and a
home growing smaller. Let’s

SEARCH my father’s profile: moustache black and holding back a

SECRET he still hasn’t told me,

SECTION of the couch that’s fallen a bit from his repeated weight,

SECTOR of the government designed to keep him from flying. He kept our
house

SECURE except from the little bugs that come with dried herbs from Iran.
He gives

SECURITY officers a reason to get off their chairs. My father is not afraid of

SEDITION. He can

SEIZE a wild pigeon off a Santa Monica street or watch

SEIZURES unfold in his sister’s bedroom—the FBI storming through. He
said use wood sticks to hold up your protest signs then use them in

SELF-DEFENSE when the horses come,

SENSITIVE When he passes advice to me, like I’m his

SEQUEL, like we’re all a

SERIAL caught on Iranian satellite TV. When you tell someone off, he calls it

SERVICING. When I stand on his feet, I call it

SHADOWING. He naps in the afternoon and wakes with

SHEETLINES on his face, his hair upright, the sound of

SHELLS (SPECIFY)—the sound of mussel shells on the lip of the Bosphorus
crunching beneath his feet. He’s given me

SHELTER and

SHIELDING, shown it’s better to travel away from the

SHOAL. Let them follow you he says from somewhere in Los Angeles waiting
for me. If he feels a

SHORT FALL he doesn’t tell me about it.

———————————————————————————

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Clean Like My Bones

Golden Madonna waits by the links in the shade.
Tea time was at 3pm, and dusk is falling late.
And golden Madonna stands there still 
and waiting.
How long has she had to wait?
How many hours of yearning will fill the vase?
The viscous liquid laps at my lips. 
I drink it all but it always fills again.

The wind tore at me
when she looked at me. 
That seeping desire
to be always at the height of my powers.
Like a snake always devours.
And time and time again,
what else am I only left 
but the blood on my lips.

But her –
she was immune to snake venom,
going up and down the driveway 
counting the anthills and plotting 
their wars, romance, and infamies.
And in the ant pews, the clergy
looked up praying to a tawny Madonna. 

Distance by Ken Friedman

The distance from the sentence to your eye is
my sculpture.

Much of What Happens to Us in Life is Nameless Because Our Vocabulary is Too Poor
edited from John Berger’s “Some Notes on Song”


I cup the air with both my hands and close my eyes.
And this gesture announces that the muzzle of the song
is nestling in the palm of my hand.
Putting its arms around me in historical time,
like I have not been held before.
When the song smiled, which it often did,
it was the smile that comes after the tragic has been assimilated.
Hopelessness leads to wordlessness.
It’s difficult today to express or sum up in prose
the experience of Being Alive and Becoming.
The living flesh is needed to interpret and
raise its contours above the precise present,
and then…

like a river the song –
following its own course,
yet always flowing to the sea, from which everything came.
The fact that in many languages the place where
a river enters the sea
is called the river’s mouth emphasizes the comparison.
The waters that flow out of a river’s mouth
have come from an immense elsewhere.
And something similar happens with
what comes out of the mouth of a song.
And something whole out of the empty…

All I know is that these arms wrap around nothing.
Only empty space interlaced by the circle my arms make.
In other words, songs are sung to an absence.
Absence is what inspired them, and it’s what they address.
In the sharing of the song the absence is also shared –
Listen and become possessed, inhabited,
by a force or compulsion coming from outside.
A ghost from an elsewhere past.
The memory of the singing.
I cling to song and make it my own.
I put my arms around linear time without being utopian
and sing