Birth of a Poem

Birth of a Poem 
C. P. Cavafy
(transl. by Daniel Mendelsohn

One night when the beautiful light of the moon
poured into my room . . . imagination, taking
something from life: some very scanty thing—
a distant scene, a distant pleasure—
brought a vision all its own of flesh,
a vision all its own to a sensual bed . . .

Poetry, you are mine...

Compassion IV
by Noelle Kocot

The human realities of the living are now 
As close to me as my own--oh, see how 
Dusty that plant gets when you don't clean
It! The rippling day is a fabulous lesson,
My pants are too loose, and yet. Bon nuit,
Mes chéries! All over the whole neighbor-
Hood, your fluid legs move--you are all
Permission and flounce, and your stockings
Catch in the mere light. Perfection, wholeness
Is what I see now in everyone I touch. That
Day when two men came in from the stream,
Wet, bothered, the windows were blackened,
And the cats ran around. Rain came, but
Also sunlight, and the years of hard living
Dissolved. A blanket of verbs crosses the
Threshold. Poetry, you are mine, and I will
Go anywhere with you. A gap in the mind,
A spangled street, my spine, perfectly erect now,
Chooses these words, yet it as if I have no choice.

some wordplay

Spine to Spin, Spoke to Speak
by Andrew Joron

The pilot alone knows
That the plot is missing its
Eye.

Why isn't this "ominous science"
itself afraid, a frayed
Identity?

Pray, protagonist —
Prey to this series of staggered instants.

Here the optic
Paints its hole, its self-consuming moment.
It is speech, dispelled, that
begs to begin to ache.

So that wind accelerates to wound, a dead sound
enlivened by the visitation of owls.

As pallid as parallel, the cry
Of the negative is not the negative
of the cry — an irreparable blessing —

A green world's
"sibilant shadows" where
The syllables of your name are growing younger.

As involuntary as involuted, "who"
returns its noun
to each tender branch
That noon breaks into no one.

Point of view
Hovers, a circular cloud, over evacuated
Time.

That heard its herd bellow below
the terraced cities, the milled millions

as sold as unsouled, ghost-cargos.

A symptom of the Maddening —
Woman undressed of her flesh.
Man's address
to Thou, & the flag of Thou.

How the fallen state
Meets the starry horizon, veil
against witness, hunger against void.

O, oldest
outermost Other —

Ageing mask
Of the transparent Earth. Unspeculated
image
Streaked with mirror & stricken words.

You are neither the torn, nor the thorn.

You are the many-petalled
melting point of repeating decimals. . .

Receiver, river
Has been burned into voice, a day-dark ribbon.

All signal is this
Single.

Happy birthday, Mary Oliver

Breakage

by Mary Oliver

I go down to the edge of the sea.

How everything shines in the morning light!

The cusp of the whelk,

the broken cupboard of the clam,

the opened, blue mussels,

moon snails, pale pink and barnacle scarred—

and nothing at all whole or shut, but tattered, split,

dropped by the gulls onto the gray rocks and all the moisture gone.

It's like a schoolhouse

of little words,

thousands of words.

First you figure out what each one means by itself,

the jingle, the periwinkle, the scallop

full of moonlight.

Then you begin, slowly, to read the whole story.

Watch out for the oft-surly adjectives!

The Student Theme

by Ronald Wallace

The adjectives all ganged up on the nouns,
insistent, loud, demanding, inexact,
their Latinate constructions flashing. The pronouns
lost their referents: They were dangling, lacked
the stamina to follow the prepositions' lead
in, on, into, to, toward, for, or from.
They were beset by passive voices and dead
metaphors, conjunctions shouting But! or And!

The active verbs were all routinely modified
by adverbs, that endlessly and colorlessly ran
into trouble with the participles sitting
on the margins knitting their brows like gerunds
(dangling was their problem, too). The author
was nowhere to be seen; was off somewhere.

the fruit of sense

Words are like leaves; and where they most abound,
Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.
False eloquence, like the prismatic glass,
Its gaudy colours spreads on every place;
The face of Nature we no more survey,
All glares alike, without distinction gay;
But true expression, like th'unchanging sun,
Clears and improves whate'er it shines upon;
It gilds all objects, but it alters none.

—Alexander Pope, English poet, An Essay on Criticism, 1711