Betrayal, by William Hathaway

Maurice Ravel - Ma mère l'oye (Mother Goose)
with Martha Argerich and Lang Lan

It’s now all about money

about which poetry rarely reaches

transcendence. But love must still fester

even under that. Everyone I know

frets if poetry can still matter,

but what about love? It’s all become

too much for them, and they’re all

on the soma. It makes sense

with these pills when the someone

they thought they loved for years

by never thinking about it says,

“I don’t love you anymore,

but let’s stay friends in that mellow

woebegone way poetry now

sings without singing.” Of course,

they’re always asking “What is poetry?”

and then answering by saying

it’s what Boethius was thinking about

when they squished his head

until his eyes popped out,

or anything barbaric enough to get

everyone to stop eating for a bit

and reach for a moment past

a chatty moment. Sort of a solution

to awkward goodbyes. How money

becomes a sort of welcome

relief that defuses the poetry

charging tense moments. “Interesting,”

someone remarks between bites,

“to be right here in the moment

yet also out there watching

some once-in-a-lifetime sublimity

unfold, as if living as if already

dead.” As if standing in a dream far up

in the stars somewhere with Scipio

and seeing how little love matters,

or poetry for that matter,

considering how glory endures

only in glittering plunder. But best

of all, all of it stays just sort of

as if.

poem from Poetry (October 2009)

No worst, there is none, by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Giacomo Puccini - Vissi d'arte, from Tosca 
with Angela Gheorghiu

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?
My cries heave, herds-long; huddle in a main, a chief
Woe, world-sorrow; on an age-old anvil wince and sing —
Then lull, then leave off. Fury had shrieked ‘No ling-
ering! Let me be fell: force I must be brief’.

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap
May who ne’er hung there. Nor does long our small
Durance deal with that steep or deep. Here! creep,
Wretch, under a comfort serves in a whirlwind: all
Life death does end and each day dies with sleep.


poem from here

Not the loss alone, by Gregory Orr

Antonio Vivaldi - Concerto No. 4 in F minor, Op. 8, RV 297, "L'inverno" (Winter)
Part II. Largo

Not the loss alone,
But what comes after.
If it ended completely
At loss, the rest
Wouldn't matter.

But you go on.
And the world also.

And words, words
In a poem or song:
Aren't they a stream
On which your feelings float?

Aren't they also
The banks of that stream
And you yourself the flowing?


poem from Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved
Copper Canyon Press, 2013

I love the dark hours, by Ranier Maria Rilke

 
Franz Schubert - "An den Mond", op. 57 No.3, D 193 
with Rita Streich, voice and Erik Werba, piano 

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.

Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that's wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots embrace:

a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.


from Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God 
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

These Poems, She Said, by Robert Bringhurst

Maurice Ravel - Bolero 

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.


poem from The Beauty of the Weapons: Selected Poems 1972-1982 (Copper Canyon Press, 1982)
as posted at poetryfoundation.org

post inspired by this blog 

Intermitent rain, by Roo Borson

Claude Debussy - Arabesque n°1
with Alberto Neuman 

Rain hitting the shovel
leaned against the house,
rain eating the edges
of the metal in tiny bites,
bloating the handle,
cracking it.
The rain quits and starts again.

There are people who go into that room in the house
where the piano is and close the door.
They play to get at that thing
on the tip of the tongue,
the thing they think of first and never say.
They would leave it out in the rain if they could.

The heart is a shovel leaning against a house somewhere
among the other forgotten tools.
The heart, it's always digging up old ground,
always wanting to give things a decent burial.

But so much stays fugitive,
inside,
where it can't be reached.

the piano is a way of practising
speech when you have no mouth.
When the heart is a shovel that would bury itself.
Still we can go up casually to a piano
and sit down and start playing
the way the rain felt in someone else's bones
a hundred years ago,
before we were born,
before we were even one cell,
when the world was clean,
when there were no hearts or people,
the way it sounded
a billion years ago, pattering
into unknown ground. Rain

hitting the shovel leaned against the house,
eating the edges of the metal.
It quits,
                 and starts again.



from Sudden Miracles: Eight Women Poets
edited by Rhea Tregebov (Second Story Press, 1991)

The Spring, by Delmore Schwartz

Johann Strauss Jr. - Spring Waltz

(After Rilke)

Spring has returned! Everything has returned!
The earth, just like a schoolgirl, memorizes
Poems, so many poems. ... Look, she has learned
So many famous poems, she has earned so many prizes!

Teacher was strict. We delighted in the white
Of the old man's beard, bright like the snow's:
Now we may ask which names are wrong, or right
For "blue," for "apple," for "ripe." She knows, she knows!

Lucky earth, let out of school, now you must play
Hide-and-seek with all the children every day:
You must hide that we may seek you: we will! We will!

The happiest child will hold you. She knows all the things
You taught her: the word for "hope," and for "believe,"
Are still upon her tongue. She sings and sings and sings.


from Last and Lost Poems (Vanguard Press, 1979)
as posted at panhala.net