Poetry Selections

In the years since 1934, hundreds of poets have worked, for shorter or longer periods, along the lines suggested by Lawrence and John Hart. Here are works by a few of the more prominent ones.

ROBERT BARLOW

The Gods in the Patio

Museo Nacional de Arqueología, Historia y Etnografía, México, D. F.

Have the gods herded into some cave, their clumsy joints all bent in the direction of flight: Is there a spider hanging its gourd in the jar of Tlaloc, where rain once shook golden rings? Are all the Cholula plates broken? 
O Tiger Knight, I saw your torso like a maize-ear, I saw the rusty roses on your garment. I saw princes who would be beautiful if they were statues, who envied only the snake, the jaguar and the ant. How long must they lie, the robbed and fragrant dead, by the Snake Wall, the Coatepantli?

To One Rescued

Dropped by the tiger, you whose wounds brim red
In a lace of torment
Where the fang pushed in and felt your arm-bone’s shape inside your arm,
Scattering the sinews, slackening the body’s bow-cord:
Though the desert he dragged you through were fifty miles greater,
Though the day were fifty hours longer,
Would you call us with our antelope-hide shields,
Our clubs,
To break his low flower face
A second time?

ROBERT BROTHERSON

Summer 1958

Now, when the green is downward in all rivers
So hangs the blood like ferns within the heart.
Other colors carry near their masters
Shadows that once held us like a coat.

And I, waking, catch the morning still in ointments,
Trying to recall what lovers
strolled like a formal garden
The substantial pasts and pigments of my brain.
About me dreams still sit like guests:
And even memory regulates and shares.

Summer hardens all about us
The weak spring wildness;
Where we thought the tender
Would be enough to charm us
desire grows solid like a pod.
From sleep we come out whole and beastlike
And begin the construction of the hard.

What were bowers are walls now:
The clipped hedge grown grammatical
Between that other green and us.

ANN FIELDS

Hanging Up the Washing

Yes, but you get caught—
you almost have to bend under blue
between sheets you hang in sunshine.
Sheets solid white with glare
are the outside of your view.

But always, holding clothespins, you look
upwards to your hands,
and there she sky is in strips above the clothes-reel,
or it is in pieces against the pear trees
where buds slant almost not out of the branches
into spaces that leaves will fill.

And above the trees is the highway
where a gleam of sun hangs invisible
until the chrome of a car slides under it.
I see neighbors of mine on that hill,
and I know them by their nearness
to the walls of their own houses.

WALTRINA FURLONG

Nor I

Then he said, Of course this is what we all must do
But we cannot change, here and now under the marquee
While the rain continues, starting freshets in the blood,
For very soon the aged blossoms reappear
and I do not intend to stop them,
Nor you, nor you, nor you,
Sit one spring out.

Nor I, said she,
But not as you think of reasons.
For how could I begin at all
Who will be absent in the spring,
Expert of distraction, wandered at the foundering interval,
Returning at summer, preparing for at autumn frost,
I who am lost among the seasons.

The dumb, cold clouds,
Climb marble on marble
Trimming their splendid absence.

If we could remember not how the hero pranced
But in which compass point he stood and flashed.

No hold, she said,
In a holocaust of pride.

By flash and patch and pearl,
The twitching forward of a damaged revelation.

Poem

Lazarus of the seven wastes
Wandering in secret, solely horrified.
All touch has been error:
All transfiguration, a deceit of children.
I am alone with a fathom of birds
Which threaten to sing at once.
I am alone with blossoms so shining
They may char at once.
In a sunlit waste of years
Why choose from the present
any of its accidents.

The waste of sunlight is the purest disaster:
Its comprehension, the purest redemption.

JOHN HART

The Faller

“When I fell on Washington Column,” said my friend,
“I could see myself, could see my own shape, falling,
red man, black outline, into the waste of air.

“Was not afraid.

“Was vigilant, rather; wary; shrewd:
like someone who passes with money a road made famous by thieves:
ready to act, if action were required,
or if no other action ever came
but that of death, to lay the body down
in that same calm.

“And, striking a ledge, I lived.”

Incessantly we have these wild reports
brought back to us by those experienced:
whom late we rescued, not by their consent,
by blood, or rope, or hideous incision,
outrage of surgery, or the bitter sleep
where the blind drugs fight and the offended flesh
trambles and lives:

But for what need the fantasy evolved—
during the moment of loss, when the black arc closes,
during the moment itself, that all is well
(and even a short time after)—
we do not know.

Ask Darwin, raiding the islands for birds.
Ask any magician, changing the atom by stealth
that makes red hair or a leer:
and he will say: “This comfort could be spared.
For by it there is no one who has lived
another hour to breed.
It must be some damnable
gift or illusion,
reversal of grief
for the changing occasion:
whatever it is, it is
a thing unreal.”

Grieving he turns his back but still we see.
Though to the nurses bent over the bed
grief comes professional, brow pursed, well paid:
though to the ancient relatives it comes
with a handful of wrenched flowers:
though the mourners start up in the pond like a circle of frogs:

The dancer himself is silent.
His hope once gone, the discipline begins.
The light falls softly to the center of the room.
The soul picks up its insubstantial shirt,
goes into evening like a mad recruit,
envying all that have gone down before.

And the ringed, unspeakable dauphin—
the climber, falling, forgotten
already by his friends who shy away—
whatever drug he was impaled upon before,
is sobered by death imminent, death sure.

Goes into the dark like a powerful swimmer,
the great arms forwards, breasting without labor
a long and gleaming, dolphin-crowded sea.

They say that when the impact comes
the destruction of the body is not felt but heard
and heard for a long time.
And death does not disturb the dying soul
any more than the snowfall, vanishing into the lake,
can move nor discontent the pale water.

LAWRENCE HART

Sonnet III

I have made idols of all shapes wherethrough
Those brilliant fingers transiently pressed
Of what it is that does not move nor rest.
And thence has struck a desperate venom to
The mind held, or the veins held, or the two.
Each sight compels my love, but yet the best
And noblest forms wound swifter than the least—
O eidolon of love, so do not you.

Well it was so I wrote when I was young,
Grasping to grasp what served the form and used it
Not looking in my own sense for the cause,
The name to teach or blight the naming tongue.
Till having grasped the fooled-at mind and fused it,
Finger by finger that fell hand withdraws.

ROBERT HORAN

Antiphonal Song

What is it eats the hunter’s breath
as he picks through the thicket?
The blood that’s bound to bleed to death
like a leak in a bucket.

What is it tires the oarsman so
as he climbs the chaste water?
The love that he leaves and the winds that blow
him on green miles after.

What is it drains the drinker there
at the jumping fountain?
The desert he crossed that brought him there
and the next mountain.

Litany

Among the skeletons of sun
where the yellow lions run
goes one in a diamond color,
tears on his antique shoulder.

He walks in a sea of salt
with intention to exalt:
to scatter the green miles
with blessings of exile.

Even as I
to his lion’s side will fly,
or with feathery fastness
to his feast,

as birds surround
a glistening wound;
my body endangering
the moment of his angeling.

The most amiable and best beloved host,
of these he is my God longest,
and shall be least lost
and last blessed.

JEANNE McGAHEY

Warning by Daylight

This is the corner, look four ways at stone.
Watch in two streets a wind
In the rattled and paper autumn.
(This to be dreamed of,
In some dark waken and hear the heart strike fear.)

Pages against the grating
Turn war and the Katzenjammers, someone named Talbot
Or merchandise.
                              She leaned out from a window,
Held apart curtains.
                              I saw her face
True Romances, the hair yolk-yellow,
And the pearls lay out
On the tight satin, and she held a cup
That was blue and empty: and whatever it was she said,
Or whether she laughed, I saw her mouth move with it,
Dental and bright.
                                                But it was the stone I heard
And gutter of leaves.
                                                And seeing how the wind
Blew big the curtains, and her red-cluttered hand
Twisted the cord, even before I woke
I saw she was the death that I had come for.

Homecoming with Reflections

Draw up a chair, like a boring boon companion.
Pull at the curtain, cover up the dark,
And drink from the tilting glass
The room’s small changing image.

The animals furred to the foot
Arrive, nose forward.
The slipper at the hob
Warms briefly, like a chestnut.
In a bowl of spoon
Consult that other eye
Sly, hollow and silver
From which expect no answer.

Along that coast
Disturbed by February
The tide with its clamoring edges
is always rising:
Headland by headland
The beacons turn the fog:
and something moves there
Cold in the surges; neither eye nor finger.
Remembers from the beginning,
Aimed for nowhere.

And reports come in from the Farallones,
The bottles encrusted with salt, and odd sea creatures,
And I can believe it now:

Those forests. Those greenstack cities. The wide stems wooden
And rained on by green shining.
The ferns up to the eyelid,
(Iris and fringed with light);
The firs with all their age upon them,
Its solemn gear: companions of mist: so living, scrupulous, and damned—

Those forests are really gone.

—No, tears won’t do it. Not all the freshets
Pouring in March down the Klamath; not beating the bark,
Nor desolations timely, futile, and too late.
And we who have arrived at something past maturity,
Less agile, knowing we know no more—
We are the ones who saw the forests fall.
But saw the forests.
As you, my dear, will not.

Forgive this hour,
This hearth. This dog asleep
And eyeless as a foot.

Forgive this page of words
We sometimes recognize.

Forgive this door
That opens on the weary
And closes on the night.

MIKE MESERVE

To My Teacher

to Lawrence Hart

The rain will not stop its exodus.
These are the coldest drops and the whole storm is near.
The tear that comes out ugly.
The silent face outside.
To say that we remain alive in someone else’s memory
Is easy for the alive to say.
We say it because we can and leave because we must
This side of the looking glass.
I guess in the end we are all forgettable
But you will not be forgotten by me.

You tricked us into quality
You tried to get our poems out of hiding.
(The landscape obvious and waiting in the weeds.)
You brought us into your optometry.
Change shape, you said, from gloating
to a luminous detail.
You never rejected us,
even if we had nothing to give.
You held high the transparent object
so we could see clearer your one good hand.

Go figure: you are now an ancestor.
Worship is a somber ship, out there, beyond and I am young.
And the Year is an indescribable creature, harmful to man.
Briefly, definition: it’s sad.
But the twelve animals of History. They are benevolent.
And though Inertia said: it does no good to talk to them at all,
No good at all,
That wind-bent face shines from the rock remembered.
Love is teaching, teaching, Love.

JON B. MILLER

On Receiving Notice of My Divorce in the Mail

Though I promised never to race the sun,
I grieve its indifference to my gait,
Displaced among flaws and dark compulsion,
Breath and retraction repeat and negate.

Not all loss, adjured by star or reason,
Advances within long, vocal lament,
Mine, intrinsic as moon or dull ocean,
Lacks ready retort, my name redundant.

As, disregarded by your foursquare gaze,
I cannot foretell the future you make,
My heart, ancestral, simplified, conveys
Only the feral stroke and blind intake.

Joined once, we, in certainty of measure,
Now dispel like unintended weather.

ROSALIE MOORE

Shipwreck

Watching, watching from shore:
Wind, and the shore lifting,
The hands raising on wind
And all the elements rising.

Calmly the wreck rides,
Turns like leviathan or log,
And the moon-revealing white turns upward
(Upward of palms, the dead);
And all the of the sea’s attack, small tangents and traps,
Is wasted on it, the wind wasted,
Helpless to wreck or raise.

Often in sleep turning or falling
A dream’s long dimension
I rock to a random ship:
The one like a broken loon,
Clapping its light and calling:
The one bug-black, signing its sign in oil;
The telegraph-tall, invented—
Moved by a whine of wires;
The Revenge riding its crossbar,
Raising its sword hilt:

And I know their power is ended, and all of the dreams
Too vacant and inhabited:
The ships with lights on their brows, the mementos, the messages,
The cardinals, couriers to Garcias;
And after it all, they say,
The ships make more noise than the sea

And I look again
At the equal ocean
With its great dead ship.

The Mind’s Disguise
Copyright 1951 Yale University Press

The mind’s disguise is permanence.
Whether on rock, or on wrecked surfaces,
Wrests the uncluttered wind for the needed enemy,
Watches with many turns at once,
Confronts a century.

Learn early, unletter
Your alphabet decision.
Coming down to
Accident’s corner of fence;
Enigma, protector of mighty.

And the winged, divisible sorrow,
Granted, almost—like love,
Is shunt from the high forbidder,
Forehead of No.

LOIS MOYLES

The Refuge

When will it end, this dust
Tumbling around us its dark boxes?
All faces have fallen, unaimed among us.
I saw them holding to light those gestures
like enlarged flowers.

What we did not mean
we were able to say
and said, and so is meant.
What we did not speak has hardened to bone.

Then through the arms I raise must ache like arrows
do not take them from me
those whom I do not love.
The heart is a migratory muscle,
seeking to return to a temperature remembered wrong.
And though here is far less than summer
Do not release me to swing
between the shadow of my own hands
like an unattended gate.

Knowing that all the waves are set like traps
I would enter the hooked sea
Hoping to be traveler,
Seeking to be unknown.

PATRICIA NELSON

Noah Waits

My palm still feels her softness,
the little dove that I tossed upward
with her thirst and her height.

The motion in her wings grows louder
like a memory or premonition
of something beyond a curve.

Some future that might know her
or a blooming island lifted strangely
in the circle of her sight.

In this horizon, truth is liquid. A wave
that somehow knows each beating thing
that goes through it or upon it.

Oh, whoever drops the turning stars
into the color of the night,
burning and filled with error,

I invoke you. Yes, they’re only floating rocks,
but they’re forgiven their blankness, even loved
for where they enter the story.

FRED OSTRANDER

The Station

The past we chase. A train moving out. Great blasts of steam,
great wheels, gradual at first, out of the station—
glass, iron ceiling, and steam dispersing.
And a ridiculous figure who runs hopelessly, helplessly after an untraceable past.

Those whom he loved were so briefly present. They do not look back,
they being of the past. As he slows, without breath,
perhaps stumbles, catches himself, and turns back slowly, reluctantly,
disbelieving, in a confusion of loss, death, memory, tricks and falsifications of his time.
What is it they take with them?

Returning to a vacant, waiting present, the numberless clocks,
a station with all trains gone.

The Deluge

In the museums I return to that massive, dark, over-framed painting of the biblical flood
that howls across the rooms, a wind, a demolition—
it is a fury, like a prophet, a loud half-idiot jeremiad, a damnation of souls—
like that at the streetcorner, finger pointed as in the poster—
it is the verb left out of the language.

Souls–that cling with small hands, with fingers, to badly painted rocks,
beneath the terrible God speaking with repeated brilliance out of the sky—
or they float, mere swimmers, with ineffective strokes in the chaos of lifting or utterly disintegrating waves—
or floating among the chains—
souls staring with round eyes out of the comical deluge, calling to rescuers
(and will
until the paint crumbles upon the canvas)–
to rescuers who themselves, small swimmers, have been pulled into the vast, insatiate, twisting spiral of the sea.

Together with masts, spars, all, the handpainted half-clothed smiling figurehead,
the little rodents,
and the great vanquished statue of Bel,
the emaciated carriers of the stones,
the particular colors of fallen gardens,
the terrified horses of Babylon (detail of an eye reflecting light),
and the armies unable to swim, helplessly lifted upon the flood . . .

On the right, and distant upon the waves, and growing smaller,
Noah floats with his animals.

This dark, overpopulated deluge.

Punishment. Beneath the lightning and the electricities, one erratic bird.

It is a painting without a miracle.

There is little sky.

BONNIE THOMAS

September’s Pause

Again, the body’s child comes, Look! Look!
holding bare the mistakes — fireflies in a jar.

And we, in our varying postures,
resist a perfect solemnity
as the asymmetrical leaps of living
dampen the sound of all fallen behind us.

The curse, descending darkness, changes its skin
like the low-slung, slinking animal,
variable as the loosely staked fences
between our bright and careful gardens.

We continue ourselves through the young,
salve old worry with the new measure of sun,
the music lifting up through the leaves,
as children run through grasses, fall, run again.

We look toward all not having arrived to ground,
gather the gentian — the blue flowers
that balm our errant, human bodies,
blue petals holding light that is not ours.

LAUREL TRIVELPIECE

Leda

First the music, expanding
like pastel chrysanthemums, stemless,
and the wind swollen against my face . . .
this time he’d worked out some white
elaboration of the air, waffled it up into wings,
the long, clean neck luminous with greed . . .
And I did brim with the reported light it webbed
between fingers, soaked up the sunset,
spongy in the crevices—filled with a god’s
bloodless abundance!

And so emptied on these black sands without
moons around us, the sorrowing of birds turning
back, there is no water here . . .

What matter his invented feathers
were wet as a dipstick with my human mix?
He glittered and dissolved, hurried on—
some fool showering of gold was next, I hear

JUDITH YAMAMOTO

Stari Most

The Old Bridge, in Mostar, Bosnia, was destroyed by war in 1993.

After dark, the dogs bark east of the equator
and in the absence of lilacs and of rivers encircling the earth
the orphans do not sleep well.

The grandmothers listen
beside the stone bridge.
What can they say to the mumbling of doves?

After the last months of shelling—
not to mention the ancient earthquakes and the old, old wars—
the mortar of eggs and goat hair
collapsed in the arms of these women.

I look for answers in newspapers, in old books,
where I find sulfur,
neither a metal nor the name of one of my children.
See dreams,
see fires that burn forever under our shoes.