my horse my hound

Question


Body my house
my horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen

Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt

Where can I go
without my mount
all eager and quick
How will I know
in thicket ahead
is danger or treasure
when Body my good
bright dog is dead

How will it be
to lie in the sky
without roof or door
and wind for an eye

With cloud for shift
how will I hide?

--May Swenson

E.D.

CXXXIX.

TO pile like Thunder to its close,
Then crumble grand away,
While everything created hid–
This would be Poetry:
Or Love,–the two coeval came–
We both and neither prove,
Experience either, and consume–
For none see God and live.

from This Lamentable City, one of the many books purchased at AWP

Conjunction And

We met on a Sunday, no not exactly,
we met before, but it wasn’t that either:
you drank coffee through a straw but it was more like
a poor bird stopping in to see a horse in a coat
and you took me by the took me by the took me by the hand
and a tree with red berries and mountains and mountains
and we laughed and listened and Lord everything was bullshit
and the tree with its red berries and its bark and its bark
and we had each other like beasts without pausing
and if everything after the fact is sad we are not things
and we came from garbage and we played with garbage
and you caressed my skin with the seeds of pearls. Now it’s January
already and over us, pardon me, pink magnolias with their dog tongues
on the grey background of old snow have bloomed, and every time I pass
among these miracles I remember the smell of your hand
torn from me, and torn from you.

— Polina Barskova, translated by Ilya Kaminsky with Matthew Zapruder

"It seems to me to be a process of looking for something in there, rather than having something and revising it. I don't consider that I really have anything yet--except inchoate mess. As I work on it, I'm always trying to hear the sound of the words, and trying to take out everything that doesn't feel alive. That's my goal: to take out everything that doesn't feel alive."

--Jean Valentine, on writing & revising

The Virgin Spring (1960)

+

"You see how the smoke trembles up near the hole in the roof? As if whimpering and afraid. Yet it’s only going out into the open air, where it has the whole sky to tumble about in. But it doesn’t know that. So it cowers and trembles under the sooty ridge of the roof. People are the same way. They worry and tremble like leaves in a storm, because of what they know and what they don’t know. You shall cross a narrow plank, so narrow you can't find your footing. Below you roars a great river. It's black and wants to swallow you, but you pass over it unharmed. Before you lies a chasm, so deep you can't see the bottom. Hands grope for you, but they can't reach you. At last you stand before a mountain of terror. It spews fire like a furnace, and a vast abyss opens at its feet. A thousand colors blaze there: copper and iron, blue vitriol and yellow sulfur. Flames dazzle and flash and lash at the rocks. And all about, men leap and writhe, small as ants, for this is the furnace that swallows murderers and evildoers. But at the very moment you think you're doomed, a hand shall grasp you and an arm circle around you, and you'll be taken far away, where evil no longer has power over you."

Thomas + Anne 4ever

Whoso list to hunt

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,

But as for me, alas, I may no more;

The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,

I am of them that furthest come behind.

Yet may I by no means my wearied mind

Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore

Fainting I follow; I leave off therefore,

Since in a net I seek to hold the wind.

Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,

As well as I, may spend his time in vain.

And graven with diamonds in letters plain,

There is written her fair neck round about,

"Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,

And wild for to hold, though I seem tame."

--Sir Thomas Wyatt

Letter to a Mute

If I could reach you now, in any way

At all, I would say this to you:

This afternoon I walked into a thicket

Of gold flowers that had no idea

What they were after. They couldn't hear a thing.

I walked among a million small, deaf ears

Breaking their gold into the afternoon.

I think they were like you, golden, golden,

Unable to express a single thing.

I walked among them, thinking of you,

Thinking of what it would be like

To be completely solitary. Once I was alone like that.

All the field was humming, brimming

With some brazen kind of song, and I

Thought that somehow I could disappear

Into the empty hall of your right ear,

Wandering through the slender bones of you.

But I knew that I could never let you know

That it is lame summer here, that I

Can hear the crickets every evening

Hollowing out the darkness at my window,

That you have vanished into a dark tunnel

Where I have tried to reach you with my mouth

Till my mouth ran gold, spilling over everything.

Tonight I looked into your face, tenderly,

Tenderly, but I can never find you there.

I can only touch your quiet lips.

If I could stick my pen into your tongue,

Making it run with gold, making

it speak entirely to me, letting the truth

Slide out of it, I could not be alone.

I wouldn't even touch you, for I know

How you are locked away from me forever.

Tonight I go out looking for you everywhere

As the moon slips out, a slender petal

Offering all its gold to me for nothing.

--Thomas James