My Life had stood - a Loaded Gun

In the Museum of Lost Objects

By Rebecca Lindenberg
What thou lov’st well shall not be reft from thee;   
What thou lov’st well is thy true heritage.        
          Ezra Pound

You’ll find labels describing what is gone:

an empress’s bones, a stolen painting

 

of a man in a feathered helmet

holding a flag-draped spear.

 

A vellum gospel, hidden somewhere long ago

forgotten, would have sat on that pedestal;

 

this glass cabinet could have kept the first

salts carried back from the Levant.

 

To help us comprehend the magnitude

of absence, huge rooms

 

lie empty of their wonders—the Colossus,

Babylon’s Hanging Gardens and

 

in this gallery, empty shelves enough to hold

all the scrolls of Alexandria.

 

My love, I’ve petitioned the curator

who has acquired an empty chest

 

representing all the poems you will

now never write. It will be kept with others

 

in the poet’s gallery. Next door,

a vacant room echoes with the spill

 

of jewels buried by a pirate who died

before disclosing their whereabouts.

 

I hope you don’t mind, but I have kept

a few of your pieces

 

for my private collection. I think

you know the ones I mean.
from My Life

by Lyn Hejinian (1941-)

Back and backward, why, wide and wider. Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality. The continent is greater than the content. A river nets the peninsula. The garden rooster goes through the goldenrod. I watched a robin worming its way on the ridge, time on the uneven light ledge. There as in that's their truck there. Where it rested in the weather there it rusted. As one would say, my friends, meaning no possession, and don't harm my trees. Marigolds, nasturtiums, snapdragons, sweet William, forget-me-nots, replaced by chard, tomatoes, lettuce, garlic, peas, beans, carrots, radishes--but marigolds. The hum hurts. Still, I felt intuitively that this which was incomprehensible was expectant, increasing, was good. The greatest thrill was to be the one to "tell." All rivers' left banks remind me of Paris, not to see or sit upon but to hear spoken of. Cheese makes one thirsty but onions make a worse thirst. The Spanish make a little question frame. In the case, propped on a stand so as to beckon, was the hairy finger of St. Cecilia, covered with rings. The old dress is worn out, torn up, dumped. Erasures could not serve better authenticity. The years pass, years in which, I take it, events were not lacking. There are more colors in the great rose window of Chartres than in the rose. Beside a body, not a piece, of water. Serpentine is fool's jade. It is on a dressed stone. The previousness of plants in prior color--no dream can come up to the original, which in the common daylight is voluminous. Yet he insisted that his life had been full of happy chance, that he was luck's child. As a matter-of fact, quite the obverse. After a 9-to-5 job he got to just go home. Do you have a compulsion to work and then did you have a good time. Now it is one o'clock on the dot, but that is only a coincidence and it has a bad name. Patriots drive larger cars. At the time the perpetual Latin of love kept things hidden. We might be late to the movies but always early for the kids. The women at the parents' meeting must wear rings, for continuity. More sheep than sleep. Paul was telling me a plot which involved time travel, I asked, "How do they go into the future?" and he answered, "What do you mean?--they wait and the future comes to them--of course!" so the problem was going into the past. I think my interests are much broader than those of people who have been saying the same thing for eight years, or so he said. Has the baby enough teeth for an apple. Juggle, jungle, chuckle. The hummingbird, for all we know, may be singing all day long. We had been in France where every word really was a bird, a thing singing. I laugh as if my pots were clean. The apple in the pie is the pie. An extremely pleasant and often comic satisfaction comes from conjunction, the fit, say, of comprehension in a reader's mind to content in a writer's work. But not bitter.

Girl

By Jamaica Kincaid (1949-)

Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap; wash the color clothes on Tuesday and put them on the clothesline to dry;

don't walk bare head in the hot sun;

cook pumpkin fritters in very hot sweet oil;
soak your little cloths right after you take them off;
when buying cotton to make yourself a nice blouse, be sure that it doesn't have gum on it, because that way it won't hold up well after a wash;

soak salt fish overnight before you cook it;

is it true that you sing benna in Sunday school?;
always eat your food in such a way that it won't turn someone else's stomach;

on Sundays try to walk like a lady and not like the slut you are so bent on becoming;

don't sing benna in Sunday school;
you mustn't speak to wharf-rat boys, not even to give directions;

don't eat fruits on the street - flies will follow you;

but I don't sing benna on Sundays at all and never in Sunday school;

this is how to sew on a button;

this is how to make a buttonhole for the button you have just sewed on;
this is how to hem a dress when you see the hem coming down and to prevent yourself from looking like the slut you are so bent on becoming;

this is how you iron your father's khaki shirt so that it doesn't have a crease;

this is how you iron your father's khaki pants so that they don't have a crease;
this is how you grow okra - far from the house, because okra tree harbors red ants;

when you are growing dasheen, make sure it gets plenty of water or else it makes your throat itch when you are eating it;

this is how you sweep a corner;
this is how you sweep a whole house;
this is how you sweep a yard;

this is how you smile to someone you don't like too much;

this is how you smile at someone you don't like at all;
this is how you smile to someone you like completely; 

this is how you set a table for tea;

this is how you set a table for dinner;
this is how you set a table for dinner with an important guest;
this is how you set a table for lunch;
this is how you set a table for breakfast;

this is how to behave in the presence of men who don't know you very well, and this way they won't recognize immediately the slut I have warned you against becoming;

be sure to wash every day, even if it is with your own spit;
don't swat down to play marbles - you are not a boy, you know;
don't pick people's flowers - you might catch something;
don't throw stones at blackbirds, because it might not be a blackbird at all;

this is how to make a bread pudding;

this is how to make doukona;
this is how to make pepper pot;
this is how to make a good medicine for a cold; 
this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child; 

this is how to catch a fish;

this is how to throw back a fish you don't like and that way something bad won't fall on you;
this is how to bully a man; 

this is how a man bullies you;

this is how to love a man, and if this doesn't work there are other ways, and if they don't work don't feel too bad about giving up;
this is how to spit up in the air if you feel like it, and this is how to move quick so that it doesn't fall on you;

this is how to make ends meet;

always squeeze bread to make sure it's fresh;
but what if the baker won't let me feel the bread?;
you mean to say that after all you are really going to be the kind of woman who the baker won't let near the bread?
The Argument of his Book

By Robert Herrick (1591-1674)

I sing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,

Of April, May, of June, and July flowers.

I sing of May-poles, hock-carts, wassails, wakes,

Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal-cakes.

I write of youth, of love, and have access

By these to sing of cleanly wantonness.

I sing of dews, of rains, and piece by piece

Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris.

I sing of Time's trans-shifting; and I write

How roses first came red, and lilies white.

I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing

The court of Mab, and of the fairy king.

I write of Hell; I sing (and ever shall)

Of Heaven, and hope to have it after all.

From Tender Buttons

By Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)

OBJECTS. 

Within, within the cut and slender joint alone, with sudden equals and no more than three, two in the centre make two one side. 

If the elbow is long and it is filled so then the best example is all together. 

The kind of show is made by squeezing. 

EYE GLASSES. 

A color in shaving, a saloon is well placed in the centre of an alley. 

A CUTLET. 

A blind agitation is manly and uttermost. 

CARELESS WATER. 

No cup is broken in more places and mended, that is to say a plate is broken and mending does do that it shows that culture is Japanese. It shows the whole element of angels and orders. It does more to choosing and it does more to that ministering counting. It does, it does change in more water. 

Supposing a single piece is a hair supposing more of them are orderly, does that show that strength, does that show that joint, does that show that balloon famously. Does it. 

A PAPER. 

A courteous occasion makes a paper show no such occasion and this makes readiness and eyesight and likeness and a stool. 

A DRAWING. 

The meaning of this is entirely and best to say the mark, best to say it best to show sudden places, best to make bitter, best to make the length tall and nothing broader, anything between the half. 

WATER RAINING. 

Water astonishing and difficult altogether makes a meadow and a stroke. 

COLD CLIMATE. 

A season in yellow sold extra strings makes lying places. 

MALACHITE. 

The sudden spoon is the same in no size. The sudden spoon is the wound in the decision. 

AN UMBRELLA. 

Coloring high means that the strange reason is in front not more in front behind. Not more in front in peace of the dot. 

A PETTICOAT. 

A light white, a disgrace, an ink spot, a rosy charm. 

A WAIST. 

A star glide, a single frantic sullenness, a single financial grass greediness. 

Object that is in wood. Hold the pine, hold the dark, hold in the rush, make the bottom. 

A piece of crystal. A change, in a change that is remarkable there is no reason to say that there was a time. 

A woolen object gilded. A country climb is the best disgrace, a couple of practices any of them in order is so left. 

A TIME TO EAT. 

A pleasant simple habitual and tyrannical and authorised and educated and resumed and articulate separation. This is not tardy. 

A LITTLE BIT OF A TUMBLER. 

A shining indication of yellow consists in there having been more of the same color than could have been expected when all four were bought. This was the hope which made the six and seven have no use for any more places and this necessarily spread into nothing. Spread into nothing. 
…
Pied Beauty

By Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
Glory be to God for dappled things –

   For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

      For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

   Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

      And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

   Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

      With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

                                Praise him.

From alphabet 

by Inger Christensen (1935-2009)
translated by Susanna Nied 

1.

apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist

2.

bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries;

bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen
3

cicadas exist; chicory, chromium

citrus trees; cicadas exist;

cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cere-

bellum
4

doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;

killers exist, and doves, and doves;

haze, dioxin, and days; days

exist, days and death; and poems

exist; poems, days, death

*translator’s note: The length of each section of Christensen’s alphabet is based on Fibonacci’s sequence, a mathematical sequence beginning 0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21

Prayer (I)

By George Herbert (1593-1633)
Prayer the church's banquet, angel's age,

         God's breath in man returning to his birth,

         The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,

The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth

Engine against th' Almighty, sinner's tow'r,

         Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,

         The six-days world transposing in an hour,

A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;

Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,

         Exalted manna, gladness of the best,

         Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,

The milky way, the bird of Paradise,

         Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul's blood,

         The land of spices; something understood.

That One

By Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)
O days consecrated to the useless
office of forgetting the biography
of a lesser poet from the hemisphere
below, to whom the shades or the stars
bequeathed a body that leaves behind no son
and blindness, penumbra and prison,
and old age, aurora of death,
and fame, which nobody deserves,
and the habit of devising hendecasyllabics
and an old love of encyclopedias
and of fine calligraphic maps
and of fragile ivory and an incurable
nostalgia for Latin and fragmentary
memories of Edinburgh and Geneva
and the oblivion of dates and of names
and the cult of the Orient, which the peoples
of the miscellaneous Orient do not share,
and vigils glimmering with expectation,
and the abuse of etymology
and the iron of Saxon syllables
and the moon, which always surprises us,
and that bad habit, Buenos Aires,
and the flavor of grapes and of water and of cocoa, confection of Mexico,
and a few coins and a clock made of sand
and who, one afternoon, like so many others,
resigns himself to these verses.


Harlem

By Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
What happens to a dream deferred?
      Does it dry up

      like a raisin in the sun?

      Or fester like a sore—

      And then run?

      Does it stink like rotten meat?

      Or crust and sugar over—

      like a syrupy sweet?
      Maybe it just sags

      like a heavy load.

      Or does it explode?


Apostroph

By Walt Whitman (1819-1892) 

Download 241.83 Kb.

Share with your friends: