Belewe Moon

Willy Ronis

for Spencer

Belewe Moon

At night, a whisper, soft against the breeze
in subtle winter, combing her white wreathes,
did rouse the muse and sudden beckoning
positioned me beneath your fecund moon.

When out amung the daffodils, you there,
unbridled in your limitless field, called
all impatient paperwhites, wait not
for the last frost to break and bloom!

I sought you like a newformed hyacinth
burrowing my way through root and rock,
though no more capable were my weak limbs
than those periwinkle petals, still I climbed

Out of the graveyard of my buried hearts--
there a piece, a war wound, a soft death--
I scaled past every failure, shaming each
with the audacity of my ascent.

And up and up, I clambered to your call,
with rain sending me running for what looked
like sanctuary, from afar, those hills
earthen breasts breathing under your belewe moon.

And it, and you, together captured me,
my heart a soft sandbar in rising tide,
and coaxed me deep into the cool dream of
your body, your sea-green eyes, those bombshells.

When all along my soul had crept unseen
among the hushed minefields of love; that moon
arrested me, doe-still and sudden snap!
the clap-trap shock, betrayed me to your gaze.



[copyright Taylor Roberts, 2010]

You Being In Love

allan grant

you being in love
by e.e. cummings


you being in love
will tell who softly asks in love,

am i separated from your body smile brain hands merely
to become the jumping puppets of a dream? oh i mean:
entirely having in my careful how
careful arms created this at length
inexcusable, this inexplicable pleasure-you go from several
persons: believe me that strangers arrive
when i have kissed you into a memory
slowly, oh seriously
-that since and if you disappear

solemnly
myselves
ask "life, the question how do i drink dream smile

and how do i prefer this face to another and
why do i weep eat sleep-what does the whole intend"
they wonder. oh and they cry "to be, being, that i am alive
this absurd fraction in its lowest terms
with everything cancelled
but shadows
-what does it all come down to? love? Love
if you like and i like,for the reason that i
hate people and lean out of this window is love,love
and the reason that i laugh and breathe is oh love and the reason
that i do not fall into this street is love."


[copyright e.e.cummings, 1925]

Song of Cybele

Song of Cybele

The song of Cybele still visits me
upon cool January mornings, just
before the frost has burned away
I hear her quiver on days like today.

She who tumbled, layering the snow
about her, arbitrary armor. Built
to last one winter, nay, even a gaze,
A penny picture paper-cut could melt.

Panoply of an orchid in its pot,
Thrice replanted, dropping all her blooms.
Naked in her rest they’d thought her dead
And buried her beneath the shadowy moon.

She staggered out and groping for the light,
In all her strength, that slight might, fought to leech
another soul’s good deed, and desperate,
she clawed the closest vein, her own outlet.

And now her armor, ropes of silk and pearls
And diamonds dug from West African earth
Challenge the silence of resembled beds;
Those airless chambers, mines for the near dead.

Cruel hauntings having come so close to truth
Do thin her skin and make her blood run blue.
Poor little flower, if she only knew
Some warmer soil to bravely place her root.

No peridot, no diamond could dispute
The courage of good nature, such a feature
Could grow a rhododendron of a creature.



[copyright Taylor Roberts, 2010]

Chanson

Yale Joel

Song
by Frank O'Hara

Did you see me walking by the Buick Repairs?
I was thinking of you
having a Coke in the heat it was your face
I saw on the movie magazine, no it was Fabian's
I was thinking of you
and down at the railroad tracks where the station
has mysteriously disappeared
I was thinking of you
as the bus pulled away in the twilight
I was thinking of you
and right now




[copyright 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith]

Song

New York Times, 1978

Song
by Frank O'Hara


I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab
which is typical
and not just of modern life

mud clambers up the trellis of my nerves
must lovers of Eros end up with Venus
muss es sein? es muss nicht sein, I tell you

how I hate disease, it's like worrying
that comes true
and it simply must not be able to happen

in a world where you are possible
my love
nothing can go wrong for us, tell me



[copyright 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith]

Chansonnier

serge jacques


Immerse the dream, Drench the Kiss,
Dip the song into the stream

-Edna St Vincent Millay

Sporting Life
by Jack Spicer

The trouble with comparing a poet with a radio is that radios don’t develop scar-tissue. The tubes burn out, or with a transistor, which most souls are, the battery or diagram burns out replaceable or not replaceable, but not like that punchdrunk fighter in the bar. The poet
Takes too many messages. The right to the ear that floored him in New Jersey. The right to say that he stood six rounds with a champion.
Then they sell beer or go on sporting commissions, or, if the scar tissue is too heavy, demonstrate in a bar where the invisible champions might not have hit him. Too many of them.
The poet is a radio. The poet is a liar. The poet is a counterpunching radio.
And those messages (God would not damn them) do not even know they are champions.


[copyright Jack Spicer, Wesleyan University Press, 2008]

Each and Every Door

"The easiest kind of relationship for me is with
ten thousand people. The hardest is with one."

-Joan Baez