à la folie

 à la folie

If there was a god
Who could make a world in seven
How many thousands of days have
I sat not creating fire? No, I mean
A woman is not a rope-bridge

I am reaching for the apotheosis
An arc between catastrophes
The boys come and pass, looking at love
Through sunlit glass, and a woman
Is not a pier leading to an ocean

When I do not say Je t'aime
In any language
There is a great body of love falling
From these tiny hands that were
Never good containers

If there was a god, she would not be a
Woman is not a rope, a noose or lasso
No, I mean, letting down my hair
The need to give is not a dispensation
Dragging by my hair, a woman is not
A respite from despair, pulling down
My hair as I lay slack the reins, lay
Waiting to be stepped upon, a kiss of
Salt is no gauge for a woman

When I do not say Je t'aime à la folie
A great body of love
Escapes me
Through tiny fingers
That never were containers



[copyright Taylor Roberts 2016]

2

My Grandmother's Love Letters

Édouard Boubat

My Grandmother's Love Letters
by Hart Crane

There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother’s mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.

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Haiku

Students sit in protest at Woolworth's in Jackson, MS. Photo by Fred Blackwell.

Haiku 

by Sonia Sanchez


my bones hang to-
gether like pinched dragonflies
shake loose my skin



[copyright Sonia Sanchez, 1999]

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The Interrogation Of The Man Of Many Hearts

The Interrogation Of The Man Of Many Hearts

by Anne Sexton

Who's she, 

that one in your arms?

She's the one I carried my bones to

and built a house that was just a cot

and built a life that was over an hour

and built a castle where no one lives

and built, in the end, a song

to go with the ceremony.

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Nauset

Nauset

by Taylor Roberts

Nauset was your periscope.

It held out what all you wrote,
Lantern-pages, pipe smoke, smoke-signals, pages.
The waves waxed and receded like the sea was hormonal
And it shook you, didn’t it? It quaked you.

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Belewe Moon

Belewe Moon

by Taylor Roberts

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 among the daffodils, you there,
unbridled in your limitless field, called
all impatient paper whites, wait not
for the last frost to break and bloom!

I sought you like a new-formed 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.

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Thanks

Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, 1971 by Graham Howe

Thanks

by Yusef Komunyakaa


Thanks for the tree
between me & a sniper's bullet.
I don't know what made the grass
sway seconds before the Viet Cong
raised his soundless rifle.
Some voice always followed,
telling me which foot
to put down first.
Thanks for deflecting the ricochet
against that anarchy of dusk.
I was back in San Francisco
wrapped up in a woman's wild colors,
causing some dark bird's love call
to be shattered by daylight
when my hands reached up
& pulled a branch away
from my face. Thanks
for the vague white flower
that pointed to the gleaming metal
reflecting how it is to be broken
like mist over the grass,
as we played some deadly
game for blind gods.
What made me spot the monarch
writhing on a single thread
tied to a farmer's gate,
holding the day together
like an unfingered guitar string,
is beyond me. Maybe the hills
grew weary & leaned a little in the heat.
Again, thanks for the dud
hand grenade tossed at my feet
outside Chu Lai. I'm still
falling through its silence.
I don't know why the intrepid
sun touched the bayonet,
but I know that something
stood among those lost trees
& moved only when I moved.


[copyright 1993, by Yusef Komunyakaa]

0

Dirge Without Music

Alfred Eisenstaedt

for the families of Newtown

Dirge Without Music

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.

So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:

Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned

With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.

Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.

A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,

A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.

The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,—

They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled

Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.

More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave

Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;

Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.

I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned. 

[copyright Edna St. Vincent Millay]

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Excerpt from Ann Arbor Variations

allan grant

Ann Arbor Variations (IV)

by Frank O'Hara


The violent No! of the sun
burns the forehead of hills.
Sand fleas arrive from Salt Lake
and most of the theatres close.

The leaves roll into cigars, or
it seems our eyes stick together
in sleep. O forest, o brook of
spice, o cool gaze of strangers!

the city tumbles towards autumn
in a convulsion of tourists
and teachers. We dance in the dark,
forget the anger of what we blame

on the day. Children toss and murmur
as a rumba blankets their trees and
beckons their stars closer, older, now.
We move o'er the world, being so much here.

It's as if Poseidon left off counting
his waters for a moment! In the fields
the silence is music like the moon.
The bullfrogs sleep in their hairy caves.

across the avenue a trefoil lamp
of the streets tosses luckily.
The leaves, finally, love us! and
moonrise! we die upon the sun.


[copyright 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith]

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Since Feeling Is First

allan grant

since feeling is first
e.e. cummings


since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
- the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other; then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis



[copyright e.e.cummings, 1925]

0

Song of Cybele

Song of Cybele

read this and other poems in Taylor's upcoming book of poetry, Bombshell Bohemia: poems from the underground.

0

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]

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Bees of Paradise

william files

"-- And Bees of Paradise"
by Hart Crane


I had come all the way here from the sea,
Yet met the wave again between your arms
Where cliff and citadel--all verily
Dissolved within a sky of beacon forms--

Sea gardens lifted rainbow-wise through eyes
I found.

Yes, tall, inseparably our days
Pass sunward. We have walked the kindled skies
Inexorable and girded with your praise,

By the dove filled, and bees of Paradise.


[copyright Hart Crane, 1920]

0

Juggling Clouds

Wrap us and lift us; drop us then, returned
Like water, undestroyed, --like mist, unburned...
But do not claim a friend like him again,
Whose arrow must have pierced you beyond pain.


-excerpted from "To The Cloud Juggler"
by Hart Crane, 1920

0

Mnemosyne

Mnemosyne

by Taylor Roberts

Tonight I do not feel a rush to put my clothes back on
The silence drips out of the darkness
Like uneasy ooze through the city wilderness

I look down on
Sunset, I dream, I wake up

You ask me about dolls and I answer like my father

I have memories I cannot unlock
With any spell
Hell is this: an unused muse
(that flower oughta be smelled)

I tried hypnosis
I remembered turning in chiffon curtains as a girl,
My grandfather’s sawmill breakfast,
And leaving you

There are those the rose remembers
Combing through the LA noise, her
Fire engines bawling past my windows
Like teenagers’ fuck-howls

The dancer lays down her left ear giving confession to a pillowcase

It all starts somewhere
A mover without a voice

You sing--
I dress, I dream, I wake up

There is someone on Sunset with a basketball now
Silence lifts
And cars resume their swims east/west across the strip.

0

Lack of Any Bed

Improvisations On A Sentence By Poe

Jack Spicer

"Indefiniteness is an element of the true music."
The grand concord of what
Does not stoop to definition. The seagull
Alone on the pier cawing its head off
Over no fish, no other seagull,
No ocean. As absolutely devoid of meaning
As a French horn.
It is not even an orchestra. Concord
Alone on a pier. The grand concord of what
Does not stoop to definition. No fish
No other seagull, no ocean—the true
Music.


[copyright Jack Spicer, 1961]

Orfeo

by Jack Spicer

Sharp as an arrow Orpheus
Points his music downward.
Hell is there
At the bottom of the seacliff.
Heal
Nothing by this music.
Eurydice
Is a frigate bird or a rock or some seaweed.
Hail nothing
The infernal
Is a slippering wetness out at the horizon.
Hell is this:
The lack of anything but the eternal to look at
The expansiveness of salt
The lack of any bed but one’s
Music to sleep in.


[copyright Jack Spicer, 1961]

photos by alfred eisenstaedt and william claxton

0

A City Winter

alfred eisenstaedt

A City Winter (excerpt)
Frank O'Hara

The snow drifts low

and yet neglects to cover me, and I
dance just ahead to keep my heart in sight.
How like a queen, to seek with jealous eye
the face that flees you, hidden city, white
swan. There's no art to free me, blinded so.


[copyright Frank O'Hara, 1951]

0

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy

by Jack Spicer


What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water. Shedding it
Down empty acres of oak and manzanita
Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana
Driving the hills crazy,
A fast wind with a bit of dust in it
Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.
Or down in the city where the peach trees
Are awkward as young horses,
And there are kites caught on the wires
Up above the street lamps,
And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer
As slow getting started
As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza
After a lot of unusual rain
California seems long in the summer.
I would like to write a poem as long as California
And as slow as a summer.
Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow
As the very tip of summer.
As slow as the summer seems
On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside
Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road
Between Bakersfield and Hell
Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now?

I’m thinking that she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways
Traveling up and down her skin
Long empty highways
With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them
On hot summer nights.
I am thinking that her body could be California
And I a rich Eastern tourist
Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas
Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California
That I have never seen.
Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,
Send them.
One of each breast photographed looking
Like curious national monuments,
One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway
Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging
In the world’s oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?

I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated. How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.



[copyright Jack Spicer, c.1950s]

0

Grandfather

Grandfather

read this and other poems in Taylor's upcoming book of poetry, Bombshell Bohemia: poems from the underground.

0

99

99
e.e. cummings

now all the fingers of this tree(darling)have
hands,and all the hands have people;and
more each particular person is(my love)
alive than every world can understand

and now you are and i am now and we're
a mystery which will never happen again,
a miracle which has never happened before--
and shining this our now must come to then

our then shall be some darkness during which
fingers are without hands;and i have no
you:and all trees are(any more than each
leafless)its silent in forevering snow

--but never fear(my own,my beautiful
my blossoming)for also then's until


[copyright E.E. Cummings, 1950]

0