Fernando Pessoa

If They Want Me to Be a Mystic, Fine

If they want me to be a mystic, fine. So I’m a mystic.

I’m a mystic, but only of the body.

My soul is simple; it doesn’t think.

 

My mysticism consists in not desiring to know,

In living without thinking about it.

 

I don’t know what Nature is; I sing it.

I live on a hilltop

In a solitary cabin.

And that’s what it’s all about.

(Translated by Edwin Honig) 

Frank O'Hara

Ode to Joy 

 

We shall have everything we want and there’ll be no more dying

on the pretty plains or in the supper clubs

for our symbol we’ll acknowledge vulgar materialistic laughter

over an insatiable sexual appetite

and the streets will be filled with racing forms

and the photographs of murderers and narcissists and movie stars

will swell from the walls and books alive in steaming rooms

to press against our burning flesh not once but interminably

as water flows down hill into the full-lipped basin

and the adder dives for the ultimate ostrich egg

and the feather cushion preens beneath a reclining monolith

that’s sweating with post-exertion visibility and sweetness

near the grave of love

No more dying

 

A. E. Stallings

 

Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther

 

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes, 

The booze and the neon and Saturday night, 

The swaying in darkness, the lovers like spoons? 

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes? 

Does he hum them to while away sad afternoons 

And the long, lonesome Sundays? Or sing them for spite? 

Why should the Devil get all the good tunes, 

The booze and the neon and Saturday night? 

Michael Palmer

Notes for Echo Lake

Who did he talk to

Did she trust what she saw

Who does the talking

Whose words formed awkward curves

Did the lion finally talk

Did the sleeping lion talk

Did you trust a north window

What made the dog bark

What causes a grey dog to bark

What does the juggler tell us

What does the juggler’s redness tell us

Is she standing in an image

Were they lost in the forest

Were they walking through a forest

Has anything been forgotten

Did you find it in the dark

Is that one of them new atomic-powered wristwatches

Was it called a talking song

Is that an oblong poem

Was poetry the object

Was there once a road here ending at a door

Thus from bridge to bridge we came along

Did the machine seem to talk

Did he read from an empty book

Did the book grow empty in the dark, grey felt hat blowing down the

street, arms pumping back and forth, legs slightly bowed

Are there fewer ears than songs

Did he trust a broken window

Did he wake beneath a tree in the recent snow

Whose words formed difficult curves

Have the exaggerations quieted down

The light is lovely on trees which are not large

My logic is all in the melting-pot

My life now is very economical

I can say nothing of my feeling about space

Nothing could be clearer than what you see on this wall

Must we give each one a name

Is it true they all have names

Would it not have been simpler

Would it not have been simpler to begin

Were there ever such buildings

I must remember to mention the trees

I must remember to invent some trees

Who told you these things

Who taught you how to speak

Who taught you not to speak

Whose is the voice that empties

Denis Johnson

 

Sway

 

Since I find you will no longer love,

from bar to bar in terror I shall move

past Forty-third and Halsted, Twenty-fourth

and Roosevelt where fire-gutted cars,

their bones the bones of coyote and hyena,

suffer the light from the wrestling arena

to fall all over them. And what they say

blends in the tarantellasmic sway

of all of us between the two of these:

harmony and divergence,

their sad story of harmony and divergence,

the story that begins

I did not know who she was

and ends I did not know who she was.

  

Andrew Zawacki

OTHEREARTHLY SONNET

Sashes open, a blouse flutters white

Diffraction artifacts



Morning in the Place des Vosges—perlite

Sunlight baccarats the garden’s 10-blade diaphragm—, you

Tipple through the blanched arcades a

Banshee beauty

Parlor curler

Left plugged in too long



Starlet or harlot, faux Arletty

Harlow with your furloughed halo (chemin de verre is

Some thing wrong



Lens flare carries the outscape, an aura of the Aura



Blow on it with your breath



Then, aircraft

 

Andrew Zawacki

 

Dixie Pixie Sonnet

Solar panel, a Fresnel lens,
5 lb bag of M&Ms; & we could 3-D print a clone of you

Pell mell all hell & ill will will break loose
If you don’t wear your cheap synthetic, frilly fuchsia princess dress,
Faux glass high heel sequin slippers clacking on the tile

In your lifetime, the Arctic will have been

You’re a frog no you’re a frog

To conjugate in a future imperfect : will have been ongoing, once

Daughter you’re borderline pixilated, perhaps from the Swedish dialect pyske — 
“fairy,” ca. 1630 — or Cornwall Celtic for “pixie-led” : confused, bewildered,
unbalanced, astray ; or an actress as stop-motion marionette, in animated films,
altering her posture — like a flick book — frame by frame

Sound speed :
They are drilling it out of the ground to blacken the sun

Tom Clark

Tom Clark, three Padgetts. Photo. by Joe Brainard,  1966.

Blown Away

ephemeral as tinkerbell 
unmoored yet not unmoved 
tossed cloudward, flipped 

sans volition 

into the flow 

going but not wanting to go 
without the other flotsam

Tom Clark

 

Tom Clark in Bolinas, California in 1972. He was a prized student of the poet Donald Hall and the poetry editor for George Plimpton’s Paris Review.Credit...Gerard Malang

Oct. 28

The day of the dead when 
the veil between us and them 
is thinnest eyelash 
kitty breath umbrella flutter 
psychic butterfly - 

A whole procession of them coming 
pushing through the thin 
mesh of the net - the sugar candy 
shedding of the skin and how 
it lets the wind blow through the veins 
the dance of the skulls and when 
the spinning of the little mechanic 
inside the toy clock stops 
the dark man carrying two suitcases 
steps from the now no longer 
moving train - 

That's the day when 
I know someone will be 
no longer waiting, 
the unborn child said. 
I invented what I wanted to say 
in case anybody out there, 
on a cold grey day in autumn, 
wanted to hear the thoughts 
of the dead -� 

I opened the door and 
in flew a moth, thinking 
twilight came early