I've got a Q!

Question
by May Swenson

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?

The lover by Sina Queyras

He still manages to paint. At least he shows up at dinner with splotches on his pants and cap, though never, she notices, on his face. His shoulders touch his ears and are curved, like wings, she thinks, his head always about to go under. When she stands behind him in the dinner line she wants to put her head between his blades and pull. She is afraid his heart might crack. He keeps busy, the lover. He walks to the bar in town where he has heard they have fights. He plays pool badly, and loses. Afternoons he tosses a baseball, always only at first base. The one he loves has red hair and is firm. He will not have her, and perhaps he knows this already. Still, at midnight he finds her yellow room and slips under the door. He believes in everything about her. But the best thing is how she fits him: how she lies on top of him like a cat in a bowl.

Way to go Mary, another Q. Now, if we can just come up with 1 or 2 X's.

"Questioning Faces" by Robert Frost

The winter owl banked just in time to pass
And save herself from breaking window glass.
And her wings straining suddenly aspread
Caught color from the last of evening red
In a display of underdown and quill
To glassed-in children at the windowsill.

Theodore Roethke is one of my "return to" poets. His poems reach in without much noticing and grow silently in the body's dark hollows. And then you return to them, read them again, sometimes years later, and recognize them like the image in the mirror.

A Field of Light

1

Come to lakes; came to dead water,
Ponds with moss and leaves floating,
Planks sunk in the sand.

A log turned at the touch of a foot;
A long weed floated upward;
An eye tilted.

Small winds made
A chilly noise;
The softest cove
Cried for sound.

Reached for a grape
And the leaves changed;
A stone’s shape
Became a clam.

A fine rain fell
On fat leaves;
I was there alone
In a watery drowse.

2

Angel within me, I asked,
Did I ever curse the sun?
Speak and abide.

Under, under the sheaves,
Under the blackened leaves,
Behind the green viscid trellis,
In the deep grass at the edge of field,
Along the low ground dry only in August,--

Was it dust I was kissing?
A sigh came far.
Alone, I kissed the skin of a stone;
Marrow-soft, danced in the sand.

3

The dirt left my hand, visitor.
I could feel the mare’s nose.
A path went walking.
The sun glittered on a small rapids.
Some morning thing came, beating its wings.
The great elm filled with birds.

Listen, love.
The fat lark sang in the field;
I touched the ground, the ground warmed by the killdeer,
The slat laughed and the stones;
The ferns had their ways, and the pulsing lizards,
And the new plants, still awkward in their soil,
The lovely diminutives.
I could watch! I could watch!
I saw the separateness of all things!
My heart lifted up with the great grasses;
The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.
There were clouds making a rout of shapes crossing a windbreak of cedars,
And a bee shaking drops from a rain-soaked honeysuckle.
The worms were delighted as wrens.
And I walked, I walked through the light air;
I moved with the morning.

Recusatio - "A term applied by Classical scholars to a poem in which the speaker implicitly or explicitly "refuses" to write on a certain subject or in a particular style. A type of programmatic poetry, recusationes often dramatize the poet's rejection of one kind of poem and choice of another; he or she may claim to have been asked to compose a different kind of poem; he may even pretend to have tried to do so; he may claim to be reacting to criticism; a god may rebuke the poet or give his approval."

Ovid's Amores is an example. There are sections of it here: http://homepage.usask.ca/~jrp638/DeptTransls/Ovid.html

Let Me Die a Youngman's Death by Roger McGough

Let me die a youngman's death
not a clean and inbetween
the sheets holywater death
not a famous-last-words
peaceful out of breath death

When I'm 73
and in constant good tumour
may I be mown down at dawn
by a bright red sports car
on my way home
from an allnight party

Or when I'm 91
with silver hair
and sitting in a barber's chair
may rival gangsters
with hamfisted tommyguns burst in
and give me a short back and insides

Or when I'm 104
and banned from the Cavern
may my mistress
catching me in bed with her daughter
and fearing for her son
cut me up into little pieces
and throw away every piece but one

Let me die a youngman's death
not a free from sin tiptoe in
candle wax and waning death
not a curtains drawn by angels borne
'what a nice way to go' death

I feel I must post Kay Ryan for R, as she is the curent Poet Laureate of the US, and two more for me; Theodore Roethke and Adrienne Rich. I've known of Rich since college (even had to buy one her books for a class), but I've only just come to reading her poetry. As I was preparing to make this post a friend called to see how I was doing (2 1/2 days into a migraine) and to see if I wanted some ice cream. I think there was a little magic in the ice cream or maybe it was the concern of my friend that worked the magic, but I feel a bit better.

Here's Adrienne Rich --

Miracle Ice Cream
by Adrienne Rich

Miracle's truck comes down the little avenue,
Scott Joplin ragtime strewn behind it like pearls,
and, yes, you can feel happy
with one piece of your heart.

Take what's still given: in a room's rich shadow
a woman's breasts swinging lightly as she bends.
Early now the pearl of dusk dissolves.
Late, you sit weighing the evening news,
fast-food miracles, ghostly revolutions,
the rest of your heart.