The Professors of Water

Whenever I Go There


Whenever I go there everything is changed

The stamps on the bandages the titles
Of the professors of water

The portrait of Glare the reasons for
The white mourning

In new rocks new insects are sitting
With the lights off
And once more I remember that the beginning

Is broken

No wonder the addresses are torn

To which I make my way eating the silence of animals
Offering snow to the darkness

Today belongs to few and tomorrow to no one


                                ~ by W.S. Merlin

Under a Spell

Two songs sung by Sally Ann Howes

Doll on a Music Box

 
What do you see? You people gazing at me
You see a doll on music box that's wound by a key
How can you tell, I'm under a spell, 
I'm waiting for love's first kiss

You cannot see, how much I long to be free
Turning around on this music box that's wound by a key
Yearning... Yearning...
While I'm turning around and around


Toyland


Toyland! Toyland!
Little girl and boy land
While you dwell within it
You are ever happy then
Childhood’s joyland
Mystic, merry toyland
Once you pass its borders
You can ne’er return again

  

Algebra

 

Wonders There

America
                   
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.



                                        ~ by Claude McKay

Memory Storage

The American Short Story (Perspective Films)

     “Bartleby, the Scrivener” by Melville: Film and Text

     “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” by Fitzgerald: Film and Text

     “The Golden Honeymoon” by Lardner: Film and Text

     “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” by Porter: Film and Text

     “Paul’s Case” by Cather: Film and Text

     “Rappaccini's Daughter” by Hawthorne: Film and Text


Voices & Visions Film Series on American Poets
Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, Emily Dickinson, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Robert Lowell, 
Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams

The Lively Air

The Waking

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

                           
                                 ~ by Theodore Roethke

Other Gardens

Autumn Fires

In the other gardens   
  And all up the vale,   
From the autumn bonfires   
  See the smoke trail!   

Pleasant summer over            
  And all the summer flowers,   
The red fire blazes,   
  The gray smoke towers.   
 
Sing a song of seasons!   
  Something bright in all!     
Flowers in the summer,   
  Fires in the fall!


              ~ by Robert Louis Stevenson

Prolepsis

Twenty-Four Hundred Years Ago

Bernard Knox hosts this 1959 series on Oedipus at The Internet Archive:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Clock

The Babysitters

It is ten years, now, since we rowed to Children's Island.
The sun flamed straight down that noon on the water off Marblehead.
That summer we wore black glasses to hide our eyes.
We were always crying, in our spare rooms, little put-upon sisters,
In the two, huge, white, handsome houses in Swampscott.
When the sweetheart from England appeared, with her cream skin and Yardley cosmetics,
I had to sleep in the same room with the baby on a too-short cot,
And the seven-year-old wouldn't go out unless his jersey stripes
Matched the stripes of his socks.

Or it was richness! --- eleven rooms and a yacht
With a polished mahogany stair to let into the water
And a cabin boy who could decorate cakes in six-colored frosting.
But I didn't know how to cook, and babies depressed me.
Nights, I wrote in my diary spitefully, my fingers red
With triangular scorch marks from ironing tiny ruchings and puffed sleeves.
When the sporty wife and her doctor husband went on one of their cruises
They left me a borrowed maid named Ellen, "for protection,"
And a small Dalmation.

In your house, the main house, you were better off.
You had a rose garden and a guest cottage and a model apothecary shop
And a cook and a maid, and knew about the key to the bourbon.
I remember you playing "Ja-Da" in a pink piqué dress
On the game-room piano, when the "big people" were out,
And the maid smoked and shot pool under a green shaded lamp.
The cook had one walleye and couldn't sleep, she was so nervous.
On trial, from Ireland, she burned batch after batch of cookies
Till she was fired.

O what has come over us, my sister!
On that day-off the two of us cried so hard to get
We lifted a sugared ham and a pineapple from the grownups' icebox
And rented an old green boat. I rowed. You read
Aloud, cross-legged on the stern seat, from the Generation of Vipers.
So we bobbed out to the island. It was deserted ---
A gallery of creaking porches and still interiors,
Stopped and awful as a photograph of somebody laughing
But ten years dead.

The bold gulls dove as if they owned it all.
We picked up sticks of driftwood and beat them off,
Then stepped down the steep beach shelf and into the water.
We kicked and talked. The thick salt kept us up.
I see us floating there yet, inseparable--two cork dolls.
What keyhole have we slipped through, what door has shut?
The shadows of the grasses inched round like hands of a clock,
And from our opposite continents we wave and call.
Everything has happened.
   

                                                       ~ by Sylvia Plath

Where the Chalk Wall Falls

Look, Stranger

Look, stranger, on this island now
The leaping light for your delight discovers,
Stand stable here
And silent be,
That through the channels of the ear
May wander like a river
The swaying sound of the sea.

Here at a small field's ending pause
Where the chalk wall falls to the foam and its tall ledges
Oppose the pluck
And knock of the tide,
And the shingle scrambles after the suck-
-ing surf,
And a gull lodges
A moment on its sheer side.

Far off like floating seeds the ships
Diverge on urgent voluntary errands,
And this full view
Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And all the summer through the water saunter.


                                      ~ by W.H. Auden

Through All the Summer Weather

When the Last Long Trek is Over

When the last long trek is over,
And the last long trench filled in,
I’ll take a boat to Dover,
Away from all the din;
I’ll take a trip to Mendip,
I’ll see the Wilshire downs,
And all my soul I’ll then dip
In peace no trouble drowns.

Away from noise of battle,
Away from bombs and shells,
I’ll lie where browse the cattle,
Or pluck the purple bells.
I’ll lie among the heather,
And watch the distant plain,
Through all the summer weather,
Nor go to fight again.


                ~ by Alec de Candole

Liminal Space

1. 2. 3. 4. 
  5. 6. 7.

In an Evening of July

A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky

A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July —

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear —

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die:
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream —
Lingering in the golden gleam —
Life, what is it but a dream?


                                 ~ by Lewis Carroll

Limitless

Across the Universe

Words are flowing out
Like endless rain into a paper cup
They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe

Pools of sorrow waves of joy
Are drifting through my opened mind
Possessing and caressing me

Jai Guru Deva, Om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world

Images of broken light
Which dance before me like a million eyes
They call me on and on across the universe

Thoughts meander like a
Restless wind inside a letter box
They tumble blindly as they make their way across the universe

Jai Guru Deva, Om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world

Sounds of laughter, shades of life
Are ringing through my opened ears
Inciting and inviting me

Limitless undying love
Which shines around me like a million suns
It calls me on and on across the universe

Jai Guru Deva, Om
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Nothing's gonna change my world
Jai Guru Deva
Jai Guru Deva
Jai Guru Deva
Jai Guru Deva
Jai Guru Deva

                                                 ~ The Beatles

Most Real

Cybele's Reverie

Childhood is very nice
Childhood brings magic

What to do when one has done everything?
Read everything, drunk everything, eaten everything?
Given everything in truth and in detail,
When one has cried on all the rooftops,
Wept and laughed in the towns and in the country?

Childhood is the most real
The garden of new visions

The house, the house, of other times
The house, the house that we have left

And the silence
That penetrates me



Cybele's Reverie

Matières sensuelles et sans suite
L'enfance est plus sympathique
L'enfance apporte le magique

Que faire quand on a tout fait
Tout lu tout bu tout mangé
Tout donné en vrac et en détail
Quand on a crié sur tous les toits
Pleuré et ri dans les villes et en campagne

L'enfance est plus authentique
Le jardin au haut portique

Les pierres, les arbres, les murs, racontent
La maison la maison d'autrefois
La maison la maison à venir

Et le silence
Me pénétrera


                                   ~ Stereolab

Picture Sequence

Childhood

It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely -and why?

We’re still reminded-: sometimes by a rain,       
but we can no longer say what it means;
life was never again so filled with meeting,
with reunion and with passing on

as back then, when nothing happened to us
except what happens to things and creatures:       
we lived their world as something human,
and became filled to the brim with figures.

And became as lonely as a shepherd
and as overburdened by vast distances,
and summoned and stirred as from far away,       
and slowly, like a long new thread,
introduced into that picture-sequence
where now having to go on bewilders us.


                                      ~ by Rainer Maria Rilke

Blossoms Now

An Adieu

Sorrow, quit me for a while!
    Wintry days are over;
Hope again, with April smile,
    Violets sows and clover.

Pleasure follows in her path,
    Love itself flies after,
And the brook a music hath
    Sweet as childhood’s laughter.

Not a bird upon the bough
    Can repress its rapture,
Not a bud that blossoms now
    But doth beauty capture.

Sorrow, thou art Winter’s mate,
    Spring cannot regret thee;
Yet, ah, yet—my friend of late—
    I shall not forget thee!


                                 ~ Florence Earle Coates

When in April

April Come She Will

April come she will
When streams are ripe and swelled with rain
May she will stay
Resting in my arms again
June she'll change her tune
In restless walks she'll prowl the night
July she will fly
And give no warning to her flight
August die she must
The autumn winds blow chilly and cold
September I remember
A love once new has now grown old



                                      ~ by Paul Simon

Time's Scythe

Sonnet XII

When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls, all silvered o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves,
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake
And die as fast as they see others grow;
     And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence
     Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence. 



                                                 ~ William Shakespeare 
                                      

Twilight Hour

Early March

March having come this year mild, hazy-skied and calm,
With hill-top airs from northward breathing frost-like smell,
I dawdle along the lane that leads to Sundial Farm.

Beguilements (which my middle-age can't yet dispel)
Steal into me. Rejuvenescence works its charm.
Designlessly in love with life unlived, I go
Content with the mere fact that fields are drying fast
And tiny beads of bud along the hedge foreshow
The blackthorn winter that will come too late to last.

Beyond that bare untidy orchard, now and then,
One thrush half tells how in the twilight hour he'll sing
To no one but himself his wild belief in spring
Meanwhile I'm thankful for this almost dusty road,
Celandine's lowly gold, and daylight lengthening when
The winterbournes, like time, past February have flowed.

                                               
                                                          ~ by Siegfried Sassoon

Poetry Matters

Tell all the truth but tell it slant,
Success in circuit lies,
Too bright for our infirm delight
The truth's superb surprise;

As lightning to the children eased
With explanation kind,
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.
 

              ~ by Emily Dickinson