I was disappointed to see only 8 hits on this thread, but that seems to be Dick Barnes' fate, for reasons obscure to me. He seems to me clearly a far better poet than Graham, Ashbery,
Williams (CK), Levine, Clifton etc etc, yet almost no one seems to have heard of him. But I'm delighted to read the various responses, to see Tim's beautiful review quoted at length, and a number of other excellent poems posted. It's a big book, so no harm in adding another poem or two:
A CHILD WHO IS NOT LIKABLE
A child who is not likable, quite lacks
the innocent coquetries of her age and sex,
knocks things over often, demands what she can get,
does not expect to be liked, and is not likable--yet
seldom frets, and never without calculation, sees
right through the phony kindness of adults she knows,
plays soberly upon their vanities, never pleads for mercy
nor for the love she isn't going to get, gets
what she has, and keeps it.
And here is one of Dick's exquisite Borges versions:
LUKE XXIII
Gentile or Hebrew or simply a man
Whose face is lost in time;
We shall never recover from oblivion
The silent letters of his name.
About mercy he knew what a bandit can know
Whom Judea nails to a cross.
Of time gone before, we can recover, now,
Nothing. During his final task,
To die crucified, he heard
Among the jibes of the people
That the man crucified next to him
Was a god, and he blurted out, "Lord,
Remember me when thou comest
Into thy kingdom." The inconceivable voice
That one day shall judge all beings
Promised from the terrible Cross
Paradise. They said no more
Till the end came, but history
Won't let the memory
Of that afternoon when they both died, die.
O my friends, the innocence of this friend
Of Jesus, the openness that prompted him
To ask for Paradise and to receive it
Out of the ignominy of his chastisement
Was the same that threw him down so many times
Into bloody calamity and crimes.
And one more---one that shows how surely and gracefully he handles a formal measure. The hero of this little ballad is the adolescent Borges; a true story:
GENEVA, 1916
A glance along the table,
light words, heady laughter,
the possibly deliberate
pressure of an ankle,
a possible innuendo
in clever things she said:
one thing led to another,
and she led him to her bed.
It seemed to him a conquest
though she were oh so willing;
but after a night with her
he woke up in the morning
to find that she had done it
as a favor to his father.
She, his father's mistress.
He felt "unstable as water,"
like Reuben in the Bible.
An atavistic sheen
undid the sexual debut
of this son from the Argentine
but gave him, as a poet,
a thought to write about:
whether all our deeds are darkened
by the shadow of a doubt;
who is, in any action,
the actor, who the author?
If you do what another has done,
are you the same, or the other?
Enjoy.
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