[William A. Baurle]

Originally Posted by Michael Ferris

Ah, Bill. It’s my hope, too, that I’m growing a little wiser and not just older. How many poems have I scudded over and failed to get? A barking dog or an empty stomach can render me utterly stupid. But just this morning I re-read a poem and finally got it.

Delight!

Progress…

Indeed! I must have read Eliot's Four Quartets a hundred times in my late teens and early twenties, and hardly understood a thing. Now it seems like every line is crystal clear and heavy with meaning.

However, I still don't grok the title. I know there are four poems, but there are five sections to each poem, hence, wouldn't a better title be Four Quintets ?

***

Here's a great poem by a great contemporary poet:

Gospel: Juan

We crossed the border
Hours before dawn
Through a hole
Dug under a fence.

We crossed
Dressed as soldiers,
Faces painted
Mud green

The coyotes
That promised
We’d make it, gave us
A straw broom

To drag behind,
Erasing our tracks.
They gave us meat
Drugged for the dogs.

Farther off,
There were engines,
Voices, a light
That swept the ground.

We crossed
On our bellies.
I wonder
If we’ll ever stand up.

— Tracy K. Smith

**Edited out the TMI.

This poem is part of a series, but I think it works just fine on its own.

I wanted to include another doozy by Smith called "Betty Blue", but I can't find an online version. I highly recommend her book, The Body's Question. Nearly every poem is dynamite.

[William A. Baurle]

This next poem is masterful, and I daresay hardly anyone will know of it. I hope I'm wrong, though.

Maybe a male poet might be in order, after all the ladies. Especially this poet, who is terribly under-read and under-appreciated. I also picked this poem because of its technical expertise, since we've been doing a lot of free verse in this thread.

***

Love-Making; April; Middle Age

A fresh west wind from water-colored clouds
Stirs squills and iris shoots across the grass
Now turning fiery green. This storm will pass
In dits and stipples on the windowpane
Where we lie high and dry, and the low sun
Will throw rose rays at our gray heads upon
The back-room bed's white pillows. Venus will
Descend, blue-white, in horizontal airs
Of red, orange, ochre, lemon, apple green,
Cerulean, azure, ultramarine,
Ink, navy, indigo, at last midnight.
Now, though, this clouded pewter afternoon
Blurs in our window and intensifies
The light that dusts your eyes and mine with age.

We turn our thirties over like a page.

— L.E. Sissman

[Clive Watkins]

I liked this poem by John Knoepfle the first time I read it back in the mid-1960s – its plainness of speech and a kind of tragic power for all that ostensibly it is only about a group of young men getting ready for a football match. It is from Knoepfle’s first book, Rivers into Islands (University of Chicago Press, 1965). It is interesting to compare it with what I guess is the much more well-known “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio” by James Wright (in The Branch Will Not Break, 1963 – https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...s/detail/47733). I think Knoepfle’s the better poem.

John Knoepfle (1923 – ): October Scrimmage

Below the office window
players stretch their cleats
over sweatsocks. They wear
promethean shoulderpads
this ancient afternoon, and I
can hear the murmur of their chatter
magnified down classroom brick
from where I crouch
within my cage of glass.
The team they play for
is famous in this town, and they
are all heroes. On the field
the scrimmage roars in dust
the wind whirls from the west
away, always from the west
away, and the sun there
wrinkles a shadow line of oak
against the school wall
in back of the boys who spit
on their hands and roll laces
to thread impossible eyes.

The ending of Knopfle’s poem puts me in mind of "Wings" by the Czech poet Miroslav Holub (1923 - 1998):

We have
a map of the universe
for microbes,
we have a map of a microbe
for the universe.

We have
A Grand master of chess
made of electronic circuits.

But above all we have
the ability to sort peas,
to cup water in our hands,
to seek
the right screw
under the sofa
for hours.

This
gives us
wings.

(translated by Ian Milner and George Theiner, in Selected Poems: Miroslav Holub, Penguin Books, 1967.)

Clive Watkins

[Aaron Novick]

H.D.'s "Acon" has been really impressing me lately:


Acon (H.D.)

I

Bear me to Dictaeus,
and to the steep slopes;
to the river Erymanthus.

I choose spray of dittany,
cyperum, frail of flower,
buds of myrrh,
all-healing herbs,
close pressed in calathes.

For she lies panting,
drawing sharp breath,
broken with harsh sobs,
she, Hyella,
whom no god pities.

II

Dryads
haunting the groves,
nereids
who dwell in wet caves,
for all the white leaves of olive-branch,
and early roses,
and ivy wreaths, woven gold berries,
which she once brought to your altars,
bear now ripe fruits from Arcadia,
and Assyrian wine
to shatter her fever.

The light of her face falls from its flower,
as a hyacinth,
hidden in a far valley,
perishes upon burnt grass.

Pales,
bring gifts,
bring your Phoenician stuffs,
and do you, fleet-footed nymphs,
bring offerings,
Illyrian iris,
and a branch of shrub,
and frail-headed poppies.




I wrote a bit about what I think makes this poem special here.

[John Isbell]

I like HD too. Didn't know that one - thank you!

[William A. Baurle]

Originally Posted by John Isbell

I like HD too. Didn't know that one - thank you!

H.D. rocks. That gem of hers is not exactly hidden, though, as it appears in several big anthologies. I'll see if I can hunt up something shiny and sparkly that you guys (and gals - though I don't think we've had a female Spherian post in this thread yet? - Hello ladies!) may not have seen.

Here's a good one. But then, she was almost the female Yeats, who didn't really know how to write a bad poem.

***

Sea Poppies

Amber husk
fluted with gold,
fruit on the sand
marked with a rich grain,

treasure
spilled near the shrub-pines
to bleach on the boulders:

your stalk has caught root
among wet pebbles
and drift flung by the sea
and grated shells
and split conch-shells.

Beautiful, wide-spread,
fire upon leaf,
what meadow yields
so fragrant a leaf
as your bright leaf?

— H.D.

And another:

Leda

Where the slow river
meets the tide,
a red swan lifts red wings
and darker beak,
and underneath the purple down
of his soft breast
uncurls his coral feet.

Through the deep purple
of the dying heat
of sun and mist,
the level ray of sun-beam
has caressed
the lily with dark breast,
and flecked with richer gold
its golden crest.

Where the slow lifting
of the tide,
floats into the river
and slowly drifts
among the reeds,
and lifts the yellow flags,
he floats
where tide and river meet.

Ah kingly kiss --
no more regret
nor old deep memories
to mar the bliss;
where the low sedge is thick,
the gold day-lily
outspreads and rests
beneath soft fluttering
of red swan wings
and the warm quivering
of the red swan's breast.

— H.D.

***

Little shout out: We still haven't featured a lesser known Emily Dickinson poem. I think we might all agree that she was one of the greatest poets to write in English? I'm not any kind of Dickinson afficianado. I've got her complete poems on Kindle, but haven't read her entire oeuvre. What is it with French words that I have to check ten times if I've spelled it right? It's like Steve Martin said, "Those French people have a different word for everything! "

[John Isbell]

There's a bit of The Waste Land that reminds me of H.D.:

The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide

and so forth. I'd never noticed it before, thank you Bill. I think H.D. was publishing by 1912...
Nice Steve Martin quote. Here's a little Dickinson poem:

To make a prairie it takes a clover
And one bee,-
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

Cheers,
John

[William A. Baurle]

Pastoral

for Steven

Empty hayrick, nineteenth-century barn
fields unfurling toward late spring, light rain
in the unbroken dark, a little thunder
way off toward the west horizon.

New green tractor beside the decrepit one
he still uses because a wren has built in the new
machine and he refuses to disturb her.
Red pickup still ticking beside the house.

He’s just come from last shift at the welding job
he has to keep if he would save this farm.
He’s young, married not long, his wife
out this night with girlfriends, gone

until late. He steps into the brief gold
of the porch light, whistles up the dog, commences
in small rain—the errand he’s bent upon.
Perhaps a goat is stuck in the back pasture fence,

or something to do with the pond he dug with his father
who died last year, their great project stocked at last
with catfish, bream, a few bass. There’s some thing
he means to tend, or he’s just walking the land, checking,

the way lovers do. Perhaps he hums, or speaks
to the dog dancing beside him or leaping ahead,
and the dark sky comes closer until the dog barks to call
attention and they turn back toward the house that was

his great-grandfather’s, now his to rescue, and with it
the hundred acres he has chosen to be his life.
Already he has rebuilt the fences, keeps chickens,
breeds goats, plants a garden and a sweet potato field.

What might he be thinking as the storm breaks
into sticks of flame above him? His wife
hears weather news and stops the car
on a roadside, waiting out hard rain.

In a few minutes she can turn for home. Nothing
of what is the case is in her mind or can be so.
Maybe she thinks she’ll tell him how it looked
almost like one fire, the streaks of lightening

close as clashing swords, and the sound a roar.
She’s almost there. The house-lights, fogged
by diminishing rain, are all on.
What she can’t imagine is why the doors

are all open, the dog drenched and running in and out,
her husband not answering her calls into a now
perfectly still black night in which he is facedown
in pasture mud, secured by the sky’s deadbolt

like the hand of God, the cloud’s bright nail—while
his wife calls until almost dawn with the rest
of the searchers, and the wren stays settled
warm on the nest.

— Betty Adcock

[John Isbell]

Lovely. If I've heard of Betty Adcock, I'd forgotten her. Thanks, Bill, for sharing that.

[William A. Baurle]

Originally Posted by John Isbell

Lovely. If I've heard of Betty Adcock, I'd forgotten her. Thanks, Bill, for sharing that.

Such a powerful poem. I only discovered this poet a few nights ago, while clicking around. These ten stanzas pack a Faulkner-ian punch. I went through the poem a few times and was just floored.