Two Poems for 2/28/23 - A Certain Slant of Sunlight by Ted Berrigan and There's a Certain Slant of Light by Emily Dickinson

A Certain Slant of Sunlight

Ted Berrigan - 1934-1983

In Africa the wine is cheap, and it is
on St. Mark’s Place too, beneath a white moon.
I’ll go there tomorrow, dark bulk hooded
against what is hurled down at me in my no hat
which is weather: the tall pretty girl in the print dress
under the fur collar of her cloth coat will be standing
by the wire fence where the wild flowers grow not too tall
her eyes will be deep brown and her hair styled 1941 American
      will be too; but
I’ll be shattered by then
But now I’m not and can also picture white clouds
impossibly high in blue sky over small boy heartbroken
to be dressed in black knickers, black coat, white shirt,
      buster-brown collar, flowing black bow-tie
her hand lightly fallen on his shoulder, faded sunlight falling
across the picture, mother & son, 33 & 7, First Communion Day, 1941—
I’ll go out for a drink with one of my demons tonight
they are dry in Colorado 1980 spring snow. 

There's a certain Slant of light, (320)
BY EMILY DICKINSON
There's a certain Slant of light,
Winter Afternoons –
That oppresses, like the Heft
Of Cathedral Tunes –

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us –
We can find no scar,
But internal difference –
Where the Meanings, are –

None may teach it – Any –
'Tis the seal Despair –
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the Air –

When it comes, the Landscape listens –
Shadows – hold their breath –
When it goes, 'tis like the Distance
On the look of Death –

Poem for 2/27/23 - FREDERICK DOUGLASS by Robert Hayden

From Betsy Aron, who recommended this poem: 

Robert Hayden (1913-1980) - born in Detroit, taught at Fisk, his 1963 collection A Ballad of Remembrance received the Grand Prize at the World Festival of Negro Arts. He called his work “a form of prayer—prayer of illumination, perfection.”

FREDERICK DOUGLASS (listen to Robert Hayden discuss and read this poem here)

Robert Hayden

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful

and terrible thing, needful to man as air,   

usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,   

when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,   

reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more   

than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:   

this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro   

beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world   

where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,   

this man, superb in love and logic, this man   

shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,   

not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,

but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives   

fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.

Poem for 2/23/23 - Two Poems by Marge Piercy

Two Poems by Marge Piercy
 

Erasure

Falling out of love

is a rusty chain going quickly through a winch.

It hurts more than you will remember.

It costs a pint of blood turned grey 

and burning out a few high paths 

among the glittering synapses of the brain, 

a few stars fading out at once in the galaxy, 

a configuration gone

imagination called a lion or a dragon or a sunburst 

that would photograph more like a blurry mouse.

When falling out of love is correcting vision 

light grates on the eyes

light files the optic nerve hot and raw.

To find you have loved a coward and a fool 

is to give up the lion, the dragon, the sunburst 

and take away your hands covered with small festering bites 

and let the mouse go in a grey blur 

into the baseboard.

The Morning Half-Life Blues

Girls buck the wind in the grooves toward work
in fuzzy coats promised to be warm as fur.
The shop windows snicker
flashing them hurrying over dresses they cannot afford:
you are not pretty enough, not pretty enough.

Blown with yesterday’s papers through the boiled coffee morning
we dream of the stop on the subway without a name,
the door in the heart of the grove of skyscrapers,
that garden where we nestle to the teats of a furry world,
lie in mounds of peony eating grapes,
and need barter ourselves for nothing.
not by the hour, not by the pound, not by the skinful,
that party to which no one will give or sell us the key
though we have all thought briefly we found it
drunk or in bed.

Black girls with thin legs and high necks stalking like herons,
plump girls with blue legs and green eyelids and
strawberry breasts,
swept off to be frozen in fluorescent cubes,
the vacuum of your jobs sucks your brains dry
and fills you with the ooze of melted comics.
Living is later. This is your rented death.
You grasp at hard commodities and vague lusts
to make up, to pay for each day
which opens like a can and is empty, and then another,
afternoons like dinosaur eggs stuffed with glue.

Girls of the dirty morning, ticketed and spent,
you will be less at forty than at twenty.
Your living is a waste product of somebody’s mill.
I would fix you like buds to a city where people work
to make and do things necessary and good,
where work is real as bread and babies and trees in parks
where we would all blossom slowly and ripen to sound fruit.

Poem for 2/22/23 - O Captain! My Captain! BY WALT WHITMAN

I read this poem two years ago for Presidents Day, 2021 -- given that I did not add it to the blog at that point, I thought I would reprise it.

O Captain! My Captain!

BY WALT WHITMAN

O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,

The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,

The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,

While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;

                         But O heart! heart! heart!

                            O the bleeding drops of red,

                               Where on the deck my Captain lies,

                                  Fallen cold and dead.

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;

Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,

For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding,

For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;

                         Here Captain! dear father!

                            This arm beneath your head!

                               It is some dream that on the deck,

                                 You’ve fallen cold and dead.

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,

My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,

The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,

From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;

                         Exult O shores, and ring O bells!

                            But I with mournful tread,

                               Walk the deck my Captain lies,

                                  Fallen cold and dead.

n/a

Source: Leaves of Grass (David McKay, 1891)

Poems for 2/21/23 - Two Poems by Langston Hughes

 

Two Poems by Langston Hughes

New Yorkers

    I was born here,
    that's no lie, he said,
    right here beneath God's sky.

    I wasn't born here, she said,
    I come--and why?  
    Where I come from
    folks work hard
    all there lives
    until they die
    and never own no parts
    of earth nor sky
    So I come up here.
    Now what've I got?
        You!

    She lifted up her lips
    in the dark:
    The same old spark!

Movies

    The Roosevelt, Renaissance, Gem, Alhambra:
    Harlem laughing in all the wrong places
        at the crocodile tears
        of crocodile art
        that you know
        in your heart
        is crocodile:

            (Hollywood
            laughs at me,   
            black--
            so I laught
            back.)

Barbed and Fastidious... - Russian words for 2/21/23

Barbed and Fastidious...

Но прежде нежели мы скажем, кто таков был поручик Пирогов, не мешает кое-что рассказать о том обществе, к которому принадлежал Пирогов. Есть офицеры, составляющие в Петербурге какой-то средний класс общества. ... В высшем классе они попадаются очень редко или, лучше сказать, никогда. Оттуда они совершенно вытеснены тем, что называют в этом обществе аристократами; впрочем, они считаются учеными и воспитанными людьми. Они любят потолковать об литературе; хвалят Булгарина, Пушкина и Греча и говорят с презрением и остроумными колкостями об А. А. Орлове. Они не пропускают ни одной публичной лекции, будь она о бухгалтерии или даже о лесоводстве. В театре, какая бы ни была пьеса, вы всегда найдете одного из них, выключая разве если уже играются какие-нибудь «Филатки», которыми очень оскорбляется их разборчивый вкус.

But before we tell who this Lieutenant Pirogov was, it will do no harm if we say a thing or two about the society to which Pirogov belonged. There are officers in Petersburg who constitute a sort of middle class in society. ...  Among the upper classes, they occur very rarely, or, better to say, never. They are forced out altogether by what this society calls aristocrats; however, they are considered educated and well-bred people. They like talking about literature; they praise Bulgarin, Pushkin, and Grech, and speak with contempt and barbed wit of A. A. Orlov. They never miss a single public lecture, be it on accounting or even on forestry. In the theater, whatever the play, you will always find one of them, unless they are playing some Filatkas, which are highly insulting to their fastidious taste. 

КО́ЛКОСТЬ - barb, jibe dig, quip - note that Pevear and Volkhonsky turn the noun into a adjective--literally it would be "contemptuous and witty barbs"

разборчивый - legible or clear, but also fastidious, choosy, discriminating, or finicky

What an artist can do with opium... (Russian Word for 2/17)

Tasya Kidart, see more here

What an artist can do with opium...

This passage comes after Piskarev obtains opium from his Persian friend, hoping to find his way back into sleep and dreams of his beloved...

    Пискарев рассказал ему про свою бессонницу.    — Хорошо, я дам тебе опиуму, только нарисуй мне красавицу. Чтоб хорошая была красавица! чтобы брови были черные и очи большие, как маслины; а я сама чтобы лежала возле нее и курила трубку! слышишь? чтобы хорошая была! чтобы была красавица!---    Пришедши домой, он отлил несколько капель в стакан с водою и, проглотив, завалился спать.    Боже, какая радость! Она! опять она! но уже совершенно в другом виде. О, как хорошо сидит она у окна деревенского светлого домика! наряд ее дышит такою простотою, в какую только облекается мысль поэта.

    Piskarev told [his Persian friend] about his insomnia. “Very well, I give you opium, only paint me a beauty. Must be a fine beauty! Must be with black eyebrows and eyes big as olives; and me lying beside her smoking my pipe! Do you hear? Must be a fine one! a beauty!”

---    On coming home, he poured a few drops into a glass of water and, having swallowed it, dropped off to sleep.      God, what joy! It's she! She again! but now with a completely different look! Oh, how nicely she sits by the window of a bright Country house! Her dress breathes such simplicity as only a poet’s thought is clothed in.  (Pevear and Volkhonsky, p. 263)
облекаться - ahbliKAt'sia - to put on, to take the appearance, to assume the form of... 
The opium restores his beloved to him, but in an even more idealized, unrealistic form--further and further from the real woman and closer to a poetic figment, the image of a beauty that his Persian friend demands as for as payment for the opium (and which he will never receive)...