Subud Life

Poetry Corner - poem

benito - Feb 16, 2007 - 09:13 AM
Post subject: poem

Hello
my
name
is
Elias,
not
Benito
anymore....but...i...have.a.poem.
For the birthday letters…

I was recommended this book,
Last work, much-celebrated
Obituary for a wreck
Some gone storm had took
To beach only now, (excavated)-
Its salt stains the pages.
How did you write it?
This was no iron-man, non-fiction,
It landed.
A rendered backward
Look, its lit glance shines
Flashes from grown-old eyes.
A page
Shroud- white, silent, reclines
It is not her ghost. But
At the hover
And press of the nib of a pen-
Her blood rushes in. It

Gasps and seethes a cry: the zoetrope spin
Of her treads flash from your eyes

To play an echo of her steps. She lives.

Embers ash in footfalls, within
The prints of feet,
Cooling into words:
Charcoal, formal traces.

I read,
You wrote: In pity or sin
Cutting stills
From a current of places
The circling motion pictures’ busy
Ill-lit dark or candid kisses
Light a gift of singing glances:
Strange wreath-creels, bearing fishes.

Apart I watch the shadow dance
Of the dangerous tripping carousel
Some would call science. Tender,
Candid, elegaic, fond, bleak and fell.
A molten crush of impressions stream
A crying shame to tell.
A wife, a mother.
The turn of her story shrieks or exhales
A mist, now heavy cloud.
Later you died.
Sylvia found.

Through the clotted gangways
Of a dam-stalled river, she
Bursts tears out her distanced eye
To the pen.

But words are crumbs,
Dumb
Dust
Like unwritten letters
Too late to send. Ted
Shook them off,

I pick them up.
Trouble is
They crush to touch.

benito - Feb 17, 2007 - 08:31 AM
Post subject: Stanley Kunitz: 'Touch Me'- Love this poem...

Very beautiful poem. Kunitz lived to 100+ I think...

It needs sharing.

Touch Me
by Stanley J. Kunitz

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late,
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

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