Writings

Akiba

Originally published in The Speed of Darkness (1968) THE WAY OUT The night is covered with signs. The body and face of man, with signs, and his journeys. Where the rock is split and speaks to the water; the flame speaks to the cloud; the red splatter, abstraction, on the door speaks to the angel and the constellations. The grains of sand on the sea-floor speak at last to the noon. And the loud hammering of the land behind speaks ringing up the bones of our thighs, the hoofs, we hear the hoofs over the seethe of the sea. All [...]

2018-12-07T19:38:30+00:00December 7, 2018|Long Poetry, Writings|0 Comments

Desdichada

Originally published in Breaking Open (1973) 1 For that you never acknowledged me, I acknowledge the spring's yellow detail, the every drop of rain, the anonymous unacknowledged men and women. The shine as it glitters in our child's wild eyes, one o'clock at night. This river, this city, the years of the shadow on the delicate skin of my hand, moving in time. Disinherited, annulled, finally disacknowledged and all of my own asking. I keep that wild dimension of life and making and the spasm upon my mouth as I say this word of acknowledge to you forever. Ewig. Two [...]

2018-12-07T19:37:04+00:00December 7, 2018|Poetry, Writings|0 Comments

Excerpt of Savage Coast

CHAPTER THREE At the frontier getting down, at railhead drinking hot tea waiting for pack-mules, at the box with three levers watching the swallows ... The fatty smell of drying clothes, smell of cordite in a wood, and the new moon seen along the barrel of a gun. —W.H. Auden GENERAL STRIKE. The words at the end of a poem, the slogan shouted, the headline for gray industrial scenes, waterfront blue-gray, the black even in the air over mines, the dark sidewalks before factories, covered with lines of gray parading people. Words printed, painted out, broadcast in handbills. Not like [...]

2018-12-07T19:34:07+00:00December 7, 2018|Prose, Writings|0 Comments

The Return

An Idea ran about the world screaming with the pain of the mind until it met a child who stopped it with a word. The Idea leaned over those newborn eyes and dreamed of the nature of things: the nature of memory and the nature of love; and forgave itself and all men. Quieted in a sea of sleeping the Idea began its long return-- renewed by the child's sea-colored eyes remembered the flesh, smiled and said: I see birds, spring and the birthplace unknown by the stable stone. I know light and I know motion and I remember I [...]

2023-09-04T19:58:28+00:00December 7, 2018|Poetry, Writings|1 Comment

Ajanta

Originally published in Beast in View (1944) 1 THE JOURNEY Came in my full youth to the midnight cave Nerves ringing; and this thing I did alone. Wanting my fullness and not a field of war, For the world considered annihilation, a star Called Wormwood rose and flickered, shattering Bent light over the dead boiling up in the ground. The biting yellow of their corrupted lives Streaming to war, denying all our words. Nothing was left among the tainted weather But world-walking and shadowless Ajanta. Hallucination and the metal laugh In clouds, and the mountain-spectre riding storm. Nothing was certain [...]

2018-12-28T00:36:25+00:00December 7, 2018|Long Poetry, Writings|0 Comments

Letter, Unposted

"My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?" James Joyce If I could write : Summer waits your coming, the flowers are colored, but half-alive and weak, earth sickens, as I sicken, with waiting, and the clouds print on the dull moon a dark and blotting streak. If I could write : no energy is kinetic, storm breaks nor foot falls until you arrive, the trees thrive, but no fruit is born to hang heavily : and the stale wind continues to drive all pausing summer before it into the distance from which you, shining, will [...]

2018-12-07T19:26:52+00:00December 7, 2018|Poetry, Writings|0 Comments

Despisals

Originally published in Breaking Open (1973) In the human cities, never again to despise the backside of the city, the ghetto, or build it again as we build the despised backsides of houses.Look at your own building. You are the city. Among our secrecies, not to despise our Jews (that is, ourselves) or our darkness, our blacks, or in our sexualitywherever it takes us and we now know we are productive too productive, too reproductive for our present invention - never to despise the homosexual who goes building another with touchwith touch(not to despise any touch) each like himself, like [...]

2018-12-07T19:25:49+00:00December 7, 2018|Poetry, Writings|0 Comments

The Speed of Darkness

Originally published in The Speed of Darkness (1968) 1 Whoever despises the clitoris despises the penis Whoever despises the penis despises the cunt Whoever despises the cunt despises the life of the child. Resurrection music,silence,and surf. 2 No longer speaking Listening with the whole body And with every drop of blood Overtaken by silence But this same silence is become speech With the speed of darkness. 3 Stilness during war, the lake. The unmoving spruces. Glints over the water. Faces, voices.You are far away. A tree that trembles. I am the tree that trembles and trembles. 4 After the lifting [...]

2019-01-11T10:44:25+00:00December 7, 2018|Poetry, Writings|0 Comments
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