Yerevan Blues, no.1
life is so short and poetry so long … london underground graffiti, 1992.
And I am so glad there is so much poetry in the world! They say Romantic poetry is cliche in this post-post-post-modern world but I am all for it. When will schools start to teach Lord Byron again? And everything Langston Hughes ever wrote should be required reading as well (though he's a more Romantic Blues poet). I was on a bus in San Francisco sometime in the 1992 or 93 and saw the words "The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator" (that's a title of an Anne Sexton poem by the way, just in case you thought I was being crude) as graffiti on a bus seat. So, in the spirit of sharing what words move us, here are a dozen or so poems I simply L*O*V*E and want the whole world to read. Enjoy!
Czeslaw Milosz's A Song On the End of the World
Jane Hirshfield's This Was Once a Love Poem
Gwendolyn Brooks's We Real Cool
Frank O'Hara's Lana Turner has collapsed!
Aliki Barnstone's Euphoria at Zero
Dylan Thomas' The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
H.D.'s from Helen in Egypt: Eidolon, Book III: #4
Pablo Neruda's The Invisible Man/ El hombre invisible
Amy Gerstler's Hymn to the Neck
Heather McHugh's What He Thought
Wislawa Szymborska's Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem
Charles Bukowski's so you want to be a writer?
Derek Walcott's Love After Love
And speaking of what moves us, I have been working on some memories concerning the capital of Armenia, Yerevan, where I lived for a while as a Peace Corps volunteer. There are three sonnets here, the second I used in my photo project with Katya. I will probably remove that poem from this collectoin and use something else later. Still, I enjoy the poem and want to use it everywhere. Frost and pain, pain and frost and a city that seems to balance between them … it is an interesting thought to ponder where you fit in between these metaphors. These easy metaphors.
I. [Yerevan]
Late morning and the frost
again, I try to explain
just burning off the farm
again, I try to explain
fields, ox at work, the tower
again, I try to explain
of the Fortress, of Metsamor
again, I try to explain
steam clouds from its nuclear
again, I try to explain
reactor and behind all this
again, I try to explain
Ararat rising, filling you
again, I try to explain
cannot imagine something
again, I try to explain
so vast, old stone tsunami
again, I try to explain
in its shadow, Yerevan
again, I try to explain
city without opium, without estuary
again, I try to explain
nights without lights
again, I try to explain
just late morning and the frost
again, I try to explain
not winter, not sleep, just frost***
All the opium Coleridge took for pain/
pain that old dun horse/ Horse at the salt lick/
Lick of brackish winter/ Winter remain
with me here/ Here everything is panic/
Panic remembers out beyond the creek/
Creek bed full of snow/ Snow on my tongue/ Tongue
in your mouth/ Mouth full of words/ Words lovesick
with my craving … Was it craving that flung
winter away? Was it these words that stung?
A wasp on the ice fields? Was it my mouth
winter dread? The glimmer of warmth among
kisses? Or was it panic from the south?
Blizzard bound horse? Was it Coleridge's frost
winter left me for? Winter! I am lost —***
what does ice recall? on the lip
like locusts eating lust
of a shot glass the pockmarked wall
like locusts eating lusts
with curvaceous whorls of cedar
like locusts eating lust
wood hanging incense
like locusts eating lusts
the old men at the Backgammon
like locusts eating lust
board in high summer when
like locusts eating lusts
this was possible: a kiss, torment, all this –***
The view from this apartment, these stanzas,
includes this: all this Yerevan skyline
with its satellite dishes, antennas,
then that outlandish moisture, all alpine
purple, that causes the great mountain, shrine
to the ark, to loom over everything.
The old man next to me says how divine
it is. What? The dead, praise God, returning
to Mount Ararat. I'm not sure. Smoking
purple rises up, a myth, from the peak's
base. All day Turkish troops looting, burning
Kurdish camps and so much of this myth speaks
of ghosts trying to return to fortune
denied; a land, a people, a mountain.***
– like locusts eating lust
all the crumpled sheets belong
like locusts eating lusts
somewhere else, arching hips, fluent
like locusts eating lust
ribs, the one dark nipple
like locusts eating lusts
my finger recalls.***
Pity the poor memory. An anger
now lost in shadows or words, frustrations,
that fail to guess our needs. Why is pleasure
so hard to find? The tale of the daughter
who bleeds herself to suffer her passion's
zest? — that is me, too. And this zest? like ants
swarming our blood, odd honey of romance.
Nothing but strips of memory, ribbons
of words and you say you're hungry, you reach
out to touch. What did you expect? fever
amok with obscenity? Your body
recalling; the way skin calls for the leech,
the kiss of its teeth, new scars, a pleasure
now lost. Is that me? Yes, that is me.