More Poetry
Sep. 27th, 2006 04:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormIt's fascinating how so few poems feel like they apply to me lately, but still are very lovely and feel good to read. Usually I like them to have some sort of a ring that echoes my situation, but I think my current situation is too comfortable for most people to like poetry written about it. It would need to be something strongly imagist, about apples and sunshine and cats and someone cooking dinner in the background, or the way the house feels when you wake up at 3am, still clothed and tangled with someone you love, and switch the laundry and turn out the lights before crawling properly into bed for the rest of the night. Maybe something about weekend mornings, too, walking hand-in-hand through clear sunlight like cool water and drifts of leaves on the way to the corner store to get coffee and a custard tart; sometimes there are girls playing badminton in the brick plaza in the park.
Greatpoets is producing, but none like that. Here's one that resonates a little:
IX
from Twenty-One Love Poems
Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live
I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.
It's not my own face I see there, but other faces,
even your face at another age.
Whatever's lost there is needed by both of us—
a watch of old gold, a water-blurred fever chart,
a key . . . . Even the silt and pebbles of the bottom
deserve their glint of recognition. I fear this silence,
this inarticulate life. I'm waiting
for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water
for once, and show me what I can do
for you, who have often made the unnameable
nameable for others, even for me.
-Adrienne Rich
This one is so evocative of nostalgia that I'm not sure if I've been here, or if the poem just makes me feel like I remember it.
On The Table
I would like to make it clear that I have bought
this tablecloth with its simple repeating pattern
of dark purple blooms not named by any botanist
because it reminds me of that printed dress you had
the summer we met - a dress you have always said
I never told you I liked. Well I did, you know. I did.
I liked it a lot, whether you were inside it or not.
How did it slip so quietly out of our life?
I hate - I really hate - to think of some other bum
swinging those heavy flower-heads left to right.
I hate even more to think of it mouldering on a tip
or torn to shreds - a piece here wiping a dipstick,
a piece there tied round a crack in a lead pipe.
It's all a long time ago now, darling, a long time,
but tonight just like our first night here I am
with my head light in my hands and my glass full,
staring at the big drowsy petals until they start to swim,
loving them but wishing to lift them aside, unbutton them,
tear them, even, if that's what it takes to get through
to the beautiful, moon-white, warm wanting skin of you.
-Andrew Motion
Greatpoets is producing, but none like that. Here's one that resonates a little:
IX
from Twenty-One Love Poems
Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live
I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.
It's not my own face I see there, but other faces,
even your face at another age.
Whatever's lost there is needed by both of us—
a watch of old gold, a water-blurred fever chart,
a key . . . . Even the silt and pebbles of the bottom
deserve their glint of recognition. I fear this silence,
this inarticulate life. I'm waiting
for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water
for once, and show me what I can do
for you, who have often made the unnameable
nameable for others, even for me.
-Adrienne Rich
This one is so evocative of nostalgia that I'm not sure if I've been here, or if the poem just makes me feel like I remember it.
On The Table
I would like to make it clear that I have bought
this tablecloth with its simple repeating pattern
of dark purple blooms not named by any botanist
because it reminds me of that printed dress you had
the summer we met - a dress you have always said
I never told you I liked. Well I did, you know. I did.
I liked it a lot, whether you were inside it or not.
How did it slip so quietly out of our life?
I hate - I really hate - to think of some other bum
swinging those heavy flower-heads left to right.
I hate even more to think of it mouldering on a tip
or torn to shreds - a piece here wiping a dipstick,
a piece there tied round a crack in a lead pipe.
It's all a long time ago now, darling, a long time,
but tonight just like our first night here I am
with my head light in my hands and my glass full,
staring at the big drowsy petals until they start to swim,
loving them but wishing to lift them aside, unbutton them,
tear them, even, if that's what it takes to get through
to the beautiful, moon-white, warm wanting skin of you.
-Andrew Motion
