"A Bonus" by Elizabeth Smart

 

Elizabeth Smart

That day i finished
A small piece
For an obscure magazine
I popped it in the box

And such a starry elation
Came over me
That I got whistled at in the street
For the first time in a long time.

I was dirty and roughly dressed
And had circles under my eyes
And far far from flirtation
But so full of completion
Of a deed duly done
An act of consummation
That the freedom and force it engendered
Shone and spun
Out of my old raincoat.

It must have looked like love
Or a fabulous free holiday
To the young men sauntering
Down Berwick Street.
I still think this is most mysterious
For while I was writing it
It was gritty it felt like self-abuse
Constipation, desperately unsocial.
But done done done
Everything in the world
Flowed back
Like a huge bonus.

"Clenched Soul" by Pablo Neruda

 

We have lost even this twilight.
No one saw us this evening hand in hand
while the blue night dropped on the world.
I have seen from my window
the fiesta of sunset in the distant mountain tops.
Sometimes a piece of sun
burned like a coin in my hand.
I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.
Where were you then?
Who else was there?
Saying what?
Why will the whole of love come on me suddenly
when I am sad and feel you are far away?
The book fell that always closed at twilight
and my blue sweater rolled like a hurt dog at my feet.
Always, always you recede through the evenings
toward the twilight erasing statues.

"September 1913" by W.B. Yeats

 

What need you, being come to sense,

But fumble in a greasy till

And add the halfpence to the pence

And prayer to shivering prayer, until

You have dried the marrow from the bone;

For men were born to pray and save:

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind,

The names that stilled your childish play,

They have gone about the world like wind,

But little time had they to pray

For whom the hangman’s rope was spun,

And what, God help us, could they save?

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread

The grey wing upon every tide;

For this that all that blood was shed,

For this Edward Fitzgerald died,

And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,

All that delirium of the brave?

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,

It’s with O’Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,

And call those exiles as they were

In all their loneliness and pain,

You’d cry, ‘Some woman’s yellow hair

Has maddened every mother’s son’:

They weighed so lightly what they gave.

But let them be, they’re dead and gone,

They’re with O’Leary in the grave.

Psyche's Night Journey, July 2018

 

2012

1.

 

From the bottom of a garbage can in the kitchen

honeybees fly out as a great black cloud,

I ran to the living room and then closed myself in the sun porch.

A dog, with a black face, joined me.

“They stung my face,” he complains.

Others join us and somehow we get rid of the bees.

Meanwhile, someone is sitting on the stairs outside by a pool in the garden.

  

2.

 

There are three of us sky diving,

holding hands forming a circle.

We are not falling, instead

we are ascending the sky.

As we rise higher, the physical body  

feels not only healed, but ecstatic

in freedom from earth and an aging body:

I did not want to return to the life

I am living, I did not want to return

to the old life. I weep as I feel the joy of freedom.

 

3.

 

Former Prime Minister Chretien tells me

he’ll do what he can for us

to hang onto the building,

but there are other people who want it.

Also he wants me to lose weight, improve my health.

 

4.

 

In a basement, flooded with two or three feet of water,

big shits like loaves of bread

float in the water and I try to break them into slices

with a paddle so that when my wife arrives,

walking in the water, she won’t step on the shit.

I try to stuff the shit down a drain

 

5.

 

My son tells me he wants me as a “friend”.

I reply, “I am your father, not a friend;

a father is better; I love you as a father,

a friend is less than a father.”

  

6.

 

The key is broken to the old Volkswagen,

but it still starts the car. Returning home,

the car’s gear shift comes off in my hand and trying to repair it,

I crawl into the car’s body and discover the car is a wooden vessel,

a web of slats covered with plywood, almost paper thin

for lightness. I arrive at Oxford Avenue where I grew up;

at the front door a man’s corpse covered with a white sheet

sits in an upright position. When I return that evening he is gone

and I am relieved: But who was this corpse?

Someone I have forgotten or never knew,

the white sheet a shroud, like a body

found in the frozen north—one of Franklin’s crew—

preserved by the cold, lips pulled back in the permanent

grin of the dead, like a wolf’s bared yellow teeth.

 

7. Five Black Horses

 

It was a demonstration of something, the severed

horse’s head on a chair and the four black horses

standing facing the audience. Behind the middle horse

a man took a hammer and drove a bolt

into the horse’s neck; at first, the horse stood as before,

we were all calm, including the horses,

and then the animal fell to the floor.

The others were to follow.

 

8.

 

I am told my father has just died.

He was alive all the years

I thought he was dead.

For fifty years I grieved

and regretted his death.

Now, again, I have missed him.

 

9.

 

A cat has been a nuisance,

the landlord next door is dealing with it.

He has a big knife and has cut off the cat’s paws,

and then cut further up the leg.

Someone holds the cat for him.

He may even have skinned the cat,

and planned to keep it alive to suffer.

We are in his car and I am pleading with him

to kill the cat, pleading kill the cat, end his suffering.

His daughter is also pleading with him to kill the cat,

“Daddy, please kill the cat. Please, please kill the cat.”

 

10.

 

I am walking along a street of ice and snow.

I stop and pay for a newspaper with tokens from the casino.

Then I am in a dentist’s office full of Americans,

all smiling and young, each in a separate cubicle.

The dentists in their white jackets

are all eager to work, they ignore  

a small black dog trying to get into the building.

I open a door for the dog and a stag is there,

I try to hold him back, but he’s large

and incredibly strong as he breaks through the door.

Now he’s in the building, in the hallway, in the room.

 

11.

 

A man is trying to get into a house

through an attic window,

the attic full of old furniture,

paintings, books, and old cardboard boxes

with writing in black felt pen on them.

Two children run down the stairs

to escape this man standing on a ladder

at the attic window. Outside, in a barren field,

 two other men lean over a dead animal,

behind them are cattle they killed

covered with six inches of soil;

“oh no,” they say when a grey horse,

they thought dead, rises up on its front legs.

 

"The Hunter" by William Carlos Williams

In the flashes and black shadows
of July
the days, locked in each other's arms,
seem still
so that squirrels and colored birds
go about at ease over
the branches and through the air.

Where will a shoulder split or
a forehead open and victory be?

Nowhere.
Both sides grow older.

And you may be sure
not one leaf will lift itself
from the ground
and become fast to a twig again.

“Fishing on the Susquehanna in July” by Billy Collins

 

Vancouver, 2010

I have never been fishing on the Susquehanna

or on any river for that matter

to be perfectly honest.

Not in July or any month

have I had the pleasure—if it is a pleasure—

of fishing on the Susquehanna.

I am more likely to be found

in a quiet room like this one—

a painting of a woman on the wall,

a bowl of tangerines on the table—

trying to manufacture the sensation

of fishing on the Susquehanna.

There is little doubt

that others have been fishing

on the Susquehanna,

rowing upstream in a wooden boat,

sliding the oars under the water

then raising them to drip in the light.

But the nearest I have ever come to

fishing on the Susquehanna

was one afternoon in a museum in Philadelphia

when I balanced a little egg of time

in front of a painting

in which that river curled around a bend

under a blue cloud-ruffled sky,

dense trees along the banks,

and a fellow with a red bandanna

sitting in a small, green

flat-bottom boat

holding the thin whip of a pole.

That is something I am unlikely

ever to do, I remember

saying to myself and the person next to me.

Then I blinked and moved on

to other American scenes

of haystacks, water whitening over rocks,

even one of a brown hare

who seemed so wired with alertness

I imagined him springing right out of the frame.

Copyright © 1998 by Billy Collins

"I taught myself to live simply" by Anna Akhmatova

 

2022

I taught myself to live simply and wisely,
to look at the sky and pray to God,
and to wander long before evening
to tire my superfluous worries.
When the burdocks rustle in the ravine
and the yellow-red rowanberry cluster droops
I compose happy verses
about life's decay, decay and beauty.
I come back. The fluffy cat
licks my palm, purrs so sweetly
and the fire flares bright
on the saw-mill turret by the lake.
Only the cry of a stork landing on the roof
occasionally breaks the silence.
If you knock on my door
I may not even hear.

"Answer July" by Emily Dickinson

Answer July—
Where is the Bee—
Where is the Blush—
Where is the Hay?

Ah, said July—
Where is the Seed—
Where is the Bud—
Where is the May—
Answer Thee—Me—

Nay—said the May—
Show me the Snow—
Show me the Bells—
Show me the Jay!

Quibbled the Jay—
Where be the Maize—
Where be the Haze—
Where be the Bur?
Here—said the Year—