[New-Poetry] 2 poems with dates

[Anny Ballardini]

AARON FOGEL

 

337,000, December, 2000

 

 

1.

 

They are formidable, the wild geese, in their numbers.

They lie down in the rushes and become reeds.

The leaf-shaped facts, in fact, have many shapes.

 

Use reuses itself to become design-

The sketcher's brushstroke determines the count and the light

And how it is absorbed and at what angles.

 

The beak that widened to meet the prey,

The cry a half-tone higher.

 

Literature is an infiltration of the mind

By its stops. The mandarins stopped to wonder on the mountains.

The echo of the chorus broke the sidewalk-

People encumbered benches-vegetation-

No conspiracy controlled the census list

But it was misused

 

A husband and wife argue about Christmas and Chanukah,

They are formidable, the wild geese, even alone

 

Even far from China flying over east coast waves near here

At prodigal speeds alone and just above the water

 

 

2. 

 

You say beyond I say in time beyond

And who knows whether the great painters of the old regime

Were not in fact political monsters?

Composing great annotations together for the wrong side?

 

It is the sieve of words the wild geese flying 

The Luoyang exiles, the six vowels

And a thousand years later the Luoyang fire

 

The six avowals the six false promises the six days of creation the six sicknesses

 

Clogs approach dogs on the yeast white sand

By which we mean the murder of the seals

 

Doctors in nineteenth-century English novels

Approached their jobs according to their authors'

Views as to whether the culture might be healed

There were three quacks for every quail four quails

For every raven and one blind eagle.

 

But they reformed the blind craft and divided

Into pharmacists, no longer peddling their drugs

And the farsighted Oedipus the Cured

 

Some of the leaves were punctured while alive

 

 

3.

 

But here, in the diseased undercount

They thought the word marsupial was witty

Ti Yi failed to laugh at it on the haystack mountain and was banished

For not having a "sense of humor"

As they wrote with careful brushstrokes on the indictment

 

And there were holes and punctures in the paper

Left by the stylus of the people

And that was made a joke and the wild geese crying

Sounded like laughter or mourning to the official Listeners

 

Artful complaint is never as murky as it seems

All are freed by it-a little

And artful compliance never as unforgivable

 

Here is where shells insinuate clouds and mist

Into history

Despite the west wind

They work like scribes glad to be accused of too much

Obedience or obscurity. On the floors and walls they climb like chalk.

The pari-mutuel parodists flatter the roundcheeked

Laughers

Desperate to see themselves as merry

In the mirror they carry around with them.

They are sprung but not freed. They take dictation

>From the cage of comedy.

It defines them.

 

Reformulation gathers the vowels in

As legal reform cannot

 

Summon us with chapters of return

 

 

4. 

 

The cinnabar of banishment

 

The primed mountains are full of filial herbs.

Interns and residents traipse trellises or caves

Taking brief time off when they can to nap:

Each part of the body has its distinctive tiredness.

The heart tires in its own iodine; a feeling different from the weariness

Of the shoulders' gravel and the exhaustion of the differently graveled brain.

 

Each hour of sleep denotes the rest

Of devotion, and is devoted to one of the seven parts,

It was all kabbalah, all the book of the body.

 

Now there are three hundred thirty-seven thousand 

Days in the year, and a year is a dragon's empire,

And time writes down what the single leaves could not.

Promotion equals demotion the denotation of the soul

 

Refining cinnabar in a night furnace

Tinterns and interns glint the inner kiln

They call the court the melting geodesic

Dome the igloo aglow the banished rabbi

Whose reticent political emotions guide the sefer

 

Hedging; the hedges

The cinnabar of banishment

 

 

5.

 

The bird and the leaf who resemble each other

In not staying lastingly on the tree

Are not friends, are unaware of each other.

They inhabit different corners of attention.

 

Their departures are at their own rates, statistically speaking.

They fold into their own collectives or unfold

Wingspans against the humors of each of their worlds.

They have no common reputations except in a language

Different from any here: they unfold in the fog.

 

 

                                               from Pataphysics

 

 

 

JACK COLLOM

 

3-4-00

 

Sundown

at Walden Pond. Redwings

singing, plump Canadas

all around.

 

"Whew!"

say the starlings. Song-sparrow

song breaks into

delicacies I've never heard before.

 

Meadowlark whistling

on pink smear

below three pictures:

pasture, pits and refuge.

 

Sun descending

somewhere south of James.

Hooded merganser

swimming near the far (north) shore.

 

Jet trails

like 'live scars;

something's 

happening up there.

 

Sewage domes as ever

silver the north edge. Long's

peeks over-robin

warble.

 

Plane and glider.

everything turns blue

and I wonder again

who's pushing who?

 

 

                        from Ecopoetics 

 

 

both poems are taken from 

The Best American Poetry 2004

Guest Editor Lyn Hejinian

Series Editor David Lehman

 






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Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! 
Friedrich Nietzsche 
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