[New-Poetry] paris poem

[Anny Ballardini]

A very touching poem, thank you, Anny

On Mon, Nov 24, 2008 at 4:07 PM, opus40-01 at opus40.org
<opus40-01 at opus40.org>wrote:

> This is wonderful.
>
> Original Message:
> -----------------
> From:  jforjames at aol.com
> Date: Mon, 24 Nov 2008 09:25:17 -0500
> To: new-poetry at wiz.cath.vt.edu
> Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] paris poem
>
>
>
> The Red Coal
>
>
> Sometimes I sit in my blue chair trying to remember
> what it was like in the spring of 1950
> before the burning coal entered my life.
>
>
> I study my red hand under the faucet, the left one
> below the grease line consisting of four feminine angels
> and one crooked broken masculine one
>
>
> and the right one lying on top of the white porcelain
> with skin wrinkled up like a chicken's
> beside the razor and the silver tap.
>
>
> I didn't live in Paris for nothing and walk
> with Jack Gilbert down the wide sidewalks
> thinking of Hart Crane and Apollinaire
>
>
> and I didn't save the picture of the two of us
> moving  through a crowd of stiff Frenchmen
> and put it beside the one of Pound and Williams
>
>
> unless I wanted to see what coals had done
> to their lives too. I say it with vast affection,
> wanting desperately to know what the two of them
>
>
> talked about when they lived in Pennsylvania
> and what they talked about at St. Elizabeth's
> fifty years later, looking into the sun,
>
>
> 40,000 wrinkles between them,
> the suffering finally taking over their lives.
> I think of Gilbert all the time now, what
>
>
> we said on our long walks in Pittsburgh, how
> lucky we were to live in New York, how strange
> his great fame was and my obscurity,
>
>
> how we now carry the future with us, knowing
> every small vein and every elaboration.
> The coal has taken over, the red coal
>
>
> is burning between us and we are at its mercy—
> as if a power is finally
> dominating
> the two of us; as if we're huddled up
>
>
> watching the black smoke and the ashes;
> as if knowledge is what we needed and now
> we have that knowledge. Now we have that knowledge.
>
>
> The tears are different—though I hate to speak
> for him—the tears are what we bring back to the
> darkness, what we are left with after our
>
>
> own escape, what, all along, the red coal had
> in store for us as we moved softly,
> either whistling or singing, either listening or reasoning
>
>
> on the gray sidewalks and the green ocean;
> in the cars and the kitchens and the bookstores;
> in the crowded restaurants, in the empty woods and libraries.
>
>
> —Gerald Stern, This Time: New and Selected Poems (Norton, 1998)
>
>
>
>
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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!
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