Ranting Details

"Spinning the trivial and the unique away..."

This is a poem by Delmore Schwartz that my mother left on the kitchen counter today.  I love how well he uses the repetition throughout.  Seems like it could make a cool dance.  Hmmm...

Calmly We Walk Through This April's Day

Calmly we walk through this April's day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn...)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(...that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn...)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
What I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn...)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!
(...that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)
But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn. 

-Delmore Schwartz

My Soul (WHAT?!)

(Random picture of a poster in my friend's house.)

I mentioned in my previous post that I was drawn to a bulletin board containing poetry at the Elementary school a few days ago.  It was interesting to see the similarities in all the poems.  For instance, you could tell they had been guided to include all of the senses, and there were frequent uses of horse, water, fire, and flower imagery.  Yet the way that each child interpreted this was vastly different.  These poems transfixed me, and I think they are absolutely wonderful.  The first was written by a fourth grader, and the second by a third grader!  If only I could get my mind to work like that again! 

My Soul

My soul is a rabbit bouncing up and down
like a scary rollercoaster.
My soul is a cut that won't stop bleeding.
My soul is clock tick, tock, tick, tock.
My soul is a tick on the back of your neck,
Sucking the blood- oh, I love your blood
it's very tasty.  My soul is lava bubbling
and boiling.  My soul is you with a smile
on your face.

My Soul

My soul is like a horse jumping over things
and when it stops its soul leaps really fast every second
when anybody tries to touch the wild horse in my soul
he will try to bite you. 

My soul moves like a dancing girl all night
And she never stops until her feet hurt
But they never hurt because she is really good at it
And she never sleeps at night and she is very poor too
But she lives, she has a little bite of food.

My soul dreams about if I am going to have kids
Or if I am going to have a husband for my kids
Or if I will have a big family.

My soul smells and feels like fresh water
running through my body and my soul feels
like I am spreading my wings out of my back.

My soul has been seen by little creatures
And they crawl inside me when I sleep.
I feel really weird
and when I wake up they crawl out of me. 

Poems

Today has been a long day.  As much as I have been trying to keep my mind off of the events that took place a mere 48-hours ago, I cannot do it.  After I got home from seeing a movie with friends tonight, I picked up a book of poetry that I have by Rainer Maria Rilke.  A few of them struck me as particularly beautiful on this evening.  That is one of the things that I love about poetry, individual poems pop out to me at different times.  I have looked through this book numerous times, and I can't explain why these caught my attention tonight.  I thought I would share them with everyone. 

Lament

Everything is far
and long gone by.
I think that the star
glittering above me
has been dead for a million years.
I think there were tears
in the car I heard pass
and something terrible was said.
A clock has stopped striking in the house
across the road...
When did it start?...
I would like to step out of my heart
and go walking beneath the enormous sky.
I would like to pray.
And surely of all the stars that perished
long ago,
one still exists.
I think that I know
which one it is-
which one, at the end of its beam in the sky,
stands like a white city...

Portrait Of My Father As a Young Man

In the eyes: dream.  The brow as if it could feel
something far off.  Around the lips, a great
freshness-seductive, though there is no smile.
Under the rows of ornamental braid
on the slim Imperial officer's uniform:
the saber's basket-hilt.  Both hands stay
folded upon it, going nowhere, calm
and now almost invisible, as if they
were the first to grasp the distance and dissolve.
And all the rest so curtained with itself,
so cloudy, that I cannot understand
this figure as it fades into the background-.

Oh quickly disappearing photograph
in my more slowly disappearing hand.

Lament

Whom will you cry to, heart? More and more lonely,
your path struggles on through incomprehensible
mankind.  All the more futile perhaps
for keeping to its direction,
keeping on toward the future,
toward what has been lost.

Once.  You lamented?  What was it?  A fallen berry
of jubilation, unripe.
But now the whole tree of my jubilation
is breaking, in the storm it is breaking, my slow
tree of joy.
Loveliest in my invisible
landscape, you that made me more known
to the invisible angels.

Imaginary Career

At first childhood, limitless and free
of any goals.  Ah sweet unconsciousness.
Then sudden terror, schoolrooms, slavery,
the plunge into temptation and deep loss.

Defiance.  The child bent becomes the bender,
inflicts on others what he once went through.
Loved, feared, rescuer, wrestler, victor,
he takes his vengeance, blow by blow.

And now in vast, cold, empty space, alon.
Yet hidden deep within the grown-up heart,
a longing for the first world, the ancient one...

Then, from His place of ambush, God leapt out. 

A Poem Before Bed

In the comments of my last post, the wonderful Angelina mentioned Rainer Maria Rilke, which got me thinking about a poem of his that I think is absolutely gorgeous.  I sent it to a close friend of mine tonight, and decided to share it here.  For some reason I have the feeling I posted this before but I couldn't find it in the archives, so here it is.  As many times as I've read it, I still think it's one of the most gorgeous poems I've ever read.

[You who never arrived]

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you.  I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of the next
moment.  All the immense
images in me- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods -
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.

You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing.  An open window
in a country house-, and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me.  Streets that I chance upon,-
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled gave back
my too-sudden image.  Who knows? perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...

20 Minutes

For some strange reason, this came to me tonight while I was watching Ohad Naharin at BAM.  My mind wandered for a minute and here is where it went.  I'm never one to claim my poetry is anything special, but I tend to share most everything on the Rant.  This one's not about what you would assume...or maybe it is?

Just give me twenty minutes
Without thinking about you.
Please, that’s all I ask. 

You plague me like some
Sick love
That emaciates my body
Only to feed my soul.
It’s odd how I despise you,
Yet I’ve learned to live with
Displeasure before. 

Just give me twenty minutes
To be completely free.
Please, that’s all I ask. 

You consume my mind;
(You’re me)
Obliterating everything
Except my knowledge
of your presence. 
Like an elephant in the room
Without the tension.

Just give me twenty minutes,
And I'll stretch it forever. 
Please, that’s all I ask.