Upon Finding A Book Of John Berryman Poems On A Street Corner Manhattan Lower East - A Shabbos Poem

for Gerald & Shirah Kober Zeller

'Lord, lord...why are our finest always dead? ' - Louis Zukovsky

from traffic onto street corner
2nd Ave and St. Marks now here
Berryman is lifted up from a corner
not yet 'spiffied' the works gummed
up literally spit out for years
countless Chicklets spat
2-per-box-a-nickle a lover's
quarrel with the shoe-and-should
what good come of the chewing
masses hurrying home or to ferry
over river/bay to old brick
even the convent on the hill
just up from the undocking
crowd is dark for want of mercy

[...] Read more

poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

from 'Ragas For Krishna

A little boy waking up at dawn, asking his dear mama for an omelet to eat:

'Sleepy Bee, ' she called to him. 'Go, my Sleepy Bee, to the garden and be sure to smell the jasmine there, touch softly the spices in trembling rows, fetch then some chilies of many colors and I will prepare for you a dish as you wish. When the teacher makes you sleepy by noon reach then your fingers to your face, smell the spices there, remember the touch of smooth skinned chilies whispering of lingering liaisons to come, and you will brighten my Sleepy Bee.'

A chili omelet she would make, a side of yogurt to soothe the burn, and milk from the cow drawn before dawn's first udder swelled against the press of distant hills where even the Temple soundly sleeps so very full and pleased with itself. Mother, each morning as he stumbles, rubbing his eyes, into the garden, tells him,

You may shout if you wish to wake

the Temple for the cow cannot speak -

Wake up! Awake! Make haste!

Lord Indra comes! Prepare the wicks,

the incense sticks for His Holy Fire!

Hasten! Hurry! Quicken!

There beside Lord Indra's captured fire in the little grate her Bee awakens watching her slow movements, the slicing of chilies, the removal of seeds, the washing again of plump hands, the cracking of eggs, beating them with the whisk, spreading ghee upon the hot flat stone, the enchantment of liquid whites and yokes becoming firm, becoming food. She turns them in round rhythms as she rhythmically prays.

[...] Read more

poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Beyond Blossoms, For James Wright

.
Old teacher,
consigned
to poems now -
another way
beyond blossoms
of which you
often spoke.

If you were here now I, too, would
speak of horses encountered on a
hill in the south of France, Monthaut,
its ruined church without knees,
sun low over foothills of the Pyrenees -

From shadowed trees downhill
at least 20 of them run to me.
I feel them before they fiercely
appear, hooves tearing dirt
and grass in their ecstatic

[...] Read more

poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

O Mighty Beyond the Chimney Yet Under the Bed - One Address To the Lord After Berryman's 'Eleven' Astutter

for Andrew

'I don't try to reconcile anything' said the poet at eighty,
'This is a damned strange world.' - John Berryman*

I beg (as did Berryman as did
also Job) Do not give up on me
drag me (gently) pull me (tug
tenderly) gather me (dew me
softly cover) do not delay
Shepherding (O Numberless One,
Creator of the Majestic Zero
beyond all counting, that I may
be beyond 'the Ninety and the Nine'**
so) woo me (though a cold bed I
am and make, though human hand
pen/paw at Thee O Mighty beyond
the chimney yet under the bed

[...] Read more

poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Three For Cemetery Statues By The Atlantic, Falmouth, Massachusetts 1977

These three
being of stone
or steel...

Figure 1

An old woman, never married,
speaks among the dunes:

I am the older sister, and ugly.

I watch the sea by the wall,
yearn for each tide's return.

I walk the surf in all weather
and spend myself amidst

the sea wrack screaming
with the tern and the dove.

[...] Read more

poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

From the Encampment Of Heart Strife, A Young Warrior's Journal - Fragments From an 11th Century Japanese Scroll

for Goodfew

'like unto like'
but do not say it
my forbidden simile

one is not immune
to jealous couriers
who would come
between lovers

Rice paper is thin

Tender words never
tear though ink and
tears fade sure
words to guesses

[...] Read more

poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Upon This Wide Water, On Our Broken Boat - Two For Staten Island Ferry, circa 1985 Manhattan

'On the ferry-boats the hundreds and hundreds that cross,
returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose,
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are
more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.'
- Walt Whitman, from 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry'

1

Upon this wide water, Whitman's bay, wandering
outward toward Eastward windings -

Upon this white-starred charted bay we ride
gray with midnight leaning toward the Towers**
distant growing, stalking, yellow and glowing,
mimicing the stars -

Our eyes stare tearing,
seawind pushes lids to slits.
We glimmer. Lights shimmer

[...] Read more

poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

2 Proems from ' 'Now, Heart' - Some Of What I Remember When I Listen

for Willie 'in the pocket' now of earth

A river is a process through time, and the river stages are its momentary parts.
—Willard Van Orman Quine

One [Remembering Chattanooga Days With Willie, Tennessee River Close By]:

One night Willie, much 'in the pocket'—an expression for being well onto drunk which I've never heard from anyone but him—wanted to dance to a Bessie tune playing, 'Back Water Blues', him recalling nights as a young man in rural Tennessee where he had worked hard days in oppressive vegetable fields then hit the after hours juke joints for 'colored, twas parting days, Jim Crow, ' he explained, where he would drink, dance then dive/delve into sensual mysteries of moist skin, hot breath, mutually open mouths, their commodious moans and mumbles, venial hands, always vital parts, private hearts mutually pounding ancient known rhythms, odors, tastes of gin and those slender, forbidden, now greedily stolen bites in those all too short nights with their damned intrusive dawns.

Jumping to his feet, Willie described 'powder dancin'' (pronounced marvelously, 'powdah') which I had never heard of. Talcum powder would be copiously scattered onto the planked dance floor where couples in stockinged or bare feet would ecstatically dance, gliding and sliding sweetly scented, muskily bent toward later glides and slides in slippery joy of momentary allure, amour on dimmed porches or in surrounding woods often enough and gratis upon delicate slabs of moonlight gratuitously dewy providing cushion for Passion's out and in, honoring, dignifying deities of skin wanting more making more skin, headlong Nature's frictional algorithms indelibly scored in every each his her yawing yen.

Two [Paean To Rivers]:

I know that wheat is anciently holy but now even more so for flour, the sight and feel of it, its unbaked smell, turns me again toward a Chattanooga 3rd street, its compass river swelling like bread nearby bearing witness still for one cannot say too much about rivers—their irreverence of edges scored, spilling themselves, proclaiming natural gods deeper than memory yet dependent upon it for traced they must be in every human activity no matter the breech, for something there is to teach even deity though it may be wrong to do so, or hearsay to say it or sing, but the song is there for those whose ears are broken onto bottoms from which cry urgencies of Being and between, dutiful banks barely containing the straining Word.

poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Der Einfall, Remaining Light In Duino

[Beginning with two lines from Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke]

1

'You that fall with the
thud only fruits know, unripe, '
here wait to be shaken.

Here we carry, or ought to, driven so much past
bitter root,

sugar,

not for selves but for the gods to sweeten their too
objective palates

(at least they have tongues/mouths,
we know they have teeth)

to open them into our subjectivity which, secret told, is

[...] Read more

poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!

Where Dispose Of The Joke Of Bones - Minimalist Cryptics Sometimes Metaphysical, circa 1981

.
For two:

Agnes Martin, American artist,
minimalist painter extraordinaire

Elaine Bellezza, artist, too,
and traveler,
and early Anima-as-Fate,
and 'eye giver'

'Is that dance slowing in the mind of man
that made him think the universe could hum? ' - Theodore Roethke

1

off the square
in the darkest cell

[...] Read more

poem by Warren Falcon
Added by Poetry Lover
Comment! | Vote! | Copy!