Heap Stones

When creeks are full
The poems flow
When creeks are down
We heap stones.

Poem: Gary Snyder, from the poem "Civilization" found in Regarding Wave, 1967.
Photo: Jennifer Mapes

It's the Languorous Ecstasy...

"The wind on the heath
Abates, holds its breath".
Favart

It's the languorous ecstasy,
It's the lovers' lethargy,
It's the rustling woods: the trees-
Branches, leaves, zephyr-caressed-
It's the dusk's gray-shadowed nest:
Hushed choir brustling in the breeze.

O that fragile rippling, whose
Whispered mutter trills and coos
Like the supple, tender sound
Wafting from the grasses, ruffled...
Or the river's pebbles, muffled,
Tumbling, soft, over the ground.

Ours, that soul lamenting, weeping
In that plaintive murmur, sleeping;
Ours it is, no? spirit twain-
Yours, mine- gently soughed and sighed
Low, this balmy eventide,
In a humble, soft refrain.

Poem: "It's the Languorous Ecstasy..." Paul Verlaine, Ariettes Oubliees, I, 1874.
Photo: Laurel Gagnon

Men of the High North

Men of the High North, the wild sky is blazing;
Islands of opal float on silver seas;
Swift splendors kindle, barbaric, amazing;
Pale ports of amber, golden argosies.
Ringed all around us the proud peaks are glowing;
Fierce chiefs in council, their wigwam the sky;
Far, far below us the big Yukon flowing,
Like threaded quicksilver, gleams to the eye.

Men of the High North, you who have known it;
You in whose hearts its splendors have abode;
Can you renounce it, can you disown it?
Can you forget it, its glory and its goad?
Where is the hardship, where is the pain of it?
Lost in the limbo of things you've forgot;
Only remain the guerdon and gain of it;
Zest of the foray, and God, how you fought!

You who have made good, you foreign faring;
You money magic to far lands has whirled;
Can you forget those days of vast daring,
There with your soul on the Top o' the World?
Nights when no peril could keep you awake on
Spruce boughs you spread for your couch in the snow;
Taste all your feasts like the beans and the bacon
Fried at the camp-fire at forty below?

Can you remember your huskies all going,
Barking with joy and their brushes in air;
You in your parka, glad-eyed and glowing,
Monarch, your subjects the wolf and the bear?
Monarch, your kingdom unravisht and gleaming;
Mountains your throne, and a river your car;
Crash of a bull moose to rouse you from dreaming;
Forest your couch, and your candle a star.

You who this faint day the High North is luring
Unto her vastness, taintlessly sweet;
You who are steel-braced, straight-lipped, enduring,
Dreadless in danger and dire in defeat:
Honor the High North ever and ever,
Whether she crown you, or whether she slay;
Suffer her fury, cherish and love her--
He who would rule he must learn to obey.

Men of the High North, fierce mountains love you;
Proud rivers leap when you ride on their breast.
See, the austere sky, pensive above you,
Dons all her jewels to smile on your rest.
Children of Freedom, scornful of frontiers,
We who are weaklings honor your worth.
Lords of the wilderness, Princes of Pioneers,
Let's have a rouse that will ring round the earth.

Poem: "Men of the High North" Robert Service, from "Ballads of a Cheechako" 1909.

the World's FAIR / The Nimbus

the first strains of
three to get ready
saw the other two go
to sleep because
and me awake from the
multiple conversational bumps
and these sounds Brubeckish
I scribble to definitions
not unlike bullets to the moon
in hopes of irrefutable inanity
and maybe you'll just
kill some unsuspecting
life
and then in the near future
you bite it
makes sense
longsy'allspeakittoo


The Nimbus

To dive for the nimbus on the sea-floor
Or seek it in the sun
Calls for a plucky steeplejack
Scaling the sky's giddy ocean
Or dolphin-hearted journeyman
To swim from the foundered sunburst's roar
With lost treasure on his back.

Ocean that slovens and sidles in vast
Indifference, hides
In its sludge a wreath of drowning bells.
Who in those tricky tides
Or up the slippery daybreak's sides
Can grapple the spices of mornings fast
That waste on the listless swells?

Smothered beneath a lowering ceiling
All cock-crow crispness dies.
Bleary hordes are afraid to wake
Into the mists that rise
From a palsied swamp where a marsh-bird cries.
Stranger, reconquer the source of feeling
For an anxious people's sake.

Plunder the mind's aerial cages
Or the heart's deep catacombs.
O daring's virtuoso, tossed
Where the furious sunlight foams
Or through the instinct's twilit glooms,
Return with the sunburst's glistering pledges
As a garland for the lost.

A bittern rusting in the reeds
Is startled, and through the mist
Whirs screaming. Now, if now only, come
With the nimbus in your fist.
Strike, strike the rust like a rhapsodist
And burnish gold each throat that pleads
For dawn's encomium.

Poem 1: "the World's FAIR" Robert Lescatre
Poem 2: "The Nimbus" Douglas Le Pan
Photo: JG

John Ashbery: Words to Live By

Deer Among Cattle

Here and there in the searing beam
of my hand going through the night meadow
they all are grazing
with pins of human light in their eyes.
A wild one also is eating
the human grass,

slender, graceful, domesticated
by darkness, among the bred-
for-slaughter,

having bounded their paralyzed fence
and inclined his branched forehead onto
their green frosted table,

the only live thing in this flashlight
who can leave whenever he wishes,
turn grass into forest,

foreclose inhuman brightness from his eyes
but stands here still, unperturbed,
in their wide-open country,

the sparks from my hand in his pupils
unmatched anywhere among cattle,

grazing with them the night of the hammer
as one of their own who shall rise.

Poem: "Deer Among Cattle" James Dickey, from his collection "Falling" 1960's
Painting: James Gagnon 41"x 28"