• You are currently viewing our forum as a guest, which gives you limited access to view most discussions and access our other features. By joining our free community, you will have access to additional post topics, communicate privately with other members (PM), view blogs, respond to polls, upload content, and access many other special features. Registration is fast, simple and absolutely free, so please join our community today! Just click here to register. You should turn your Ad Blocker off for this site or certain features may not work properly. If you have any problems with the registration process or your account login, please contact us by clicking here.

Wikileaks and Poetry

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Last night anonymous hacked two poems by the same poet. I can't decide which one to publish so here are both of them -

The Power

Forget all of that end-of-the-pier
palm-reading stuff. Picture a seaside town
in your head. Start from its salt-wrack-rotten smells
and raise the lid of the world to change the light,
then go as far as you want: the ornament
of a promenade, the brilliant greys of gulls,
the weak grip of a crane in the arcades
you've built, ballrooms to come alive at night,
then a million-starling roost, an opulent
crumbling like cake icing ...
Now, bring it down
in the kind of fire that flows along ceilings,
that knows the spectral blues; that always starts
in donut fryers or boardwalk kindling
in the dead hour before dawn, that leaves pilings
marooned by mindless tides, that sends a plume
of black smoke high enough to stain the halls
of clouds. Now look around your tiny room
and tell me that you haven't got the power.

and -

The Milk Nostalgia Industries

When they send the fleet of floats into the dawn
you know they're trading in covert nostalgia.
When the empties tinkle and the motor strains
you know it's more than milk delivery.
The clean, reflective words parlour and dairy
can be squeezed for something far more nourishing.
Parlour in particular can yield
Jane Austen sitting on a milking stool
with a natty teat technique; that and a pail
each jet rings into, soft lit, in an English field.

And dairy draws on road maps' blank regions,
where sewage works and abattoirs and stud farms
exist as in original outlines
drawn up in Milk Nostalgia Head Office.
They say that down its corridors are rooms
where every bottled note left out is filed
before joining the archives underground.
Remember when we took the audio tour
to look upon this great, lost literature
writ in last-thing-at-night's forgotten hand?

Ah, the tour. The very milk of homesickness
was handed to us in warm tetra-paks,
and we felt our headphones fill with the white hiss
of the world speeding up. The milk turned black
as bull's blood, but before we reached the end
each saw their own arcades and galleries:
my father was down there, blowing on the skin
of boiling milk to calm its head of steam,
and my mother carrying a glass lit from within
to bed. And then the gift shop, full of cheese.

- Paul Farley.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Forgetting the bacon, the poet came home with -

A Bowl of Spaghetti

"To find a connectome, or the mental makeup of a person,"
researchers experimented with the neurons of a worm

then upgraded to mouse hoping
"to unravel the millions of miles of wire in the [human] brain"

that they liken to "untangling a bowl of spaghetti"

of which I have an old photo: Rei in her high chair delicately
picking out each strand to mash in her mouth.

Was she two? Was that sailor dress from Mother?
Did I cook from scratch? If so, there was a carrot in the sauce

as Mother instructed and I'll never forget
since some strand determines infatuation as a daughter's fate.

- Kimiko Hahn.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Sent by our mole last night and posted today for you -

My Love, Don't Believe

My love, don't believe that today
the planet travels on another orbit,
it is the same journey between old
pale stations,
there is always a sparrow flitting
in the flowerbeds
a thought grown stubborn in the mind.
Time turns on the face of the clock, it joins
a trace of fog above the pine trees
the world veers into the regions of cold.
Here are the crumbs on the earth,
the embers in the fireplace,
the wings,
the low and busy hands.

(From the Italian of Bartolo Cattafi)

- Dana Gioia.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Sent last night and posted today -

Baltimore

In other noises, I hear my children crying—
in older children playing on the street
past bedtime, their voices buoyant
in the staggered light; or in the baby
next door, wakeful and petulant
through too-thin walls; or in the constant
freakish pitch of Westside Baltimore
on The Wire, its sirens and rapid gunfire,
its beleaguered cops haranguing kids
as young as six for propping up
the dealers on the corners, their swagger
and spitfire speech; or in the white space
between radio stations when no voice
comes at all and the crackling static
might be swallowing whole a child's
slim call for help; even in silence itself,
its material loops and folds enveloping
a ghost cry, one I've made up, but heard,
that has me climbing the stairs, pausing
in the hall, listening, listening hard,
to—at most—rhythmical breathing
but more often than not to nothing, the air
of the landing thick with something missed,
dust motes, the overhang of blankets, a ship
on the Lough through the window, infant sleep.

- Sinéad Morrissey.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Hoist last night and hosted today -

Half-Life: Pittsylvania County, Virginia

CHATHAM, VA., JANUARY 2, 2008—Underneath a plot of farmland used
to raise cattle, hay, and timber in south-central Virginia lies what is thought
to be the largest deposit of uranium in the United States.
Uranium was discovered by eighteenth-century chemist Martin Heinrich
Klaproth, who called it "a strange kind of half-metal" and named it in part
for the recently discovered seventh planet, Uranus, one of the so-called
"ice giants."


That some slow, cold distant planet formed
with a core of ice and stone and named
for the embodiment of sky and heaven
should have anything to do with it seemed wrong—
given its rumored rise from pitchblende to the surface
of fields and pastures, its dissolve into the wells
dug and the ponds made for the animals,
or its decay into the brief, more deadly
daughters—an old explosion's persistent, widening
wake—and now even more wrong given its ungodly
worth to the men who had already sold
the rights to it, ignorant of the worse cost
of confusing what chooses us with what we choose,
the near-infinite half-life of remains.

•

And the worry that cancer simply ran
in families had been replaced by suspicion
of a greater cause: the massive vein
of uranium found just a few miles
outside of town on farms where in the 1950s
scientists had come to look because
of a known fault, restless in the rock.
The percussive, intermittent tick
of their Geiger counters had escalated
to something measureless—the place itself
a worse genetic element, the very land
guilty. In the small sanctuary
of the Presbyterian church where I was raised—
the women's whispering soft and steady
as the beat of moths' wings—their purses
still closed around tissues, lozenges, the same

thin tithes and offerings. Among them, I could recount
losses so common it was no wonder
they had come after time to believe
predestined sacrifice: of the easily
stricken elderly, or a son in middle age,
an infant or toddler daughter.

The cancers: both common and rare—
of the lung, stomach, brain, pancreas, liver,
breast, of the ovary, the blood itself,
the houses on the street where I grew up
marked with its slow plague—patient,
insatiable—not one passed over.

•

My father recalled a story about a family
who lived in the oldest house on some of that land,
the structure built of brick, slave-made on the place,
he said, of the place itself—and about one
of the women stricken with a tumor of the brain
before there was an instrument to see it,
long before anyone knew what uranium was.
The story misremembered, half-lie

or whole, I imagined again that house,
her body-driven madness appearing
first as headache—the one pupil eclipsing
its iris before auras around the windows,
around the children's heads, the chimney ciphering
like the church organ pipe, one long note

unplayed, the sound unaccounted for. She would have been
bound inside herself to a stake—burning at it,
the rope around her wrists giving way a little
every day to the stronger bonds of invisible fire;
what if it were in the walls, the brick laced with it,
the water, the melons and eggs, the milk; what if

she sifted it with the salt into the flour and fried it
in the pan, telling her daughter to run away
from her, to go, you go, every day,
as far as you can. But what if it were
in her apron with her little knife;
she could see clearly herself in its blade.

•

We had already memorized the three-bladed
black fan, symbol for the fallout shelter
the men had built under the post office,
beneath its thick-combed walls of letter boxes—
small-windowed, gilt-numbered doors with bronze
combinations we would inherit,
thresholds opening to promise and debt.
It was somewhere beneath the cases

where the rural carriers sorted their routes,
long days of gravel back roads, orbits
relentless, the sinuous dust of retraces.
I never saw that shelter, never met
anyone who had, but believed in deep shelves
of syrupy pears and peaches as I had been taught
to believe in heaven, safe, dreaded
place I was told I would go, not meaning

for my soul to be taken in my sleep,
not meaning to drift past the moon, past
the farthest planets, the slow, dim one ringed
with dust and ice. It glowed the palest green
of opaque glass, a globe at the end
of an empty street, so far from the source
it appeared bioluminescent origin,
half cause, half sanctuary of last light.

- Claudia Emerson.
 
A

A window to the soul

Guest
Oh Robin Hood of poetry, there's charm and humor here. You're touching souls.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Oh Robin Hood of poetry, there's charm and humor here. You're touching souls.

Oh brere fox, we look at you from the briar patch, and we wonder if it is you, brere fox, slipping out at night, on the hunt for a careless poem, or a poem coming home late with a little too much to drink, to whisk off the street, bundle up, and send anonymously to Oz Branch of Wikileaks, Poetry Section for publication the next day. Of course we don't know and don't want to know. And even if they tie us to a chair and torture us, we will never let the words, "Brere fox", pass our lips.

But we wonder why you are sending us, with such charm and humour, poems to touch the soul. We wonder, no doubt unworthily, if it is to entice us out of the briar patch to your dinner table. So we argue amongst ourselves in the briar patch.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Found last night and posted today -

Drinking Like a Fish

Though blue at a distance,
the surface is clear
as gin with a tension
that can bob you like
an ice cube. What
you really want, though,
is to float below
in chartreuse light,
to glide through tonic bubbles
above the swaying kelp,
borne along on currents, while
your heavy body, stranded
on land, still stumbles
and gasps. This
is your true element,
where predators
ignore the pinstripe
of the inedible.
You're even
a Pisces.

Deeper and deeper
you go, to the bottom,
fin silt that swirls
like bourbon in branch water
to darken the gloom
where things with gelatin
wings glow blue
as a gas flame.
And this is where
you want to live
forever—to grow so
transparent, so fragile,
even the weight of the sea
cannot crush you.

- William Greenway.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Overheard last night, and today we repeat -

The Conversation

Though he thought I was asleep in the sun, I was not. I was lucid.
For a long time I watched his ship departing
until the flag at the stern vanished, eaten by the gray horizon.
Then the gulls came, then the stars. I began to live between visions
of reunion and the truth shifting like tides against the dunes.
Under a tent of yaupons I built a hut of driftwood, using sea oats
for a threshold and the emptied halves of mollusk shells for the roof.
Butterflies traversed the shore. When I held the ocean's shell
to my ear we were one
vessel speaking to another vessel
about the rapture of the void.

- Christine Garren.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
If you were intrigued by the poem, "The Conversation", and would like to meet the poet, Christine Garren, it's need to know.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
Decrypted last night -

Convivium

In memoriam Emily Carlson

After we'd redivided
Gaul into twenty-three parts,
our seventh-grade Latin class
in sandals and off-white togas
threw a convivium.

Over the fried chicken
our haruspex announced the signs
as bene, bene, bene,
so we pitched and proved
we could conjugate, decline,
and define some verbs and nouns
sometimes almost as well
as Miss Emily Carlson.

All fall she'd listened to us
mumble and mispronounce
with a set smile on her face
and at least one eye half closed
behind thick horn-rim glasses.
We failed her, and she passed us.

She believed we were carrying on
some semiclassical
tradition, if not for her sake,
for our own, that at least a few
of the radices she'd watered
in our poor soil wouldn't shrivel
but would finally rise and shine.

When all our games were over
and after she'd handed out
the small edulis prizes,
wrapped and trimmed and inscribed
with her own neat, careful digits,
she shouted toward the ceiling
an exclamatio
and fell down on the floor
and began to shake, shudder,
and jitter the whole length
of her gray dress, her mouth
uttering through white foam
untranslatable words,
then died post meridiem.
Oh sunt lacrimae rerum.

- David Wagoner.
 

Mole

Permabanned
Joined
Mar 20, 2008
Messages
20,284
For the poetasters a taste of -

Danger

In the pictures we drew as children, wind was green, aquatic,
so here was a tune only we could hear,
a green tune of cats we painted

in the morning when our mother's illness kept us quiet.
And if blue was to be the color of danger
in pictures we drew as children, then sky would be green, and aquatic

the suns we painted yellow-on-yellow and left
in the room for our mother where the slightest motion was the color
of danger. What we knew we made, painting a green tune of cats

in the afternoons when our mother's illness kept us quiet.
We knew the color of danger was brilliant: blue and red and deeper
blue in the pictures we drew as children, the aquatic

limbs of trees, birds above houses in a perfumed arc;
every night we found a tune of new paint for the greenest spire
of our green tune filled with cats.

In the hours of our mother's illness, we painted wind and the flight
of wind with brushes and feathers, our names the letters
she found in the pictures we drew as children, blue-green and aquatic
when danger was greenest blue, was red, was a green tune filled with cats.

- Laurie Lamon.
 
Top