I can't seem to distract myself from the poems I've collected, like love stories, some so stretched out that they no longer fit my frame. Still, I can no more abandon them than I can abandon the stories which give them meaning, weaving strange strands into perfectly plain white t-shirts worn to distract us from the sweat of the past. So here are a few more of my favorite poems, or poems which were once worthy of my favoritism before ending up in memory's warm consignment shop.
FINISH by Charles Bukowski
We are like roses that have never bothered to
bloom when we should have bloomed and
it is as if
the sun has become disgusted with
waiting
THE GRAPEVINE by John Ashberry
Of who we and all they are
You all now know. But you know
After they began to find us out we grew
Before they died thinking us the causes
Of their acts. Now we'll not know
The truth of some still at the piano, though
They often date from us, causing
These changes we think we are. We don't care
Though, so tall up there
In young air. But things get darker as we move
To ask them: Whom must we get to know
To die, so you live and we know?
AND SO IT GOES by Tom Waits
If I was a seagull high and aloof
I'd sail to the highest perch on your roof
But I ain't no seagull, you know my name
And the wind's blowin fortune, the wind's blowin pain
And so it goes, nobody knows
How to get to the sky, how to get to the sky
If I was a puppy dog in the early dawn
I'd make it to your house and sleep on your lawn
but I ain'ty no puppydog, you know my name
And the wind blows fortune, the wind blows pain
And so it goes, nobody knows
How to get to the sky, how to get to the sky
How to get to the sky, how to get to the sky
AS ONCE THE WINGED ENERGY OF DELIGHT by Rainer Maria Rilke
As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.
Wonders happen if we can succeed
in passing through the harshest danger;
but only in a bright and purely granted
achievement can we realize the wonder.
To work with Things in the indescribable
relationship is not too hard for us;
the pattern grows more intricate and subtle,
and being swept along is not enough.
Take your practiced powers and stretch them out
until they span the chasm between two
contradictions...For the god
wants to know himself in you.
COUNT by Paul Celan
COUNT the almonds,
count what was bitter and kept you awake,
count me in:
I looked for your eye when you opened it, no one was looking at
you,
I spun that secret thread
on which the dew you were thinking
slid down to the jugs
guarded by words that to no one's heart found their way.
Only there did you wholly enter the name that is yours,
sure-footed stepped into yourself,
freely the hammers swung in the bell frame of your silence,
the listened for reached you,
what is dead put its arm round you also
and the three of you walked through the evening.
Make me bitter.
Count me among the almonds.
SENTIMENTAL STORY by Nichita Stanescu
Then we met more often.
I stood at one side of the hour,
you at the other,
like two handles of an amphora.
Only the words flew between us,
back and forth.
You could almost see their swirling,
and suddenly,
I would lower a knee,
and touch my elbow to the ground
to look at the grass, bent
by the falling of some word,
as though by the paw of a lion in flight.
The words spun between us,
back and forth,
and the more I loved you, the more
they continued, this whirl almost seen,
the structure of matter, the beginnings of things.
