Written by
Louise Bogan |
Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs,
Eyes rolled by white sticks,
Ears cupping the sea's incoherences,
You house your unnerving head -- God-ball,
Lens of mercies,
Your stooges
Plying their wild cells in my keel's shadow,
Pushing by like hearts,
Red stigmata at the very center,
Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of
departure,
Dragging their Jesus hair.
Did I escape, I wonder?
My mind winds to you
Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,
Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous
repair.
In any case, you are always there,
Tremulous breath at the end of my line,
Curve of water upleaping
To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,
Touching and sucking.
I didn't call you.
I didn't call you at all.
Nevertheless, nevertheless
You steamed to me over the sea,
Fat and red, a placenta
Paralyzing the kicking lovers.
Cobra light
Squeezing the breath from the blood bells
Of the fuchsia.
I could draw no breath,
Dead and moneyless,
Overexposed, like an X-ray.
Who do you think you are?
A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary?
I shall take no bite of your body,
Bottle in which I live,
Ghastly Vatican.
I am sick to death of hot salt.
Green as eunuchs, your wishes
Hiss at my sins.
Off, off, eely tentacle!
There is nothing between us.
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Written by
Conrad Aiken |
See, as the carver carves a rose,
A wing, a toad, a serpent's eye,
In cruel granite, to disclose
The soft things that in hardness lie,
So this one, taking up his heart,
Which time and change had made a stone,
Carved out of it with dolorous art,
Laboring yearlong and alone,
The thing there hidden—rose, toad, wing?
A frog's hand on a lily pad?
Bees in a cobweb?—no such thing!
A girl's head was the thing he had,
Small, shapely, richly crowned with hair,
Drowsy, with eyes half closed, as they
Looked through you and beyond you, clear
To something farther than Cathay:
Saw you, yet counted you not worth
The seeing, thinking all the while
How, flower-like, beauty comes to birth;
And thinking this, began to smile.
Medusa! For she could not see
The world she turned to stone and ash.
Only herself she saw, a tree
That flowered beneath a lightning-flash.
Thus dreamed her face—a lovely thing
To worship, weep for, or to break .
.
.
Better to carve a claw, a wing,
Or, if the heart provide, a snake.
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Written by
Louise Bogan |
I had come to the house, in a cave of trees,
Facing a sheer sky.
Everything moved, -- a bell hung ready to strike,
Sun and reflection wheeled by.
When the bare eyes were before me
And the hissing hair,
Held up at a window, seen through a door.
The stiff bald eyes, the serpents on the forehead
Formed in the air.
This is a dead scene forever now.
Nothing will ever stir.
The end will never brighten it more than this,
Nor the rain blur.
The water will always fall, and will not fall,
And the tipped bell make no sound.
The grass will always be growing for hay
Deep on the ground.
And I shall stand here like a shadow
Under the great balanced day,
My eyes on the yellow dust, that was lifting in the wind,
And does not drift away.
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Written by
Francesco Petrarch |
[Pg 178] SONNET CLXIV.
L' aura celeste che 'n quel verde Lauro.
HER HAIR AND EYES.
The heavenly airs from yon green laurel roll'd,
Where Love to Phœbus whilom dealt his stroke,
Where on my neck was placed so sweet a yoke,
That freedom thence I hope not to behold,
O'er me prevail, as o'er that Arab old
Medusa, when she changed him to an oak;
Nor ever can the fairy knot be broke
Whose light outshines the sun, not merely gold;
I mean of those bright locks the curlèd snare
Which folds and fastens with so sweet a grace
My soul, whose humbleness defends alone.
Her mere shade freezes with a cold despair
My heart, and tinges with pale fear my face;
And oh! her eyes have power to make me stone.
Macgregor.
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