Machines - Michael Donaghy
Dearest, note how these two are alike:
This harpsicord pavane by Purcell
And the racer's twelve-speed bike.
The machinery of grace is always simple. This chrome trapezoid, one wheel connected To another of concentric gears, Which Ptolemy dreamt of and Schwinn perfected, Is gone. The cyclist, not the cycle, steers. And in the playing, Purcell's chords are played away.
So this talk, or touch if I were there, Should work its effortless gadgetry of love, Like Dante's heaven, and melt into the air.
If it doesn't, of course, I've fallen. So much is chance, So much agility, desire, and feverish care, As bicyclists and harpsicordists prove
Who only by moving can balance, Only by balancing move.
Note: Putting this poem here because of its strong resonance with Theodore Rotheke's closing lines from his sestina, "The Waking":
"I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go."
Listen to the poet read it here.
Big Book Of Poetry
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Narrow-Minded - Czeslaw Milosz
My knowledge is limited, my mind puny. I tried hard, I studied, I read many books. And nothing. In my home books spill from the shelves, they lie in piles on furniture, on the floor, barring the passage from room to room. I cannot, of course, read them all, yet my wolfish eyes constantly crave new titles. In truth, my feeling of limitation is not permanent. Only from time to time an awareness flares of how narrow our imagination is, as if the bones of our skull were too thick and did not allow the mind to get hold of what should be its domain. I should know everything that's happening at this moment, at every point on the earth. I should be able to penetrate the thoughts of my contemporaries and of people who lived a few generations ago, and two thousand and eight thousand years ago. I should, so what?
Translated from the Polish by the author and Robert Hass
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Inhabited Body - Eugénio de Andrade
Body on a horizon of water,
body open
to the slow intoxication of fingers,
body defended
by the splendour of apples,
surrendered hill by hill,
body lovingly made moist
by the tongue’s pliant sun.
Body with the taste of cropped grass in a secret garden, body where I am at home, body where I lie down to suck up silence, to hear the murmur of blades of grain, to breathe the deep dark sweetness of the bramble bush.
Body of a thousand mouths, all tawny with joy, all ready to sip, ready to bite till a scream bursts from the bowels and mounts to the towers and pleads for a dagger. Body for surrendering to tears. Body ripe for death.
Body for imbibing to the end – my ocean, brief and white, my secret vessel, my propitious wind, my errant, unknown, endless navigation.
Translated from the Portuguese by Alexis Levitin
Big Book Of Poetry
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