30

A Lady Who Thinks She Is Thirty by Ogden Nash

Unwillingly Miranda wakes,
Feels the sun with terror,
One unwilling step she takes,
Shuddering to the mirror.

Miranda in Miranda's sight
Is old and gray and dirty;
Twenty-nine she was last night;
This morning she is thirty.

Shining like the morning star,
Like the twilight shining,
Haunted by a calendar,
Miranda is a-pining.

Silly girl, silver girl,
Draw the mirror toward you;
Time who makes the years to whirl
Adorned as he adored you.

Time is timelessness for you;
Calendars for the human;
What's a year, or thirty, to
Loveliness made woman?

Oh, Night will not see thirty again,
Yet soft her wing, Miranda;
Pick up your glass and tell me, then--
How old is Spring, Miranda?

Song of The Seven Hearted Boy by Lorca

Seven hearts
are the hearts that I have.
But mine is not there among them.

In the high mountains, mother,
where I sometimes ran into the wind,
seven girls with long hands
carried me around in their mirrors.

I have sung my way through this world
with my mouth with its seven petals.
My crimson colour galleys
have cast off without rigging or oars.

I have lived my life in landscapes
that other men have owned.
And the secrets I wore at my throat,
unbeknownst to me, have come open.

In the high mountains, mother,
where my heart rises over its echoes
in the memory book of a star,
I sometimes ran into the wind.

Seven hearts
are the hearts that I have.
But mine is not there among them.

--
translation Jerome Rothenberg

Quote from 'Between Dog and Wolf' by Elske Rahill

It took me a long time in life to realize how rude it is to stand back from something and watch it ...  How disrespectful it it, that watching, because it can rob anything of its validity, make anything ridiculous, because a person cant gaze on life like God. God infuses meaning. This sort of looking takes meaning away.

p233

Hymn To The Drivers by Michael Symmons Roberts

Every second a child is born, a car is made;
knitted together in factory towns
by robot arms with sparks at their fingertips.
The cars wait, possessed but never owned,
left out in the rain, driven hard.

And the children wait for them, a-stagger
on their slow pins, they watch the elders
slide by behind tinted windscreens, lips
in time with the radio. Deliverance comes
as a set of keys and a card in your name.

Even at night, car power is palpable.
Under linden trees they rest on haunches,
colour indeterminate in sodium light.
Think of them as coiled, not cataleptic,
and the road as open, wet with lime leaves.


---
from Drysalter

Persephone by Michael Longley

 Perspehone by Michael Longley

I see as through a skylight in my brain
The mowl strew its buildings in the rain,

The swallows turn above their broken homes
And all my acres in delirium.

Straitjacketed by cold and numbskulled
Now sleep the well adjusted and the skilled-

The bat folds its wings like a winter leaf,
The squirrel in its hollow holds aloof.

The weasel and ferret, the stoat and fox
Move hand in glove across the equinox.

I can tell how softly their footsteps go-
Their footsteps borrow silence from snow.

Heart My Lovely Hobo by Sandro Cisernos

Heart, my lovely hobo, you

remember, then, that afternoon in Venice

when all the pigeons rose flooding the piazaa

like a vaulted celing. That was you

and you alone who grinned.

Fat as an oyster,

pulpy as a plum,

raw, exposed, naieve,

dumb. As if love 

could be curbed, and grace

could save you from daily beatings.

Those blue jewels of flowers in the arbor

that the bees loved. Oh, there'll be other 

flowers, a cat maybe beside the bougainvillea,

a little boat with flags glittering in the harbour

to make you laugh,

to make you spiral ince more.

Not this throbbing.

This.

----

July Evening by Norman Mac Caig

A bird's voice chinks and tinkles
Alone in the gaunt reedbed-
            Tiny silversmith
Working late in the evening.

I sit and listen. The rooftop
With a quill of smoke stuck in it
            Wavers against the sky
In the dreamy heat of summer.

Flowers' closing time: bee lurches
Across the hayfield, singing
            And feeling its drunken way
Round the air's invisible corners.

And grass is grace. And charlock
Is gold of its own bounty.
            The broken chair by the wall
is one with immortal landscapes.

Something has been completed
That everything is part of,
            Something that will go on
Being completed forever.