A Jack Gilbert Poem

 Horses At Midnight Without A Moon


Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.
Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there's music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing.
Our spirit persists like a man struggling
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.


(2005)

A George Oppen Poem

  Image of the Engine


1

Likely as not a ruined head gasket
Spitting at every power stroke, if not a crank shaft
Bearing knocking at the roots of the thing like a pile-driver:
A machine involved with itself, a concentrated
Hot lump of a machine
Geared in the loose mechanics of the world with the valves jumping
And the heavy frenzy of the pistons. When the thing stops,
Is stopped, with the last slow cough
In the manifold, the flywheel blundering
Against compression, stopping, finally
Stopped, compression leaking
From the idle cylinders will one imagine
Then because he can imagine
That squeezed from the cooling steel
There hovers in the moment, wraith-like and and like a plume of
       steam, an aftermath,
A still and quiet angel of knowledge and of comprehension.


2

Endlessly, endlessly,
The definition of mortality

The image of the engine

That stops.
We cannot live on that.
I know that no one would live out
Thirty years, fifty years if the world were ending
With his life.
The machine stares out,
Stares out
With all its eyes

Thru the glass
With the ripple in it, past the sill
Which is dusty—If there is someone
In the garden!
Outside, and so beautiful.


3

What ends
Is that
       Even companionship
Ending.

'I want to ask if you remember
When we were happy! As tho all travels

Ended untold, all embarkations
Foundered.


4

On that water
Grey with morning
The gull will fold its wings
And sit. And with its two eyes
There as much as anything
Can watch a ship and all its hallways
And all companions sink.


5

Also he has set the world
In their hearts. From lumps, chunks,

We are locked out: like children, seeking love
At last among each other. With their first full strength
The young go search for it,

Native in the native air.
But even in the beautiful bony children
Who arise in the morning have left behind
Them worn and squalid toys in the trash

Which is the grimy death of love. The lost
Glitter of the stores!
The streets of stores!
Crossed by the streets of stores
And every crevice of the city leaking
Rubble: concrete, conduit, pipe, a crumbling
Rubble of our roots

              But they will find
In flood, storm, ultimate mishap:
Earth, water, the tremendous
Surface, the heart thundering
Absolute desire.



(1975)

An Amy King Poem

 

The Moon in Your Breath


Man acts as an antenna for the sun
and then: a trout in the milk, 
men who wear kilts after darkness. 
Build a bottle of fish with a few dried figs. 
Dear Shadow,
when did I become that person? 
I mean one who says "plastic glucose" 
without wondering what 
rotten-sweet is? The one who teenagers
represent? There's a room in your breath
I crawl into, eating the wallpaper's yellow,
looking out for the man on the stairs,
his knife in hand, poise incarnate.
I am your minimum envelope,
your string between tin cans and
cannot stop the talk between us.

In Berlin, they lay buildings on concrete
slabs that look straight back at us.
The windows of the soul seek to err
on the side of humanity. Put a piece of glass
between us for less resistance.
Invite rococo scrawl in heated breath upon it.
The moon appears in a cinched waist. 
Stand penance atop her curvature's axis, 
above a hill where headstones claw up 
through the clouds, pulling their fibers 
into blankets across us.

The sleet and silver smiles loom, gauze-thin.
We slip from a reel of translation back 
into how we cater to loneliness,
how we move our mouths and mouth
our meals, engorging entrails where 
even foodstuffs give off energies. 
I am that uncontrollable,
fear in a mesh of moonrock's lapis soup.
We demons are in love and afoot.
As in the primordial diary, time will come 
to take the hem in, tether the ether 
that dreams become from, and examine 
our ankles as the sugar washes over,
disappearing. As with everything, 
that's the body he works on. She also
knows honey lasts best in the future.


(2012)

POEM: "After a Tanka by Rosemary Nissen-Wade"

After a Tanka by Rosemary Nissen-Wade


I talk to the one
you were which

comes back to me
conversing as if

he were doomed
or blessed. The cup

finally full of need
Lord, but we have to

talk again as lovers
like it was our food.

© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Donald Hall Poem

Tubes 




1.

"Up, down, good, bad," said
the man with the tubes
up his nose, "there's lots
of variety…
However, notions
of balance between
extremes of fortune
are stupid—or at
best unobservant."
He watched as the nurse
fed pellets into
the green nozzle that
stuck from his side. "Mm,"
said the man. " Good. Yum.
(Next time more basil…)
When a long-desired
baby is born, what
joy! More happiness
than we find in sex,
more than we take in
success, revenge, or
wealth. But should the same
infant die, would you
measure the horror
on the same rule? Grief
weighs down the seesaw;
joy cannot budge it."

2.

"When I was nineteen,
I told a thirty-
year-old man what a
fool I had been when
I was seventeen.
'We were always,' he
said glancing down, 'a
fool two years ago.'"

3.

The man with the tubes
up his nostrils spoke
carefully: "I don't
regret what I did,
but that I claimed I
did the opposite.
If I was faithless
or treacherous and
cowardly, I had
my reasons—but I
regret that I called
myself loyal, brave,
and honorable."

4.

"Of all illusions,"
said the man with the
tubes up his nostrils,
IVs, catheter,
and feeding nozzle,
"the silliest one
was hardest to lose.
For years I supposed
that after climbing
exhaustedly up
with pitons and ropes,
I would arrive at
last on the plateau
of walking-level-
forever-among-
moss-with-red-blossoms.
But of course, of course:
A continual
climbing is the one
form of arrival
we ever come to—
unless we suppose
that the wished-for height
and house of desire
is tubes up the nose."


(2006)

POEM: "Is That Really Me"

Is That Really Me


There is so much in demand he says
Night lights guaranteed us the return
Yes I say and of even complicated sleep
The so much unhappiness we don't discern
Ah he says but we see that in each other
For aren't we wise men calling for another?
Why won't we finally go home to a missus
Whose please don't stay out too late this time
Asks us to tilt our view of happiness?
Because life and death are both so endless
We would uncomplicate each and every step.


© 2012 Rob Schackne

An Esther Ettinger Poem

  The Sadness Cage 


It’s the sadness cage
not even ten by ten. A lioness
walks back and forth on a bare concrete floor
from end to end, from side to side, six measured paces and three
wild ones and two leaps of pain.

It’s the sadness cage,
three walls plastered over greenish iron studs,
and rain and sun and wind and leaves, and people’s hot faces,
and lights at night, through bars that rust every winter.
She sees all this, but she watches the whitewashed floor,
her rough and golden fresco.
And her legs take her into the corner where she rolls up
into a big dry woolly ball and in another corner she
sprawls out pain-struck.
Because it’s the sadness cage
the sugar of sadness that streams in her veins covered
in blackening fur leads from dead end to dark end
sometimes measured, sometimes wild,
her only food the meat of her household.

She knows, it was also suggested
that the bars are a stage set, that the metal is painted on cardboard
and what’s cardboard to a lioness, and what’s iron.
Everything’s open
and she doesn’t go out to the grass, the sun, the flowers
in front of the soft warm people who wonder at her
who push in to see her, who tell her ad nauseum
rise up go forth
shake your head in a circular motion
rise up go forth race
out there carpets of space, a world.

(1991) Tr. Lisa Katz, 1999

(Translator's note: “the meat of her household” is from Proverbs 31:15)

POEM: "Kung-An"

Kung-An

                                  Mind is the Buddha


Master Ma-Tzu is very full of joy
For today he can give each monk
A pane of precious glass to hold

After the hard running warm-up
He bids them sit & behold two things
Both of them true both of them false

Behind before and in the glass
A chilling task Ch'an has set them
Hour by hour their chattering teeth

Don't even think about reality, he said
Don't ever turn your gaze into a mirror
As they now try to leave the world

Master meets them in a distant garden
Don't even think of leaving this world
Your Master Winter examines the bones!

A monk stands up and starts shouting
What could be simpler than reality!
Another passes out from the strain.


© 2006/2012 Rob Schackne

A Hai Zi Poem

Facing The Ocean, Where Spring Flowers Blossom


Starting tomorrow I will be a happy man.
Take care of horses. Chop firewood. Travel around the world.
Starting tomorrow, I will provide myself with what I need to live.
I will have a house. It will face the ocean, where the spring flowers blossom.
Starting tomorrow, I'll write letters to everyone I love
Telling them how happy I am. 
This happiness hit me like a bolt of lightning. What it told me
I will tell everyone.
And give every river and every mountain a goodhearted name.
Strangers: I wish you well.
I hope you have a brilliant future.
I hope you find true love.
I hope you have a happy life.
I only hope to face the ocean, where the spring flowers blossom.


(1989) Tr. Zachary Mexico, 2012

POEM: "To My Future Lover (2)"

To My Future Lover
                                                
                                        after A. de Saint-Exupéry


Was I dishevelled in a mirage
where desire, unkindled limit
was a kiss that didn't matter
in the night ocean of those days
was I fearsome as a pilot waking
to a smoke and a slow brandy
delinquent of my own concerns
(every animal and its own smell)
and it never mattered love was
shadows or the sun did not light
each caress or that time would not
search for the fine wreckage?


© 2012 Rob Schackne

A Ruth Stone Poem

 

Up There


Belshazzar saw this blue
as he came into the walled garden,
though outside all was yellow
sunlight striking the fractals of sand,
the wind striating the sand in riffles.

Land changes slowly, the fathoms
overhead accruing particles,
reflecting blue or less blue.

Vapor, a transient thing; a dervish
seen rising in a whirl of wind
or brief cloud casting its changing shadow;
though below, the open-mouthed might stand
transfixed by mirage, a visionary oasis.

Nevertheless, this deep upside down
wash, water color, above planted gardens,
tended pomegranates, rouged soles of the feet
of lovers lounging in an open tent;
the hot blue above; the hareem
tethered and restless as the camels.

This quick vision between walls, event,
freak ball, shook jar of vapor,
all those whose eyes were not gouged out,
have looked up and seen within the cowl
this tenuous wavelength.


(1997)

A Barbara Köhler Poem

  

Rondeau Allemagne


I’m hanging on, a stranger to this land,
Caught up by love that drives me beyond the bounds
Between the skies. Where you are is your look-out.
I’m hanging on a stranger to this land.

Caught up by love that drives me beyond the bounds,
To break the agreements is to me what matters,
To laugh, although I tear my heart in tatters,
Caught out by love that drives me beyond the bounds.

Between the skies where you are is your look-out:
The bloody pennant’s raised, the airship falls,
No land in sight, a rope, perhaps, that holds
Between the skies. Where you are is your look-out.


(1991) Tr. Georgina Paul

POEM: "Towards An Aesthetics Of Being Here"

Towards An Aesthetics Of Being Here

                                                                             
                                                               for Will Knox

First, the tunnel metaphor will favor you too

If the desperate sides be avoided, estrangement

From all we were never invited to understand;

A sometimes unstately progress through

The peppery knowledge that we don't belong.

Then, unwelcome, untie that hurt from our own hurt;

There is no skirmish that is worth the battle

That lost the war. We’re survivors, not soldiers.

You will leave the brothers to fight each other

And pick an artful way through the darkness.

When, untouched by ignorance, insult & deceit
We emerge at last in daylight on the other side
And looking back…but no, we will never look back
At the unhappiness we did not cause, nor the pain
We did not stop to answer. We were not saints.

© 2011 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Drive The Dog Away"

Drive The Dog Away

In the old days villagers banged

their woks with sticks of wood to

drive the dog away into the night

but odd now that so few look up

I use this finger to point holding

her from behind my head resting

on her neck I say we’re pretty lucky
& then we both walk back into the bar

Take deception to the limit, trying

yet again to pour joy into the intellect

the memory of other eclipses

following quietly behind

These days that effortlessly fall

away to nothing save their return

tonight the Moon is bitten by a dog

& all that I can say is we’re lucky.

© 2011 Rob Schackne

A Federico Garcia Lorca Poem

 

City That Does Not Sleep


In the sky there is nobody asleep. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
The creatures of the moon sniff and prowl about their cabins.
The living iguanas will come and bite the men who do not dream,
and the man who rushes out with his spirit broken will meet on the street corner
the unbelievable alligator quiet beneath the tender protest of the stars.

Nobody is asleep on earth. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is asleep.
In a graveyard far off there is a corpse
who has moaned for three years
because of a dry countryside on his knee;
and that boy they buried this morning cried so much
it was necessary to call out the dogs to keep him quiet.

Life is not a dream. Careful! Careful! Careful!
We fall down the stairs in order to eat the moist earth
or we climb to the knife edge of the snow with the voices of the dead dahlias.
But forgetfulness does not exist, dreams do not exist;
flesh exists. Kisses tie our mouths
in a thicket of new veins,
and whoever his pain pains will feel that pain forever
and whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.

One day
the horses will live in the saloons
and the enraged ants
will throw themselves on the yellow skies that take refuge in the eyes of cows.

Another day
we will watch the preserved butterflies rise from the dead
and still walking through a country of gray sponges and silent boats
we will watch our ring flash and roses spring from our tongue.
Careful! Be careful! Be careful!
The men who still have marks of the claw and the thunderstorm,
and that boy who cries because he has never heard of the invention of the bridge,
or that dead man who possesses now only his head and a shoe,
we must carry them to the wall where the iguanas and the snakes are waiting,
where the bear's teeth are waiting,
where the mummified hand of the boy is waiting,
and the hair of the camel stands on end with a violent blue shudder.

Nobody is sleeping in the sky. Nobody, nobody.
Nobody is sleeping.
If someone does close his eyes,
a whip, boys, a whip!
Let there be a landscape of open eyes
and bitter wounds on fire.
No one is sleeping in this world. No one. No one.
I have said it before.

No one is sleeping.
But if someone grows too much moss on his temples during the night,
open the stage trapdoors so he can see in the moonlight
the lying goblets, and the poison, and the skull of the theaters.


(c. 1929) Tr. Robert Bly 

POEM: "Robbie and Sabine"

Robbie and Sabine

                                   (and the Penguin Café Orchestra)

The loneliness
at the well of
your lips the beauty
of untidy hair

crosses the creek
dismounts & enters
the cave puts a note
under a rock

the sound
of someone
you love who's
going away but
it doesn't matter

this time when
there's no shouting
no brokenness
or deaf doors

only that love
that sings
over & over
& over again
perfection, now.


© 2011 Rob Schackne

A William Carlos Williams Poem

  

For Elsie

The pure products of America

go crazy—

mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of

Jersey

with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves

old names

and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken

to railroading

out of sheer lust of adventure—

and young slatterns, bathed

in filth

from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night

with gauds

from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them

character

but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags—succumbing without

emotion

save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry

or viburnum—

which they cannot express—

Unless it be that marriage

perhaps

with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate

so hemmed round

with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an

agent—

reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in

some hard-pressed

house in the suburbs—

some doctor's family, some Elsie—

voluptuous water

expressing with broken

brain the truth about us—

her great

ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap

jewelry

and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet

were

an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners

destined

to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains

after deer

going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September

Somehow

it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that

something

is given off

No one

to witness

and adjust, no one to drive the car

(1938)

POEM: "Civics"

Civics


I read of conscientiousness
& how it increases the life-span
When this afternoon I see a man
On a bike porting a long sharp pole

But there is no flag of red alert
So maybe now it's the accident
Waiting to happen to that small girl
Who steps off the curb in such a hurry

Grandmother moves too slow
The pole pierces her precious eye
And enters her brain for a moment
And shuts down her primary function

So sudden the need for a civil society
Last seen haggling over the money
One experience of liability bleeding
One man looking for the first chance to run.


© 2004/2011 Rob Schackne

An Ivor Gurney Poem

To His Love


He’s gone, and all our plans
Are useless indeed.
We’ll walk no more on Cotswolds
Where the sheep feed
Quietly and take no heed.

His body that was so quick
Is not as you
Knew it, on Severn River
Under the blue
Driving our small boat through.

You would not know him now…
But still he died
Nobly, so cover him over
With violets of pride
Purple from Severn side.

Cover him, cover him soon!
And with thick-set
Masses of memoried flowers—
Hide that red wet
Thing I must somehow forget.

(1917)

POEM: "Zirkusmusik/Angel Fragments"

The 5 Zirkusmusik/Angel Fragments poems that follow are about Wim Wenders' 1987 film Wings of Desire, set in West Berlin before the Wall came down, where a group of invisible angels observe human activity. The angel Damiel falls in love with Marion, a circus artist — and decides to become mortal. The actor Peter Falk, another angel who years ago elected to live as a human, plays himself getting ready for his role in a film about Nazi Berlin. He senses Damiel's presence and offers him some advice. Peter Handke wrote much of the dialogue.

POEM: "Marion"

Marion

                           Lovers, if they knew how, might utter
                           strange things in night air. Since it seems
                           eveything hides us.

                           R.M. Rilke, Second Duino Elegy (Tr. Kline)


When she was a child she made faces
Whenever they took photographs

Already knowing that she was
At grave odds with the world

Hearing the loud machinery
Outside the levelling of the choir

At 12 years old reading Nietzsche
Tossing that aside for Rilke at 14

Then the Japanese Zen cases later
Other mystics social astrophysics

Not waiting around the silent library
For knowledge at the end of the world

Accidents come after painting & music
Poetry and the men came after that

I place my hand on her shoulder
She spits and shivers like a cat.

© 2011 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Marion & Damiel"

Marion & Damiel


Circus dreams. Is this the end?
Clumsy performance that eventually
Changed to pleasure, now slipping off
I'm going down, suddenly forgetting how
These fake wings could ever fly with art and love

How I watch her beautiful on the trapeze
Arguing with all the gravities of need
Less effort, Marion! More swing!
Today the circus Berlin is pulling down the tent
And elephants are doing tricks for themselves

O Angels of solitude and tears
Why do you all look like criminals?
How do you spend the eternal days?
Would you have me sing my song
At night alone in my little van?

There is no answer, why be desperate?
This shall go on for a very long time
Singing the epic of peace, dreaming
Like the old man, breathless, he looks
For the past and remembers Nazi flags

You're the angel. They almost lived happily
Ever after. Sensing the breezy motions
The dozens everywhere, tremor or itch
I can't even tell if you're beside me now
Hiding, utter me anything real tonight.


© 2011 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Peter Falk"

Peter Falk

                             "These people are extras...extra humans."

I.

A single tree grows out of a lake
Primordial, surrounded by fog and
Quiet water. Water as cold as it gets

Winter in Berlin. Bombs were dropped
An old man walks through a wasteland
His Potsdamer Platz still can't be found

A pre-war car is taken out for a drive
Every street has its own hard borderline
A schoolgirl waits for a john in the cold


II.

The clowns don't speak, doubles and ghosts
The clowns try on hats, ghosts and doubles
Lies, if you didn't have it, you would miss it

Charivari. A trained goat is walking a barrel
It's their last performance, free for the kids
They race into the ring to get their balloons

This one is for those who wished they were alive
This one is for all the evil places in the world
This one is for the poets. 

© 2011 Rob Schackne

POEM: "Who Would Rather Not Think Anymore"

Who Would Rather Not Think Anymore


Sit in the van getting ready
The last night will be your best
A little bit afraid of the full moon
Thinking where were our angels
When the bombs were falling?

Before the story of war
It was going quite well
The days of ecstatic dance
Learning to live with animals
Before it was all paved over

Is the antiphon dirge or beatus
That plays when life is risky?
There will be a party afterwards
But first the audience applauds
The woman who fights the air

Furry ropes and tired props
And cigarette butts joining
White feathers on the water
All of it invents the story
You will keep on having

Glory is all drunken singing
There is a sorrow in angels
No doorways or corners
The set of war is suicide
Why are you crying?

© 2011 Rob Schackne

POEM: "So Many Good Things"

So Many Good Things

                                                Als das Kind Kind war...
                                                Peter Handke

I.

It is very late. A Turkish woman
Is vacuuming the empty library

Then she'll go to an all-night laundromat
And watch hope go through its cycles

When the child was a child
She lived in Room 29 next to mine
She could imagine anything


II.

Wake up with the holy armor
When it is thrown down at you
Later that day you'll pawn it for $50

Your head is still bleeding a little
But there are so many good things left

A stranger gives you your first money
To buy your very first cup of coffee

And you'll burn your mouth
Wondering about the first snow

You give a stranger exquisite directions
And wait for first bliss in a circle of sand

Compañero, compañero, they whisper 
Other wings will grow that will be valid

You will find her. You will find a home.

© 2011 Rob Schackne

POEM: "It Doesn't Have To Be Perfect"

It Doesn't Have To Be Perfect

At 5 o’clock listening for the birds
They wake up and start their calling
(As if nobody again will listen)

Drive in to work, play Keith Jarrett
And there’s no one there to disagree
Driving home, AC/DC’s Highway To Hell

On Sunday you don’t go to church, instead
You go to the pharmacy “Family Planning” section
& stare too long at the inverted commas

The music in there is horrible
All mixed up with improbable fears
(You probably still love your wife a little)

A parking lot in the afternoon—
But no she says, it’s more like sunset
She throws her leg over you and sighs.


© 2011 Rob Schackne