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Time To Be Great Again, My Lord

November 20, 2010 5 Comments

SPANNERS
by: Sippican Cottage

Sun’s beaming in the window,
There’s rumbling from the floor,
We’re swinging while we’re swaging
Boxes dancing out the door.

Oh how our muscles ripple,
We’re making twenty knots,
We’re alternating; current —
We’re glowing with the watts.

Pounding down the corridors,
With Bill of Lading piles;
Our output’s put the boss on ice
We’re blowing out the dials.

They count the beans but can’t keep up,
We’re cooking with the gas;
Our arms are made from tempered steel,
Our heart is made of brass.

That brass is rolled to make a tube,
The tube is bent just so;
And if we blow that trumpet, Jack,
The girls get all aglow.

The whistle blows at five o’clock,
It’s twenty-three skidoo;
The guys and gals that made that stuff,
Go out for dancing too.

They box the compass of the steps
Then swing from chandeliers;
They leave the clerks there in the lurch
Then kick it up a gear.

They pound the floor into the ground,
They swing and then they sway;
They’d drink to all their troubles,
But they’ve long since gone away.

They close the places late at night,
And walk home ‘neath the stars;
Arm in arm, exchanging charms
One’s Venus, one is Mars.

Mighty children spring from them,
To keep the flame alight;
They nurse them with acetylene,
And ultra-violet light.

They grow some whiskers when they’re old,
And sit down for a spell;
Their Ercoles will take their place,
And raise a little hell.

Before I Am Old I Shall Have Written Him One Poem Maybe As Cold And Passionate As The Dawn

November 17, 2010 No Comments
ALTHOUGH I can see him still,
The freckled man who goes
To a grey place on a hill
In grey Connemara clothes
At dawn to cast his flies,          5
It’s long since I began
To call up to the eyes
This wise and simple man.
All day I’d looked in the face
What I had hoped ’twould be   10
To write for my own race
And the reality;
The living men that I hate,
The dead man that I loved,
The craven man in his seat,   15
The insolent unreproved,
And no knave brought to book
Who has won a drunken cheer,
The witty man and his joke
Aimed at the commonest ear,   20
The clever man who cries
The catch-cries of the clown,
The beating down of the wise
And great Art beaten down.
  
Maybe a twelvemonth since   25
Suddenly I began,
In scorn of this audience,
Imagining a man
And his sun-freckled face,
And grey Connemara cloth,   30
Climbing up to a place
Where stone is dark under froth,
And the down turn of his wrist
When the flies drop in the stream:
A man who does not exist,   35
A man who is but a dream;
And cried, ‘Before I am old
I shall have written him one
Poem maybe as cold
And passionate as the dawn.’   40

-William Butler Yeats

An Aged Man Is But A Paltry Thing, A Tattered Coat Upon A Stick, Unless…

November 5, 2010 7 Comments

My friend Bird Dog is waxing about poetry.

He is the rarest of things in this world to me. He rouses my mind from its torpor. I do not know what the possibilities available to me might have been, based on the space between my ringing ears, and will never know, because life is short and you have to be in a hurry.We’re all Popeye after a while and must act it. But it’s nice to have something new to chew on. New is hard for me to come by.

I can’t watch the news on television. It’s like a mildly retarded car salesman, or the woman that sprays smells on you unwonted at the department store, reading a bad newspaper to you very slowly. A printed newspaper has many uses. We covet them here. The heavy paper bags you used to get at the grocery store were superior of course, because you could cover a textbook with them as well as start fires in the fireplace, but a newspaper is pretty good. Neither of them can hold a candle to corrugated for warmth, but they recycle that stuff now. But read them? They’re like being forced to read a fourth-grader’s homework; the child of a neighbor you don’t like very much.

The Intertunnel, my beloved Intertunnel, is 99 44/100% written by people with negligible intellects telling me they can read a newspaper harder than I can. Then the apostrophe faerie comes and sprinkles their screeds with goodness everywhere.

But my Intertunnel is so large, it doesn’t matter. It’s given me the world, and everything in it. I only require the half percent that’s not twaddle. It’s too much for any man.

As I said, Bird Dog is the rarest of things, and the most valuable to me. A stranger that tells me what his life is like. He does it inferentially, mostly. A lot of words offered mean obfuscation. There was a reason Eisenhower required all major proposals to be presented to him on one foolscap page. It wasn’t because he was dumb and couldn’t read. He knew the authors would use any more than that to obfuscate, and dissemble, and cover their ass. So Bird Dog says read this, and offers a mordant word or two, and occasionally says: this is where I go, and this is what I do, and this is what I like, and this is what I think. Other than young ladies that disrobe and are ambivalent about the presence of a camera in the room, what is best in Intertunnel life besides that?

He reads T.S. Eliot. Did, and does. I did not, and don’t, so him telling me he does means I might.

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is very good, of course, but it’s a WASPy thing, and so, stranieri.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

I’m with the broads on this one.

A man is what he is, sometimes. I don’t know if I ever had it in me to be a souper, but old men just eat what’s put in front of them and don’t worry so much.

But the urge for words does comes to me from some place now; from an inaccessible but visible stone that disgorges its faeries nightly. The land of the nervously fingered beads, and Cuchulain, too.

WHAT shall I do with this absurdity –
O heart, O troubled heart – this caricature,
Decrepit age that has been tied to me
As to a dog’s tail?
Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible –
No, not in boyhood when with rod and fly,
Or the humbler worm, I climbed Ben Bulben’s back
And had the livelong summer day to spend.
It seems that I must bid the Muse go pack,
Choose Plato and Plotinus for a friend
Until imagination, ear and eye,
Can be content with argument and deal
In abstract things; or be derided by
A sort of battered kettle at the heel.

Our World’s More Full Of Weeping Than You Can Understand

October 12, 2010 No Comments

 Morning Star –Alphonse Mucha
 
 THE STOLEN CHILD

WHERE dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.

-William Butler Yeats

Third Rock From The Sun

June 8, 2010 2 Comments

When Sisyphus was pushing the stone up the mountain,
Always near the top
As you remember, at the very tip of the height,
It lapsed and fell back upon him,
And he rolled to the bottom of the incline, exhausted.

Then he got up and pushed up the stone again,
First over the grassy rise, then the declivity of dead man’s gulch,
Then the outcroppings halfway, at which he took breath,
Looking out over the rosy panorama of Helicon;
Then finally the top

Where the stone wobbled, trembled, and lapsed back upon him,
And he rolled again down the whole incline.
Why?
He said a man’s reach must exceed his grasp,
Or what is Hades for?

He said it’s not the goal that matters, but the process
Of reaching it, the breathing joy
Of endeavor, and the labor along the way.
This belief damned him, and damned, what’s harder,
The heavy stone.

Josephine Miles

Tag: poetry

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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