Intimations

Reagan's poems

My dear friend and colleague, Reagan Pugh, is at it again. Go to Goodpancreas and breathe in these wondrous poems.

Thank you Reagan for your words.

Ode: To the Blinking Lights

I know you don't belong to me,
But to some distant pole;
That pole belongs to the ground;
And that ground to some Man
Who's moneyed like I'll never be.

But the Blinking Lights I see,
Under the street-lit sky
From this apartment balcony–
Tonight, you belong to me.

Between the trees and chimneys,
Across the span of golf-course greens
And neatly trimmed trees,
With my little embered stick,
I blink back to thee.

Let the Record Show:

Let the record show:
These thoughts have slipped down
And in the darkness grow.

Let the iris slide
into pupil's black glow,
And all the light to shuffle off
Into this darkling show.

I am not the things I know,
But all that I know not.
Here in the darkness, sweet and slow,
Is all that I have got.

(For Reagan, thanks for the inspiration. I want to be like you when i grow up.)

Home town poet

My good friend Reagan Pugh has posted an original poem that renewed my morning. You've got to read it for yourself here

To Know the Dark

"To go in the dark with a light is to know the light.
To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight,
and find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,
and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings."

-- Wendell Berry

Timeless, Twinned

"Angelic, lonely, autochthonous, one white
Cloud lolls, unmoving , on an azure which
Is called the sky, and in gold drench of light,
No leaf, however gold, may stir, nor a single blade twitch,

Though autumn-honed, of the cattail by the pond. No voice
Speaks, since here no voice knows
The language in which a tongue might now rejoice.
So silence, a transparent flood, thus overflows.

In it, I drown, and from my depth my gaze
Yearns, faithful, toward that cloud's integrity,
As though I've now forgotten all other nights and days,
Anxiety born of the future's snare, or the nag of history.

What if, to my back, thin-shirted, brown grasses yet bring
The heat of summer, or beyond the perimeter northward, wind,
Snow-bellied, lurks? I stare at the cloud, white, motionless. I cling
To our single existence, timeless, twinned."

– Robert Penn Warren. From "Being Here"

Waiting

You will have to wait. Until it. Until
The last owl hoot has quivered to a

Vibrant silence and you realize that there is no breathing
Beside you, and dark curdles toward dawn of no dawn. Until

Douth breaks, to late to save the corn,
But not too late for flood, and the hobbled cow, stranded

On a sudden islet, gargles in grief in the alder-brake. Until
The doctor enters the waiting room, and

His expression betrays all, and you wish
He’d take his goddam hand off your shoulder. Until

The woman you have lived with all the years
Says, without rancor, that life is the way life is, and she cannot

Remember when last she loved you, and had lived the lie only
For the children’s sake. Until you become uncertain of French

Irregular verbs, and by a strange coincidence begin to take Catholic
Instruction from Monsignor O’Malley, who chews a hangnail. Until

You realize, to your surprise, that our Savior died for us all,
And as tears gather in your eyes, you burst out laughing,

For the joke is certainly on Him, considering
What we are. Until

You pick the last alibi off, like a scab, and
Admire the inwardness, as beautiful as inflamed

Flesh, or summer sunrise. Until
You remember that, remarkably, common men have done noble deeds. Until

It grows on you that, at least, God
Has allowed man the grandeur of certain utterances.

True or not. But sometimes true.

--Robert Penn Warren

"From a Book"

I would rather look down
into the face of
a bed of portulaca

than into the level
black eyes
of the virgin whom I love

Tra-la
tra-la
tra-la la la la

– William Carlos Williams

Poetry Month

I want to honor Poetry Month with a few of my favorites. But also notice what they are putting forth. They say something, or do something that I think is important to poetry itself. Do you see it?

For Once, Then, Something

Others taught me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths--and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something. -Frost

The art of losing isn't hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster
:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster
--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. -Bishop

Pied Beauty

GLORY be to God for dappled things,
For skies of couple-color as a brinded cow,
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls, finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced, fold, fallow and plough,
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange,
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;
Praise him. -Hopkins