Strong Verbs Are Just Better

Brother Paul! look!
—but he rushes to a different
window.
The moon!

I heard shrieks and thought:
What's that?

That's just Suzanne
talking to the moon!
Pounding on the window
with both fists:

Paul! Paul!

—and talking to the moon.
Shrieking
and pounding the glass
with both fists!

Brother Paul! the moon!

---

Thank lotesse for this one, if I recall my readlist correctly.

The saints cannot distinguish
between being with other people and being
alone: another good reason for becoming one.

They live in trees and eat air.
Staring past or through us, they see
things which we would call not there.
We on the contrary see them.

They smell of old fur coats
stored for a long time in the attic.
When they move they ripple.
Two of them passed here yesterday,
filled and vacated and filled
by the wind, like drained pillows
blowing across a derelict lot,
their twisted and scorched feet
not touching the ground,
their feathers catching in thistles.
What they touched emptied of colour.

Whether they are dead or not
is a moot point.
Shreds of they litter history,
a hand here, a bone there:
is it suffering or goodness
that makes them holy,
or can anyone tell the difference?

Though they pray, they do not pray
for us. Prayers peel off them
like burned skin healing.
Once they tried to save something,
others or their own souls.
Now they seem to have no use,
like the colours on blind fish.
Nevertheless they are sacred.

They drift through the atmosphere,
their blue eyes sucked dry
by the ordeal of seeing,exuding gaps in the landscape as water
exudes mist. They blink
and reality shivers.

Come, neighbour, take a walk with me,
Thro' many a London Street;
And see the cause of penury,
In hundreds we shall meet.

We shall not need to travel far—
Behold that great man's door;
He well discerns that idle crew,
From the deserving poor.

He will relieve with liberal hand
The child of honest thrift:
But where long scores at Gin-ships stand
He will with-hold his gift

Behold that shivering female there,
Who plies her woeful trade!
'Tis ten to one you'll find that Gin
That hopeless wretch has made.

Look down those steps, and view below
Yon cellar under ground;
There every want, and every woe,
And every Sin, is found.

Those little wretches trembling there,
With hunger and with cold,
Were by their parents love of drink,
To Sin and Misery sold...

To prison dire misfortunes oft
The guiltless debtor bring;
Yet oft'ner far it will be found
From Gin the misery springs.

See the pale Manufact'rer there,
How lank and lean he lies!
How haggard is his sickly cheek!
How dim his hollow eyes!

He plied the loom with good success,
His wages still were high;
Twice what the village lab'rer gains,
His master did supply.

No book-debts kept him from his cash,
All paid as soon as due;
His wages on the Saturday
To fail be never knew.

How amply had his gains sufficed,
On wife and children spent!
But all must for his pleasure go;
All to the Gin-shop went.

See that apprentice, young in years;
But hackney'd long in sin,
What made him rob his master's till?
Alas! 'twas love of Gin.

That serving Man—I knew him once,
So jaunty, spruce, and smart!
Why did he steal, and pawn the plate?
'Twas Gin ensnared his heart.

But hark! what dismal sound is that?
'Tis Saint Sepulchre's bell!
It tolls, alas! for human guilt,
Some malefactor's knell

O! woeful sound, O! what could cause,
Such punishment and sin?
Hark! hear his words, he owns the cause—
Bad Company and Gin.

And when the future Lot is fixed,
Of darkness, fire and chains,
How can the drunkard hope to 'scape
Those everlasting pains?

For if the murderer's doomed to woe,
As holy writ declares,
The Drunkard with Self-murderers
That dreadful portion shares.

---

Stanzas from the (long) original as selected in Eighteenth Century Women Poets: An Anthology ed. Roger Lonsdale. Interestingly, the Oxford Text Archive transcribes a version set in Dublin, and bemoaning the ills of whiskey.

Today's poem is brought to you by end-of-semester G&Ts with various colleagues, including an impromptu lesson on the social history of gin by Lecturer 18th c. You may wish to accompany this poem with Hogarth's 'Beer Street and Gin Lane'

To my Niece, A.M. With a new Pair of Shoes on her first going alone. Written Dec. 22, 1774

When little girls begin to walk,
Their next attempt should be to talk.
Then why thus, Nancy, why thus long
Do you persist to hold your tongue?
Full sixteen months gone o'er your head,
And not a word by you been said!
Oh! let it never once be told
That silence reigned in a girl so old!
But let us hear, by Christmas day,
Your speech at last hath found its way:
In lisping accents sweetly prattle
Of fine new shoes, of doll, and rattle,
And prove to all your friends around
Your sex's province you have found.

Only the feathers floating around the hat
Showed that anything more spectacular had occurred
Than the usual drowning. The police preferred to ignore
The confusing aspects of the case,
And the witnesses ran off to a gang war.
So the report filed and forgotten in the archives read simply
“Drowned,” but it was wrong: Icarus
Had swum away, coming at last to the city
Where he rented a house and tended the garden.

“That nice Mr. Hicks” the neighbors called,
Never dreaming that the gray, respectable suit
Concealed arms that had controlled huge wings
Nor that those sad, defeated eyes had once
Compelled the sun. And had he told them
They would have answered with a shocked,
uncomprehending stare.
No, he could not disturb their neat front yards;
Yet all his books insisted that this was a horrible mistake:
What was he doing aging in a suburb?
Can the genius of the hero fall
To the middling stature of the merely talented?

And nightly Icarus probes his wound
And daily in his workshop, curtains carefully drawn,
Constructs small wings and tries to fly
To the lighting fixture on the ceiling:
Fails every time and hates himself for trying.

He had thought himself a hero, had acted heroically,
And dreamt of his fall, the tragic fall of the hero;
But now rides commuter trains,
Serves on various committees,
And wishes he had drowned.

---

I'm a total sucker for Icarus poems.

MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.

O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we're met,
And cloister'd in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it suck'd from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou
Find'st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
'Tis true ; then learn how false fears be ;
Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me,
Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee.

---

One of the rare occasions when I share a text I'm teaching. First-years are disapointingly bad at being dirty-minded. Why, in MY day we had three innuendos before breakfast!

Only in teaching it did I notice the weird amount of trinitarian references and the 'blood of innocence' / guilt thing which makes me think of Pilate's wife's words re: Christ. You filthy-minded sacriligeous weirdo, John Donne.

I'm a strange composition as e'er was in nature,
Being wondrously studious and yet a great prater.
Retirement and quiet I love beyond measure,
Yet I am always ready for parties of pleasure.
I can cry till I laugh, or laugh till I cry,
Yet few have a temper more equal than I.
My shape is but clumsy, I see it and know it,
Yet I am always dancing and skipping to show it.
My visage is round, just the shape of a bowl,
With a great pair of grey eyes resembling an owl.
My nose and my mouth are none of the least,
Though one serves me to smell and the other to taste.
What I gain in these features makes up for no chin,
But here's my misfortune, my smile's a broad grin.
My temper is rather addicted to satire,
And yet, without vanity, fraught with good nature.
My friends I can laugh at, but most at myself.
I've no inclination for titles or pelf;
And this I can vouch for, believe me or nay,
To my friend's my own interest does always give way.
I really am cleanly, but yet my discourse,
If you're squeamish, may make you sick as a horse.
Without any voice, I can sing you a song,
And though I grow old, I shall always be young.
I put on assurance, though nat'rally shy,
And most people love me, though none can tell why.
I'm not yet disposed of: come bid for a blessing,
For those who first guess me shall have me for guessing.

I was so bored yesterday evening
two packs of cigarettes did absolutely nothing for me.
Tried to write, wrote nothing.
For the first time in years I played the violin,
walked around,
watched people play backgammon
and made appropriate comments,
sang songs off key,
caught flies — a matchboxful.
Finally, dammit!
I came here to see you...

At majoline's request, some thoughts on the year of poetry posting:

I'm finding it really hard to envision *ceasing* to post daily poems. I thought, when I wrote a series of reflections for poetree a few months ago, that I would be incredibly glad to stop, but now I'm faced with two points of consternation: one, what are the chances that I will finish the two anthologies I'm working through, and two, what am I supposed to do with things I read now?

I really struggle with the process of reading without some form of associated output, can you tell?

It's interesting how separate poem-a-day remains from my teaching. I'm teaching detailed poetic analysis and I really have no desire to try that out on the poems I post here - although this week I learned about 'zeugma' and you bet I'll post here the first poem I find in the wild with a zeugma in it. I want a whole poem FULL of zeugmas!*

---

This has been your first December prompted post! Pls to be giving more prompts.

Week 1 - Poetry meme, as per majoline
Week 2 -
Week 3 -
Week 4 -



~

* Tangentially, today I taught my class about Dad Jokes. I told them many zeugmas were puns, but not all puns were zeugmas, and then they wanted examples of non-zeugma puns.

Because you were foolish enough to love one place,
now you are homeless, an orphan
in a succession of shelters.
You did not prepare yourself sufficiently.
Before your eyes, two people were becoming old;
I could have told you two deaths were coming.
There has never been a parent
kept alive by a child's love.

Now, of course, it's too late --
you were trapped in the romance of fidelity.
You kept going back, clinging
to two people you hardly recognized
after what they'd endured.

If once you could have saved yourself,
now that time's past: you were obstinate, pathetically
blind to change. Now you have nothing:
for you, home is a cemetery.
I've seen you press your face against the granite markers --
you are the lichen, trying to grow there.
But you will not grow,
you will not let yourself
obliterate anything.