Poetry ...where a quince once took me

Quince
Cydonia oblonga flowers
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Plantae Division: Magnoliophyta Class: Magnoliopsida Order: Rosales Family: Rosaceae Subfamily: Maloideae Genus: Cydonia Species: C. oblonga
Binomial name
Cydonia oblonga Mill.

I like to read poetry and just got a book recommended by a poet whose work has been a part of my days and evenings for awhile. Dr. Michael Salcman writes beautiful, powerful, sharp, incising, clutching, embracing verses. Read The Clock Made of Confetti. It's a very good volume.
He recommended The Dream of the Poem, Hebrew Poetry From Muslim and Christian Spain 950-1492 translated, edited and introduced by Peter Cole. In a review he included this poem, one that was compelling to me:

Here is "The Apple", an ekphrastic poem by Shmu'el Hanagid (993-1056):

I
I, when you notice,
am cast in gold:
the bite of the ignorant
frightens me.

II
An apple filled with spices:
silver coated with gold.
And others that grow in the orchard
beside it, bright as rubies.

I asked it: Why aren't you like those?
Soft, with your skin exposed?
And it answered in silence: Because
boors and fools have jaws.

I've always been hung up on Japonica and quinces.
This relates to me.....I am sure that the fruit of Eden is the quince. The apple.
As a McIntosh named Sarah these things are my roots you know.
And the Hesperides apple too. (That link is fascinating)
My connection to quinces through a teacher in my childhood days who grew and made her jelly with them andshared it with we kids at school. So I am just anxiously beginning this beautiful book, which came today after a three week wait. I wait for these pieces of poetry connected to Dr. Salcman. They are worth it.


Waiting with a son who is having trouble sleeping last night decided to go on a site that's cool. I found it not very long ago. You can look up some poetry there. It's called American Poems.
All the following came from this site. I like to write out poems in journals and follow that with writing some reason why this was selected...... this poem to read and save. A moment connection often grows into themes.
So today, thinking of writing a few things later tonight I'll share my game. Even with my very young 1st graders I do keep poetry journals. This and the song journals are essential. At the first of the year we memorize and illustrate but later in the year they select poems, copy, and write them. Word pictures......it remains the most core piece I feel under assault in current ed. programs, that I WILL NOT GIVE UP.


My comments follow the poems, skip them merrily. The poetry I enjoyed....

my love is building a building... (XII) -
written by e.e. cummings

my love is building a building
around you, a frail slippery
house, a strong fragile house
(beginning at the singular beginning

of your smile)a skillful uncouth
prison, a precise clumsy
prison(building thatandthis into Thus,
Around the reckless magic of your mouth)

my love is building a magic, a discrete
tower of magic and(as i guess)

when Farmer Death(whom fairies hate)shall

crumble the mouth-flower fleet
He'll not my tower,
laborious, casual

where the surrounded smile
hangs

breathless

I know exactly why I selected this poem. Anne Lindberg I read at some point in a letter to a friend, as I recall Saint Exupery, (I'm linking to a biography I loved) but that could be wrong, writing of wishing her love could be so great to wish another free of it's clutches. Something of this has always captured me. And within this poem by cummings I find this thought. Loving another I find it easy to construct my house walls. They are invisibly magnificent prisons I think. As grand as that ice palace in Narnia. But ....the poem.....they crack and melt, tumble. Love has a kind of frailty.

Not with a Club, the Heart is broken - written by Emily Dickinson

Not with a Club, the Heart is broken
Nor with a Stone --
A Whip so small you could not see it
I've known

To lash the Magic Creature
Till it fell,
Yet that Whip's Name
Too noble then to tell.

Magnanimous as Bird
By Boy descried --
Singing unto the Stone
Of which it died --

Shame need not crouch
In such an Earth as Ours --
Shame -- stand erect --
The Universe is yours.

I want to turn from this one, returning to read it five, six times. I suppose I spent an early life absorbing the universes of shame. And this often is the envelope for my heart messages sent in the wind to burn another.

Conversation Among The Ruins - written by Sylvia Plath

Through portico of my elegant house you stalk
With your wild furies, disturbing garlands of fruit
And the fabulous lutes and peacocks, rending the net
Of all decorum which holds the whirlwind back.
Now, rich order of walls is fallen; rooks croak
Above the appalling ruin; in bleak light
Of your stormy eye, magic takes flight
Like a daunted witch, quitting castle when real days break.

Fractured pillars frame prospects of rock;
While you stand heroic in coat and tie, I sit
Composed in Grecian tunic and psyche-knot,
Rooted to your black look, the play turned tragic:
Which such blight wrought on our bankrupt estate,
What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?

I read a song today saying something like...go ahead...say what you want to say. It was a man's song. A song of closure and walk from the understanding. That's a shame, it says, you feel that way. This seems the version of that set in the mind of the female to hear such song.

Shel Silverstein - Picture Puzzle Piece

One picture puzzle piece
Lyin' on the sidewalk,
One picture puzzle piece
Soakin' in the rain.
It might be a button of blue
On the coat of the woman
Who lived in a shoe.
It might be a magical bean,
Or a fold in the red
Velvet robe of a queen.
It might be the one little bite
Of the apple her stepmother
Gave to Snow White.
It might be the veil of a bride
Or a bottle with some evil genie inside.
It might be a small tuft of hair
On the big bouncy belly
Of Bobo the Bear.
It might be a bit of the cloak
Of the Witch of the West
As she melted to smoke.
It might be a shadowy trace
Of a tear that runs down an angel's face.
Nothing has more possibilities
Than one old wet picture puzzle piece.

This Silverstein popped up, to warm places my reading was taking me with so much heart rending. The possibilities of the pieces. The fit, the connections we make. Our meanings pieces found to complete us. I liked this especially today.

Walt Whitman
Kosmos

WHO includes diversity, and is Nature,
Who is the amplitude of the earth, and the coarseness and sexuality of the earth, and the
great
charity of the earth, and the equilibrium also,
Who has not look’d forth from the windows, the eyes, for nothing, or whose brain held
audience with messengers for nothing;
Who contains believers and disbelievers—Who is the most majestic lover;
Who holds duly his or her triune proportion of realism, spiritualism, and of the
aesthetic, or
intellectual,
Who, having consider’d the Body, finds all its organs and parts good;
Who, out of the theory of the earth, and of his or her body, understands by subtle
analogies
all other theories,
The theory of a city, a poem, and of the large politics of These States;
Who believes not only in our globe, with its sun and moon, but in other globes, with their
suns
and moons;
Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day, but for all time, sees
races,
eras, dates, generations,
The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.

Well, not George Bush.

Amy Lowell - Thompson's Lunch Room -- Grand Central Station


Study in Whites

Wax-white --
Floor, ceiling, walls.
Ivory shadows
Over the pavement
Polished to cream surfaces
By constant sweeping.
The big room is coloured like the petals
Of a great magnolia,
And has a patina
Of flower bloom
Which makes it shine dimly
Under the electric lamps.
Chairs are ranged in rows
Like sepia seeds
Waiting fulfilment.
The chalk-white spot of a cook's cap
Moves unglossily against the vaguely bright wall --
Dull chalk-white striking the retina like a blow
Through the wavering uncertainty of steam.
Vitreous-white of glasses with green reflections,
Ice-green carboys, shifting -- greener, bluer -- with the jar of
moving water.
Jagged green-white bowls of pressed glass
Rearing snow-peaks of chipped sugar
Above the lighthouse-shaped castors
Of grey pepper and grey-white salt.
Grey-white placards: "Oyster Stew, Cornbeef Hash, Frankfurters":
Marble slabs veined with words in meandering lines.
Dropping on the white counter like horn notes
Through a web of violins,
The flat yellow lights of oranges,
The cube-red splashes of apples,
In high plated `epergnes'.
The electric clock jerks every half-minute:
"Coming! -- Past!"
"Three beef-steaks and a chicken-pie,"
Bawled through a slide while the clock jerks heavily.
A man carries a china mug of coffee to a distant chair.
Two rice puddings and a salmon salad
Are pushed over the counter;
The unfulfilled chairs open to receive them.
A spoon falls upon the floor with the impact of metal striking stone,
And the sound throws across the room
Sharp, invisible zigzags
Of silver.

I've eaten at Grand Central. And slept on the floor there. And not had the money to come home missing a bus and having to wrangle to get tickets fixed and needing enough to make the connection. I've watched my Mom buy five people lunch there who no one would speak to and they refused to seat inside the cafeteria so she took each plate out and paid to be able to do that, extra.Ordered Roast beef sandwiches with gravy, open faced. This is a beautiful poem. (Me cursing her for feeding those she knew were hungry, figuring we'd both be robbed and run out of money......to which she said, "At least I know they ate today.")

Ezra Pound - The Garden


En robe de parade.
Samain

Like a skien of loose silk blown against a wall
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens,
And she is dying piece-meal
of a sort of emotional anaemia.

And round about there is a rabble
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor.
They shall inherit the earth.

In her is the end of breeding.
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive.
She would like some one to speak to her,
And is almost afraid that I
will commit that indiscretion.

She would like someone to speak to her. To uphold her falsehoods, or relieve her of them. This is a part of the past.....yet the remnants affect me all the time in what I do.

Charles Bukowski -

The Blackbirds Are Rough Today


lonely as a dry and used orchard
spread over the earth
for use and surrender.

shot down like an ex-pug selling
dailies on the corner.

taken by tears like
an aging chorus girl
who has gotten her last check.

a hanky is in order your lord your
worship.

the blackbirds are rough today
like
ingrown toenails
in an overnight
jail---
wine wine whine,
the blackbirds run around and
fly around
harping about
Spanish melodies and bones.

and everywhere is
nowhere---
the dream is as bad as
flapjacks and flat tires:

why do we go on
with our minds and
pockets full of
dust
like a bad boy just out of
school---
you tell
me,
you who were a hero in some
revolution
you who teach children
you who drink with calmness
you who own large homes
and walk in gardens
you who have killed a man and own a
beautiful wife
you tell me
why I am on fire like old dry
garbage.

we might surely have some interesting
correspondence.
it will keep the mailman busy.
and the butterflies and ants and bridges and
cemeteries
the rocket-makers and dogs and garage mechanics
will still go on a
while
until we run out of stamps
and/or
ideas.

don't be ashamed of
anything; I guess God meant it all
like
locks on
doors.

I reveal my limits. For me this is a poem about walls, barriers, and our capacity to boundary until we choke the life from anything remotely like love.