Self-Criticism in February

Robinson Jeffers

The bay is not blue but sombre yellow
With wrack from the battered valley, it is speckled with violent foam-heads
And tiger-striped with long lovely storm-shadows.
You love this better than the other mask; better eyes than yours
Would feel the equal beauty in the blue.
It is certain you have loved the beauty of storm disproportionately.
But the present time is not pastoral, but founded
On violence, pointed for more massive violence: perhaps it is not
Perversity but need that perceives the storm-beauty.
Well, bite on this: your poems are too full of ghosts and demons,
And people like phantoms — how often life’s are —
And passion so strained that the clay mouths go praying for destruction —
Alas, it is not unusual in life;
To every soul at some time. But why insist on it? And now
For the worst fault: you have never mistaken
Demon nor passion nor idealism for the real God.
Then what is most disliked in those verses
Remains most true. Unfortunately. If only you could sing
That God is love, or perhaps that social
Justice will soon prevail. I can tell lies in prose.

To the States

by Walt Whitman

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist
    much, obey little,
Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,
Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever
    afterward resumes its liberty.

Intersection

Pat Lowther

The Blue Boy Motor Hotel at Fraser & Marine, Vancouver, BC, circa 1964

At Fraser & Marine, slapped
by the wind from
passing traffic

light standards, trolleys
everything has edges
too real to touch

taxis unload at the hotel
the Gulf station fills them up

the lego apartment block
is sharp as salt

And the sunset is tea rose
colour strained, clarified
between navy-blue clouds,
the moon in its first
immaculate crescent

it’s an axis
  double intersection
    transparencies

the thumb end
where you press
and the whole universe twirls out
a long seamless skin
a rill of piano music

the calla lily is seamless
yet divided

that cream skin wall
deceives the eye
following round and around
like fingers on ivory

refractions hook under
the eyelashes
you imagine that you can see
honeycombs
                   jewels
                       individual cells

texture reveals nothing;

to touch is to bruise

diesel trucks negotiate
left turns,
their long trailers creaking

headlights spurt
at the green signals

it was just here
at this bus stop
I lost my glove
my forty-cent transfer
my book
of unwritten profundities

I tell you they fell upward !
I saw them
            glinting
                      catching light
from the thin, solid moon

The Blue Boy Motor Hotel
advertises:
try our comfortably
refurbished rooms
with color TV

the clouds are ink-blue
in the west
mercury lights lie along
the streets’ contours
like strings of blue rhinestones

the bus stop bench
is painted blue, it
advertises Sunbeam bread

Don’t touch the bench
it could burn you
or crystallize
your molecules with cold

keep your eyes on the sidewalk,
not paved here,
the puddles from recent rain

the Gulf station
could swallow you like a prairie

you could walk into
that phone booth
and step out between the planets

Contrast

ROBINSON JEFFERS

Kaweah Gap on High Sierra Trail

The world has many seas, Mediterranean, Atlantic, but
here is the shore of the one ocean.
And here the heavy future hangs like a cloud; the
enormous scene; the enormous games preparing
Weigh on the water and strain the rock; the stage is
here, the play is conceived; the players are
not found.

I saw on the Sierras, up the Kaweah valley above the
Moro rock, the mountain redwoods
Like red towers on the slopes of snow; about their
bases grew a bushery of Christmas green,
Firs and pines to be monuments for pilgrimage
In Europe; I remembered the Swiss forests, the dark
robes of Pilatus, no trunk like these there;
But these are underwood; they are only a shrubbery
about the boles of the trees.

Our people are clever and masterful;
They have powers in the mass, they accomplish marvels.
It is possible Time will make them before it
annuls them, but at present
There is not one memorable person, there is not one
mind to stand with the trees, one life with
the mountains.

The Truck Driver

By Bill Simmons

In tribute to Canada’s gallant truckers

(https://www.rebelnews.com/tags/convoy_reports)

This ribbon of highway that lay before me
It seems a hundred thousand miles
Every mile is so alone
I wonder if she is at home

This ribbon of highway that lay before me
As I travel the mind unravels
If I ever get back home
I’ll never again leave her alone

In her letter she said the better
So alone she would be gone
Will I ever see again her smile
May as well be a hundred thousand miles

If I ever get back home
I’ll never again leave her alone
If I ever see her again
This ribbon of highway I’ll put an end

As I come from this highway
I turn down a lonely street
And as I see in to her drive way
I see her standing waiting for me

This ribbon of highway that lays behind me
As I hold her and I see her smile
I wonder if she knows
How I counted every single mile.

A Sonnet for Gary Snyder on his 80th Birthday

Paula Meehan

To sit an hour in gratitude, the heart
opening to dustmote sunbeam deep shade
in this sequoia grove the mind expands
to the edge of the forest which is the edge

of mind where I see the enchanted path
in and through the teeming forest of childhood,
your poetry written on my empty hands,
the leaves, your pages dreaming a whole age:

its mysteries writ clear as a star chart
across the heavens — the trail you have blazed —
O to be alive! The blest holy land
beneath my bare feet, humble and privileged;

to follow after, to walk the same earth,
to get down and kiss the ground of your birth.

8th of May, 2010

HOMECOMING

SHEROD SANTOS

Bixby’s Landing

ROBINSON JEFFERS

Abandoned Lime Kilns in California

They burned lime on the hill and dropped it down
here in an iron car
On a long cable; here the ships warped in
And took their loads from the engine, the water
is deep to the cliff. The car
Hangs half way over in the gape of the gorge,
Stationed like a north star above the peaks of
the redwoods, iron perch
For the little red hawks when they cease from
hovering
When they’ve struck prey; the spider’s fling of a
cable rust-glued to the pulleys.
The laborers are gone, but what a good multitude
Is here in return: the rich-lichened rock, the
rose-tipped stone-crop, the constant
Ocean’s voices, the cloud-lighted space.
The kilns are cold on the hill but here in the
rust of the broken boiler
Quick lizards lighten, and a rattle-snake flows
Down the cracked masonry, over the crumbled
fire-brick. In the rotting timbers
And roofless platforms all the free companies
Of windy grasses have root and make seed; wild
buckwheat blooms in the fat
Weather-slacked lime from the bursted barrels.
Two duckhawks darting in the sky of their cliff-hung
nest are the voice of the headland.
Wine-hearted solitude, our mother the wilderness,
Men’s failures are often as beautiful as men’s
triumphs, but your returnings
Are even more precious than your first presence.

RANDOM INTERVIEW

Pat Lowther

From:  Time Capsule. Polestar 1996, pp. 242.

1,  the fear

the fear is of everything
staying the way it is
and only i changing

the fear is
of everything changing
and i staying the same

the world expanding
branch tunnel cell
more and more
precious and terrible

while i grow only more
fragile and confused

the fear is my own
hands beating
like moths

my eyelids stuttering
light breaking into
meaningless phrases

the fear is of you
patiently elsewhere growing
a blood shape
of all my wishes

2,  i am tired

i am tired of pain
i am tired of my own pain
i am tired of
the pain of others

i am tired of lives
unwinding like a roll
of bloody bandage
i shall roll up
the sky, pinch the sun

i go out to the cliff pours
of stars, the tall
volumes of stars

i go down
to the grains of soil
to bacteria
to viruses
to the neat mechanics of molecules

to escape the pain
to escape the pain

3,  what i want

what i want is to be blessed
what i want is a cloak of air

the light entering my lungs
my love entering my body
the blessing descending
like the sky
sliding down the spectrum

what i want is to be
aware of the spaces between stars, to breathe
continuously the sources of sky,
a veined sail moving,
my love never setting
foot to the dark
anvil of earth

The Little Vagabond

BY WILLIAM BLAKE

Dear Mother, dear Mother, the Church is cold,
But the Ale-house is healthy & pleasant & warm;
Besides I can tell where I am use’d well,
Such usage in heaven will never do well.

   But if at the Church they would give us some Ale. 
And a pleasant fire, our souls to regale; 
We’d sing and we’d pray, all the live-long day; 
Nor ever once wish from the Church to stray, 

   Then the Parson might preach & drink & sing. 
And we’d be as happy as birds in the spring: 
And modest dame Lurch, who is always at Church,
Would not have bandy children nor fasting nor birch.

   And God like a father rejoicing to see, 
His children as pleasant and happy as he: 
Would have no more quarrel with the Devil or the Barrel 
But kiss him & give him both drink and apparel.