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The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently ~ Thomas Lux
THE VOICE YOU HEAR WHEN YOU READ SILENTLY is not silent, it is a speaking- out-loud voice in your head; it is spoken, a voice is saying it as you read. It's the writer's words, of course, in a literary sense his or her "voice" but the sound of that voice is the sound of your voice. Not the sound your friends know or the sound of a tape played back but your voice caught in the dark cathedral of your skull, your voice heard by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts and what you know by feeling, having felt. It is your voice saying, for example, the word "barn" that the writer wrote but the "barn" you say is a barn you know or knew. The voice in your head, speaking as you read, never says anything neutrally- some people hated the barn they knew, some people love the barn they know so you hear the word loaded and a sensory constellation is lit: horse-gnawed stalls, hayloft, black heat tape wrapping a water pipe, a slippery spilled chirr of oats from a split sack, the bony, filthy haunches of cows... And "barn" is only a noun- no verb or subject has entered into the sentence yet! The voice you hear when you read to yourself is the clearest voice: you speak it speaking to you. |
The Farm by Joyce Sutphen My father's farm is an apple blossomer. He keeps his hills in dandelion carpet and weaves a lane of lilacs between the rose and the jack-in-the-pulpits. His sleek cows ripple in the pastures. The dog and purple iris keep watch at the garden's end. His farm is rolling thunder, a lightning bolt on the horizon. His crops suck rain from the sky and swallow the smoldering sun. His fields are oceans of heat, where waves of gold beat the burning shore. A red fox pauses under the birch trees, a shadow is in the river's bend. When the hawk circles the land, my father's grainfields whirl beneath it. Owls gather together to sing in his woods, and the deer run his golden meadow. My father's farm is an icicle, a hillside of white powder. He parts the snowy sea, and smooths away the valleys. He cultivates his rows of starlight and drags the crescent moon through dark unfurrowed fields. |
Thanks for all the great posts. Even though I don't really post much anymore, I still come to this thread regularly to enjoy all the wonderful verse.
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Creek Walk
by Sarah M. Wells Wading in the river current pulling me in like sliding under covers— I become part of the riverbed, sediment blending with my skin. I am woven with wild grasses on banks, molded to the surface of earth in perfect curves, body fluid, rooted. I could be washed away with a little rain. What trickles harmless around me now exposes roots of ancient trees that lean toward light, grow sideways to keep from sliding. They will join the rapid flow, deteriorate with me and we will deposit in a delta with every other swallowed figure from upriver. I dip my fingers in, feel the stream make room for me. I will share in this shifting of earth—dirt loosened until the roots give way. |
Old Houses by Robert Cording Year after year after year I have come to love slowly how old houses hold themselves— before November's drizzled rain or the refreshing light of June— as if they have all come to agree that, in time, the days are no longer a matter of suffering or rejoicing. I have come to love how they take on the color of rain or sun as they go on keeping their vigil without need of a sign, awaiting nothing more than the birds that sing from the eaves, the seizing cold that sounds the rafters. |
To Be Reborn
By Teresa Williams What if rebirth is like stepping into a room, something ordinary, then ...............Surprise! Giant crimson tree, temple of hexagons, a magic cup of moon-tea. ..........................Rebirth. Incited by luminescence, light chaser, Isis. Through layers of ancient skin you came from black to red to breathing center. Now here, you are the shimmering one the one who ripples and shines glittering the air, gold and bright. You shooting star of a songbird light. Once again, feel your freshly found face flooding the room with new freedom, star nectar, white queen, gleaming. And again, savor this renewal this taste of dawn as you swallow death's end, from bitter and night, bitter then sweet .............holy crescent, oracle of brilliance you stepping into .......a new room. |
Sometimes
by David Whyte Sometimes if you move carefully through the forest breathing like the ones in the old stories who could cross a shimmering bed of dry leaves without a sound, you come to a place whose only task is to trouble you with tiny but frightening requests conceived out of nowhere but in this place beginning to lead everywhere. Requests to stop what you are doing right now, and to stop what you are becoming while you do it, questions that can make or unmake a life, questions that have patiently waited for you, questions that have no right to go away. ~ David Whyte ~ |
This reminded me of Giovanni's in VB :)
Décor by X. J. Kennedy This funky pizza parlor decks its walls With family portraits some descendant junked, Ornately framed, the scrap from dealers' hauls, Their names and all who cherished them defunct. These pallid ladies in strict corsets locked, These gentlemen in yokes of celluloid— What are they now? Poor human cuckoo clocks, Fixed faces doomed to hang and look annoyed While down they stare in helpless resignation From painted backdrops—waterfalls and trees— On blue-jeaned lovers making assignation Over a pepperoni double cheese. |
Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. Robert Frost |
http://www.scenicreflections.com/ith...aper__yvt2.jpg Night Creatures by Jim Harrison "The horses run around, their feet are on the ground." In my headlights there are nine running down the highway, clack-clacking in the night, swerving and drifting, some floating down the ditch, two grays, the rest colorless in the dark. What can I do for them? Nothing, night is swallowing all of us, the fences on each side have us trapped, the fences tight to the ditches. Suddenly they turn. I stop. They come back toward me, my window open to the glorious smell of horses. I'm asking the gods to see them home. |
http://libzine.files.wordpress.com/2...e704bded72.jpg What to Remember When Waking by David Whyte In that first hardly noticed moment to which you wake, coming back to this life from the other more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began, there is a small opening into the new day which closes the moment you begin your plans. What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep. To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others. To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance. You are not a troubled guest on this earth, you are not an accident amidst other accidents you were invited from another and greater night than the one from which you have just emerged. Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window toward the mountain presence of everything that can be, what urgency calls you to your one love? What shape waits in the seed of you to grow and spread its branches against a future sky? Is it waiting in the fertile sea? In the trees beyond the house? In the life you can imagine for yourself? In the open and lovely white page on the waiting desk? |
The Truelove by David Whyte There is a faith in loving fiercely the one who is rightfully yours, especially if you have waited years and especially if part of you never believed you could deserve this loved and beckoning hand held out to you this way. I am thinking of faith now and the testaments of loneliness and what we feel we are worthy of in this world. Years ago in the Hebrides I remember an old man who walked every morning on the grey stones to the shore of the baying seals, who would press his hat to his chest in the blustering salt wind and say his prayer to the turbulent Jesus hidden in the water, and I think of the story of the storm and everyone waking and seeing the distant yet familiar figure far across the water calling to them, and how we are all preparing for that abrupt waking, and that calling, and that moment we have to say yes, except it will not come so grandly, so Biblically, but more subtly and intimately in the face of the one you know you have to love, so that when we finally step out of the boat toward them, we find everything holds us, and confirms our courage, and if you wanted to drown you could, but you don’t because finally after all the struggle and all the years, you don’t want to any more, you’ve simply had enough of drowning and you want to live and you want to love and you will walk across any territory and any darkness, however fluid and however dangerous, to take the one hand you know belongs in yours. |
Sonnet XVII
I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz, or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off. I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance, risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way than this: where I does not exist, nor you, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep. ” ― Pablo Neruda |
I Remember You As You Were
I remember you as you were last autumn.You were the grey beret and the still heart. In your eyes the flames of twilight fought on. And the leaves fell on the water of your soul. Clasping my arms like a climbing plant the leaves garnered your voice, that was slow and at peace. Bonfire of awe in which my thirst was burning. Sweet blue hyacinth twisted over my soul. I feel your eyes traveling, and the autumn is far off: grey beret, voice of bird, heart like a house, towards which my deep longings migrated and my kisses fell, happy as embers. Sky from a ship, Field from the hills:Your memory is made of light, of smoke, of a still pond! Beyond your eyes, farther on, the evenings were blazing. Dry autumn leaves revolved in your soul.
--Pablo Neruda |
Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev
(Leader of a woman’s climbing team, all of whom died in a storm on Lenin Peak, August 1974. Later, Shatayev’s husband found and buried the bodies.)
The cold felt cold until our blood grew colder then the wind died down and we slept If in this sleep I speak it’s with a voice no longer personal (I want to say with voices) When the wind tore our breath from us at last we had no need of words For months for years each one of us had felt her own yes growing in her slowly forming as she stood at windows waited for trains mended her rucksack combed her hair What we were to learn was simply what we had up here as out of all words that yes gathered its forces fused itself and only just in time to meet a No of no degrees the black hole sucking the world in I feel you climbing toward me your cleated bootsoles leaving their geometric bite colossally embossed on microscopic crystals as when I trailed you in the Caucasus Now I am further ahead than either of us dreamed anyone would be I have become the white snow packed like asphalt by the wind the women I love lightly flung against the mountain that blue sky our frozen eyes unribboned through the storm we could have stitched that blueness together like a quilt You come (I know this) with your love your loss strapped to your body with your tape-recorder camera ice-pick against advisement to give us burial in the snow and in your mind While my body lies out here flashing like a prism into your eyes how could you sleep You climbed here for yourself we climbed for ourselves When you have buried us told your story Ours does not end we stream into the unfinished the unbegun the possible Every cell’s core of heat pulsed out of us into the thin air of the universe the armature of rock beneath these snows this mountain which has taken the imprint of our minds through changes elemental and minute as those we underwent to bring each other here choosing ourselves each other and this life whose every breath and grasp and further foothold is somewhere still enacted and continuing In the diary I wrote: Now we are ready and each of us knows it I have never loved like this I have never seen my own forces so taken up and shared and given back After the long training the early sieges we are moving almost effortlessly in our love In the diary as the wind began to tear at the tents over us I wrote: We know now we have always been in danger down in our separateness and now up here together but till now we had not touched our strength In the diary torn from my fingers I had written: What does love mean what does it mean “to survive” A cable of blue fire ropes our bodies burning together in the snow We will not live to settle for less We have dreamed of this all of our lives Adrienne Rich (1974) |
No Other Kind of Light Find that flame That existence That can burn beneath the water No other kind of light Will cook the food you need. -Hafiz http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3100/...4ff205c265.jpg |
Alcestis on the Poetry Circuit
The best slave
does not need to be beaten. She beats herself. Not with a leather whip, or with stick or twigs, not with a blackjack or a billyclub, but with the fine whip of her own tongue & the subtle beating of her mind against her mind. For who can hate her half so well as she hates herself? & who can match the finesse of her self-abuse? Years of training are required for this. Twenty years of subtle self-indulgence, self-denial; until the subject thinks herself a queen & yet a beggar – both at the same time. She must doubt herself in everything but love. She must choose passionately & badly. She must feel lost as a dog without her master. She must refer all moral questions to her mirror. She must fall in love with a cossack or a poet. She must never go out of the house unless veiled in paint. She must wear tight shoes so she always remembers her bondage. She must never forget she is rooted in the ground. Though she is quick to learn & admittedly clever, her natural doubt of herself should make her so weak that she dabbles brilliantly in half a dozen talents & thus embellishes but does not change our life. If she’s an artist & comes close to genius, the very fact of her gift should cause her such pain that she will take her own life rather than best us. & after she dies, we will cry & make her a saint. ~Erica Jong |
http://i45.tinypic.com/106mtxh.jpg Water Picture by May Swenson In the pond in the park all things are doubled: Long buildings hang and wriggle gently. Chimneys are bent legs bouncing on clouds below. A flag wags like a fishhook down there in the sky. The arched stone bridge is an eye, with underlid in the water. In its lens dip crinkled heads with hats that don't fall off. Dogs go by, barking on their backs. A baby, taken to feed the ducks, dangles upside-down, a pink balloon for a buoy. Treetops deploy a haze of cherry bloom for roots, where birds coast belly-up in the glass bowl of a hill; from its bottom a bunch of peanut-munching children is suspended by their sneakers, waveringly. A swan, with twin necks forming the figure 3, steers between two dimpled towers doubled. Fondly hissing, she kisses herself, and all the scene is troubled: water-windows splinter, tree-limbs tangle, the bridge folds like a fan. |
Remember Remember me when I am gone away, Gone far away into the silent land; When you can no more hold me by the hand,Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.Remember me when no more day by day You tell me of our future that you planned: Only remember me; you understandIt will be late to counsel then or pray.Yet if you should forget me for a while And afterwards remember, do not grieve: For if the darkness and corruption leave A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,Better by far you should forget and smile Than that you should remember and be sad.(f) |
kate o'brien...
in the beginning (ii)
between the moment and the moment lives the meaning between the moment and the moment love bursts into being in the beginning (i) is quite good too |
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