Architecture poems
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Preamble (A Rough Draft For An Ars Poetica)
© Jean Cocteau
The grain of rye
free from the prattle of grass
et loin de arbres orateurs
Carol Of Occupations
© Walt Whitman
COME closer to me;
Push close, my lovers, and take the best I possess;
Yield closer and closer, and give me the best you possess.
Seashore
© Ralph Waldo Emerson
I heard or seemed to hear the chiding Sea
Say, Pilgrim, why so late and slow to come?
Dream Song 55: Peter's not friendly. He gives me sideways looks
© John Berryman
Peter's not friendly. He gives me sideways looks.
The architecture is far from reassuring.
I feel uneasy.
A pity,âthe interview began so well:
I mentioned fiendish things, he waved them away
and sloshed out a martini
The Ancient World
© Mark Doty
Today the Masons are auctioning
their discarded pomp: a trunk of turbans,
gemmed and ostrich-plumed, and operetta costumes
labeled inside the collar "Potentate"
Turtle, Swan
© Mark Doty
Because the road to our house
is a back road, meadowlands punctuated
by gravel quarry and lumberyard,
there are unexpected travelers
some nights on our way home from work.
Once, on the lawn of the Tool
Little Mack
© Eugene Field
This talk about the journalists that run the East is bosh,
We've got a Western editor that's little, but, O gosh!
He lives here in Mizzoora where the people are so set
In ante-bellum notions that they vote for Jackson yet;
Wittgenstein's Ladder
© David Lehman
"My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way:
anyone who understands them eventually recognizes them as
nonsensical, when he has used them -- as steps -- to climb
up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder
after he has climbed up it.)" -- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus
A Calendar of Sonnets: December
© Helen Hunt Jackson
The lakes of ice gleam bluer than the lakes
Of water 'neath the summer sunshine gleamed:
Far fairer than when placidly it streamed,
The brook its frozen architecture makes,
Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow
© Robert Duncan
that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein
In the Holy Nativity of our Lord
© Richard Crashaw
CHORUS
Come we shepherds whose blest sight
Hath met love's noon in nature's night;
Come lift we up our loftier song
And wake the sun that lies too long.
Verses from the Shepherds' Hymn
© Richard Crashaw
WE saw Thee in Thy balmy nest,
Young dawn of our eternal day;
We saw Thine eyes break from the East,
And chase the trembling shades away:
We saw Thee, and we blest the sight,
We saw Thee by Thine own sweet light.
What Would Freud Say?
© Bob Hicok
Wasn't on purpose that I drilled
through my finger or the nurse
laughed. She apologized
three times and gave me a shot
To Be Blind
© Arthur Seymour John Tessimond
Is it winds
curling round invisible corners?
Polyphony of perfumes?
Antennae discovering an axis,
erecting the architecture of a world?
California Plush
© Frank Bidart
is the Hollywood Freeway at midnight, windows down and
radio blaring
bearing right into the center of the city, the Capitol Tower
on the right, and beyond it, Hollywood Boulevard
blazing
