Immortal Drunkenness by Thomas Wolfe

Immortal drunkenness!
What tribute can we ever pay,
What song can we ever sing,
What swelling praise can ever be sufficient
To express the joy, the gratefulness, and the love
Which we, who have known youth and hunger in
America,
Have owed to alcohol?

We are so lost, so lonely, so forsaken, in America:
Immense and savage skies bend over us,
And we have no door.

But you, immortal drunkenness,
Came to us in our youth
When all our hearts were sick with hopelessness,
Our spirits maddened with unknown terrors,
And our heads bowed down with nameless shame.
You came to us victoriously,
To possess us, and to fill our lives with your wild music,
To make the goat-cry burst from our exultant throats,
To make us know that here upon the wilderness, the
savage land,
That here beneath the immense, inhuman skies of time,
In all the desolation of the cities,
The gray unceasing flood-tides of the manswarm,
Our youth would soar to fortune, fame and love,
Our spirits quicken with the power of mighty poetry,
Our work go on triumphantly to fulfillment
Until our lives prevailed.

What does it matter, then,
If since that time of your first coming,
Magic drunkenness,
Our head has grown bald, our young limbs heavy,
And if our flesh has lain
Battered, bleeding in the stews?

You came to us with music, poetry, and wild joy,
When we were twenty,
When we reeled home at night
Through the old moon-whitened streets of Boston
And heard our friend, comrade, and our dead companion,
Shout through the silence of the moonwhite square:
"You are a poet and the world is yours."
And victory, joy,
Wild hope, and swelling certitude
And tenderness
Surged through the conduits of our blood
As we heard that drunken cry,
And triumph, glory, proud belief
Was resting like a chrysm around us
As we heard that cry,
And turned our eyes then
To the moon-drunk skies of Boston,
Knowing only that we were young,
And drunk,
And twenty,
And that the power of mighty poetry
Was within us,
And the glory of the great earth
Lay before us-
Because we were young and drunk and twenty,
And could never die!


Magic
And who shall say-
Whatever disenchantment follows-
That we ever forget magic,
Or than we can ever betray,
On this leaden earth,
The apple-tree, the singing,
And the gold?


New Orleans -- River

And he looked upon
The huge yellow snake of the river,
Dreaming of its distant shores,
The myriad estuaries
Lush with tropical growth that fed it,
All the romantic life
Of plantation and canefields that fringed it,
Of moonlight,
Of dancing darkies on the levee,
Of slow lights on the gilded river-boat,
And the perfumed flesh of black-haired women,
Musical wraiths
Below the phantom drooping trees.

drivel from espana

-----
heart beats burnt red umber,
pumped by a dusty recollection.
In swathes of butter yellow
the grain sings a hymn
that windswept
becomes an ecstatic fiesta shout:
and oh how the poppies dance and sway.
soul now resting on the tip of a windmill,
undulating in the zephyr
weaving fantasies of authors and ingenioso
while lines of cypress mark
my mourning--
unwilling departure.
In this land my blood flows red wine,
voices hushed in dust driven wind
as my spirit floats over mountains to brief petal rest.
To be smothered here in this field of hay, wildflowers
-leave me to lay awhile
I will crouch and cry
supplicate to sweet Apollo
until I breathe as the knotted arms
of the olive tree.
rooted -- restful


illness in the morning

Giant of a baby
swaddled in white
hallucinating crosses, the faces of men, female ecstasy-
incorrect buttons
feed acidic breath
Dehydration.
twists and turns
of a profaned digestive trail
Do not eat the egg.
bright beaked black bird
seen through a crack in the door
i’m tired of this base bodily burn
lull an empty core stranded without flight
hot tea please,
i do not desire foul solids now.
a day to waste and ache and whine
birdsong mocks my stomach
Do not eat the egg.

groucho gauchos

gaucho girls, gaucho girls
what do you scowl for?
unsexed grime
oh no not another with a guitar
dreadnought hair,
and rats on your necks
i suppose you are right to keep scowling

afternoon in lorca park

closing our hands in the sweet dusk of grass
verdure and waste and the sigh
of the sparrow-
feathered wine spills from my lips.
ever the journey, never the rest
respite gives way to spite
and that to indifference-
a birdsong of dewdrops caught
in fading light.
oh melancholy petal life,
delicate and transient
to rest a wing for a while
to lay tangled in branches.
departures like nicotine left on the tongue
chased down with juices mostly toxic
and dull.
exhale like my lungs full of smoke
longing, lulled..

Poppies in July

Poppies in July
By Sylvia Plath

Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a
mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.
Like bloody skirts!

There are fumes that I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed- or sleep!-
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,
Dulling and stilling.

But colorless. Colorless.

The Moon and the Yew Tree

The Moon and the Yew Tree
by Sylvia Plath
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky-
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness-
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness- blackness and silence.

(photo credit to Constant Anee)

I'm currently in the thick of a plethora of Plath analysis for my 20th century writing by women class. Its been a slightly surreal experience finding myself becoming so submerged in her psyche. It is after all, a little unnerving to see in print what felt like 'confidences' of my subconscious.

A Hymn for Stuffed Dogs

I say a blessing to each splinter and I know that it is just the same--
flaccid, fictional and all so much the same.
If---no---when----fine
I waited in the soil(my soul) for your corrugated wisdom...but you left it in some alley, behind the taxidermists place.
I can’t help but wonder what I’d looked like stuffed over your mantle
Or under your mantle
Soft woolen murmurs as we walk down that alley
Just my battered boots,a paper napkin soul, and some goddamned God I have yet to meet.

Adaptation

The subterranean world heaves with the calamitous humidity of human contact.
It pollutes the pores with its ignominious deceits as I pass through burdened and deliberate.
And what of those conspirators?
They fill the commuter trains in a commiseration and celebration of their mutual fate.

Wasted, a valiant drunk among sober faces---or sober among drunk faces
Oh but a toast to mutual indifference and the ordination of a new God.
Conceal all weapons in this world of tunnels but I don’t forget where mine’s hidden.
I declare to these comrades that I will have no part in the idol worship of numbers and spinal fluid.
I await another fate.

They follow the abortive coat hanger of codependent thought like lambs blind and naked in a cunt like tunnel and always make their stop on time.

In the night the furies rose and spun some eternal wool around my eyes-- filling my ears with cotton-- I’d like to hear from you soon but I’m afraid I’ve forgotten how to listen.

Encounter

by Yevtushenko

We were sitting about taking coffee
in the aerodrome cafe at Copenhagen
where everything was brilliance and comfort
and stylish to the point of tedium.
The old man suddenly appeared
or rather happened like an event of nature,
in an ordinary greenish anorak
his face scarred by the salt and burning wind,
ploughing a furrow through the crowded room
and walking like a sailor from the wheel.
His beard was like the white foam of the sea
brimming and glistening around his face.
His gruffness and his winner's certainty
sent up a wave around him as he walked
through the old fashions aping modern fashions
and modern fashions aping old fashions.
He in his open collar and rough shirt
stepping aside from vermouth and pernod
stood at the bar demanding Russian vodka
and waving away soda with a 'No'.
He with scars marking his tanned forearms
his filthy trousers and his noisy shoes
had better style than anyone in the crowd.
The solid ground seemed to quiver under
the heavy authority of that tread.
Somebody smiled across: 'Look at that!
you'd think that was Hemingway,' he said.
Expressed in details of his short gestures
and heavy motions of his fisherman's walk.
He was a statue sketched in rough rock,
one treading down bullets and centuries,
one walking like a man hunched in a trench,
pushing aside people and furniture.
It was the very image of Hemingway.
(Later I heard that it was Hemingay.)