What? She killed 'em with mathematics. What else could it have been?

Jayne ,'Objects In Space'


We're Literary 2: To Read Makes Our Speaking English Good  

There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."


Hayden - Jul 05, 2004 5:44:40 pm PDT #4635 of 10002
aka "The artist formerly known as Corwood Industries."

Hey, I have a signed Mark Doty poem on my wall. Don't know why I didn't include him on the list.

Ararat

Wrapped in gold foil, in the search
and shouting of Easter Sunday,
it was the ball of the princess,
it was Pharoah's body
sleeping in its golden case.
At the foot of the picket fence,
in grass lank with the morning rain,
it was a Sunday school prize,
silver for second, gold
for the triumphant little dome
of Ararat, and my sister
took me by the hand and led me
out onto the wide, wet lawn
and showed me to bend into the thick nests
of grass, into the darkest green.
Later I had to give it back,
in exchange for a prize,
though I would rather have kept the egg.
What might have coiled inside it?
Crocuses tight on their clock-springs,
a bird who'd sing himself into an angel
in the highest reaches of the garden,
the morning's flaming arrow?
Any small thing can save you.
Because the golden egg gleamed
in my basket once, though my childhood
became an immense sheet of darkening water
I was Noah, and I was his ark,
and there were two of every animal inside me.

-Mark Doty

The poem is on handpressed paper in Granjon type. There's an illustration from the Frankfort Laeyon Biblia of 1569 of the animals approaching the ark. The upper corner is flecked with blood from my dog's nose (dating to before I framed the poem) where she cut it on an expedition to the woods.


Jen - Jul 05, 2004 5:51:47 pm PDT #4636 of 10002
love's a dream you enter though I shake and shake and shake you

hayden, if you weren't already married, I'd be down on one knee proposing right now.

Edit: and not just because I'd own half of that framed poem that way.


Pix - Jul 05, 2004 5:56:08 pm PDT #4637 of 10002
The status is NOT quo.

In Doty-induced happy place now.

My favorite Doty poem is "Difference".

I tell everyone they MUST read it out loud the first time they read it, though, so it has maximum impact.


Polter-Cow - Jul 05, 2004 5:57:03 pm PDT #4638 of 10002
What else besides ramen can you scoop? YOU CAN SCOOP THIS WORLD FROM DARKNESS!

Listen to the Kristin. She's only telling you for your own good.


Jen - Jul 05, 2004 5:57:47 pm PDT #4639 of 10002
love's a dream you enter though I shake and shake and shake you

Damnit, Kristin's already married too.


Pix - Jul 05, 2004 5:58:01 pm PDT #4640 of 10002
The status is NOT quo.

t hearting Polter-Cow

Edit: Hee! And Jen!


Steph L. - Jul 05, 2004 7:33:36 pm PDT #4641 of 10002
I look more rad than Lutheranism

This is my favorite Margaret Atwood poem (in fact, it was the catalyst for a huge change in my life long ago; the wrong change, as it turned out, but it was a catalyst nonetheless, and I respect that still):

Men with the heads of eagles
no longer interest me
or pig-men, or those who can fly
with the aid of wax and feathers

or those who take off their clothes
to reveal other clothes
or those with skins of blue leather

or those golden and flat as a coat of arms
or those with claws, the stuffed ones
with glass eyes; or those
hierarchic as greaves and steam-engines.

All these I could create, manufacture,
or find easily: they swoop and thunder
around this island, common as flies,
sparks flashing, bumping into each other,

on hot days you can watch them
as they melt, come apart,
fall into the ocean
like sick gulls, dethronements, plane crashes.

I search instead for the others,
the ones left over,
the ones who have escaped from these
mythologies with barely their lives;
they have real faces and hands, they think
of themselves as
wrong somehow, they would rather be trees.


billytea - Jul 05, 2004 7:36:05 pm PDT #4642 of 10002
You were a wrong baby who grew up wrong. The wrong kind of wrong. It's better you hear it from a friend.

Oh, lordy. I don't know if I'm in entirely the wrong place to be reading that right now, or entirely the right one.


Steph L. - Jul 05, 2004 7:39:50 pm PDT #4643 of 10002
I look more rad than Lutheranism

I hope entirely the right one.

You're certainly not any of the men "common as flies," nor are you a pig-man, or a man who takes off his clothes to reveal yet another set of clothes.

Would you rather be a tree?


Polter-Cow - Jul 05, 2004 7:40:45 pm PDT #4644 of 10002
What else besides ramen can you scoop? YOU CAN SCOOP THIS WORLD FROM DARKNESS!

Fucking hell, the woman's amazing. It's not fair she gets to be so good at poetry and prose.

Variation on the Word Sleep

I would like to watch you sleeping.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun and three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
and that necessary