On Reading The Separate Rose by Pablo Neruda
A sea-side rose —
the old interpreter holds it
up to his ear
Contemplative poems
Contemplative poems — a collection of the best works on PoemShip.
Lullaby
Dance, house.
White as a corpse in moonlight,
in sunlight white as a small hill of salt.
Dance in your wig of rain streaming from the eaves.
We who pass through you, who sleep
under your asphalt-shingled hat
are little more than ghosts.
The earth might move or it might not,
but thunder comes knocking almost every day in the summer.
How long can you sit while the moon circles like a madman
& flowers fade?
You don’t have forever, that sterile seed.
Somewhere on the other side of the world,
with nothing but water beneath it,
a white sail rocks.
Janus poem
Mirror, mirror
Hello, silk: a girdled witch hazel switch, curdled-milk yellow.
The stark noose of bare wood bears no tooth mark.
Light snow fogs the view, logs glow white
as egrets, Victoria’s secrets, as
hope against hope.
Exchange
I cough into the night
& a deer snorts in alarm.
I am hungry & dangerous;
small bones & bits of muscle
get stuck in my throat.
My feline love of comfort
may dull my instincts, but
I still read fear as a form of praise.
And I want to tell the deer:
I am the animal who rid
these hills of your original killers.
Shall we resent each other’s part
in the conquest? We share
almost the pact between
a pastoralist & his herd.
The tamed woods are as easy
Loggerhead
Caretta caretta
Loggerhead: originally an insult applied to people,
later a kind of cannon shot, the post on a whaleboat
anchoring the harpoon line, a bulbous-headed iron tool
used to heat tar
& the largest sea turtle in the world. Its jaws
can crunch through the thickest armor: queen conch,
giant clam. Like all sea turtles, it can’t retreat
into its shell,
but once grown too big for a grouper’s gullet,
aside from fishing nets & oil spills, it’s nearly
indestructable. When sharks attack, it shows them
the flat side
of its plastron or carapace & their teeth
snap on nothing. It’s built for combat:
even the females spar over feeding grounds,
Du Fu: A Life in Poetry, translated by David Young
Too hot in the sun
too cool in the shade
I keep going from one side
of the house to the other
breezes ripple
through the young grass
hawks slide sideways
along the ridge
the late afternoon sun sets
the flowering crabapple aglow
long shadows fill
with lilac scent
immersed in a life’s
worth of poetry
I’ve let another spring day
come & go
The Silent Banjo
The silent banjo leans against the wall
like a movie gangster, casual, coiled,
ready for some chin music.
The silent banjo may or may not
be in tune—& in what tuning, who knows?
To some, this makes it alluring.
Its neck is straight, like a mute swan
culled by a marksman.
The silent banjo is silent because
it has seen too much.
The silent banjo is silent because
no one remembers how to listen.
Approach the silent banjo as you would
any other apocryphon:
brandishing the one true book of matches
& saying in your best Hollywood voice,
Purple Sea Urchin
Spines have more uses
than one would think.
Sure, they defend against sea otters
and the voracious stars.
Ball-jointed, they swivel to catch
pieces of floating algae
for the shorter, two-
fingered pedicellines to convey
to the bottom-scraping mouth
& its five sharp pyramids.
They are digging bars.
A purple urchin can excavate
a hollow into solid rock.
If it starts too young, it may become stuck,
entombed. Some never dig at all,
& wander slow as time
Adirondack haiku
At dawn in the campground,
“The Sound of Music” on a flute.
I’m plotting murder.
Squatting to pluck puffballs
from a stump, her raincoat
pale in the dark woods.
Never mind how
you got here. Just sit,
O glacial erratic.
At the back of the store,
a free view of the stormy lake
moving three ways at once.
Not far from John Brown’s grave,
a state prison looms
above the larch.
When I open the Adirondack
The dark night (2)
What are you listening for, who
already know everything I have
to say? You are nothing but
a tourist of the night.
What appears empty to you
is in fact a fully inhabited tenement.
Your inscrutable fruit is far
more pungent than you can know,
who do not risk becoming
someone else’s morsel.
Who cooks for you?
The dark night
I am listening for an owl that doesn’t call.
It’s as taciturn as the coyotes whose presence here
we mainly infer from footprints.
Night ripens on the boughs, its blue-black fruit
an antidote to the 24-hour Wal-Mart of the soul
in which I sink.
On the Road to Santiago
My brother had chanted its name for days
until, voilà, it hung
a hundred feet above our astonished faces:
lammergeier, impossible to miss,
the open book of its body so wide
it could be read by the thinnest updrafts,
dark against the clouds —
& us standing by the very rock
that Roland’s sword was said to have split
when he fought the Basques & prepared
a feast for vultures. But this one
with its fully feathered head
& wisp of beard looked nothing like
one of those tonsured carrion-eaters.
We lamented its empty talons,
having fed ourselves on tales
Describe a feeling — we’ll find a poem
Or try: