When I was young
I had a strange notion
of old age
as if a butterfly
would pine
for caterpillar days
Age
2
Tag Archives: beginnings
The big Was
First, the big Was, expanding suddenly
Too quick to glow, too far to measure
Like blood coagulates, in lumps, relentless
Blind recognition yearning to recombine
Into the breadth-less infinite, one by one,
Across the fleeing everness
It was the lumps, after all, without them
Nothing is born, nothing dies
The lumps, flailing, contact and contract
Lend each other mass and meaning
Become vast in becoming spent
In the large and slow entropic resistance
Fragments of causation forgoing randomness
Blinding recapitulation, a first worm wriggles
Your father, my son, your mother, too
Born in that salty swilling dawn
Descending on down time’s narrow tunnel
Until all that’s left is dawn
That time I thought of poetry
1965, nickel bag, down from Chicago,
Alert, ready to flush at a moment’s notice,
When the truth was, we could have smoked it
In the front pew of the Church of Jesus Christ
The Bleeding Savior, for all anyone knew of it
Back then, back when everything dark was nameless.
And I was rambling aimlessly,
Words following words, broad and blunt,
The way a sailor rips his lines, the way
A soldier blindly fires.
And someone said,
“What’s he ranting about?”
And Hugh, my immortal vanished Hugh, said
“Dylan Thomas came down
And wrote a poem in his head.”
And, by God, he had.
Snow, again
Unbidden, it comes all the same
Without malice, unaware and uninterested
In our dreams or desires
Without even innocence
Its promise of sweet seclusion
Sequestered beneath the pale sameness
Dissolving in the salty mired streets
White and gray in a death spiral
A love embrace unlike any
Seen since the last snowfall
What may be, what could be
Belong to the feckless air
Oh, I can dream, all right
But only until recalled
By bickering gulls
Geese barking orders,
Or the shrill outrage of the
Woodpecker’s call
A field mouse trips nervously
Across an ice dam
Vultures patrol the freeway
Food from top to bottom
Interested only in replication
The slaughter of millions
But a byproduct of procreation
So long as enough survive to breed
Or not, and even then,
Some beast waits anxiously in the wings
For just enough change
Just enough opportunity
And still, falls the snow.
Ithaka, by C. P. Kafavy
A poem about travel – or not. Kafavy wrote this in Alexandria, where he was born, after returning from a brief exile in Constantinople.
As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbors seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard
exiles child 