Skip to main content

From "thirsty poems"

ukrania

in the ukraine the insect turns and devours its own head.
the grasshoppers are indeed the plague but still it was the crops failed to get up.
tractors are run until they all run out and are left to open in the slanting rain.
chernobyl, we sing a song of thanks for chernobyl, for putting us...in hell...on the map.
in the public park in kiev radiation is gotten so bad the children no longer merely play at being “dead”.
I cannot imagine the ukraine, I do not have to; it is a frontier of me.
on the road that needs attention a man trudges home with absolutely nothing on his mind.
there are red soils and grey, but it is for our black soil for which we are justly famed.
the coupon is so worthless no one spends it and so finally we have solved the problem of our inflation.
the potential future leader of the ukraine can’t speak ukrainian yet.
tell the tale of l’vov, a dirty jewel left unattended.
on a farm-strip the head-scarf of a woman balloons suddenly with the wind in it.
I will go there and I will be there and I will face a field as big as we say europe is (is it?).
there is a plot, it gets down to hatching in the south-east corner where nobody goes.
the train of kiev arrives mysteriously in warszawa; with snow still melting on the roof...
in a quiet yard are a hundred needles; locals quoth “lo! see the warheads as they glow in the night.”
coughing on the dust of a lung the worker swigs beer for old times’ sakes;
recent past revisited on the populace moves on with little real effect noted at ground level.

deepest winter. the streets of the nameless town are empty, tail lights of the occasional cares are in trouble with the falling snow. a tram gives it a go, the darkness snuffs it out; from the drains the steam purrs out and birds gather there. in the ukraine, there are no wild-cats nor stray-dogs, or if there are, as obviously there are, come the winter they die. some force has soldered them to the ice. leaving the city. the silence, it is respectful high above the slithering taxi. huddle of lights of the housing projects where everyone this night is living and everyone this night is in. to night and every night. it is minus twenty five degrees and getting colder, here!

but in the country-side the temperature slips on and beyond and is gripped with a wild negative ambition; here it can kill you just to breathe: a hundred people die from broke lungs, thirty die from just the fear of frost, seventy three people, a village, is lost. simply mislaid by the drift of the snow. come spring. they reappear in another place entirely but they carry on because here it all feels the same in any case.

I walk. down a lane. in snow, ‘cept it is not snow, not exactly and here the word pool gets parched like peppermint and where did that come from? in this lane the few ruts are left by carts and the often hoof prints, three trees are getting dressed bit by the moisture freezing in the air. every night they are the ones you see decked out in a pristine fur, silvery and haughty, dropping in white sheets in day light, for. when it is this cold the sap is pulled so far back that these trees are actually dead; nothing lives. when spring comes, the way a baseball haemorrhages in your hand, they still wear the trauma of completion and people don’t particularly bother to speculate as to why.

let me just say this:
this lane is here in darkest galicia
makes a province of ukrania
it is the other world is a subterranea
beneath the carapace, this winter’s night
and in the spring when the air is thick with blossom and each lane is a carnival
of colours, a scents certain
people are know to say they don’t
they hardly they really don’t
that it looks so very different from before because it is a different place.
or this:
when winter’s vice is broken
and retreats and pulled back north
to the caps
on great rods
that run along great grooves
ancient as ever and it all takes on its own
with it and destroys what it
is left by so it can not not be got at.

I arrive at a place where I can go no further.
my host leaves open his door and the yellow gash ruins me.
I see the stable and the stable, it sees me too.
after this place there is no other place for me.
the border is internalised and so very hard to place.
the yard is gloomy though the moon is full.
in it the useless tools are spending some quality time.
how vain is the plough when seen out of season. I
enter the house and this door shifts. on its hinges
my host welcomes me and his wife it is she opens a bottle.
the house is still, wooden, and the centre table is rotten.
on the walls superstitions barely camouflaged in gaudy icons.
the woman’s skirts are home to children which are lovely also.
in this place, this square box, came I to rest. it is trapped by winter and blocked in by the moon.
I will sleep here and dream though often content disturbs my equilibrium.
in ukrania I find my frontier and the weather lays me down.
come morning, whose son’s brilliance, leaves me tearful, leave me alone!
where is warsaw? where is lublin? in ukrania no thing stirs.
sunday morning, the church is full;
held resonating on a shivering rock of earth.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Deleuze, Difference and Repetition

For a long time I have felt that poetics has not taken into consideration a great deal written about issues pertaining to difference and repetition to be found in contemporary philosophy. As poetry's whole energy and dynamic is based on a fundamental relation to differential versus repeated units of sense (sense both in terms of meaning and the sensible), any work on difference and repetition would be welcome. That some of the greatest thinkers of the age, notably Deleuze and Derrida, have made both issues core to their whole philosophical systems is so remarkable that poetics is impoverished if it does not fully acknowledge this. Not that I am one to talk. Although I am aware of the centrality of Deleuze's work to postmodern poetry, I have as yet not been able to really address this but in Poetry Machines I began that work at least. In preparation for the few hundred words I wrote there, here are the 10,000 words I annotated in preparation. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference an

John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Manchester: Carcanet, 1977) First Published (New York: Viking, 1975) Close Readings and annotations of every poem in the collection March-April 1997 in preparation for In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde (Bucknell UP, 2001) Introduction: · Shoptaw notes that this return to poetry is dominated by images of waiting, that narrative (especially fairy-tale) returns, as do the musically based titles, there are no prose poems and no fixed forms such as sonnets of pantoums, most are free verse paragraphs, also bring forward a new American speech, more direct and inclusive. “As One Put Drunk into a Packet-Boat”, 1-2 · Shoptaw notes this was the original title for the collection, marking a self-consciously Romantic return to poetry, recording the thoughts of “I” from afternoon to night, just outside a childhood country home. Has a pastoral crisis narrative in that a summer storm gathers but passes leaving the poet reli

Charles Bernstein, Introduction

Bernstein’s three collections of poetics statements and contributions to the important collection The L=A=N=G… Book have set the agenda for a contemporary, postmodern, experimental aesthetic His comments on absorptive poetics have set the standard for a postmodern poetics developed from the modernist conception of estrangement to be found in Russian Formalism and of course then picked up on by Brecht amongst others. Bernstein on absorption: “By absorption I mean engrossing, engulfing completely, engaging, arresting attention, reverie...: belief, conviction, silence. Impermeability suggests artifice, boredom, exaggeration, attention scattering, distraction, digression, interruptive, transgressive, undecorous, anticonventional, unintegrated, fractured, fragmented...: skepticism doubt, noise, resistance “ (Charles Bernstein, A Poetics Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992) 29. Bernstein is committed to poetry in all its possible manifestations and several impossible Through the