Words on Words

Untitled
Ko Un

One day I took a pebble from
an East Sea beach and put it in my pocket
but it jumped back out, shrieking.

As it hurtled off into the distance,
it failed to make the slightest sound.

It had no idea of the strong emotions I was longing for.

Out at sea are flocks of seagulls
ready to peck out and swallow facile words.

§

One day,
I thought it was a visitor,

One day,
I thought it was the master.

Over those years
I dreamed of the smoke
coming from the chimneys.

I still do not know who the poem is.

§

Achilles' Song
Robert Duncan

I do not know more than the Sea tells me,
told me long ago, or I overheard Her
telling distant roar upon the sands,
waves of meaning in the cradle of whose
sounding and resounding power I
slept.

Manchild, She sang

--or was it a storm uplifting the night
into a moving wall in which
I was carried as if a mothering nest had
been made in dread?

the wave of a life darker than my
life before me sped, and I,
larger than I was, grown dark as
the shoreless depth,
arose from myself, shaking the last
light of the sun
from me.

Manchild, She said,

Come back to the shores of what you are.
Come back to the crumbling shores.

All night
The mothering tides in which your
Life first formd in the brooding
light have quencht the bloody
Splendors of the sun

and, under the triumphant processions
of the moon, lay down
thunder upon thunder of an old
longing, the beat

of whose repeated spell
consumes you.

Thetis, then,
my mother, has promised me
the mirage of a boat, a vehicle
of water within the water,
and my soul would return from
the trials of its human state,
from the long siege, from the
struggling companions upon the plain,
from the burning towers and deeds
of honor and dishonor,
the deeper unsatisfied war beneath
and behind the declared war,
and the rubble of beautiful, patiently
workt moonstones, agates, jades, obsidians,

turnd and returnd in the wash of
the tides, the gleaming waste,
the pathetic wonder,

words turnd in the phrases of song
before our song ...or are they

beautiful, patiently workt remembrances of those
long gone from me,
returned anew, ghostly in the light
of the moon, old faces?

For Thetis, my mother, has promised
me a boat,
a lover, an up-lifter of my spirit
into the rage of my first element
rising, a princedom
in the unreal, a share in Death

*

Time, time. It's time.

The business of Troy has long been done.

Achilles in lreuke has come home.

And soon you too will be alone.

§

A Quick One Before I Go
David Lehman

There comes a time in every man's life
when he thinks: I have never had a single
original thought in my life
including this one & therefore I shall
eliminate all ideas from my poems
which shall consist of cats, rice, rain
baseball cards, fire escapes, hanging plants
red brick houses where I shall give up booze
and organized religion even if it means
despair is a logical possibility that can't
be disproved I shall concentrate on the five
senses and what they half perceive and half
create, the green street signs with white
letters on them the body next to mine
asleep while I think these thoughts
that I want to eliminate like nostalgia
0 was there ever a man who felt as I do
like a pronoun out of step with all the other
floating signifiers no things but in words
an orange T-shirt a lime green awning