Can I borrow the "Cornwall Vault" please?

[maxg]

Who would have thought it - Blake on the Klipsch board.

For those who havent got a clue what I am talking about Allan quoted 2 lines from Blake's Tiger, tiger.

Sadly I cant remember it all anymore....

"Tiger, tiger burning bright

In the forests of the night

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearfull Symetry

With what wings did he aspire

What the hand did seize the fire

?

?

Oh what something, oh what art

To twist the sinues of thy heart

And when thy heart began to beat

What dread hand, and what dead feet

And when the stars throw down their spears

And water heaven with their tears

Did he smile his work to see

Did he who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger, tiger burning bright

In the forrests of the night

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symetry

What evils play with aging minds that let us forget such beauty. Somewhat incongruous though, in such a post as this methinks.

Great - now I think I am Shakespear - better sign off before I start with "two houses" or some such.

[Allan Songer]

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

[Allan Songer]

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday

three days after Bastille day, yes

it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine

because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton

at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner

and I don't know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun

and have a hamburger and a malted and buy

an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets

in Ghana are doing these days

I go on to the bank

and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)

doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life

and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine

for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do

think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or

Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres

of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine

after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE

Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and

then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue

and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and

casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton

of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of

leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT

while she whispered a song along the keyboard

to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

[Allan Songer]

Love

"Once I let a guy blow me.

I kind of backed away from the experience.

Now years later, I think of it

Without emotion. There has been no desire to repeat,

No hangups either. Probably if the circumstances were right

It could happen again, but I don't know,

I just have other things to think about,

More important things. Who goes to bed with what

Is unimportant. Feelings are important.

Mostly I think of feelings, they fill up my life

Like the wind, like tumbling clouds

In a sky full of clouds, clouds upon clouds."

[Allan Songer]

Trying to Talk with a Man

Out in this desert we are testing bombs,

thats why we came here.

Sometimes I feel an underground river

forcing its way between deformed cliffs

an acute angle of understanding

moving itself like a locus of the sun

into this condemned scenery.

What weve had to give up to get here

whole LP collections, films we starred in

playing in the neighborhoods, bakery windows

full of dry chocolate0filled Jewish cookies,

the language of love-letters, of suicide notes,

afternoons on the riverbank

pretending to be children

Coming out to this desert

we meant to change the face of

driving among dull green succulents

walking at noon in this ghost town

Surrounded by a silence

that sounds like the silence of this place

except that it came with us

and is familiar

and everything we were saying until now

was an effort to blot it out

coming out here we are up against it

Out here I feel more helpless

with you than without you

you mention the danger

and list the equipment

we talk of people caring for each other

in emergencies laceration, thirst

but you look at me like an emergency

Your dry heat feels like power

your eyes are stars of a different magnitude

they reflect lights that spell out: EXIT

when you get up and pace the floor

talking of the danger

as if it were not ourselves

as if we were testing anything else

[Vladi]

It is amazing where this post has gone!

[Allan Songer]

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

I

Among twenty snowy mountains,

The only moving thing

Was the eye of the blackbird.

II

I was of three minds,

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

III

The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.

It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV

A man and a woman

Are one.

A man and a woman and a blackbird

Are one.

V

I do not know which to prefer,

The beauty of inflections

Or the beauty of innuendoes,

The blackbird whistling

Or just after.

VI

Icicles filled the long window

With barbaric glass.

The shadow of the blackbird

Crossed it, to and fro.

The mood

Traced in the shadow

An indecipherable cause.

VII

O thin men of Haddam,

Why do you imagine golden birds?

Do you not see how the blackbird

Walks around the feet

Of the women about you?

VIII

I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.

IX

When the blackbird flew out of sight,

It marked the edge

Of one of many circles.

X

At the sight of blackbirds

Flying in a green light,

Even the bawds of euphony

Would cry out sharply.

XI

He rode over Connecticut

In a glass coach.

Once, a fear pierced him,

In that he mistook

The shadow of his equipage

For blackbirds.

XII

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

XIII

It was evening all afternoon.

It was snowing

And it was going to snow.

The blackbird sat

In the cedar-limbs.

[Allan Songer]

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast.

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold.

[Allan Songer]

Skunk Hour

(For Elizabeth Bishop)

Nautilus Island's hermit

heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;

her sheep still graze above the sea.

her son's a bishop. Her farmer

is first selectman in our village;

she's in her dotage.

Thirsting for

the hierarchic privacy

of Queen Victoria's century,

she buys up all

the eyesores facing her shore,

and lets them fall.

The season's ill--

we've lost our summer millionaire,

who seemed to leap from an L.L. Bean

catalogue. His nine-knot yawl

was auctioned off to lobstermen.

A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

And now our fairy

decorator brightens his shop for fall;

his fishnet's filled with orage cork,

orange, his cobbler's bench and awl;

there is no money in his work,

he'd rather marry.

One dark night,

my Todor Ford climbed the hill's skull;

I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,

they lay together, hull to hull,

where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .

My mind's not right.

A car radio bleats,

"Love, O careless Love. . . ." I hear

my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,

as if my hand were at its throat. . . .

I myself am hell;

nobody's here--

only skunks, that search

in the moonlight for a bite to eat.

They march on their soles up Main Street:

white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire

under the chalk-dry and spar spire

of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top

of our back steps and breathe the rich air--

a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.

She jabs her wedge-head in a cup

of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,

and will not scare.

[BigBusa]

"My statement regarding my memory and vindictiveness, while perhaps rash and ill-advised, remains true and didn't imply that you had ever done anything to me. Vindictiveness does not equal vengefulness."

bclarke no offense but you might want to brush up on your big words and their meanings. Especially, if you're going to throw them around in public.

Let me save you a little time ...this time.

vin·dic·tive ( P ) Pronunciation Key (vn-dktv)

adj.

Definition:

a malevolent desire for revenge. Synonyms: vengefulness

Disposed to seek revenge; revengeful.

Marked by or resulting from a desire to hurt; spiteful.

Have a nice day.

PS I can tell that you are a pulchritudinous audiophile.

[Allan Songer]

Buffalo Bill's

defunct

who used to

ride a watersmooth-silver

stallion

and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat

Jesus

he was a handsome man

and what i want to know is

how do you like your blueeyed boy

Mister Death

[ben.]

DN-

I would focus on the last portion of that definition.

When one cannot argue a point, one focuses on arbitrary minutae.

Congratulations on your prowess with a dictionary.

Also congratulations on the apparent success of your auction. Two zero feedback bidders. Wonder how that might end up.

Allan-

Keep it coming!! I don't get poetry, as I wuz never much fer tha book larnin. It jest looks purty tha way its all over the page and such.

[Allan Songer]

Lana Turner has collapsed!

I was trotting along and suddenly

it started raining and snowing

and you said it was hailing

but hailing hits you on the head

hard so it was really snowing and

raining and I was in such a hurry

to meet you but the traffic

was acting exactly like the sky

and suddenly I see a headline

LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!

there is no snow in Hollywood

there is no rain in California

I have been to lots of parties

and acted perfectly disgraceful

but I never actually collapsed

oh Lana Turner we love you get up

[Allan Songer]

I stopped the car

to let the children down

where the streets end

in the sun

at the marsh edge

and the reeds begin

and there are small houses

facing the reeds

and the blue mist in the distance

with grapevine trellises

with grape clusters

small as strawberries

on the vines

and ditches

running springwater

that continue the gutters

with willows over them.

The reeds begin

like water at a shore

their pointed petals waving

dark green and light.

But blueflags are blossoming

in the reeds

which the children pluck

chattering in the reeds

high over their heads

which they part

with bare arms to appear

with fists of flowers

till in the air

there comes the smell

of calmus

from wet, gummy stalks

[Allan Songer]

Bring me to the blasted oak

That I, midnight upon the stroke,

(All find safety in the tomb.)

May call down curses on his head

Because of my dear Jack that's dead.

Coxcomb was the least he said:

The solid man and the coxcomb.

Nor was he Bishop when his ban

Banished Jack the Journeyman,

(All find safety in the tomb.)

Nor so much as parish priest,

Yet he, an old book in his fist,

Cried that we lived like beast and beast:

The solid man and the coxcomb.

The Bishop has a skin, God knows,

Wrinkled like the foot of a goose,

(All find safety in the tomb.)

Nor can he hide in holy black

The heron's hunch upon his back,

But a birch-tree stood my Jack:

The solid man and the coxcomb.

Jack had my virginity,

And bids me to the oak, for he

(all find safety in the tomb.)

Wanders out into the night

And there is shelter under it,

But should that other come, I spit:

The solid man and the coxcomb.

[bkrop]

Allan: Once again, but with bongo please...

Attributions?

[Allan Songer]

In order from the top:

William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Robert Lowell, e e cummings, Frank O'Hara, William Carlos Williams, William Butler Yeats.

[bkrop]

Thank You!

[BigBusa]

the zero bidders are both local and have emailed me prior to bidding ...like my fine print says to do.

No worries.

You got better things to do than worry about my CW auction I'm sure.

[mobile homeless]

Great stuff, Allan.