Time poems
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To The Whore Who Took My Poems
© Charles Bukowski
some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
When Night Comes
© Li Ching Chao
To the tune of "Telling My Most Intimate Feelings"When night comes,
I am so flushed with wine,
I undo my hair slowly:
a plum calyx is
Tz'u No. 12
© Li Ching Chao
The wind ceases; fallen flowers pile high.
Outside my screen, petals collect in heaps of red
and snow-white.
Tz'u No. 11
© Li Ching Chao
It was far into the night when, intoxicated,
I took off my ornaments;
The plum flower withered in my hair.
Tz'u No. 1
© Li Ching Chao
To the tune "Courtyard Filled with Fragrance"Fragrant grass beside the pond
green shade over the hall
a clear cold comes through
the window curtains
To Lord Hu
© Li Ching Chao
I send blood-stained tears to the mountains and rivers of home,
And sprinkle a cup of earth on East Mountain.
I imagine when Your Lordship, His Majesty's envoy, upholding the Imperial spirit,
passes through our two capitals, K'ai Feng and Lo Yang,
Thousands of people would line the streets and present tea and broth
to welcome you....
The Double Ninth Festival
© Li Ching Chao
The coolness of midnight
penetrates my screen of sheer silk
and chills my pillow of jade.
Nocturne III
© Jose Asuncion Silva
One night
one night all full of murmurings, of perfumes and music of wings;
one night
in which fantastic fireflies burnt in the humid nuptial shadows,
The Dependencies
© Howard Nemerov
This morning, between two branches of a tree
Beside the door, epeira once again
Has spun and signed his tapestry and trap.
I test his early-warning system and
Gyroscope
© Howard Nemerov
This admirable gadget, when it is
Wound on a string and spun with steady force,
Maintains its balance on most any smooth
Surface, pleasantly humming as it goes.
Insomnia I
© Howard Nemerov
Some nights it's bound to be your best way out,
When nightmare is the short end of the stick,
When sleep is a part of town where it's not safe
To walk at night, when waking is the only way
The Lobster
© Howard Nemerov
Here at the Super Duper, in a glass tank
Supplied by a rill of cold fresh water
Running down a glass washboard at one end
And siphoned off at the other, and so
Fugue
© Howard Nemerov
You see them vanish in their speeding cars,
The many people hastening through the world,
And wonder what they would have done before
This time of time speed distance, random streams
Of molecules hastened by what rising heat?
Was there never a world where people just sat still?
Poetics
© Howard Nemerov
You know the old story Ann Landers tells
About the houseife in her basement doing the wash?
She's wearing her nightie, and she thinks, "Well, hell,
I might's well put this in as well," and then
The Goose Fish
© Howard Nemerov
On the long shore, lit by the moon
To show them properly alone,
Two lovers suddenly embraced
So that their shadows were as one.
Lion & Honeycomb
© Howard Nemerov
He asked himself, poor moron, because he had
Nobody else to ask. The others went right on
Talking about form, talking about myth
And the (so help us) need for a modern idiom;
The verseballs among them kept counting syllables.
The Makers
© Howard Nemerov
Who can remember back to the first poets,
The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus?
No one has remembered that far back
Or now considers, among the artifacts,
A Spell before Winter
© Howard Nemerov
After the red leaf and the gold have gone,
Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rain
Bruised and discolored, when October's flame
Goes blue to guttering in the cusp, this land
Learning by Doing
© Howard Nemerov
They're taking down a tree at the front door,
The power saw is snarling at some nerves,
Whining at others. Now and then it grunts,
And sawdust falls like snow or a drift of seeds.
September, The First Day Of School
© Howard Nemerov
My child and I hold hands on the way to school,
And when I leave him at the first-grade door
He cries a little but is brave; he does
Let go. My selfish tears remind me how
I cried before that door a life ago.
I may have had a hard time letting go.
