Perverse Pleasure

Diane di Prima

Song for Spring Equinox
 

It is the first day of spring, the children are singing
(they are supposed to be sleeping) the clock is ticking
the cats are waiting for supper, one of them pregnant
kittens to herald the spring, nothing is blooming
nothing seems to bloom much around farms, just hayfields and corn
farms are too pragmatic, I look at ads
for hydrangea bushes, which I hate they remind me of brooklyn

for chinese wisteria vines, which I can't picture
but they sound exotic and mysterious
a kind of blue purple, I decide I'll get some

will I be disappointed, will they be yellow?
will I hate the Shetland pony we are buying
will we run out of wholewheat flour this week
before a new supply drives up from the city?

oh, it is very like being a pioneer,
but then everything is in this country, and in the country
especially. it was like being a pioneer on 5th street, too
and houston street, and amsterdam avenue
and in brooklyn, under the streetlights growing up
rollerskating at dusk with stickball games in the street
was the most pioneery of all,

it is slightly boring,
it tastes a lot of the times crossword puzzle
and ordering things thru the mail, which never come
or turn out wrong, or come the wrong color (wisteria)

I can't blame Alan for planning to go to India
to free his kundalini, so that his ears peel
or something dreadful happens to his physique
we are built for the exotic, we americans, this landscape leaves us
as open as a piece of chocolate cream pie 

Perverse Pleasure

Impermanence By Alex Dimitrov Issue no. 227 (Winter 2018) The first ending. And knowing it would end I wanted another. Lover, summer, pen with which to write it all down. The first disappointment. Which is not remembered but lives in the body. And how familiar it became. To take  the same walk home or lean over ledges,  to say my own name when meeting someone.  Again and again for the last time: the taste of salt in the afternoon. Flowers for no one—alive and sold on the street. What did I think was promised in being? The way a stranger can finish you off. Once only. And never the same after that. After knowledge.  How people are being detained  and shot with our money.  All of which cannot prepare us for death of which I am a student  and which is this country's business: the permanence of others. Even our cruelty toward one another. Will end. And I know  that looking at the night sky is me looking at the past. At light that's long escaped and travels alone but won't always.

Perverse Pleasure

Green Night By Edward Hirsch Issue no. 182 (Fall 2007) (Summer, 1982) We walked down the path to breakfast. The morning swung open like an iron gate. We sat in Adirondack chairs and argued for hours about the self—it wasn't personal— and the nature of nature, the broken Word, the verse of God in fragments. We trotted back and forth to readings. The trees were the greenest I had ever seen. We cut bread from a large brown loaf at a long wooden table in the mountains. A farmer hayed the meadows and the afternoon flared around us. Pass the smoky flask. Pass the cigarettes: twenty smouldering friends in a package. We swam in the muddy pond at dusk. The sky was a purple I had never seen. Someone was always hungover, Scheming with rhymes, hanging out. Nothing could quench our thirst for each other. At the bonfire, we flamed with words. The houses were named after trees. I slept with someone at the top of a maple. It was a green night to be a poet in those days. We didn't care if the country didn't care about us. Image: Pinterest

Perverse Pleasure

Diffused love
by Suchi Govindarajan
:::::::::

To grow up without cold seasons is
to find an obsession dusted with snow
For too long, my sun kept drawing shadows
But in my dreams, I would see tree trunks
branching into fragile hands
my bare prayer held up against the white

I imagined the weighted blanket of it
how it might quieten my heart's chaos
make my longings more calm and austere

In days when sunspots flecked my lashes
and the sand felt blister-rough as though it
would fuse into glass and catch the glare,
I dreamt of becoming a migrant bird
compelled to find routes away from the sun
I would follow every winter wind and current
And as calendars faded to blue-ink endings,
I would fly to lands full of diffused light

Like the Earth, I too would complete my orbit
pulled by a strange and foreign love.

Perverse Pleasure

The Root of Mother is Moth
By Terese Svoboda
Issue no. 106 (Spring 1988)

At dusklight she slips
into acetate underclothing,
all rustling.
                Has she slept
all day? Or is that housedress
draped over the hassock warm? From her motion,
  one of submission, her pale arms
                 upraised, the slip sliding,
           talc issues invisibly.

Mother is faceless so far up in the dark.
Just her torso glows,
and the color around her takes on the design
of a falling leaf, grey-yellow plaid.

     From the mirror, she draws what little light
there is inside her, and sighs.
                           But she is really very young
                 and will think so later.

Now nothing can claim her.
               I am quiet, all chrysalis,
                         hidden in her closet.

Perverse Pleasure

"Black Is the Color of My True Love's Hair" by Reginald Shepherd In the painting by Guido Reni of Saint Sebastian in the Palazzo Rosso, which reproduction makes available to those who travel only on the page, the saint to be  (he's not yet assumed by artifice, encumbered with perfections) endures continual martyrdom  with a visual sigh, gazing almost directly upward  as if to ask What now my love, or hum a chorus of Is that all there is, the body always some song or another. The eye tramping the simulacrum  of a surface hands have touched can't help but note how lush the uncorrupted flesh appears: the curve, for one  example, of the waist (narrowest circuit of the boy), just beneath the instance of an arrow's entrance, or the shadow just above the tangled loincloth that is surely pubic hair. One grasps that sainthood is an attribute of youth, the wondrous fair, as in old ballads; they always end. The boy in the Eagle Discount Supermarket,  for another, an apparition in a backwards baseball cap  appraising cuts of meat in artificial light,  deciding what he can afford to buy, how much each cut costs. I love the ground on where be stands. His face? Unverifiable. Image from the Internet

Perverse Pleasure

Bunny Slope
by Tadeusz Dąbrowski

When I'm writing a poem,
there's less and less of it.

As I approach the mountains,
they vanish behind a gentle hill,
behind the bunny slope.

And once I'm standing with them
face to face,
they take away my speech.

The very best poem 
finishes half way

Image from the Internet

Perverse Pleasure

On Being Coy
by Kimiko Hahn
Issue no. 186 (Fall 2008)

Many fish in those murky ocean caves
of Mexico, Brazil, Croatia, Oman

have no eyes.
Though in the streams outside—

clear as a frat bar in '75—

other males zip around and nip the females

to test chemical signals
and harass

with so much sex

that the females often cease to exist.
Better off

with a slower, blind suitor

I say—then think of Marvell's "rough strife"—
which I adore.

See—a little coyness can work
to cloud the current.

Those black lizard boots instead of mules—
that Manhattan tourist spot.

He's twenty-five. I'm forty.  
He demands one thing—well, two: my feet.

See what I mean?
Little has changed in the carpe diem—
or the simmering transparent stream.

Perverse Pleasure

Domestic Life — Gregory Orr

11 January 2015

from: The Caged Owl: New and Selected Poems

         1. TODAY 
Open yourself up: today 
that's no different than opening 
a refrigerator door: large chunks 
of meat, eggs 
scattered on the metal racks, 
and cowering in the back: 
a tiny, frightened woman. 
You are huge and clumsy; 
you fumble for her, breaking 
all the eggs, and she eludes you, 
and you don't feel a thing 
except cold inside.

         2. SOMETHING 
Something is burning inside you 
like a rose made from cellophane, 
like something white burning 
in a snowfield: no flames, 
all you can see is the shadow 
of smoke on the snow.

         3. BEFORE DAWN 
Your wife left before you woke. 
She scratched a note on your back; 
you try to read it with mirrors. 
You decide to talk to the cat, 
but when you open your mouth 
honey-colored wasps fly out.

The blood in the lightbulbs 
burns less brightly.

         4. THE WATERFALL 
Failing to hold on to things, 
a man can become 
a waterfall. 
His friends stare, 
silent and aghast, 
as he disappears 
over the cliff, carrying 
off his books, his wife, 
all his furniture.

         5. FALL CLEANING 
This morning, the almost weightless bodies 
of insects drift down 
from the ceiling. It's seasonal; 
you have to expect that sort of thing 
when you live in a burrow under the earth. 
Yesterday a package arrived 
in the mail; it contained bird beaks 
in assorted colors and sizes. 
Some are small like yellow thorns, 
but others are larger; 
I slip those over my fingers, 
clack them together and dance 
around the room in my gray bathrobe. 
The insects revive. I am their god. 
They dance after me up the tunnel 
and out into the autumn woods.

Perverse Pleasure

From Life
by Shane McCrae

I came from life from living I arrived

Nowhere     in the midst of God     in the midst of God

God is a city      in which no one has ever lived

We live      in houses like the houses we once had

Some in their first      some in their last

I live in the house I lived in with my wife

The first year we were married     a small white

House at the edge of campus it's as if

We never graduated     never left

Except she isn't here     and none of our

Friends but the friends who died so long ago

They aren't our friends anymore

I do what old friends do

And love them anyway    we eat together at the Waf-

fle House on Saturdays and wait all week to die

How many weeks now I don't know

Except it can't be more than three

Thousand I guess about three thousand    sixty years or so

Or how long do young people live

Seems like it's longer every day    three thousand or

She would be here with me I have

Thought hard about it and I'm sure

But sometimes     I feel like I've thought about

Her life for longer than she could have lived it

And mean to ask an angel      why we can see

Everything but Earth     from Heaven

But I don't ask     I don't think I could stand to not

Be answered     but I don't think I could stand the answer

Perverse Pleasure

Poem
by Alice Notley
Issue no. 56 (Spring 1973)

       The havoc-caused
        soul occurs not
        recovers yet the
        treatment bought
        with submission
        fiddles and
        caricatures contains nothing but
        heal intoxication
        (courage is in-
        toxication) wide
        & embedded
        stalactite and
        fall of snow... so

He winds a sheet around me
which must be sarong & song
He asks can I protect myself
I say I'm aware of my self-
inviolability he says
he means can I grease a car
for everyone must run a race
in the body's own running place

Running's itself's pure pleasure
I begin to overtake myself
and suddenly I was first
at the end of the race
along with everyone else

For we are all in college to learn to Marry:

        the winding dragon of night
        and horses of day and humming-
        birds motes of light and the
        dragon of the night:

        in black dress will be the lady
        in a silver vest or it's black
        against which looms the lighter
        black tree loom.

   One steps
   on a rusty nail, disbelieves
   in lockjaw one thinks forever without a thought

   telephone poles & railroad tracks
   the same and the same and the
   same silver clack telephone wires the
   luminous lines of the world
                                       on which I walk

   bare feet in fog
   foggy-footed spider     See
   the spider toe-dance on its
   tender tendril legs across
   my hand shimmering mote
   with room comfort room service
   silver artifice & uprightness
   an arrow's a lily a lily's an arrow

   blank blank yellow & red blank

   ...I weep I read novels
   Someday I'll count all your freckles
   bagatelles of transient experience
   A different one always dies
   whose name seems forgotten a sacred
   thread blows away
my rags of righteousness

            are all your heroism your social charm your
            wit your victories on land
            on sea?
            Style he says is the ultimate morality
            of mind
            Stick cinnamon is 84 cents

O Turmeric
of use in mustard chow-chow piccalilli
sauces where the color the COLOR
yellow is thought desireable!
for that is life, to blaze with color.

One ignores the gossip
rounds the turn
dances & ducks & jabs
& Bites the Blade. Pleasant days.
There's a tone-free bullet
Someone cycles away

                something strums
                not tree not airplane
                not seen
                       I stop
                not entirely to pieces

                       I flow
                 in litter of sunflower seeds.

"The whole path of a material particle
between any limits of time must achieve some
perfection worthy
of the providence of God"
Everything I have has an earwig in it

which will make light of sacred things,
a genuine form being seen

                 a light and things

                                                   some kisses being exchanged
amid the whirl of the maddening dance.

Joy now is high-wire joy.