Off The Shelf Archive~July 2012

The archivist has been most remiss of late, plus under medication, but no excuses. It's more than past time for a new selection for the Off the Shelf Page, and it's a good time for one, as I still am a bit groggy and not up for much in the writing department. 

This month, what's left of it, I've chosen a moody and bizarre poem from American novelist and poet Stephen Crane called On the Desert. It makes heavy use of repetition, without rhyme or a true refrain, and for me is one of those poems that give the effect of being in someone else's nightmare, a sensation of grue and creeping darkness. There's a bio of Crane here at The Poetry Foundation   for those who'd like to know more about him.

You can read On the Desert here:  Off the Shelf Archive for September 2012

And to make room for the current offering, last month's selection, Beyond Love by Octavio Paz, is archived below for a final reading. As always feel free to comment on either poem here, as comments are disabled off the main page :

Beyond Love

~by Octavio Paz

Everything menaces us:

time that divides into fragments

who I was

from who I will be,

like a machete does a snake:

consciousness, transparency transfixed,

the blind look of watching yourself look;

words, grey gloves, mental dust on the grass,water, skin;

our names, that rise up between you and me,

walls of emptiness that no trumpet can fell.

Neither dreams peopled with broken images,

nor delirium and its prophetic foam,

nor love with its teeth and claws, suffices.

Beyond us,

on the frontiers of being and time,

a greater life than life beckons us.

Outside the night breathes, it expands,

full of great hot leaves,

of mirrors in combat:

fruit, talons, eyes, foliage,

backs that glisten,

bodies that push their way through other bodies.

Lie down here on the edge of so much foam,

of so much life that does not know and surrenders:

you too belong to the night.

Stretch out, whiteness that breathes,

throb, oh portioned star,

cup,

bread that tips the balance to the side of the dawn,

pause of blood between this time and another, without measure.

From El Girasol, Poems 1943-1948

© Octavio Paz

Image: Blue Dahlias, 

© joy ann jones 2012

Off the Shelf Archive~May

As usual I've procrastinated insufferably on this feature, waiting till the absolute last day of the month to change out the Off the Shelf selection. Again I'm falling back on a poem I've lived with for the last few decades, one from Octavio Paz, called Beyond Love. I couldn't tell you how many times I've read this one in a dark midnight.  

You'll find it here, in the Off the Shelf archives for July.

And here is a biography of the man, in my opinion one of the great Spanish language poets of our time.

So without further ado, here's last month's selection for a final read before it enters the archives, an even older favorite of mine by John Donne, 

 A Valediction; Forbidding Mourning:

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning 

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move,
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did and meant,
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must
Like th' other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun. 

~ by John Donne

Image: Carlysle Wall(The Lovers), 1853,  by Dante Gabriel Rossetti 

Public Domain via wikipaintings.org