Amant Fantôme

Amant Fantôme

In the time of hollowing oaks

in the gauzy dark there came

a rattle and a pounce.

Memory the housebreaker

stole the lintel from

the dolmen, drank the juice

that sports the flower, 
chipped the rime 
from the quicksilver lips

of the ghost that lights my heart.

In the time of moon-eyes' spying,

in the white night there came

a kiss like falling rain

a laugh like falling leaves

a stroke of stormgrey clouds,

and love was a combing,

a black floodtide 

that drowns

as it recedes.

~October 2012

Posted for   real toads

Ella's Challenge: Hallows Edge

Ella asks us to write a poem of ghosts, borrowing a line from another writer.

The line "In the days of night riders" inspired the opening stanza lines here, as directed in the prompt, and  is taken from a favorite poem by Yusef Komunyakaa, Blue Dementia. All copyright belongs to the copyright holders. I have altered the line because I don’t like to use others' work verbatim.

Image: The Abbey in the Oakwood, by Caspar David Friedrich

public domain, via wikipaintings.org

Off the Shelf Archive~October

It's time to refresh the Off the Shelf selection for the month of October, which marks one year of blogging here at Verse Escape, and is also the month of All Hallows, when everything that goes bump in the night does its best bumping. 

So I'm bringing out the big guns of the macabre, my old childhood companion, Edgar Allen Poe (1809-1849)with my utmost favorite from him, Ulalume, in all its ineffable soaring and occasionally silly bleakness, plus, because Halloween is my favorite holiday, an extra poem--just a small side dollop of the stark with In the Desert by Stephen Crane (1871-1900) to take some of the purple pouffe out. 

Sometimes it's hard to read Poe with a totally straight face as an adult, and yet he comes up with some amazing language that just knocks you backwards, even as you're shaking your head going, "over the top" or "sometimes less is more."

Crane is Crane, in this one, short, sharp and merciless. If you're only familiar with him as the author of The Red Badge of Courage, his poetry is more than worth exploring. 

You'll find both poems here on the Off the Shelf Page

And here is the previous selection for one last reading before it enters the vault, The Day I Saw Barack Obama Reading Derek Walcott's Collected Poems, by Yusef Komunyakaa, this years winner of the Wallace Stevens Award for Poetry. I wrote more about him last month and included some links here if you're curious about him.

As always please feel free to comment on either poem here, as comments are disabled off the main page. Suggestions for next time are always welcome, also.

The Day I Saw Barack Obama Reading Derek Walcott's Collected Poems

Was he looking for St. Lucia's light
to touch his face those first days 
in the official November snow & sleet 
falling on the granite pose of Lincoln?
 
If he were searching for property lines
drawn in the blood, or for a hint
of resolve crisscrossing a border,
maybe he'd find clues in the taste of breadfruit.
 
I could see him stopped there squinting
in crooked light, the haze of Wall Street
touching clouds of double consciousness,
an eye etched into a sign borrowed from Egypt.

If he's looking for tips on basketball,
how to rise up & guard the hoop,
he may glean a few theories about war   
but they aren't in The Star-Apple Kingdom.

If he wants to finally master himself,
searching for clues to govern seagulls
in salty air, he'll find henchmen busy with locks
& chains in a ghost schooner's nocturnal calm.

He's reading someone who won't speak
of milk & honey, but of looking ahead
beyond pillars of salt raised in a dream
where fat bulbs split open the earth.

The spine of the manifest was broken,
leaking deeds, songs & testaments.
Justice stood in the shoes of mercy,
& doubt was bandaged up & put to bed.

Now, he looks as if he wants to eat words,
their sweet, intoxicating flavor. Banana leaf
& animal, being & nonbeing. In fact, 
craving wisdom, he bites into memory.  

The President of the United States of America
thumbs the pages slowly, moving from reverie
to reverie, learning why one envies the octopus
for its ink, how a man's skin becomes the final page.

by Yusef Komunyakaa 

Off the Shelf Archive ~September

In preparation for changing out selections for the Archive, I was browsing poetry sites a bit earlier today and saw that there is a Wallace Stevens Award for Poetry, given by The Academy of American Poets. I was immensely saddened to find out I'd never heard of it, (or hardly any of the poets who've received it since it was established in 1994, except for W.S. Merwin and Adrienne Rich.)

Naturally, with my Wallace Stevens issues, I had to check it out, and found the 2011 recipient is contemporary poet Yusef Komunyakaa, born in 1947 in Bogalusa, LA, whose work is totally new to me, though he's been around and published for quite awhile. Since I hardly ever pick living poets, and rarely ones I haven't read extensively, I thought I'd make this next Off The Shelf page his poem:

  

The Day I Saw Barack Obama Reading Derek Walcott's Collected Poems

Here's his biography for those who'd like to know more about him:

Yusef Komunyakaa on Poets.org

 ************                     *****************               *************

And to make room for this new piece, we have below the last selection , moved here to the Archive, an excerpt from Four Quartets 1:Burnt Norton, by T.S. Eliot. Feel free to comment on either poem here as comments are disabled off the main page.

Four Quartets 1: Burnt Norton
(excerpt)

I

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.


II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance....

by T.S. Eliot

You can read the remainder of the poem here.

Photo:  'Pat Austin' English Rose, by joy ann jones