For Poetry Monday:

She Says, Being Forbidden:, Leonora Speyer

And was there not a king somewhere who said:
“Back, waves! I do command you!” I forget
His name, beloved, or his race, and yet
I know the story and am comforted.
The tides will rise, are rising—see, they spread
About your robes, your ermine will be wet,
Your velvet shoes, your dear dear feet! Ah let
Me warn you, sir, the waves will reach your head!

My king, my kingly love, how shall we stay
The bold broad lifting of this lovely sea?
What is the master word that we must say
To bring these roaring waters to the knee?
The other king went scampering away!
Will you so do? Or will you drown with me?


Hat-tip to conuly. Ah, Cnut, we hardly recall ye. This is from Speyer’s 1926 collection Fiddler’s Farewell, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

---L.

Subject quote from Respect, Aretha Franklin.

For Poetry Monday:

The Llano Estacado, John Poch

How much soil do you plow to soothe a conscience?
If you’re a staked plains, dry-land, long view man:
a sky’s worth. Some even sow the dry playa
mid-summer with sorghum, the cotton plowed under
after early hail. Thus, not every farmer keeps
an old broken homestead sacred as a graveyard.
Today, no Sharpshin on a pivot for an omen,
no stoic farmer on a turn-row changing water.

Among a little wind grit, in a grid on a grid, somewhere
like the crossroads of outer space and Earth, Texas,
a handful of ragged elms withstand a long sway
of heat and wind. These old guards of a home haunt
the field but wither even as ghosts must. Honor them
with a walk among homesick bricks, and prophesy good.


First published in Poetry issue July/August 2009. The Llano Estacado is a large mesa/plateau in west Texas and easternmost New Mexico, extending from Amarillo through Lubbock and down to Odessa. The name is often translated as “staked plain,” with a folk etymologies explaining that its dry grassland is so featureless that Native Americans supposedly put up markers to guide their way (and Coronado famously did find it confusing), but the actual origin is probably “stockaded/palisaded plain,” referring to the escarpments of its eastern and western edges. The sharp-shinned hawk is a common small hawk of the region. The elms, which are not native, would have been grown by a former homesteader by irrigation from wells.

---L.

Subject quote from Dreams, Fleetwood Mac.

(I’ve no idea how much sense this will make if you don’t know the book in question.)

I’ve read Ursula K. Le Guin’s Always Coming Home many times—annually from when I was 16 till my mid-20s, and at least six times (probably more) since then. This time I made an experiment and read it out of order: I skipped Stone Telling’s first two sections until I reached her final section, then with greater social context read it all together, in a single day, before continuing on to the end.

I expected this to not work, but I was curious just how badly it wouldn’t work. The answer is, nowhere nearly as badly as reading chapters of The Dispossessed in internal chronological order, which utterly fails—that story is built around experiencing events in the order given. There is some loss of experience, as between her first and last sections there are pieces expecting you to have read her story beforehand (including a poem by Stone Telling), but it’s not as catastrophic as with The Dispossessed.

And now I know.

One thing that struck me this time: Pandora’s informant about Kesh medical practice is Alder of Chumo and Sinshan—the name Stone Telling’s husband had when she was still Woman Coming Home, who presumably found his third name, Stone Listening, at the same time she did. We don’t know exactly how long Pandora spent on her field studies, but that she has just the one informant suggests it wasn’t years upon years. And yet, the Archivist of the Madrone, when Pandora had only experienced enough of the Kesh to find their concepts of time confusing, knew of Stone Telling’s written narrative. Not a gotcha, but a hmmm.

I want to know more about Giver Ire’s daughter and Ire herself. They reappear more than anyone. Along with Thorn of Sinshan, they may be enough to constitute a reasonable Yuletide request.

(I still wonder how homosexual marriages, which are mentioned in passing only twice, work in practice in a tightly matrilocal culture.) (Pro tip to readers: the soundtrack of music and songs of the Kesh, which was included with the original publication on a cassette tape, is still available on Bandcamp.)

---L.

Subject quote from Freedom! ’90, George Michael.

For Poetry Monday:

Tired, Langston Hughes

I am so tired of waiting.
Aren’t you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two—
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.


---L.

Subject quote from Vuelvo al Sur, Astor Piazzolla & Fernando Solanas, though I confess I prefer the Gotan Project cover.

For Poetry Monday:

No Such Thing As the Innocent Bystander, Andrea Gibson

Silence rides shotgun
wherever hate goes.


---L.

Subject quote from The Sounds of Silence, Simon & Garfunkel.

Chinese has a lot of suspiciously specific characters, most of them obscure, though in many cases the suspicion is because they’re the name of an object that’s no longer used, such as 铃, pronounced líng, which is a sort of bell used only for decorating an imperial carriage. And then there’s ones like my favorite: 虯, pronounced qiú, meaning a young dragon old enough to have grown horns.

There are characters that are more suspiciously specific, but this one, I keep circling back, inventing contexts that would require having a word for the concept. I mean, I can see farmers inventing shoat/shote so they can talk specifically about weaned pigs that are less than a year old, and getting them ready for market, but dragons aren’t farmed or hunted, or even fished.

虯 —that’s—huh. Yeah.

---L.

Subject quote from Safely You Deliver, Graydon Saunders.

For Poetry Monday Tuesday (because spent yesterday hiking in the mountains), another Francis:

Hallelujah: A Sestina, Robert Francis

A wind’s word, the Hebrew Hallelujah.
I wonder they never gave it to a boy
(Hal for short) boy with wind-wild hair.
It means Praise God, as well it should since praise
Is what God’s for. Why didn’t they call my father
Hallelujah instead of Ebenezer?

Eben, of course, but christened Ebenezer,
Product of Nova Scotia (hallelujah).
Daniel, a country doctor, was his father
And my father his tenth and final boy.
A baby and last, he had a baby’s praise:
Red petticoats, red cheeks, and crow-black hair.

A boy has little to say about his hair
And little about a name like Ebenezer
Except that you can shorten either. Praise
God for that, for that shout Hallelujah.
Shout Hallelujah for everything a boy
Can be that is not his father or grandfather.

But then, before you know it, he is a father
Too and passing on his brand of hair
To one more perfectly defenseless boy,
Dubbing him John or James or Ebenezer
But never, so far as I know, Hallelujah,
As if God didn’t need quite that much praise.

But what I’m coming to; Could I ever praise
My father half enough for being a father
Who let me be myself? Sing Hallelujah.
Preacher he was with a prophet’s head of hair
And what but a prophet’s name was Ebenezer,
However little I guessed it as a boy?

Outlandish names of course are never a boy’s
Choice. And it takes some time to learn to praise.
Stone of Help is the meaning of Ebenezer.
Stone of Help; what fitter name for my father?
Always the Stone of Help however his hair
Might graduate from black to Hallelujah.

Such is the old drama of boy and father.
Praise from a grayhead now with thinning hair.
Sing Ebenezer, Robert, sing Hallelujah!

---L.

Subject quote from Don't You (Forget About Me), Simple Minds.

For Poetry Monday, something I think is a repeat but can handle a repost:

Ancient Music, Ezra Pound

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
And how the wind doth ramm!
              Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
              Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, ’tis why I am, Goddamm,
              So ’gainst the winter’s balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing goddamm.
Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.


Parody ofc of the Middle English round “Sumer is icumen in.”

---L.

Subject quote from Baker Street, Gerry Rafferty.

Short shameful (?) confession: this reread of Heyer’s The Nonesuch, my secondhand embarrassment over the romantic misunderstanding was way more acute than before, as in actively wincing as I read.

---L.

Subject quote from Circles, Post Malone.

For Poetry Monday, another cat poem from Le Guin:

Black Leonard in Negative Space, Ursula K. Le Guin

All that surrounds the cat
is not the cat, is all
that is not the cat, is all,
is everything, except the animal.
It will rejoin without a seam
when he is dead. To know
that no-space is to know
what he does not, that time
is space for love and pain.
He does not need to know it.


--L.

Subject quote from The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.