I Thought This Was Better
(I thought I was better)
1.
But to begin a procession
Or a succession of lines1
Charmed to communion by resurrection—
Running together in the rain to mail a single letter,2
The chariots pausing
At her low gate3
And think no more of wall-builders than fools.
Her face is flecked with pomace...4
To me, all that those persons have arrived at,
Sinks away from them, except5
When a street piano, mechanical and tired
Reiterates some worn-out common song6
That the heart grows old?
Though I have many words…7
________________________
1 Michael Palmer, “Its Form”
2 Robert Lowell, “The Withdrawal”
3 Emily Dickinson, “The soul selects her own society”
4 Robert Frost, “The Cow in Apple Time”
5 Walt Whitman, “Thought”
6 T.S. Eliot, “Portrait of a Lady”
7 W.B. Yeats, “The Wild Swans at Coole”
2.
These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech8
Keeps order at the center
Where space is freest9
At each extreme, and lean its rising rain
Down low, first one and then the other way10
Leaping along the verge of death and night,
You show me dauntless Youth that went to fight;11
I should employ the rake and the plow,
Having reached the autumn of ideas;12
The seasons—and let us walk to the orchid-house,
See the flowers will take the prize tomorrow13
But be.
A poem should not mean.14
________________________
8 Archibald Macleish, “Ars Poetica”
9 John Ashbery, “Some Trees”
10 A.R. Ammons, “Identity”
11 Howard Nemerov,” The Beautiful Lawn Sprinkler”
12 Siegfried Sassoon, “To Leonide Massine in ‘Cleopatra’”
13 Charles Baudelaire, “The Enemy”
14 William Carlos Williams, “A Celebration"
3.
In a poem, one line may hide another line,
As at a crossing, one train may hide another train,15
But Thought has need of no such things
For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings16
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question17
As it can belong only to radiant creatures,
Weightless and winged (after all, why not?):18
How can I aspire
To such a high mountain?19
There is a ladder. / The ladder is always there
Hanging innocently / close to the side of the schooner20
Like some hideous calendar
“Compliments of Never & Forever, Inc.”21
________________________
15 Kenneth Koch, “One Train May Hide Another”
16 Robert Frost, “Bond and Free”
17 T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
18 Czeslaw Milosz, “On Angels”
19 Li Po, “For Meng Hao-Jan”
20 Adrienne Rich, From “An Atlas of the Difficult World”
21 Elizabeth Bishop, “Argument”
4.
I make a pact with you, Walt Whitman—
I have detested you long enough,22
But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.
There was never any more inception than there is now.23
It is clearer to me than if the pink
Were on the branch. It would be a searching24
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind:25
To seize and clutch and penetrate;
Expert beyond experience.26
All those words we once used for things but have
now discarded in order to come to know things…27
Even trees understand me! Good heavens,
I lie under them, too, don't I? I'm just like a pile of leaves.28
________________________
22 Ezra Pound, “A Pact”
23 Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
24 William Carlos Williams, “A Celebration”
25 Wallace Stevens, “Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself”
26 T.S. Eliot, “Whispers of Immortality”
27 Michael Palmer, “All Those Words”
28 Frank O'Hara, “Meditations in An Emer gency”
5.
We have done what we wanted.
We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry29
Behind what and what behind that, deep down
Where the surface has lost its semblance: or30
As a real house in the dark
Filled with people cut out31
As though they'd wrought it. / Song, let them take it,
For there's more enterprise / In walking naked32
Through the gates, to see us through
The mishmash house of the coming & going33
Under the overturned lute with its
One string I am going my way34
But would feel darkness envelop [my] soul
Before this black tableau full of loathing.35
________________________
29 Mark Strand, “Coming to This”
30 A.R. Ammons, “Called Into Play”
31 Michael Palmer, “As a Real House”
32 William Butler Yeats, “A Coat”
33 A.R. Ammons, “An Improvisation for Angular Momentum”
34 W.S. Merwin, “Air”
35 Charles Baudelaire, “I Love the Naked Ages Long Ago”
6.
A waterglass on the bureau fills with morning…
Don't let anyone in to wake us36
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence37
Makes the whole lake instantly tremble.
With my foot on the water, I feel38
In the middle of an eye,
Watching myself in its blank stare.39
My friend without eyes sits in the rain smiling
With a nest of salt in his hand.40
My heart within me like a stone
Is numbed too much for hopes or fears.41
You do not always know what I am feeling.
Me, it was love for you that set me afire…42
________________________
36 Kenneth Patchen, “As We Are So Wonderfully Done With Each Other”
37 Philip Larkin, “Church Going”
38 James Dickey, “The Lifeguard”
39 Octavio Paz, “Between Going and Staying”
40 W.S. Merwin, “My Friends”
41 Sylvia Plath, “A Better Resurrection”
42 Frank O'Hara, “For Grace, After a Party”
7.
Heroic reverie mocked by clown and knave
And wondered what was left for massacre to save43
When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter
And when he cried the little children died in the streets.44
Who will lure the idyllic roe from his petrified paperbag…
Who will bury a burning flag in the wings of the clouds who will pull45
Into the charging bull. You've got
To sew yourself into a suit of light,46
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water47
That writhed in suppleness upon the bed.
She curled her legs around my neck, which led48
To an orbit / and turn with disinterested
Hard energy, like the stars.49
________________________
43 William Butler Yeats, “A Bronze Head”
44 W.H. Auden, “Epitaph on a Tyrant”
45 Hans Arp, “Kaspar Is Dead”
46 Dean Young, “Sources of the Delaware”
47 Seamus Heaney, “Death of a Naturalist”
48 Donald Hall, “Villanelle”
49 Thom Gunn, “My Sad Captains”
8.
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones;
The shapes a bright container can contain!50
From that one voice, whose fierce request the downpour
Will grant. The walls, with their ancient portraits, glide51
On our inner tube, each one a different color.
Mine was lime green, yours was pistachio,52
And was likely to pass rapidly from wrist to slave when trying to
Recollect wife.53
Our souls are light; they have shaken a burden of hours.
What did we build it for? Was it all a dream?54
It's what the kids nowadays call weed. And it drifts
Like clouds from his lips. He hopes no one55
Fades. It's been an unlucky summer. Heavy rains
Brought on the grass tremendously, a monster crop.56
________________________
50
Theodore Roethke, “I Knew a Woman”
51 Rainer Maria Rilke, “Before Summer Rain”
52 John Ashbery, “The Burden of the Park”
53 Anne Carson, So The Hall Door Shuts Again and All Noise Is Gone”
54 Conrad Aiken, “The House of Dust: Complete"
55 Raymond Carver, “Stupid”
56 Hayden Carruth, “Emergency Haying
9.
I read poets, living and dead, who teach me
Tenacity, faith, and pride. I try to understand57
Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
Some talk of how difficult it had become to govern.58
Even before it died it reeked—worse
The moment it ceased / twitching59
And rolling down the street
Head over heels, one complete somersault60
Tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought
To your face a thoughtful, deepening grace61
Of events happening elsewhere? If so,
We should shrug off resemblances62
As, for example, the ellipse of the half-moon—
Rationalists would wear sombreros.63
________________________
57 Adam Zagajewski, “Self-Portrait”
58 Carolyn Forché, “The Colonel”
59 Nick Flynn, “Statuary”
60 David Ignatow, “The Bagel”
61 Mark Doty, “The Embrace
62 John Ashbery, “It Must Be Sophisticated”
63 Wallace Stevens, “Six Significant Landscapes"
10.
I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.
They will wonder if I was important,64
Whispering to each handhold, “I'll be back,”
I go up the cliff in the dark. One place65
In the back yard under
The kitchen could we do that66
In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,
The raw material of poetry in / all its rawness and67
Tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat / up smoking in the supernatural
darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities,68
Who binds to himself a joy / Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the joy as it flies / Lives in Eternity's sunrise69
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.70
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64 Sylvia Plath, “Last Words”
65 Mary Oliver, “After Arguing against the Contention
That Art Must Come From Discontent”
66 W.S. Merwin, “Before the Flood”
67 Marianne Moore, “Poetry”
68 Allen Ginsberg, “Howl”
69 William Blake, “Several Questions Answered”
70 Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself
Graphic Elasticities
1.
mainly shooting statistics
it shouldn’t be
and indeed operational
issues1 to resolve2
progress3
within the lit focus
of poverty reduction4
the bank quotes it
and the government repeats it
and the media quotes it
and the bank repeats it
and the government quotes it
and the media repeats it…
transferred across
selectively5 needle
hedge reinsurers
key promotion
personal mobilization6
________________________
1 Such as the underestimation of entry threshold.
2 Transferability low.
3 Is capacity actually leaving the industry?
4 Reminder of failures.
5 To define a local market: How mobile is the population?
6 Principal agent problem.
2.
scaling7 through expectations8
if I could have written
what the negotiators
would walk about…9
“as soon as you talk about knowledge
there is a market failure”
not to condemn the project,10
but
to revert, or to demand quickly11
if not a strategy, then,
at least a set of ideas to implement12
as if you could cut13
the country in half14
[not that I necessarily would]15
________________________
7 Less demand is needed to sustain an incumbent than to support a new entrant. We name the known entry/Cannibalized by current oligopolists.
8 We don’t know what those coefficients would be if we chose different pairs.
9 How many firms must exist to ensure effective competition? Sometimes one is enough if there is a credible threat of entry.
10 Entry maps / Varying / Strategic structures.
11 Core proprietary nature.
12 Or is it better to have a comprehensive strategy that can address the differences between cultures?
13 Reduced form function / Indexing firms / By determining population.
14 Omitted variable bias.
15 Govt. polices alter more than incentives. They transform our preferences (e.g. fairness inclination).
apocryphaltext Vol. 2, Nos. 2 & 3
Francis Raven is a graduate student in philosophy at Temple University. His first novel, Inverted Curvatures (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005), and book of poems, Taste: Gastronomic Poems (Blazevox 2005), were recently published. Poems of his have been published in Mudlark, Conundrum, Chain, Big Bridge, Bird Dog, Caffeine Destiny, and Spindrift among others. His critical work can be found in Jacket, Logos, Clamor, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, The Electronic Book Review, The Emergency Almanac, The Morning News, The Brooklyn Rail, Media and Culture, In These Times, The Fulcrum Annual, Rain Taxi, and Flak.
2 poems by francis raven