Monkey & Bear – Joanna Newsom

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performed by Joanna Newsom. audio from Ys.

Down in the green hay,
Where monkey and bear usually lay,
They woke from a stable-boy’s cry.
He said: “someone come quick
The horses got loose, got grass-sick
They’ll founder! Fain, they’ll die.”

What is now known by the sorrel and the roan?
By the chestnut, and the bay, and the gelding grey?
It is: stay by the gate you are given.
Remain in your place, for your season.
O, had the overfed dead but listened
To that high-fence, horse-sense, wisdom…

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Snow – Cathy Smith Bowers

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It was the only act of intimacy
I ever witnessed between them– that joke
my father told her, his opening
line…I hope it snows so deep…and then
how, for the punch, he reached out
and pulled her to him, to whisper words
that sent her red and slapping
at his khaki shirt and then her hand
lifting to his chin to remove
the little ghosts of cotton
that fluttered there. Our teachers
had sent us home from school calling
See you Monday that Thursday in December
as we ran crazed into the schoolyard
and to our separate houses
to hold vigil for that white coming,
that promise we wanted so badly to believe
we could feel, already in the graying
sky, its soft descent. All evening
the heater roared its warmth
into the room as we talked
of snow-cream so cold it hurt
your head, the fine spin a hubcap gives
down a hill of white. But by the close
of second shift, all that had shown
was a stray, barking beneath
the streetlight, our father in from the mill,
blowing the night from his hands
and telling that joke, his mouth burrowing
into the smell of our mother’s hair,
and somewhere, breaking dim above the smokestacks,
a few odd stars no one would admit to seeing.

Link Wednesday – Twitter, Kooser, Bach

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Happy November!

Item 1 – Just in case we have another long break between posts, here is a link that will pass some time – The Longest Poem in the World courtesy of Twitter. It collects people’s tweets and splices them together in rhymed couplets, creating sometimes charming and always ephemeral results. Couplet of the moment:

Just stay positive and positive things will come…
were the but naked women and all the food at, hmmm???

Item 2 – American Life in Poetry. This is a weekly column written by p.otw.org favorite Ted Kooser. He features young and mostly unknown poets and couples it with a short musing of his own. A recent-ish column caught my eye due to the event it references.

It’s likely that if you found the original handwritten manuscript of T. S. Eliot’s groundbreaking poem, “The Waste Land,” you wouldn’t be able to trade it for a candy bar at the Quick Shop on your corner. Here’s a poem by David Lee Garrison of Ohio about how unsuccessfully classical music fits into a subway.

Bach in the DC Subway

As an experiment,
The Washington Post
asked a concert violinist—
wearing jeans, tennis shoes,
and a baseball cap—
to stand near a trash can
at rush hour in the subway
and play Bach
on a Stradivarius.
Partita No. 2 in D Minor
called out to commuters
like an ocean to waves,
sang to the station
about why we should bother
to live.

A thousand people
streamed by. Seven of them
paused for a minute or so
and thirty-two dollars floated
into the open violin case.
A café hostess who drifted
over to the open door
each time she was free
said later that Bach
gave her peace,
and all the children,
all of them,
waded into the music
as if it were water,
listening until they had to be
rescued by parents
who had somewhere else to go.

and a video of Joshua Bell, the Bach-performing violinist in 2007.

Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night – Dylan Thomas

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read by Dylan Thomas. audio from salon.com.

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

(1951)