Droplets

Poem: "Droplets" by C.K. Williams, from Love About Love. © Ausable Press.


Droplets 


Even when the rain falls relatively hard,
only one leaf at a time of the little tree
you planted on the balcony last year,
then another leaf at its time, and one more,
is set trembling by the constant droplets,

but the rain, the clouds flocked over the city,
you at the piano inside, your hesitant music
mingling with the din of the downpour,
the gush of rivulets loosed from the eaves,
the iron railings and flowing gutters,


all of it fuses in me with such intensity
that I can't help wondering why my longing
to live forever has so abated that it hardly
comes to me anymore, and never as it did,
as regret for what I might not live to live,


but rather as a layering of instants like this,
transient as the mist drawn from the rooftops,
yet emphatic as any note of the nocturne
you practice, and, the storm faltering, fading
into its own radiant passing, you practice again.

Having it out with Melancholy

WOOD THRUSH
from Having it Out with Melancholy  
by Jane Kenyon


High on Nardil and June light 
I wake at four, 
waiting greedily for the first
note of the wood thrush. Easeful air 
presses through the screen 
with the wild, complex song 
of the bird, and I am overcome

by ordinary contentment. 
What hurt me so terribly 
all my life until this moment? 
How I love the small, swiftly 
beating heart of the bird 
singing in the great maples; 
its bright, unequivocal eye.

Eggcorn

In linguistics, an eggcorn is an idiosyncratic substitution of a word or phrase for a word or words that sound similar or identical in the speaker's dialect. The new phrase introduces a meaning that is different from the original, but plausible in the same context, such as "old-timers' disease" for "Alzheimer's disease". This is as opposed to a malapropism, where the substitution creates a nonsensical phrase. Classical malapropisms generally derive their comic effect from the fault of the user, while eggcorns are errors that exhibit creativity or logic. Eggcorns often involve replacing an unfamiliar, archaic, or obscure word with a more common or modern word ("baited breath" for "bated breath").

 

The term eggcorn was coined by professor of linguistics Geoffrey Pullum in September 2003, in response to an article by Mark Liberman on the website Language Log, a blog for linguists. Liberman discussed the case of a woman who  substitutes the phrase egg corn for the word acorn, arguing that the precise phenomenon lacked a name; Pullum suggested using "eggcorn" itself. The phenomenon is very similar to the form of wordplay known as the pun, except that, by definition, the speaker (or writer) intends the pun to have some effect on the recipient, whereas one who speaks or writes an eggcorn is unaware of the mistake.

 

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/eggcorn#ixzz1hgobwUve

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird


Wallace Stevens


I 
Among twenty snowy mountains, 
The only moving thing 
Was the eye of the blackbird.


II 
I was of three minds, 
Like a tree 
In which there are three blackbirds.


III 
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds. 
It was a small part of the pantomime.


IV 
A man and a woman 
Are one. 
A man and a woman and a blackbird 
Are one.


V 
I do not know which to prefer, 
The beauty of inflections 
Or the beauty of innuendoes, 
The blackbird whistling 
Or just after.


VI 
Icicles filled the long window 
With barbaric glass. 
The shadow of the blackbird 
Crossed it, to and fro. 
The mood 
Traced in the shadow 
An indecipherable cause.


VII 
O thin men of Haddam, 
Why do you imagine golden birds? 
Do you not see how the blackbird 
Walks around the feet 
Of the women about you?


VIII 
I know noble accents 
And lucid, inescapable rhythms; 
But I know, too, 
That the blackbird is involved 
In what I know.

IX 
When the blackbird flew out of sight, 
It marked the edge 
Of one of many circles.


X 
At the sight of blackbirds 
Flying in a green light, 
Even the bawds of euphony 
Would cry out sharply.


XI 
He rode over Connecticut 
In a glass coach. 
Once, a fear pierced him, 
In that he mistook 
The shadow of his equipage 
For blackbirds.


XII 
The river is moving. 
The blackbird must be flying.


XIII 
It was evening all afternoon. 
It was snowing 
And it was going to snow. 
The blackbird sat 
In the cedar-limbs.

Turkeys

Turkeys
by Mary Mackey


One November
a week before Thanksgiving
the Ohio river froze
and my great uncles
put on their coats
and drove the turkeys
across the ice
to Rosiclare
where they sold them
for enough to buy
my grandmother
a Christmas doll
with blue china eyes


I like to think
of the sound of
two hundred turkey feet
running across to Illinois

on their way
to the platter
the scrape of their nails
and my great uncles
in their homespun leggings
calling out gee and haw and git
to them as if they 
were mules


I like to think of the Ohio
at that moment
the clear cold sky
the green river sleeping
under the ice
before the land got stripped
and the farm got sold
and the water turned the color 
of whiskey
and all the uncles
lay down
and never got up again


I like to think of the world
before some genius invented 
turkeys with pop-up plastic
thermometers
in their breasts
idiot birds
with no wildness left in them
turkeys that couldn't run the river
to save their souls 

Water Table

clipped from writersalmanac.publicradio.org

Water Table

by Billy Collins

It is on dry sunny days like this one that I find myself
thinking about the enormous body of water
that lies under this house,
cool, unseen reservoir,
silent except for the sounds of dripping
and the incalculable shifting

of all the heavy darkness that it holds.

This is the water that our well was dug to sip
and lift to where we live,
water drawn up and falling on our bare shoulders,
water filling the inlets of our mouths,

water in a pot on the stove.

The house is nothing now but a blueprint of pipes,
a network of faucets, nozzles, and spigots,
and even outdoors where light pierces the air
and clouds fly over the canopies of trees,
my thoughts flow underground

trying to imagine the cavernous scene.

Surely it is no pool with a colored ball
floating on the blue surface.
No grotto where a king would have
his guests rowed around in swan-shaped boats.
Between the dark lakes where the dark rivers flow
there is no ferry waiting on the shore of rock
and no man holding a long oar,
ready to take your last coin.

This is the real earth and the real water it contains.

But some nights, I must tell you,
I go down there after everyone has fallen asleep.
I swim back and forth in the echoing blackness.
I sing a love song as well as I can,
lost for a while in the home of the rain.

"Water Table" by Billy Collins, from The Art of Drowning. © University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995.

Catastrophy

THINGS ENDED
by C.P. Cavafy


Engulfed by fear and suspicion,
mind agitated, eyes alarmed,
we try desperately to invent ways out,
plan how to avoid
the obvious danger that threatens us so terribly.
Yet we're mistaken, that's not the danger ahead:
the news was wrong
(or we didn't hear it, or didn't get it right).

Another disaster, one we never imagined,
suddenly, violently, descends upon us,
and finding us unprepared -there's no time now-
sweeps us away.


The Complete Poems of Kavavy