The Green Automobile by Allen Ginsberg

If I had a Green Automobile
I'd go find my old companion
in his house on the Western ocean.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

I'd honk my horn at his manly gate,
inside his wife and three
children sprawl naked
on the living room floor.

He'd come running out
to my car full of heroic beer
and jump screaming at the wheel
for he is the greater driver.

We'd pilgrimage to the highest mount
of our earlier Rocky Mountain visions
laughing in each others arms,
delight surpassing the highest Rockies,

and after old agony, drunk with new years,
bounding toward the snowy horizon
blasting the dashboard with original bop
hot rod on the mountain

we'd batter up the cloudy highway
where angels of anxiety
careen through the trees
and scream out of the engine.

We'd burn all night on the jackpine peak
seen from Denver in the summer dark,
forestlike unnatural radiance
illuminating the mountaintop:

childhood youthtime age & eternity
would open like sweet trees
in the nights of another spring
and dumbfound us with love,

for we can see together
the beauty of souls
hidden like diamonds
in the clock of the world,

like Chinese magicians can
confound the immortals
with our intellectuality
hidden in the mist,

in the Green Automobile
which I have invented
imagined and visioned
on the roads of the world

more real than the engine
on a track in the desert
purer than Greyhound and
swifter than physical jetplane.

Denver! Denver! we'll return
roaring across the City & County Building lawn
which catches the pure emerald flame
streaming in the wake of our auto.

This time we'll buy up the city!
I cashed a great check in my skull bank
to found a miraculous college of the body
up on the bus terminal roof.

But first we'll drive the stations of downtown,
poolhall flophouse jazzjoint jail
whorehouse down Folsom
to the darkest alleys of Larimer

paying respects to Denver's father
lost on the railroad tracks,
stupor of wine and silence
hallowing the slum of his decades,

salute him and his saintly suitcase
of dark muscatel, drink
and smash the sweet bottles
on Diesels in allegiance.

Then we go driving drunk on boulevards
where armies march and still parade
staggering under the invisible
banner of Reality --

hurtling through the street
in the auto of our fate
we share an archangelic cigarette
and tell each others' fortunes:

fames of supernatural illumination,
bleak rainy gaps of time,
great art learned in desolation
and we beat apart after six decades. . . .

and on an asphalt crossroad,
deal with each other in princely
gentleness once more, recalling
famous dead talks of other cities.

The windshield's full of tears,
rain wets our naked breasts,
we kneel together in the shade
amid the traffic of night in paradise

and now renew the solitary vow
we made each other take
in Texas, once:
I can't inscribe here. . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

How many Saturday nights will be
made drunken by this legend?
How will young Denver come to mourn
her forgotten sexual angel?

How many boys will strike the black piano
in imitation of the excess of a native saint?
Or girls fall wanton under his spectre in the high
schools of melancholy night?

While all the time in Eternity
in the wan light of this poem's radio
we'll sit behind forgotten shades
hearkening the lost jazz of all Saturdays.

Neal, we'll be real heroes now
in a war between our cocks and time:
let's be the angels of the world's desire
and take the world to bed with us before
we die.

Sleeping alone, or with companion,
girl or fairy sheep or dream,
I'll fail of lacklove, you, satiety:
all men fall, our fathers fell before,

but resurrecting that lost flesh
is but a moment's work of mind:
an ageless monument to love
in the imagination:

memorial built out of our own bodies
consumed by the invisible poem --
We'll shudder in Denver and endure
though blood and wrinkles blind our eyes.

So this Green Automobile:
I give you in flight
a present, a present
from my imagination.

We will go riding
over the Rockies,
we'll go on riding
all night long until dawn,

then back to your railroad, the SP
your house and your children
and broken leg destiny
you'll ride down the plains

in the morning: and back
to my visions, my office
and eastern apartment
I'll return to New York.

The Bistro Styx
by Rita Dove



She was thinner, with a mannered gauntness
as she paused just inside the double
glass doors to survey the room, silvery cape
billowing dramatically behind her. What's this,

I thought, lifting a hand until
she nodded and started across the parquet;
that's when I saw she was dressed all in gray,
from a kittenish cashmere skirt and cowl

down to the graphite signature of her shoes.
"Sorry I'm late," she panted, though
she wasn't, sliding into the chair, her cape

tossed off in a shudder of brushed steel.
We kissed. Then I leaned back to peruse
my blighted child, this wary aristocratic mole.



"How's business?" I asked, and hazarded
a motherly smile to keep from crying out:
Are you content to conduct your life
as a cliché and, what's worse,

an anachronism, the brooding artist's demimonde?
Near the rue Princesse they had opened
a gallery cum souvenir shop which featured
fuzzy off-color Monets next to his acrylics, no doubt,

plus beared African drums and the occasional miniature
gargoyle from Notre Dame the Great Artist had
carved at breakfast with a pocket knife.

"Tourists love us. The Parisians, of course"--
she blushed--"are amused, though not without
a certain admiration . . ."
...........................The Chateaubriand



arrived on a bone-white plate, smug and absolute
in its fragrant crust, a black plug steaming
like the heart plucked from the chest of a worthy enemy;
one touch with her fork sent pink juices streaming.

"Admiration for what?" Wine, a bloody
Pinot Noir, brought color to her cheeks. "Why,
the aplomb with which we've managed
to support our Art"--meaning he'd convinced

her to pose nude for his appalling canvases,
faintly futuristic landscapes strewn
with carwrecks and bodies being chewed

by rabid cocker spaniels. "I'd like to come by
the studio," I ventured, "and see the new stuff."
"Yes, if you wish . . ." A delicate rebuff



before the warning: "He dresses all
in black now. Me, he drapes in blues and carmine--
and even though I think it's kinda cute,
in company I tend toward more muted shades."

She paused and had the grace
to drop her eyes. She did look ravishing,
spookily insubstantial, a lipstick ghost on tissue,
or as if one stood on a fifth-floor terrace

peering through a fringe of rain at Paris'
dreaming chimney pots, each sooty issue
wobbling skyward in an ecstatic oracular spiral.

"And he never thinks of food. I wish
I didn't have to plead with him to eat. . . ." Fruit
and cheese appeared, arrayed on leaf-green dishes.



I stuck with café crème. "This Camembert's
so ripe," she joked, "it's practically grown hair,"
mucking a golden glob complete with parsley sprig
onto a heel of bread. Nothing seemed to fill

her up: She swallowed, sliced into a pear,
speared each tear-shaped lavaliere
and popped the dripping mess into her pretty mouth.
Nowhere the bright tufted fields, weighted

vines and sun poured down out of the south.
"But are you happy?" Fearing, I whispered it
quickly. "What? You know, Mother"--

she bit into the starry rose of a fig--
"one really should try the fruit here."
I've lost her, I thought, and called for the bill.

Sometimes journals, they are great. This poem was originally published by The Journal, and is archived there.

Beeline Eclogue - J. Allyn Rosser

I felt it falter onto my bare foot,
and flicked without swatting,
so the bee did not attack.
Nor did it lift into the August air
and head directly for greater comfort
or congeniality but, unfazed, pressed on
over clumps of ridgy crabgrass blade
and browning clover blossom.
I was reading a book not good enough
to go back to in the presence of so felt
a need to move, to achieve arrival.
When had I last read or heard words
that could rival this intensity of purpose?
The bee was determined to get somewhere
very particular, very very particular
and would not stop, driving its body
onward at a steady clip, undeterred
by roadblocks I set up at intervals:
a rock, a white down-feather,
my hand, a rare, unspoiled
white clover blossom (at which
it aimed a reflexive, exploratory swipe
before pushing it aside), a broken
potato chip which it scrabbled over
like a manhole cover in the desert,
and finally a quarter from my pocket.
I’d hoped the shininess might give some pause,
if not the sunheated eagle texture.
It made me feel strangely lonely,
that indeflectable bobbling gait
– its completeness of intent –
dismissing me without fear or interest.
This must be how it feels when prayers
stop coming. I wasn’t going to hurt it,
but couldn’t resist one nudge with my pen
to see if it could fly. It didn’t lift a wing.
The bee, however, seemed undamaged,
maybe just ageing, aware it was about to die.
So why the haste, why consciously
squander the last drops of life-force
on this exhausting trek that might end
prematurely, far from anywhere?
Why not seek a shady spot, of which
there were plenty nearby, sip nectar
one last time from small, exquisite blooms?
I tried to think what I would do, if I knew.
If I had mobility and a clear mind, and if I knew.
What was it hoping to communicate?
To warn the others of a threat
to the hive, or to bees in general, a pesticide?
This was not a running from. A destination
was in mind where others of its kind
would buzz up close to hear the thing
this bee was desperate to convey, swarm near
to witness the whisper of its final day,
the meticulous folding of its last legs,
the fading of the sunlight in its complex eye.
I watched it ply its body like the shell
of a spent bullet through the vast pelouse,
and wondered what on earth I’d be impelled to tell,
and whom I’d choose as listeners,
if I could choose.

The Golden Journey to Samarkand by James Elroy Flecker

We who with songs beguile your pilgrimage
And swear that Beauty lives though lilies die
We poets of the proud old lineage
Who sing to find your hearts, we know not why,-

What shall we tell you? Tales, marvellous tales
Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest,
Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales,
And winds and shadows fall towards the West:

And there the world's first huge white-bearded kings
In dim glades sleeping, murmur in their sleep,
And closer round their breasts the ivy clings,
Cutting its pathway slow and deep and red.

And how beguile you? Death has no repose
Warmer and deeper than Orient sand
Which hides the beauty and bright faith of those
Who made the Golden Journey to Samarkand.

And now they wait and whiten peaceably,
Those conquerors, those poets, those so fair:
They know time comes, not only you and I,
But the whole world shall whiten, here or there;

When those long caravans that cross the plain
With dauntless feet and sound of silver bells
Put forth no more for glory or for gain
Take no more solace from the palm-grit wells.

When the great markets by the sea shut fast
All that calm Sunday that goes on and on:
When even lovers find their peace at last,
And Earth is but a star, that once had shone.

Tuscany - Chad Reynolds

http://sixthfinch.com/reynolds4.html

In a grove by Philip Lamantia

The Writer - Richard Wilbur

In her room at the prow of the house
Where light breaks, and the windows are tossed with linden,
My daughter is writing a story.

I pause in the stairwell, hearing
From her shut door a commotion of typewriter-keys
Like a chain hauled over a gunwale.

Young as she is, the stuff
Of her life is a great cargo, and some of it heavy:
I wish her a lucky passage.

But now it is she who pauses,
As if to reject my thought and its easy figure.
A stillness greatens, in which

The whole house seems to be thinking,
And then she is at it again with a bunched clamor
Of strokes, and again is silent.

I remember the dazed starling
Which was trapped in that very room, two years ago;
How we stole in, lifted a sash

And retreated, not to affright it;
And how for a helpless hour, through the crack of the door,
We watched the sleek, wild, dark

And iridescent creature
Batter against the brilliance, drop like a glove
To the hard floor, or the desk-top,

And wait then, humped and bloody,
For the wits to try it again; and how our spirits
Rose when, suddenly sure,

It lifted off from a chair-back,
Beating a smooth course for the right window
And clearing the sill of the world.

It is always a matter, my darling,
Of life or death, as I had forgotten. I wish
What I wished you before, but harder.

One of my genuine favourites.

The Work
Don Patterson

My heart was where a hundred dusty roads
crossed and then ran on; or it was a station
full of hopeful travellers, though not one
had either lodgings or a real appointment.
Whatever it was - my heart within a day,
was scattered on a hundred winds and sped
through canyons, deserts, river-plains and valleys
to dark ports, sea-lanes, unmapped continents.

But now, like a swarm returning to the hive
at that purple hour when all the crows go hoarse
and sail off to crags and the black eaves,
my heart turns to it's melancholy work
with honey gathered from a hundred flowers
and the hundred sorrows of the gathering dark.

........................if i ever push you away,
........................i don' t really mean to.
when i tell you i don' t want to talk about it
i do, i am just looking for the right words.
give me a minute, and if i can tell you; i will.
i try to be a struggling mix of real and
perfect at the same time.
.................at the moment,
i am working on the ratio.
when i get really quiet sometimes
it is because i have too much to say
i have thought too many things to tell you
all at once
and i don' t know what to say first.
i get immaturely jealous of anyone
who gets to see you on a daily basis.
.........................i miss you really easily.
.........................but i also like that we can be
........a.......p.......a.......r.......t
and we are both okay............space is good, too.
........i love the way we love some of the
........same things.........and i love how
.........we love entirely different things.
my head is a complicated pile of thoughts,
................and fears, and cravings, and dreams,
................and this tangled up nostalgia for the
................past and, somehow, the future.
i am flawed and i am human and i am broken and
i am trying. am i one person and i am two
hands and i am one................and i love you.
heart................and i am so glad you are here.

-- Blank Human Canvas
Unknown

Sing This Heart Back To Me



This heart that slept the beauty sleep
And dreamt of daylight drums of joy
This heart that dived abyss too deep

Sing this heart bring this heart
Bring this heart back to me

For there will be no more no heart
No no more heart
No no more heart to beat in me

This heart that leaped this heart that burned
In ashes smashed and crushed and rocked
This heart your heart it never learned

Sing this heart sink not this heart
Think not this heart belongs just to me

For there will be no more no heart
No no more heart
No no more heart to sing in me

This heart that shared your heart that dared
To see too much of the heart in me

Sing this heart bring this heart
Bring this heart back to me

For there will be no more no heart
No no more heart
No no more heart to dream in me

This heart your heart my heart toy heart
Sink not this heart choke not this heart

Sing this heart bring this heart
Bring this heart back to me

That I can cling to this heart
Sing to this heart
Bring my heart back to me


Miroslava Odalovic