FINALLY APRIL AND THE BIRDS ARE FALLING OUT OF THE AIR WITH JOY

by Anne Carson

April a mixed–up
blue
as voices out
of
clouds within the
deep
unleashing fresh
thing
of sky it combs
out
clear as Venus spills
aloud
behind what air up
where
the surface of her is
470
degrees and the mountains
shine
as if with snow it isn’t
snow
it’s bits of lead that storm her
atmosphere
shaped into cubes or spikes
by all
hectic radios playing at once In the Spring I Had Great Hunger.

It’s good to be neuter.
I want to have meaningless legs.
There are things unbearable.
One can evade them a long time.
Then you die.

The oceans remind me
of your green room.
There are things unbearable.
Scorn, princes, this little size
of dying.

My personal poetry is a failure.
I do not want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable.
Lover to lover, the greenness of love.
Cool, cooling.

Earth bears no such plant.
Who does not end up
a female impersonator?
Drink all the sex there is.
Still die.

I tempt you.
I blush.
There are things unbearable.
Legs alas.
Legs die.

Rocking themselves down,
Crazy slow,
Some ballet term for it—
Fragment of foil, little

spin,
little drunk,
little do,
little oh,
alas.

-Anne Carson

I'm looking for poems about theater and/or acting. Can anyone help me out?


And unrelated, here's a favorite poem of mine:


New Rule
by Anne Carson


A New Year's white morning of hard new ice.
High on the frozen branches I saw a squirrel jump and skid.
Is this scary? he seemed to say and glanced

down at me, clutching his branch as it bobbed
in stiff recoil – or is it just that everything sounds wrong today?
The branches

clinked.
He wiped his small cold lips with one hand.
Do you fear the same things as

I fear? I countered, looking up.
His empire of branches slid against the air.
The night of hooks?

The man blade left open on the stair?
Not enough spin on it, said my true love
when he left in our fifth year.

The squirrel bounced down a branch
and caught a peg of tears.
The way to hold on is

afterwords
so
clear.

TV Men: The Sleeper

The sleeper, real and dear, is carved on the dark.
Minerals of sleep are travelling into him.
Travelling out of him.
Signal leaps in his wrist.
Caught to me, caught to my nerve.

Night kneels over the sleeper.
Where did his journey begin, where will
it burn through to?
And what does he swim for now.
Swim, sleeper, swim.

Your peace as an evangelist to me.
Your transformations unknown.
I study your sleeping form
at the bottom of the pool
like a house I could return to,

like a head to be cradled in the arms.
Unless you are asleep I cannot make my way
across the night
and through my isolation.
Your small hands lap at the wave.

And contradict everything here, your passion
a whole darkness swung against the kind of sleep we
know,
the stumbled-into sleep of lanterns clipped on four a tour of the mine.
You dove once

into your privatest presentiment
and stayed, face down in your black overcoat.
To my wonder.
Endlessness runs in you like leaves on the tree of night.
To live here one must forget much.


-Anne Carson

Town of Finding Out About the Love of God.

I had made a mistake
Before this day
Now my suitcase is ready
Two hardboiled eggs
For the journey are stored
On the places where
My eyes were
How could it be otherwise?
Like a current
Carrying a twig
The sobbing made me
Audible to you.

Anne Carson.

XXIV. And Kneeling at the Edge of the Transparent Sea I Shall Shape for Myself A New Heart from Salt and Mud

A wife is in the grip of being.
Easy to say Why not give up on this?
But let's suppose your husband and a certain dark woman
like to meet at a bar in early afternoon.
Love is not conditional.
Living is very conditional.
The wife positions herself in an enclosed verandah across the street.
Watches the dark woman
reach out to touch his temple as if filtering something onto it.
Watches him
bend slightly toward the woman then back. They are both serious.
Their seriousness wracks her.
People who can be serious together, it goes deep.
They have a bottle of mineral water on the table between them
and two glasses.
No inebriants necessary!
When did he develop
this puritan new taste?
A cold ship

moves out of harbor somewhere way inside the wife
and slides off toward the flat gray horizon,

not a bird not a breath in sight.


-- Anne Carson


/// Also, whenever I go to use the Poet Tags my computer always freezes, seemingly due to the massive amount of poets on a single page. Is there any way we can make it multiple pages? I'd really like to explore or look for specific poets, but it never seems to work. Thanks!

God's Christ theory

God had no emotions but wished temporarily
to move in man's mind
as if He did: Christ.

Not passion but compassion.
Com- means 'with.'
What kind of witness would that be?

Translate it.
I have a friend named Jesus
from Mexico.

His father and grandfather are called Jesus too.
They account me a fool with my questions about salvation.
They say they are saving to move to Los Angeles.


American Poetry Review,  Jan 1996  by Anne Carson

So The Hall Door Shuts Again And All Noise Is Gone


In the effort to find one's way among the contents of memory
(Aristotle emphasizes)
a principal of association is helpful—
"passing rapidly from one step to the next.
For instance from milk to white,
from white to air,
from air to damp,
after which one recollectes autumn supposing one is trying to
recollect that season."
Or supposing,
fair reader,
you are trying to recollect not autumn but freedom,
a principal of freedom
the existed between two people, small and savage
as principals go—but what are the rules for this?
As he says,
folly may come into fashion.
Pass then rapidly
from one step to the next,
for instance from nipple to hard,
from hard to hotel room,
from hotel room

to a phrase found in a letter he wrote in a taxi one day he passed
his wife
walking
on the other side of the street and she did not see him, she was—
so ingenious are the arrangements of the state of flux we call
our moral history are they not almost as neat as mathematical
propositions except written on water—
on her way to the courthouse
to file papers for divorce, a phrase like
how you tasted between your legs.
After which by means of this wholly divine faculty, the "memory
of words and things,"
one recollects
freedom.
Is it I? cries the soul rushing up.
Little soul, poor vague animal:
beware this invention "always useful for learning and life"
as Aristotle say, Aristotle who
had no husband,
rarely mentions beauty
and was likely to pass rapidly from wrist to slave when trying to
recollect wife.


--Anne Carson

(first post after a lot of lurking...)

Sappho, translated by Anne Carson


52:

I would not think to touch the sky with two arms




168B:

Moon as set
and Pleiades: middle
night, the hour goes by,
alone I lie.

We live by tunneling for we are people buried alive. To me, the tunnels you make will seem strangely aimless, uprooted orchids. But the fragrance is undying. A Little Boy has run away from Amherst a few Days ago, writes Emily Dickinson in a letter of 1883, and when asked where he was going, he replied, Vermont or Asia.

-On Orchids


You can write on a wall with a fish heart, it's because of the phosphorus. They eat it. There are shacks like that down along the river. I am writing this to be as wrong as possible to you. Replace the door when you leave, it says. Now you tell me how wrong that is, how long it glows. Tell me.

-On Shelter

"Tango II"
from THE BEAUTY OF THE HUSBAND by Anne Carson

II. BUT A DEDICATION IS ONLY FELICITOUS IF PERFORMED BEFORE WITNESSES--IT IS AN ESSENTIALLY PUBLIC SURRENDER LIKE THAT OF STANDARDS OF BATTLE

You know I was married years ago and when he left my husband took my notebooks.
Wirebound notebooks.
You know that cool sly verb write. He liked writing, disliked having to start
each thought himself.
Used my starts to various ends, for example in a pocket I found a letter he'd begun
(to his mistress at that time)
containing a phrase I had copied from Homer: ... is how Homer says
Andromache went
after she parted from Hektor--"often turning to look back"
she went
down from Troy's tower and through stone streets to her loyal husband's
house and there
with her women raised a lament for a living man in his own halls.
Loyal to nothing
my husband. So why did I love him from early girlhood to late middle age
and the divorce decree came in the mail?
Beauty. No great secret. Not ashamed to say I loved him for his beauty.
As I would again
if he came near. Beauty convinces. You know beauty makes sex possible.
Beauty makes sex sex.
You if anyone grasp this--hush, let's pass

to natural situations.( Remainder of Tango II )

Franz Kafka was Jewish. He had a sister, Ottla, Jewish. Ottla married a jurist, Josef David, not Jewish. When the Nuremburg Laws were introduced to Bohemia-Moravia in 1942, quiet Ottla suggested to Josef David that they divorce. He at first refused. She spoke about sleep shapes and property and their two daughters and a rational approach. She did not mention, because she did not yet know the word, Auschwitz, where she would die in October 1943. After putting the apartment in order she packed a rucksack and was given a good shoeshine by Josef David. He applied a coat of grease. Now they are waterproof, he said.

from "Irony Is Not Enough: Essay On My Life as Catherine Deneuve (2nd draft)"

saison qui chante saison rapide

je commence
Beginnings are hard. Sappho put it simply. Speaking of a young girl Sappho said, You burn me. Deneuve usually begins with herself and a girl together in a hotel room. This is mental. Meanwhile the body persists. Sweater buttoned almost to the neck, she sits at the head of the seminar table expounding aspects of Athenian monetary reform. It was Solon who introduced into Athens a coinage which had a forced currency. Citizens had to accept issues called drachmas, didrachmas, obols, etc. although these did not contain silver of that value. Token coinages. Money that lies about itself. Seminar students are writing everything down carefully, one is asleep, Deneuve continues to talk about money and surfaces. Little blues, little whites, little hotel taffetas. This is mental. Bell rings to mark the end of class. He has a foreskin but for fear of wearing it out he uses another man's when he copulates, is what Solon's enemies liked to say of him, Deneuve concludes. Fiscal metaphor. She buttons her top button and the seminar is over.

Jours
If you asked her Deneuve would say Take these days away and pour them out on the ground in another country.

Parts
Seminar meets MonWedFri. Parts of time fall on her and snow wanders slowly through the other afternoons. Deneuve sits in her office looking at the word irony on a page. Half-burnt. You have to wonder. Sappho, Sokrates, is it all mental? These people seem bathed in goodness, yet here come the beautiful dangerous white rapids beating onto them. Knife of boy. Knife of girl. Knife of the little knower. Where is the ironic work that picks threads back from that surface into another design underneath, holding rapids in place? Evening fills the room. Deneuve buttons her coat and closes the office door behind her. Staircase is dim and filthy, small dirty deposits on each step. She heads for the Metro. What would Sokrates say. Name the parts. Define each name. Deneuve is turning names and parts over in her mind when she realizes she has ridden the train four stops in the wrong direction. Climbs back up from the platform, stairs are filthy here too, must be a punishment. Hip slams hard into the metal arm of the turnstile. Red sign pasted on it says NO EXIT. Sound is far away. All around her strange lamps burn brightly and human tongues press the night.

Weekends
Weekends are long and white. Snow drifts against the door. Distant threads from the piano downstairs. Deneuve washes her glassware. Dries it. Hours slide. In the hotel room it is dusk, a girl turns, I have to confess something. This is mental. Two parallel red lines of different lengths inch forward, not touching.

by Anne Carson