Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand (by Walt Whitman)

Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand
by Walt Whitman
from “Calamus” in Leaves of Grass, 1881

Whoever you are holding me now in hand,
Without one thing all will be useless,
I give you fair warning before you attempt me further,
I am not what you supposed, but far different.

Who is he that would become my follower?
Who would sign himself a candidate for my affections?

The way is suspicious, the result uncertain, perhaps destructive,
You would have to give up all else, I alone would expect to be your sole and exclusive standard,
Your novitiate would even then be long and exhausting,
The whole past theory of your life and all conformity to the lives around you would have to be abandon’d,
Therefore release me now before troubling yourself any further, let go your hand from my shoulders,
Put me down and depart on your way.

Or else by stealth in some wood for trial,
Or back of a rock in the open air,
(For in any roof’d room of a house I emerge not, nor in company,
And in libraries I lie as one dumb, a gawk, or unborn, or dead,)
But just possibly with you on a high hill, first watching lest any person for miles around approach unawares,
Or possibly with you sailing at sea, or on the beach of the sea or some quiet island,
Here to put your lips upon mine I permit you,
With the comrade’s long-dwelling kiss or the new husband’s kiss,
For I am the new husband and I am the comrade.
Or if you will, thrusting me beneath your clothing,
Where I may feel the throbs of your heart or rest upon your hip,
Carry me when you go forth over land or sea;
For thus merely touching you is enough, is best,
And thus touching you would I silently sleep and be carried eternally.

But these leaves conning you con at peril,
For these leaves and me you will not understand,
They will elude you at first and still more afterward, I will certainly elude you.
Even while you should think you had unquestionably caught me, behold!
Already you see I have escaped from you.

For it is not for what I have put into it that I have written this book,
Nor is it by reading it you will acquire it,
Nor do those know me best who admire me and vauntingly praise me,
Nor will the candidates for my love (unless at most a very few) prove victorious,
Nor will my poems do good only, they will do just as much evil, perhaps more,
For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which I hinted at;
Therefore release me and depart on your way.

* * *

To read other Whitman selections in the Crisis Chronicles Online Library, click here.

 

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The Crows (by Natalie Webster)

The Crows

They call me into night
　
A flurry of obsidian,
dark shine inside a shapeless moon…
　
They stay where words end.
　
Call of an empty November
that seals the marrow of my bones
in bitter morning.
Creak upon my movements
The tinman holds herself
　
away.
　
Still, before the winter comes: soft
warnings in the graying in the tides.
This haven of the crows,
the closing of the skies.
　
And snow white, upon the pavement,
The warmth that was my blood falls
from lips and tongues that cried out
　
in silence.
　
The crows come
　
and sweep away the dead.

“The Crows” ©November 2011 by Natalie Webster, all rights reserved by the poet


Natalie Webster’s poetry has been published in Take It to the Street Poetry’s Force Fed as well as on the on-line blog Infloressence.  She received her B.A. in Language Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Counseling Psychology from John F. Kennedy University.  Her spare time is spent working creatively with children’s art classes on painting, creating and writing who, for better or for worse, are her muses. Natalie keeps a web scrapbook of inspirations and writing sketches at Ice and Coffee.

Introductory Rhymes (by W.B Yeats)

Yeats [by George Charles Beresford, 1911]

From Responsibilities  [1914]


‘In dreams begin responsibility.’
–Old Play

‘How am I fallen from myself, for a long time now
I have not seen the Prince of Chang in my dreams.’
–Khoung-Fou-Tseu

Pardon, old fathers, if you still remain
Somewhere in ear-shot for the story’s end,
Old Dublin merchant ‘free of ten and four’
Or trading out of Galway into Spain;
And country scholar, Robert Emmet’s friend,
A hundred-year-old memory to the poor;
Traders or soldiers who have left me blood
That has not passed through any huckster’s loin,
Soldiers that gave, whatever die was cast,
A Butler or an Armstrong that withstood
Beside the brackish waters of the Boyne
James and his Irish when the Dutchman crossed;
Old merchant skipper that leaped overboard
After a ragged hat in Biscay Bay,
You most of all, silent and fierce old man
Because the daily spectacle that stirred
My fancy, and set my boyish lips to say
‘Only the wasteful virtues earn the sun’;
Pardon that for a barren passion’s sake,
Although I have come close on forty-nine
I have no child, I have nothing but a book,
Nothing but that to prove your blood and mine.

     January 1914

* * * * *

To read more Yeats in the Online Library, please click here.

Poisonous Apples (by Natalie Webster)

Poisonous Apples

I know nothing.
　
A dull gnawing
and throbbing ambivalence
of dreams:
　
You take my hands
　
and feed me poisonous apples.
　
I lie limp and languid
in your charms.
　
Train song echoing, two A.M.
A peahen’s cry: the coyote tears her
From her young:
　
Sounds of night, far below
　
a country’s harvest moon.
　
Wind’s blow turns to rain.
　
A sun’s shadows dissipated:
gray shortened days.
　
I know nothing except
　
the absence of a path
　
leading home.

 

“Poisonous Apples” ©October 2011 by Natalie Webster, all rights reserved by the poet


Natalie Webster’s poetry has been published in Take It to the Street Poetry’s Force Fed as well as on the on-line blog Infloressence.  She received her B.A. in Language Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Counseling Psychology from John F. Kennedy University.  Her spare time is spent working creatively with children’s art classes on painting, creating and writing who, for better or for worse, are her muses. Natalie keeps a web scrapbook of inspirations and writing sketches at Ice and Coffee.

I have a Bird in spring (by Emily Dickinson)

 

Emily Dickinson

[1854]

I have a Bird in spring
Which for myself doth sing—
The spring decoys.
And as the summer nears—
And as the Rose appears,
Robin is gone.

Yet do I not repine
Knowing that Bird of mine
Though flown—
Learneth beyond the sea
Melody new for me
And will return.

Fast is a safer hand
Held in a truer Land
Are mine—
And though they now depart,
Tell I my doubting heart
They’re thine.

In a serener Bright,
In a more golden light
I see
Each little doubt and fear,
Each little discord here
Removed.

Then will I not repine,
Knowing that Bird of mine
Though flown
Shall in a distant tree
Bright melody for me
Return.
 


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Tom Mahl Reminds Me (by Alex Gildzen) – video

Alex Gildzen reads his poem “Tom Mahl Reminds Me” in Elyria, Ohio.

“Tom Mahl Reminds Me” comes from Gildzen’s chapbook Elyria: Point A in Ohio Triangle, published in 2009 by Crisis Chronicles Press.

Other recommended Gildzen books include The Arrow That Is Hollywood Pierces The Soul That Is Me (2011, Otoliths), Outlaw Dreams (2008, Green Panda Press) and The Avalanche of Time: Selected Poems 1964-1984 (1986, North Atlantic Books)

You may also visit Gildzen’s blog: http://arroyochamisa.blogspot.com
read his biography: http://internet.cybermesa.com/~takis/AGBio.htm
peruse his papers: http://speccoll.library.kent.edu/faculty/gildzen.html
and view several more of his videos: http://youtube.com/user/gildzen

Scented Herbage of My Breast (by Walt Whitman)

 

Scented Herbage of My Breast
by Walt Whitman
from “Calamus” in Leaves of Grass, 1881

Scented herbage of my breast,
Leaves from you I glean, I write, to be perused best afterwards,
Tomb-leaves, body-leaves growing up above me above death,
Perennial roots, tall leaves, O the winter shall not freeze you delicate leaves,
Every year shall you bloom again, out from where you retired you shall emerge again;
O I do not know whether many passing by will discover you or inhale your faint odor,
     but I believe a few will;
O slender leaves! O blossoms of my blood! I permit you to tell in your own way of the
     heart that is under you,
O I do not know what you mean there underneath yourselves, you are not happiness,
You are often more bitter than I can bear, you burn and sting me,
Yet you are beautiful to me you faint tinged roots, you make me think of death,
Death is beautiful from you, (what indeed is finally beautiful except death and love?)
O I think it is not for life I am chanting here my chant of lovers,
I think it must be for death,
For how calm, how solemn it grows to ascend to the atmosphere of lovers,
Death or life I am then indifferent, my soul declines to prefer,
(I am not sure but the high soul of lovers welcomes death most,)
Indeed O death, I think now these leaves mean precisely the same as you mean,
Grow up taller sweet leaves that I may see! grow up out of my breast!
Spring away from the conceal’d heart there!
Do not fold yourself so in your pink-tinged roots timid leaves!
Do not remain down there so ashamed, herbage of my breast!
Come I am determin’d to unbare this broad breast of mine, I have long enough stifled and choked;
Emblematic and capricious blades I leave you, now you serve me not,
I will say what I have to say by itself,
I will sound myself and comrades only, I will never again utter a call only their call,
I will raise with it immortal reverberations through the States,
I will give an example to lovers to take permanent shape and will through the States,
Through me shall the words be said to make death exhilarating,
Give me your tone therefore O death, that I may accord with it,
Give me yourself, for I see that you belong to me now above all, and are folded inseparably together,
     you love and death are,
Nor will I allow you to balk me any more with what I was calling life,
For now it is convey’d to me that you are the purports essential,
That you hide in these shifting forms of life, for reasons, and that they are mainly for you,
That you beyond them come forth to remain, the real reality,
That behind the mask of materials you patiently wait, no matter how long,
That you will one day perhaps take control of all,
That you will perhaps dissipate this entire show of appearance,
That may-be you are what it is all for, but it does not last so very long,
But you will last very long.

* * *

To read other Whitman selections in the Crisis Chronicles Online Library, click here.

 

The Quiet (by Natalie Webster)

The Quiet

Is it the solemn adoration of what has been
built slowly over time, detail upon meticulous detail,
forged upon the once barren framework of this: my frail structure.
　
Or the deafening pang of exhaustion, before
a long and desperately desired reprieve into sleep.
The inability to grasp, obtain and hold on to the Calm.
　
The slow unwind of my mind leaves behind
the sour rind of fruits taken too late from branches
bent over under the burden of their weight.
Stretched and pulling downwards to the fertile expanses
of my skin, from far below my navel up beyond the barely visible
landscape of what was my ribcage, uneven
and contorted from ancient ravaging harvests.　
　
Now, there are no hands here to console,
no whispers and no kind glances between the arching limbs
and the leaves of this, our plentiful fruit tree
dropping its rot along paths once pristine and precious.
　
Or are they there even still, as water washes over.
　
The ticking of the clock sears into the silence as if to count
time that has gone over.　 A chime for each movement
towards the edge of this precipice: the unpayable debt.

 

“The Quiet” ©July 2011 by Natalie Webster, all rights reserved by the poet

Natalie Webster’s poetry has been published in Take It to the Street Poetry’s Force Fed as well as on the on-line blog Infloressence.  She received her B.A. in Language Studies from the University of California at Santa Cruz and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Counseling Psychology from John F. Kennedy University.  Her spare time is spent working creatively with children’s art classes on painting, creating and writing who, for better or for worse, are her muses. Natalie keeps a web scrapbook of inspirations and writing sketches at Ice and Coffee.

Into My Own (by Robert Frost)

Into My Own
by Robert Frost
[from A Boy’s Will (1913)]

One of my wishes is that those dark trees,
So old and firm they scarcely show the breeze,
Were not, as ’twere, the merest mask of gloom,
But stretched away unto the edge of doom.

I should not be withheld but that some day
Into their vastness I should steal away,
Fearless of ever finding open land,
Or highway where the slow wheel pours the sand.

I do not see why I should e’er turn back,
Or those should not set forth upon my track
To overtake me, who should miss me here
And long to know if still I held them dear.

They would not find me changed from him they knew–
Only more sure of all I thought was true.

– * –

   

On this wondrous sea (by Emily Dickinson)

Emily Dickinson

[1853]

On this wondrous sea — sailing silently —
Ho! Pilot! Ho!
Knowest thou the shore
Where no breakers roar —
Where the storm is o’er?

In the silent West
Many — the sails at rest —
The anchors fast.
Thither I pilot thee —
Land! Ho! Eternity!
Ashore at last. 

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