Swept
When we say I
miss you what
we mean is I’m
filled with
dread. At night
alone going
to bed is
like lying down
in a wave. Total
absence of light.
Swept away to
gone.—Hayden Carruth
(via mj-arnett)
Posts tagged Hayden Carruth:
Why speak of the use
of poetry? Poetry
is what uses us.
—Hayden Carruth, from Toward the Distant Islands: New and Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2006)
(Source: journalofanobody)
How it is never the same
but always changing. How
sometimes nevertheless
you recognize it. How you
see it from your window
plunging down, flattening
across the frozen lawn,
then rising in a wild
swirl and it’s gone …
—Hayden Carruth, from “Woodsmoke at 70” in Collected Shorter Poems of Hayden Carruth: 1946-1991 (Copper Canyon Press, 1992)
But still, still …
In stillness mystery calls,
though calling no one, being simply there,
somewhere I cannot tell, singing, not near,
not far, but song always, an ayre that falls
on my silence as if heard in the long halls
of eternity, of existence, this that I hear
in the incomprehensibility we share
and cannot speak, a touch, a glance that forestalls
the foreignness we felt before we came
into our knowing one another, yet no touch
nor glance in fact, nothing definable, no name
in materiality, only this singing, such
that together silently we hear and we belong
at last,
always this sonetto, this little song…
—Hayden Carruth from “Sonnet 63” in Collected Shorter Poems: 1946-1991 (Copper Canyon Press, 1992)
If It Were Not for You
Liebe, meine liebe, I had not hoped
to be so poor
The night winds reach
like the blind breath of the world
in a rhythm without mind, gusting and beating
as if to destroy us, battering our poverty
and all the land’s flat and cold and dark
under iron snow
the dog leaps in the wind
barking, maddened with winter, and his voice
claps again and again down the valley
like tatters of revolutionary pennants
birches
cry and hemlocks by the brook
stand hunched and downcast with their hands
in their pockets
Liebe, the world is wild
and without intention
how far
this might be from the night of Christmas
if it were not for you.
Down the reaching wind
shrieks of starlight bear broken messages
among mountains where shadows plunge
yet our brightness
is unwavering
Kennst du das land
wo die zitronen blühn, im dunkeln laub
die goldorangen … liebe
art thou singing
It is a question partly
of the tree with our stars and partly
of your radiance brought from the land
where legends flower to this land
but more than these our bright poverty
is a house in the wind and a light
on the mountain
Liebe, our light rekindled
in this remoteness from the other land,
in this dark of the blue mountain where only
the winds gather
is what we are for the time that we are
what we know for the time that we know
How gravely and sweetly the poor touch in the dark.—Hayden Carruth, from Collected Shorter Poems 1946-1991 (Copper Canyon Press, 1992)
Photograph: Jane Singer, n.d.
(via aneleh)
A poem is not an expression, nor
it is an object. Yet it somewhat
partakes of both. What a poem is
Is never to be known, for which I
have learned to be grateful.
—Hayden Carruth
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