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susu
Trad climber
East Bay, CA
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Oct 21, 2009 - 03:10am PT
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First Song
By: Galway Kinnell
Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy
After an afternoon of carting dung
Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing
Weary to crying. Dark was growing tall
And he began to hear the pond frogs all
Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.
Soon their sound was pleasant for a boy
Listening in the smoky dusk and the nightfall
Of Illinois, and from the fields two small
Boys came bearing cornstalk violins
And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins
And the three sat there scraping of their joy.
It was now fine music the frogs and the boys
Did in the towering Illinois twilight make
And into dark in spite of a shoulder’s ache
A boy’s hunched body loved out of a stalk
The first song of his happiness, and the song woke
His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy.
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paul roehl
Boulder climber
california
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Oct 21, 2009 - 03:48am PT
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Hey Dodo,
One should never throw the baby out with the Daffodils if ya know what I mean. At his best Wordsworth is sublime. At his worst well...
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Dodo
Trad climber
Spain/UK
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Oct 21, 2009 - 04:21am PT
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I guess you gotta go with what pays the rent :-)
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BW
climber
Big Pine, CA
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Oct 21, 2009 - 11:13am PT
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A sackful of kittens
thrown into the ice creek
increases the cold
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donini
Trad climber
Ouray, Colorado
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Oct 21, 2009 - 11:28am PT
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The Love Song of J. Alfred Pufrock by T.S. Elliot.
"Let us go then you and I, when evening is spread out against the sky...." Those opening words have always been my call to action.
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shellon copeland
Social climber
reston, virginia
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Oct 21, 2009 - 01:30pm PT
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Good one Kandolian
have to be the hopeless optimist Dylan Thomas
Do not go gently into that Good Night
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light...
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scuffy b
climber
Whuttiz that Monstrosicos Inferno?
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Oct 21, 2009 - 01:42pm PT
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Kublai Khan
The Second Coming
I Saw Myself
(Lew Welch)
I saw myself
a ring of bone
in the clear stream
of all of it
and vowed
always to be open to it
that all of it
might flow through
and then heard
"ring of bone" where
ring is what a
bell does
EDIT:
and, of course, Ozymandias
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Dodo
Trad climber
Spain/UK
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Oct 21, 2009 - 01:48pm PT
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Dylan did it all for sea cliff climbing
Yes, to dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free,
Silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sands,
With all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves,
Let me forget about today until tomorrow.
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Ksolem
Trad climber
Monrovia, California
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Oct 21, 2009 - 03:10pm PT
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Mary Oliver
Knife
Something
just now
moved through my heart
like the thinnest of blades
as that red-tail pumped
once with its great wings
and flew above the gray, cracked
rock wall.
It wasn't
about the bird, it was
something about the way
stone stays
mute and put, whatever
goes flashing by.
Sometimes,
when I sit like this, quiet,
all the dreams of my blood
and all outrageous divisions of time
seem ready to leave,
to slide out of me.
Then, I imagine, I would never move.
By now
the hawk has flown five miles
at least,
dazzling whoever else has happened
to look up.
I was dazzled. But that
wasn't the knife.
It was the sheer, dense wall
of blind stone
without a pinch of hope
or a single unfulfilled desire
sponging up and reflecting,
so brilliantly,
as it has for centuries,
the sun's fire.
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Ghost
climber
A long way from where I started
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Oct 21, 2009 - 04:21pm PT
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I always reckoned Shelley pretty much summed up human existence with this one:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
And Mojede beat me to one of my other favorites
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Eric Beck
Sport climber
Bishop, California
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Oct 21, 2009 - 06:05pm PT
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I like the prescient apocalyptic vision.
William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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hooblie
climber
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Oct 21, 2009 - 07:59pm PT
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lest anyone think i'm a bon vivant, or doubt that i'm a jeffers fan, here's a haunting image, and a link
to an earlier post to a "words of..." thread, my cyber offering in the spirit of lynne's toast to the fallen.
The Purse-Seine
Our sardine fishermen work at night in the dark
of the moon; daylight or moonlight
They could not tell where to spread the net,
unable to see the phosphorescence of the
shoals of fish.
They work northward from Monterey, coasting
Santa Cruz; off New Year's Point or off
Pigeon Point
The look-out man will see some lakes of milk-color
light on the sea's night-purple; he points,
and the helmsman
Turns the dark prow, the motorboat circles the
gleaming shoal and drifts out her seine-net.
They close the circle
And purse the bottom of the net, then with great
labor haul it in.
I cannot tell you
How beautiful the scene is, and a little terrible,
then, when the crowded fish
Know they are caught, and wildly beat from one wall
to the other of their closing destiny the
phosphorescent
Water to a pool of flame, each beautiful slender body
sheeted with flame, like a live rocket
A comet's tail wake of clear yellow flame; while outside
the narrowing
Floats and cordage of the net great sea-lions come up
to watch, sighing in the dark; the vast walls
of night
Stand erect to the stars.
Lately I was looking from a night mountain-top
On a wide city, the colored splendor, galaxies of light:
how could I help but recall the seine-net
Gathering the luminous fish? I cannot tell you how
beautiful the city appeared, and a little terrible.
I thought, We have geared the machines and locked all together
into inter-dependence; we have built the great cities; now
There is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable
of free survival, insulated
From the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all
dependent. The circle is closed, and the net
Is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing, yet
they shine already. The inevitable mass-disasters
Will not come in our time nor in our children's, but we
and our children
Must watch the net draw narrower, government take all
powers--or revolution, and the new government
Take more than all, add to kept bodies kept souls--or anarchy,
the mass-disasters.
These things are Progress;
Do you marvel our verse is troubled or frowning, while it keeps
its reason? Or it lets go, lets the mood flow
In the manner of the recent young men into mere hysteria,
splintered gleams, crackled laughter. But they are
quite wrong.
There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew
that cultures decay, and life's end is death.
Robinson Jeffers
http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=594562&msg=967231#msg967231
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Brian
climber
Cali
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Oct 21, 2009 - 09:11pm PT
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My "favorite" poem is as impossible to identify as my favorite climb, there are just too many choices, each with its own unique attraction. However, while I can't say this poem is my favorite, in a singular sense, I've been spending a good deal of time with it over the past few months (and I've posted it here once before).
“A Brief for the Defense” by Jack Gilbert (from Refusing Heaven)
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the
stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit that there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafes and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
Brian
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susu
Trad climber
East Bay, CA
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Oct 22, 2009 - 02:01am PT
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somewhere i have never traveled
by e.e. cummings
somewhere i have never traveled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near.
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully, mysteriously) her first rose.
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending.
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing.
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands.
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Dodo
Trad climber
Spain/UK
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Oct 22, 2009 - 04:05pm PT
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While doing a bit of research about Wordsworth for this thread, I came across this amazing faction that I have not proved one way or the other as yet. BUT, it seems there is a 'lost' manuscript by Wordsworth. Apparently he went to school and Uni with Fletcher Christian, he of 'Mutiny on the Bounty' fame, they grew up together in the English Lake District in a village called Hawkshead (I know it well).
It seems that the theory is that far from dying on Pitcairn Island, Fletcher Christian returned to England to prove his innocence and the only way he could be exonerated for the mutiny was to get proof that Bligh was buggering him and the third in command Peter Fletcher which was the only excuse for mutiny, otherwise it was punishable by death. Apparently he told the story to Wordsworth who wrote it all down in a hushed up manuscript. Not convinced yet but a good story nonetheless.
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hooblie
climber
"I used to care but, things have changed"
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Oct 22, 2009 - 04:22pm PT
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wow susu, new fav
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Dolomite
climber
Anchorage
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Oct 22, 2009 - 04:46pm PT
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Some days this one is my favorite:
Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.
-- James Wright
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Carolyn C
Trad climber
the long, long trailer
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Oct 22, 2009 - 06:51pm PT
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Another vote for "Ozymandias." I read it for the first time in high school senior English class.
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cintune
climber
the Moon and Antarctica
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Oct 22, 2009 - 07:12pm PT
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Just a box of rain -
wind and water -
Believe it if you need it,
if you don't just pass it on
Sun and shower -
Wind and rain -
in and out the window
like a moth before a flame
And it's just a box of rain
I don't know who put it there
Believe it if you need it
or leave it if you dare
But it's just a box of rain
or a ribbon for your hair
Such a long long time to be gone
and a short time to be there.
 Rbt. Hunter
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L
climber
The Big Blue, of course
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Oct 22, 2009 - 07:13pm PT
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The Fish
I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly--
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
--It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
--if you could call it a lip
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels--until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.
by Elizabeth Bishop
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