Drink To Your Heart's Desiring

Ceremonies for Christmas
Robert Herrick (1648)

Come, bring with a noise,

My merry, merry boys,

The Christmas log to the firing,

While my good dame, she

Bids ye all be free,

And drink to your heart’s desiring.

With the last year’s brand

Light the new block, and

For good success in his spending,

On your psalteries play,

That sweet luck may

Come while the log is a-teending.

Drink now the strong beer,

Cut the white loaf here,

The while the meat is a-shredding;

For the rare mince-pie,

And the plums stand by,

To fill the paste that’s a kneading.

Thinking The Day - Ross Leckie

Dead Beat has moved into Ross Leckie country - D.B. thinks you would want to read this poem by the man himself - even if you have better things you think you should be doing - because you haven't.



THINKING THE DAY

Now is a time of thinness, the treetops
bare like the parts of speech diagrammed.

This the substratum of the way we speak
the keener edges of longer nights,

of livid greens blanched to paler
orange and yellows. The remnants

of a cow in a stockyard drained of blood,
maple leaves holding to the memory.

The way the day was fat with sunlight,
gone like a cloud of summer gnats.

A shriveled pear has leaked its juice
upon a paving stone and the buzz

of a late wasp is below the threshold
of hearing, the wings slower as if its

battery were wearing down. Autumn
rains have settled in to a smother of

low-lying thoughtfulness unmoving
in the sky, the street a matte of charcoal.

When the fire engine scuttled past,
it seemed it could not control the blaze,

the siren screamed of the urgent trees
bursting everywhere with saintliness.

What The Doctor Said - Raymond Carver

Dead Beat's been reading Carver again. It's good to fall back on old friends. I've been reading his stories, but here's a poem for good measure:

What The Doctor Said

He said it doesn't look good
he said it looks bad in fact real bad
he said I counted thirty-two of them on one lung before
I quit counting them
I said I'm glad I wouldn't want to know
about any more being there than that
he said are you a religious man do you kneel down
in forest groves and let yourself ask for help
when you come to a waterfall
mist blowing against your face and arms
do you stop and ask for understanding at those moments
I said not yet but I intend to start today
he said I'm real sorry he said
I wish I had some other kind of news to give you
I said Amen and he said something else
I didn't catch and not knowing what else to do
and not wanting him to have to repeat it
and me to have to fully digest it
I just looked at him
for a minute and he looked back it was then
I jumped up and shook hands with this man who'd just given me
something no one else on earth had ever given me
I may have even thanked him habit being so strong

The Dump - Thom Gunn

He died, and I admired
the crisp vehemence
of a lifetime reduced to
half a foot of shelf space.
But others came to me saying,
we too loved him, let us take you
to the place of our love.
So they showed me
everything, everything
-- a cliff of notebooks
with every draft and erasure
of every poem he
published or rejected,
thatched already
with webs of annotation.
I went in further and saw
a hill of matchcovers
from every bar or restaurant
he'd ever entered. Trucks
backed up constantly,
piled with papers, and awaited
by archivists with shovels;
forklifts bumped through
trough and valley
to adjust the spillage.
Here odors of rubbery sweat
intruded on the pervasive
smell of stale paper,
no doubt from the mound
of his collected sneakers.
I clambered up the highest
pile and found myself
looking across not history
but the vistas of a steaming
range of garbage
reaching to the coast itself. Then
I lost my footing! and was c
arried down on a soft
avalanche of letters, paid bills,
sexual polaroids, and notes
refusing invitations, thanking
fans, resisting scholars.
In nightmare I slid,
no ground to stop me,

until I woke at last
where I had napped beside
the precious half foot. Beyond that,
nothing, nothing at all.

The Butcher's Son - Thom Gunn

THE BUTCHER'S SON by Thom Gunn

Mr Pierce the butcher

Got news his son was missing

About a month before

The closing of the war.

A bald man, tall and careful,

He stood in his shop and found

No bottom to his sadness,

Nowhere for it to stop.

When my aunt came through the door

Delivering the milk,

He spoke, with his quiet air

Of a considerate teacher,

But words weren't up to it,

He turned back to the meat.

The message was in error.

Later that humid summer

At a local high school fete,

I saw, returned, the son

Still in his uniform.

Mr Pierce was not there

But was as if implied

In the son who looked like him

Except he had red hair.

For I recall him well

Encircled by his friends,

Beaming a life charged now

Doubly because restored,

And recall also how

Within his hearty smile

His lips contained his father's

Like a light within the light

That he turned everywhere.

A Prayer For My Daughter: Dead Beat Kow-Tows to Eavan Boland

Eavan has been back onto Dead Beat.

"Not many daughters in poetry, you know."

"Hadn't thought about it before," I tell her.

"Of course you haven't, you're a man. Took Yeats until he was in his sixties. So print it."

"Yes Ma'am," Dead Beat kow-tows.

A Prayer For My Daughter
by W.B. Yeats

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory's wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger's eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass, for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen being chosen found life flat and dull
And later had much trouble from a fool,
While that great Queen, that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless could have her way
Yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man.
It's certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I'd have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful;
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty's very self, has charm made wise,
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound,
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
O may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there's no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty's horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven's will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all's accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony's a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

That The Science of Cartography Is Limited - Eavan Boland

That the Science of Cartography Is Limited

—and not simply by the fact that this shading of
forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,
the gloom of cypresses,
is what I wish to prove.

When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.

Where they died, there the road ended

and ends still and when I take down
the map of this island, it is never so
I can say here is
the masterful, the apt rendering of
the spherical as flat, nor
an ingenious design which persuades a curve
into a plane,
but to tell myself again that

the line which says woodland and cries hunger
and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,
and finds no horizon

will not be there.

Eavan Boland

A Meloncholy Thought Had Laid Me Low - Arthur Hallam

"If you are determined to mention me without my consent, Dead Beat, the least you can do is tell them about Arthur Hallam." So Ricks bellows outside my window.

"Shoo!" I whisper loudly, "You will waken the children."

"I don't care for children, Dead Beat."

"You will waken Hudson."

"I don't care for dogs."

"You will waken Horace. I know you care for Horace."

"Damn you, Dead Beat," he whispers as he skulks off. "I'll be back."

And so Dead Beat gives you, Arthur Hallam

A Meloncholy Thought Had Laid Me Low

A melancholy thought had laid me low;

A thought of self-desertion, and the death

Of feelings wont with my heart's blood to flow,

And feed the inner soul with purest breath.

The idle busy star of daily life,

Base passions, haughty doubts, and selfish fears,

Have withered up my being in a strife

Unkind, and dried the source of human tears.

One evening I went forth, and stood alone

With Nature: moon there was not, nor the light

Of any star in heaven: yet from the sight

Of that dim nightfall better hope hath grown

Upon my spirit, and from those cedars high

Solemnly changeless, as the very sky.

Arthur Hallam

Living Among the Untrodden Ways

SHE DWELT AMONG THE UNTRODDEN WAYS

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
--Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!

William Wordsworth

Japanese Death Poems

So Snyder gets on to Dead Beat.

"If you are going to talk about Death," he chides, "don't leave out the Japanese Death poems. Got that Dead Beat."

"I hear you Gary. I am always listening out for you."

So Dead Beat offers these up:


Hosshin, 13th century

Coming, all is clear,
no doubt about it.
Going, all is clear,
without a doubt.

What, then, is all?



Shoro, died April 1894, at age 80

Pampas grass, now dry,
once bent this way
and that.



Goku Kyonen, died October 8, 1272, at age 56

The truth embodied in
the Buddhas

Of the future, present,
past;

The teaching we
received from the

Fathers of our faith

Can be found at the tip
of my stick.



Gesshu Soko, died January 10, 1696, at age 79

Inhale, exhale

Forward, back

Living, dying:

Arrows, let flown each to each

Meet midway and slice

The void in aimless flight --

Thus I return to the source.



Shinsui, died September 9, 1769, at 49

O

During his last moment, Shisui's followers requested that he write a death poem. He grasped his brush, painted a circle, cast the brush aside, and died.
The circle is one of the most important symbols of Zen Buddhism. It indicates void -- the essence of all things -- and enlightenment.

Nothing But Death - Pablo Neruda

Nothing But Death by Pablo Neruda

There are cemeteries that are lonely,
graves full of bones that do not make a sound,
the heart moving through a tunnel,
in it darkness, darkness, darkness,
like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves,
as though we were drowning inside our hearts,
as though we lived falling out of the skin into the soul.

And there are corpses,
feet made of cold and sticky clay,
death is inside the bones,
like a barking where there are no dogs,
coming out from bells somewhere, from graves somewhere,
growing in the damp air like tears of rain.

Sometimes I see alone
coffins under sail,
embarking with the pale dead, with women that have dead hair,
with bakers who are as white as angels,
and pensive young girls married to notary publics,
caskets sailing up the vertical river of the dead,
the river of dark purple,
moving upstream with sails filled out by the sound of death,
filled by the sound of death which is silence.

Death arrives among all that sound
like a shoe with no foot in it, like a suit with no man in it,
comes and knocks, using a ring with no stone in it, with no
finger in it,
comes and shouts with no mouth, with no tongue, with no
throat.
Nevertheless its steps can be heard
and its clothing makes a hushed sound, like a tree.

I'm not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see,
but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets,
of violets that are at home in the earth,
because the face of death is green,
and the look death gives is green,
with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf
and the somber color of embittered winter.

But death also goes through the world dressed as a broom,
lapping the floor, looking for dead bodies,
death is inside the broom,
the broom is the tongue of death looking for corpses,
it is the needle of death looking for thread.

Death is inside the folding cots:
it spends its life sleeping on the slow mattresses,
in the black blankets, and suddenly breathes out:
it blows out a mournful sound that swells the sheets,
and the beds go sailing toward a port
where death is waiting, dressed like an admiral.

Bowery Blues

Jack hollered into the void: "This one is for O'Brien"
Dead Beat brings it to your ears.

Bowery Blues

The story of man
Makes me sick
Inside, outside,
I don't know why
Something so conditional
And all talk
Should hurt me so.

I am hurt
I am scared
I want to live
I want to die
I don't know
Where to turn
In the Void
And when
To cut
Out

For no Church told me
No Guru holds me
No advice
Just stone
Of New York
And on the cafeteria
We hear
The saxophone
O dead Ruby
Died of Shot
In Thirty Two,
Sounding like old times
And de bombed
Empty decapitated
Murder by the clock.

And I see Shadows
Dancing into
Doom
In love, holding
TIght the lovely asses
Of the little girls
In love with sex
Showing themselves
In white undergarments
At elevated windows
Hoping for the Worst

.I can't take it
Anymore
If I can't hold
My little behind
To me in my room
Then it's goodbye
Sangsara
For me
Besides
Girls aren't as good
As they look
And Samadhi
Is better
Than you think
When it starts in
Hitting your head
In with Buzz
Of glittergold
Heaven's Angels

Wailing

Saying
We've been waiting for you
Since Morning, Jack
Why were you so long
Dallying in the sooty room?
This transcendental
Brilliance
Is the better part
(of Nothingness
I sing)

Okay.
Quit.
Mad.
Stop.


Jack Kerouac

First Party At Ken Kesey's With Hell's Angels

First Party At Ken Kesey's With Hell's Angels

Cool black night thru redwoods
cars parked outside in shade
behind the gate, stars dim above
the ravine, a fire burning by the side
porch and a few tired souls hunched over
in black leather jackets. In the huge
wooden house, a yellow chandelier
at 3 A.M. the blast of loudspeakers
hi-fi Rolling Stones Ray Charles Beatles
Jumping Joe Jackson and twenty youths
dancing to the vibration thru the floor,
a little weed in the bathroom, girls in scarlet
tights, one muscular smooth skinned man
sweating dancing for hours, beer cans
bent littering the yard, a hanged man
sculpture dangling from a high creek branch,
children sleeping softly in their bedroom bunks.
And 4 police cars parked outside the painted
gate, red lights revolving in the leaves.

December 1965 Allen Ginsberg

Dead Beat Chooses a Christmas Poem: In California During The Gulf War - Denise Levertov

Denise Levertov floats past. Dead Beat is in the shower.

"Open up!" she yells.

D.B. is singing Blue Christmas too loudly and cannot hear her.

"Open up Dead Beat, I know you are in there." She bangs on the door near taking it off its hinges.

I arrive out steaming in my bathrobe.

"What's up Lev?" I ask.

"Dead Beat this is serious. I read your post - I Write In A Night Of Shame - I want you to listen to this. This is my Christmas poem."

Dead Beat listened then, and he listens and will listen then and then again.


In California During the Gulf War

Among the blight-killed eucalypts, among
trees and bushes rusted by Christmas frosts,
the yards and hillsides exhausted by five years of drought,

certain airy white blossoms punctually
reappeared, and dense clusters of pale pink, dark pink--
a delicate abundance. They seemed

like guests arriving joyfully on the accustomed
festival day, unaware of the year's events, not perceiving
the sackcloth others were wearing.

To some of us, the dejected landscape consorted well
with our shame and bitterness. Skies ever-blue,
daily sunshine, disgusted us like smile-buttons.

Yet the blossoms, clinging to thin branches
more lightly than birds alert for flight,
lifted the sunken heart

even against its will.
But not
as symbols of hope: they were flimsy
as our resistance to the crimes committed

--again, again--in our name; and yes, they return,
year after year, and yes, they briefly shone with serene joy
over against the dark glare

of evil days. They are, and their presence
is quietness ineffable--and the bombings are, were,
no doubt will be; that quiet, that huge cacophany

simultaneous. No promise was being accorded, the blossoms
were not doves, there was no rainbow. And when it was claimed
the war had ended, it had not ended.

The Lake Isle of Innisfree - W.B. Yeats

"Ah now, Dead Beat aren't you becoming just a tad too cynical?"
"Not at all D.B. Too much window dressing out there."
"I hear you, Dead Beat, but it's -20 out there. There's a heap of snow. The days are getting shorter."
"Okay, okay... Here, D.B. Here's one by Yeats to cheer us up."








The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.


"That's more like it, Dead Beat."

Digging - Seamus Heaney

Returning to branes soon (see below). In the meant time Famous Shay adds this worthy addition to any writing site:




Digging

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Seamus Heaney

Some Redemption from Marina Tsvetaeva

Here, some redemption (see The Subversion of Truth) from Marina Tsvetaeva:

To Byron

I think about the morning of your glory,
About the morning of your days too, when
Like a demon you from sleep had stirred
And were a god for men.
I think of when your eyebrows came together
Over the burning torches of your eyes,
Of how the ancient blood's eternal lava
Rushed through your arteries.
I think of fingers - very long - inside
The wavy hair, about all
Eyes that did thirst for you in alleys
And in the dining-halls.
About the hearts too, which - you were too young then -
You did not have the time to read, too soon,
About the times, when solely in your honor
Arose and down went the moon.
I think about a hall in semi-darkness,
About the velvet, into lace inclined,
About the poems we would have told each other,
You - yours, I - mine. I also think about the remaining
From your lips and your eyes handful of dust..
About all eyes, that are now in the graveyard
About them and us..


Translated by Ilya Shambat