A man pushing a bicycle in front of a building damaged by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, on Thursday.Credit...Evgeniy Maloletka/Associated Press 

The war in Ukraine continues. The Russian forces are closing in on Kyiv, have taken large swaths of territory along the Black Sea coast, but seem to be stalled and are suffering losses in manpower and in equipment. So Russia is now bombarding cities including hospitals and residences. President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused the Russians of terrorizing Ukraine in an attempt to break the will of the people. “A war of annihilation,” he called it. The dead increase on both sides and the destruction mounts. We are nowhere near the end of this war, but with all the destruction one cannot help but think of how it all can ever, if ever, be put back to normal. Wislawa Szymborska wrote a apt poem on just that.

The End and the Beginning

by WISŁAWA SZYMBORSKA

Translated by Joanna Trzeciak 

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won’t

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Someone has to get mired

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs,

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder

to prop up a wall.

Someone has to glaze a window,

rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,

and takes years.

All the cameras have left

for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,

and new railway stations.

Sleeves will go ragged

from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,

still recalls the way it was.

Someone else listens

and nods with unsevered head.

But already there are those nearby

starting to mill about

who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes

sometimes someone still unearths

rusted-out arguments

and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew

what was going on here

must make way for

those who know little.

And less than little.

And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown

causes and effects,

someone must be stretched out

blade of grass in his mouth

gazing at the clouds.

Source: Miracle Fair: selected poems of Wisława Szymborska (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2001)

3 by Kay Ryan

Big Frank has been reading Kay Ryan's poetry.  She is amazing.  Here are a three of her poems.

LEAVING SPACES

It takes a courageous
person to leave spaces
empty. Certainly any
artist in the Middle Ages
felt this timor, and quickly
covered space over
with griffins, sea serpents,
herbs and brilliant carpets
of flowers--things pleasant
or unpleasant, no matter.
Of course they were cowards
and patronized by cowards
who liked their swards as
filled with birds as leaves.
All of them believed in
sudden edges and completely
barren patches in the mind,
and they didn't want to
think about them all the time.


CAUGHT

If something
gets caught
like a bone
in the throat
it isn't right.

We know this
with fish:

it isn't impolite
to cough.
Our life
is at risk.

But there are
so many wrong thoughts
we refuse to release

massaging
our own throats
like pate geese.


RELIEF

We know it is close
to something lofty.
Simply getting over being sick
or finding lost property
has in it the leap,
the purge, the quick humility
of witnessing a birth--
how love seeps up
and retakes the earth.
There is a dreamy
wading feeling to your walk
inside the current
of restored riches,
clocks set back,
disasters averted.

John Ashbery's Night

[Photo: Big Frank Dickinson]

Big Frank has been reading "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" by John Ashbery. a great book of poetry. There is much too much to comment on in a single post and Asbery's words are so much more interesting than Big Frank's so let's read some. Ashbery writes of the confusion that the say brings; how difficult it is to bring meaning into your life through conscious effort using words that have so many holes in them. Night however, is a different situation. Here's what Ashbery has to say on night in this collection of poetry.

"....... you have slept in the sun

Longer than the sphinx and are none the wiser for it,

Come in. And I thought I saw a shadow fall across the door

But it was only her come to ask once more

If I was coming in, and not to hurry in case I wasn't.

The night sheen takes over. A moon of cistercian pallor

Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed,

Finally involved with the business of darkness.

And a sign heaves from all the small things on earth,

The books, the papers, the old garters and union suit buttons

Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower

Version of cities flattened under the equalizing night.

The summer demands and takes away too much,

But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.

From "As One Put Drunk Into the Packet Boat" ~ John Ashbery

out of night the token emerges

its leaves like birds alighting all at once under a tree

taken up and shaken again

put down in weak rage

knowing as the brain does it can never come about

not here not yesterday in the past

only in the gaps of today filling itself

as emptiness is distributed

in the idea of what time it is

when that time is already past

From "As You Came from the Holy Land" ~ John Ashbery

Two by Tomas Tranströmer

Two Poems by Tomas Tranströmer, the 2011 Nobel Prize laureate for literature.

April and Silence

Spring lies deserted.
The velvet-dark ditch
crawls by my side without reflections.
All that shines
are yellow flowers.
I’m carried in my shadow
like a violin in its black case.
The only thing I want to say
gleams out of reach
like the silver
in a pawnshop.

Romanesque Arches

Inside the huge Romanesque church the tourists jostled in the half darkness.
vault gaped behind vault, no complete view.
A few candle flames flickered.
An angel with no face embraced me
and whispered through my whole body:
"Don't be ashamed of being human, be proud!
Inside you vault opens behind vault endlessly.
You will never be complete, that's how it's meant to be."
Blind with tears
I was pushed out on the sun-seething piazza
together with Mr. and Mrs. Jones, Mr Tanaka, and Signora Sabatini,
and inside each of them vault opened behind vault endlessly.

Travel Poems

Big Frank is on the road again - off to Japan. Travel always takes the traveler away, not just physically. This is probably the best part of travel. The familiar is left behind and the mind travels to new places. Here are two poems that capture that larger view of travel, one by Big Frank, and one by Dick Allen. More to come from the land of the sliding doors.
[Photo: Big Frank Dickinson]

A Traveler's Wish
By BIG FRANK DICKINSON

Let me take off clearly knowing nothing
Haunts me as I move outside of the usual;
Let those dear ones behind be as
Safe at home as I will be on the road.

Let the journey take me outside of me
To a place long-sought, accepted, and true;
Let this absence be a presence
Arriving with me and welcomed by all.

Let the return be a renewed reward
For having left the unwanted behind.
Let my presence be a fulfillment;
What's wanted welcomed home.


What You Have to Get Over
BY DICK ALLEN

Stumps. Railroad tracks. Early sicknesses,
the blue one, especially.
Your first love rounding a corner,
that snowy minefield.

Whether you step lightly or heavily,
you have to get over to that tree line a hundred yards in the distance
before evening falls,
letting no one see you wend your way,

that wonderful, old-fashioned word, wend,
meaning “to proceed, to journey,
to travel from one place to another,”
as from bed to breakfast, breakfast to imbecile work.

You have to get over your resentments,
the sun in the morning and the moon at night,
all those shadows of yourself you left behind
on odd little tables.

Tote that barge! Lift that bale! You have to
cross that river, jump that hedge, surmount that slogan,
crawl over this ego or that eros,
then hoist yourself up onto that yonder mountain.

Another old-fashioned word, yonder, meaning
“that indicated place, somewhere generally seen
or just beyond sight.” If you would recover,
you have to get over the shattered autos in the backwoods lot

to that bridge in the darkness
where the sentinels stand
guarding the border with their half-slung rifles,
warned of the likes of you.

Randall Brock

Big Frank belongs to a group of poets in Spokane that meet every couple of weeks and share what they have written with each other. It is a great group: good writers and very helpful to each other in providing a place for them to gather and read what they have written. Today Big Frank is going to feature one poet from the group: Randall Brock. Randall has a beautifully unique style and a lyrical conciseness to what he writes. He has published thousands of his poems over the years. Here are four of his poems. Above is a photo of him that Big Frank took at one of our readings.

DESIRE IN RHYTHM

Desire

In rhythm

Thin

Of mad

Tear

In love

YOU ARE THE CRY

You are

the cry

deep

in dance

of blood

in mad

desire

silken

AUTUMN IN DESIRE

Autumn

In desire

Of mad

Dark

Rhythm

Of azure

Love

I AM A CURSE

I am

A curse

In caress

Of lost

Release

Uh-oh, here it comes again

Laughing Gravy

The crisis has just passed.
Uh-oh, here it comes again,
looking for someone to blame itself on, you, I . . .

All these people coming in . . .
The last time we necked
I noticed this lobe on your ear.
Please, tell me we may begin.

All the wolves in the wolf factory paused
at noon, for a moment of silence.

Truant exchanges ... brandished intentions

[Photo: Big Frank Dickinson, taken at North Bend, WA]

A beautiful poem by John Ashbery that will stay with you for some time afterwards.

Wakefulness

An immodest little white wine, some scattered seraphs,
recollections of the Fall—tell me,
has anyone made a spongier representation, chased
fewer demons out of the parking lot
where we all held hands?

Little by little the idea of the true way returned to me.
I was touched by your care,
reduced to fawning excuses.
Everything was spotless in the little house of our desire,
the clock ticked on and on, happy about
being apprenticed to eternity. A gavotte of dust motes
came to replace my seeing. Everything was as though
it had happened long ago
in ancient peach-colored funny papers
wherein the law of true opposites was ordained
casually. Then the book opened by itself
and read to us: “You pack of liars,
of course tempted by the crossroads, but I like each
and every one of you with a peculiar sapphire intensity.
Look, here is where I failed at first.
The client leaves. History natters on,
rolling distractedly on these shores. Each day, dawn
condenses like a very large star, bakes no bread,
shoes the faithless. How convenient if it’s a dream.”

In the next sleep car was madness.
An urgent languor installed itself
as far as the cabbage-hemmed horizons. And if I put a little
bit of myself in this time, stoppered the liquor that is our selves’
truant exchanges, brandished my intentions
for once? But only I get
something out of this memory.
A kindly gnome
of fear perched on my dashboard once, but we had all
been instructed
to ignore the conditions of the chase. Here, it
seems to grow lighter with each passing century. No matter
how you twist it,
life stays frozen in the headlights.
Funny, none of us heard the roar

TNT Mate

Big Frank has been reading from Jay Leeming's book of poetry entitled "Dynamite on a China Plate. The following helps a bit in approaching this book.

Dynamite (TNT): a useful explosive material with convenient handling properties. People exposed to TNT over a prolonged period tend to experience anemia and abnormal liver functions along with toxic delusions.

China Plate: London Cockney rhyming slang, china plate = mate.


Rowboat

An oar is a paddle with a home. This arrangement seems awkward at first, as if it were wrong; the wood knocks in the oarlock, and would much rather be a church steeple, or the propeller of an old airplane in France. Yet as it bites deep into the wave it settles down, deciding that the axe and the carpenter were right. And you, too, are supposed to be sitting this way, back turned to what you want, watching your history unravel across the waves as your legs brush against the gunnels. Your feet are restless, wanting to be more involved. But your back is what gets you there, closer to what finally surprises you from behind: waves lapping at the shore, the soft nuzzle of sand.

APPLE

Sometimes when eating an apple
I bite too far
and open up the little room
the lovers have prepared,
and the seeds fall
onto the kitchen floor
and I see
that they are tear-shaped.

People don't change ...

One more lap might just do it ... ha!

Maximus, to Gloucester: Letter 2
By Charles Olson

. . . . . tell you? ha! who
can tell another how
to manage the swimming?

he was right: people

don’t change. They only stand more
revealed. I,
likewise

Blake and Watts

Big Frank was listening to an audio tape of Alan Watts talking about Zen. Watts in his explanation of Zen makes an interesting statement about following through on what you know, and the wisdom that can come in this way. He ends with a quotation from William Blake: “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise.

Here are some more in this line from Blake:

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom;

Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.

The cut worm forgives the plow.

He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star.

No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.

The most sublime act is to set another before you.

Improvement makes strait roads;
but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of genius.

You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough.

Here is Alan Watts: from “Spirituality and Sensuality”

Not to cherish both the angel and the animal, both the spirit and the flesh, is to renounce the whole interest and greatness of being human, and it is really tragic that those in whom the two natures are equally strong should be made to feel in conflict with themselves. For the saint-sinner and the mystic-sensualist is always the most interesting type of human being because he is the most complete. When the two aspects are seen to be consistent with each other, there is a real sense in which spirit transforms nature: that is to say, the animality of the mystic is always richer, more refined, and more subtly sensuous than the animality of the merely animal man.

C.K. Williams

Big Frank has been reading from C.K. Williams: Collected Poems. Here are a couple of them that he likes:


The World's Greatest Tricycle-Rider

The world's greatest tricycle-rider
is in my heart, riding like a wildman,
no hands, almost upside down along
the walls and over the high curbs
and stoops, his bell rapid firing,
the sun spinning in his spokes like a flame.

But he is growing older. His feet
overshoot the pedals. His teeth set
too hard against the jolts, and I am afraid
that what I've kept from him is what
tightens his fingers on the rubber grips
and drives him again and again on the same block.

Wasp

Hammer, hammer, hammer, the wasp
has been banging his head on the window for hours;
you’d think by now he’d be brain-dead, but no,
he flings himself at the pane: hammer, hammer again.

I ease around him to open the sash, hoping
he doesn’t sting me because then I’d be sorry
I didn’t kill him, but he pays me no mind:
it’s still fling, hammer, fling, hammer again.

I’m sure his brain’s safe, his bones are outside,
but up there mine are, too, so why does it hurt
so much to keep thinking—hammer, hammer—
the same things again and, hammer, again?

That invisible barrier between you and the world,
between you and your truth… Stinger blunted,
wings frayed, only the battering, battered brain,
only the hammer, hammer, hammer again.

Two by J.V. Cunningham

Below are two poems by the late J.V. Cunningham. The first does a masterful job of laying what is perfect love. So much is written on the feelings of love and not of the care actually given to the other, as Cunningham puts it: "I care for you more/ Than my feeling for you." The second illustrates that love is a choice and that it carries a couple through their inevitable "ills" through loyalty, patience, respect, and manners. And, of course, it takes two.

(9)

Innocent to innocent,
One asked, What is perfect love?
Not knowing it is not love,
Which is imperfect–some kind
Of love or other, some kind
Of interchange with wanting,
There when all else is wanting,
Something by which we make do.

So impaired, uninnocent,
If I love you–as I do–
To the very perfection
Of perfect imperfection,
It’s that I care more for you
Than for my feeling for you.


Choice

Allegiance is assigned
Forever when the mind
Chooses and stamps the will.
Thus, I must love you still
Through good and ill.

But though we cannot part
We may retract the heart
And build such privacies
As self-regard agrees
Conduce to ease.

So manners will repair
The ravage of despair
Which generous love invites,
Preferring quiet nights
To vain delights.”

IT

The Chinese zen master put IT like this: "nothing is left to you at this moment but to have a good laugh!"

James Broughton put IT this way:

This is It
and I am It
and You are It
and so is That
and He is It
and She is It
and It is It
and That is That.

Big Frank puts It this way: What It Is!

The Snowman

[Photo: Big Frank Dickinson]

Here's one of Big Frank's favorite winter poems by Wallace Stevens - The Snow Man. Great artistic creation going from the reader/winter scene observer to the snowman and his imagined perception of winter to what that really would be . . . nothing.


The Snow Man
--- Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Reluctance

[Photo: Big Frank Dickinson]

Big Frank's thoughts at the end of this autumn, his favorite season, turn to Robert Frost's great poem.

Reluctance
---- Robert Frost

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last long aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question 'Whither?'

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

Now

Big Frank knows the answer to this lovely poem full of questions and waiting!

This Couple
by C. D. Wright

Now is when we love to sit before mirrors
wth a dark beer or hand out leaflets
at chain-link gates or come together after work
listening to each other’s hard day. The engine dies;
no one hurries to go in. We might
walk around in the yard not making a plan.
The freeway is heard, but there’s no stopping
progress, and the week has barely begun. Then
we are dressed. It rains. Our heads rest
against the elevator wall inhaling a stranger;
we think of the cliffs we went off
with our laughing friends. The faces
we put our lips to. Our wonderful sex
under whatever we wear. And of the car
burning on the side of the highway. Of jukeboxes
we fed. Quarters circulating with our prints.
Things we sent away for. Long drives. The rain. Cafes
where we ate late, and once only. Eyes of an animal
in the headlamps. The guestbooks that verify
our whereabouts. Your apple core in the ashtray.
The pay toilets where we sat without paper. Rain.
Articles left with former lovers. The famous
ravine of childhood. Movie lines we’ve stood in
when it really came down. Moments
we have felt forsaken: waiting for the others
Tt step from the wrought-iron compartment,
or passing through some town with the dial
on a Mexican station, wondering for the life of us
where were we going and when would we meet.

"You will outlive yourself . . ."

Big Frank shares below a great poem by Timothy Donnelly from his latest collection of poems: "The Cloud Corporation". And no, it's not just because the title has "Cloud" in it that Big Frank recommends the book. The poems are sharp, they tread familiar territory but reveal it in startlingly pleasing ways. Here's one that Big Frank especially likes on the transitoriness of feeling, but unlike much lyric poetry this is presented as a good thing - not a loss. There are times when we feel we would bet large on the permanence of what we feel; as Donnelly puts it: "You wager too much, small self, on the way you feel." For, as the poem concludes: "you will outlive/ yourself again, and what you feel now, this adamantine/ sorrow, will scatter its dicethrow behind you into swans." Yes that wager that you were so sure of . . . the dicethrow turns into swans!

THROUGH THE WILDERNESS OF HIS FOREHEAD
By Timothy Donnelly

You wager too much, small self, on the way you feel. Nothing
you have thought should last forever can’t be lost.

Even the yellow wind that begins at once to strip the last of the
heart-shaped foliage from the tree across the way

knows that feeling is a spell from which the mind can
rouse itself awake if it would only let itself be taken

leaf by leaf apart. And you have felt this fear before, clung
as to a vapor misremembering what had stood to

live through memory alone. Or was it afterwards among
fog folded into blankets of some self-erasing sleep.

Or when, conversely, focused on the constancy of any given
thing without dispersing, undissolved – an icecap-

white moon or clock-face on a tower – the mind intent on far
too fine a point to take in any more. You will outlive

yourself again, and what you feel now, this adamantine
sorrow, will scatter its dicethrow behind you into swans.

Rhinovirus & NY

While Big Frank recovers from a bout with a rhinovirus, he heard this poem recited by David Rakoff and was transported by it. Read it and go where it takes you - beautiful.

Letter To N.Y.

by Elizabeth Bishop
(for Cd)

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

--Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

Dorothy Parker

Big Frank has been dipping in lately to The Portable Dorothy Parker. Here are some gems:

Ornithology For Beginners
by Dorothy Parker

The bird that feeds from off my palm
Is sleek, affectionate, and calm,
But double, to me, is worth the thrush
A-flickering in the elder-bush.

The Searched Soul
by Dorothy Parker

When I consider, pro and con,
What things my love is built upon--
A curly mouth; a sinewed wrist;
A questioning brow; a pretty twist
Of words as old and tried as sin;
A pointed ear; a cloven chin;
Long, tapered limbs; and slanted eyes
Not cold nor kind nor darkly wise--
When so I ponder, here apart,
What shallow boons suffice my heart,
What dust-bound trivia capture me,
I marvel at my normalcy.