memory & desire

Upcoming: The Perfume Inside the Poem

Pleasures
- by Denise Levertov -

I like to find
what's not found
at once, but lies

within something of another nature,
in repose, distinct.
Gull feathers of glass, hidden

in white pulp: the bones of squid
which I pull out and lay
blade by blade on the draining board—

       tapered as if for swiftness, to pierce
       the heart, but fragile, substance
       belying design.               Or a fruit, mamey,

cased in rough brown peel, the flesh
rose-amber, and the seed:
the seed a stone of wood, carved and

polished, walnut-colored, formed
like a brazilnut, but large,
large enough to fill
the hungry palm of a hand.

I like the juicy stem of grass that grows
within the coarser leaf folded round,
and the butteryellow glow
in the narrow flute from which the morning-glory
opens blue and cool on a hot morning.

From Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960, New Directions Publishing, 1979.

The Occasional Pie

The Poet's Occasional Alternative
- by Grace Paley -

I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead      it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft     a poem would have had some
distance to go     days and weeks and
much crumpled paper

the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine on
the kitchen floor

everybody will like this pie
it will have apples and cranberries
dried apricots in it       many friends
will say      why in the world did you
make only one

this does not happen with poems

because of unreportable
sadnesses I decided to
settle this morning for a re-
sponsive eatership       I do not
want to wait a week       a year    a
generation for the right
consumer to come along

from Begin Again: Collected Poems, (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 2001) reprinted in Good Poems for Hard Times, edited by Garrison Keillor (Viking, 2005) p. 184