"In A Long Rage": More Poems By Louise Bogan

I've been reading around  again in Louise Bogan's The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923- 1968--The Noonday Press: New York, 1968--and I have four more poems I'd like to share.

I've quoted four other poems by Louise Bogan here.

Read aloud, please, and listen:


MAN ALONE


It is yourself you seek
In a long rage,
Scanning through light and darkness
Mirrors, the page,


Where should reflected be
Those eyes and that thick hair,
That passionate look, that laughter.
You should appear


Within the book, or doubled,
Freed, in the silvered glass;
Into all other bodies
Yourself should pass.


The glass does not dissolve;
Like walls the mirrors stand;
The printed page gives back
Words by another hand.


And your infatuate eye
Meets not itself below:
Strangers lie in your arms
As I lie now.




BAROQUE COMMENT


From loud sound and still chance;
From mindless earth, wet with a dead million leaves;
From the forest, the empty desert, the tearing beasts,
The kelp-disordered beaches;
Coincident with the lie, anger, lust, oppression and death in many forms:


Ornamental structures, continents apart, separated by seas;
Fitted marble, swung bells; fruit in garlands as well as on the branch;
The flower at last in bronze, stretched backward, or curled within;
Stone in various shapes: beyond the pyramid, the contrived arch and the buttress;
The named constellations;
Crown and vesture; palm and laurel chosen as noble and enduring;
Speech proud in sound; death considered sacrifice;
Mask, weapon, urn; the ordered strings;
Fountains; foreheads, under weather-bleached hair;
The wreath, the oar, the tool,
The prow;
The turned eyes and the opened mouth of love.




PACKET OF LETTERS


In the shut drawer, even now, they rave and grieve--
To be approached at times with the frightened tear;
Their cold to be drawn away from, as one, at nightfall,
Draws the cloak closer against the cold of the marsh.


There, there, the thugs of the heart did murder.
There, still in the murderers' guise, two stand embraced, embalmed.




SOLITARY OBSERVATION BROUGHT
BACK FROM A SOJOURN IN HELL


At midnight tears
Run into your ears.

"Keel or Reef": Four Poems by Louise Bogan

I've been reading around in Louise Bogan's The Blue Estuaries: Poems 1923-1968, and I wanted to share a handful that definitely hold my attention. I hope they please you too.

TO AN ARTIST, TO TAKE HEART

Slipping in blood, by his own hand, through pride,

Hamlet, Othello, Coriolanus fall.

Upon his bed, however, Shakespeare died,

Having endured them all.

CARTOGRAPHY

As you lay in sleep

I saw the chart

Of artery and vein

Running from your heart,

Plain as the strength

Marked upon the leaf

Along the length,

Mortal and brief,

Of your gaunt hand.

I saw it clear:

The wiry brand

Of the life we bear

Mapped like the great

Rivers that rise

Beyond our fate

And distant from our eyes.

ZONE

We have struck the regions wherein we are keel or reef.

The wind breaks over us,

And against high sharp angles almost splits into words,

And these are of fear or grief.

Like a ship, we have struck expected latitudes

Of the universe, in March.

Through one short segment's arch

Of the zodiac's round

We pass,

Thinking: Now we hear

What we heard last year,

And bear the wind's rude touch

And its ugly sound

Equally with so much

We have learned how to bear.

MUSICIAN

Where these hands have been,

By what delayed,

That so long stayed

Apart from the thin

Strings which they now grace

With their lonely skill?

Music and their cool will

At last interlace.

Now with great ease, and slow,

The thumb, the finger, the strong

Delicate hand plucks the long

String it was born to know.

And, under the palm, the string

Sings as it wished to sing.