Meaningless but full of messages

Five poems this Sunday morning. Wish I could write poetry again... but the muse seems to have died these past few years.

-

In the window, the moon is hanging over the earth,
meaningless but full of messages
....
If there’s an image of the soul, I think that’s what it is.

- from Village Life, a poem by Louise Gluck, in the New Yorker.

--

Canned laughter in the empty house
Like the sound of beer cans tied to a hearse.

-- from Driving Home, a nice little poem by Charles Simic, also in the New Yorker.

Just learned that earlier this month Simic was appointed as the 15th Poet Laureate of the US. (They really should make these at least a 2 year appointment. Seems like yesterday that the esteemed poet, Donald Hall, was appointed to the post.) Incidentally, Gluck was the12th U.S. Poet Laureate from 2003-2004.

---

But see how each busy capitalist
stares serenely through an exhibit's glass
to gaze at lotus flowers, a phoenix,
or philosophers on a mountain path.

- from a poem, In the National Palace Museum, Taiwan, by Sarah Wardle, who won the Poetry Society's Geoffrey Dearmer prize in 1999.

---

Some people sell their blood. You sell your heart.
It was either that or the soul.

- in Heart by Margaret Atwood, from her book, The Door

---

If there is something to desire,
there will be something to regret.

If there is something to regret,
there will be something to recall.

If there is something to recall,
there was nothing to regret.

If there was nothing to regret,
there was nothing to desire.

——

Let us touch each other
while we still have hands,
palms, forearms, elbows . . .
Let us love each other for misery,
torture each other, torment,
disfigure, maim,
to remember better,
to part with less pain.

-- Two of the Four Poems by Vera Pavlova, also published in the New Yorker.

Do read the other two poems also - even in translation (from the Russian), this is good stuff. And this interesting interview from 2002 with Pavlova, where she says:

"Men became so female, that women had to take on the male part themselves. How did all this resolve itself? Towards the end of the century, women poets became far more radical than men. Stylistically and spiritually."

and later...

"In art the basic distinction is not between male and female, but between dead and alive."