MetaChat - The Other Tiger

MetaChat is an informal place for MeFites to touch base and post, discuss and chatter about topics that may not belong on MetaFilter. Questions? Check the FAQ. Please note: This is important.

14 December 2006

The Other Tiger →[More:]

A tiger comes to mind. The twilight here
Exalts the vast and busy Library
And seems to set the bookshelves back in gloom;
Innocent, ruthless, bloodstained, sleek
It wanders through its forest and its day
Printing a track along the muddy banks
Of sluggish streams whose names it does not know
(In its world there are no names or past
Or time to come, only the vivid now)
And makes its way across wild distances
Sniffing the braided labyrinth of smells
And in the wind picking the smell of dawn
And tantalizing scent of grazing deer;
Among the bamboo's slanting stripes I glimpse
The tiger's stripes and sense the bony frame
Under the splendid, quivering cover of skin.
Curving oceans and the planet's wastes keep us
Apart in vain; from here in a house far off
In South America I dream of you,
Track you, O tiger of the Ganges' banks.

It strikes me now as evening fills my soul
That the tiger addressed in my poem
Is a shadowy beast, a tiger of symbols
And scraps picked up at random out of books,
A string of labored tropes that have no life,
And not the fated tiger, the deadly jewel
That under sun or stars or changing moon
Goes on in Bengal or Sumatra fulfilling
Its rounds of love and indolence and death.
To the tiger of symbols I hold opposed
The one that's real, the one whose blood runs hot
As it cuts down a herd of buffaloes,
And that today, this August third, nineteen
Fifty-nine, throws its shadow on the grass;
But by the act of giving it a name,
By trying to fix the limits of its world,
It becomes a fiction not a living beast,
Not a tiger out roaming the wilds of earth.

We'll hunt for a third tiger now, but like
The others this one too will be a form
Of what I dream, a structure of words, and not
The flesh and one tiger that beyond all myths
Paces the earth. I know these things quite well,
Yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me
In this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest,
And I go on pursuing through the hours
Another tiger, the beast not found in verse.

Jorge Luis Borges
_____________________________________

Just a nice poem for you today. Share a nice poem, if you care to.

post by: taz at: 03:23 | 11 comments

And I thought you beside me
How rare and how desperate
And your eyes were wet
And your face as still
As the body of a leveret
On a tranced hill
But my thought belied me
And you were not there
But only the trees that shook,
Only a storm that broke
Through the dark air.

Mervyn Peake
_____________________________________

posted by misteraitch 14 December | 03:46

You don't have characters no more

Then there was the Elephant
which everybody called the Monkey.
The taproom door, a sliding door
had a counterweight and the counterweight
was a brass monkey. Honduras mahogany
furnishings. Pewter spittoon. Leaded lights.
Cut-glass brilliants. Atmosphere.
They should never have pulled it down.

Then there was the Horse and Trumpet,
which people called the Smiling Mule.
Embossed plate glass. Mosaic floor.
Four-pull beer-engine. Eight-tap spirit-fountain.
Sign on bar: NO singing. NO strap.
Not that we’d’ve gone in, but we did
for a quick one. And Eric said
it was the best neck-oil in town.

Drayman’s had a right bad name:
back-street, bare-boards, spit-and-sawdust.
Not that we’d’ve gone in, but we did.
Bread and dripping in fat-pot. Rat pit.
Hardened faces. Rough. Poor.
And I mean poor. There — for the long pull:
There — to get a break from wife and kids.
Tipsy women sipped their gin-and-it.

Then the Black Swan, the Mucky Duck.
And, further up, the Fox and Pheasant,
formerly the Hare and Hounds.
Not that we’d’ve gone in, but we did.
Man comes up. — How do! — How do.
— Wanna bargain? — What you got?
He opens his coat and shows us
pockets stuffed with snuff-boxes.

Ed Reiss

posted by seanyboy 14 December | 04:02

Seven Strophes

I was but what you'd brush
with your palm, what your leaning
brow would hunch to in evening's
raven-black hush.

I was but what your gaze
in that dark could distinguish:
a dim shape to begin with,
later - features, a face.

It was you, on my right,
on my left, with your heated
sighs, who molded my helix
whispering at my side.

It was you by that black
window's trembling tulle pattern
who laid in my raw cavern
a voice calling you back.

I was practically blind.
You, appearing, then hiding,
gave me my sight and heightened
it. Thus some leave behind

a trace. Thus they make worlds.
Thus, having done so, at random
wastefully they abandon
their work to its whirls.

Thus, prey to speeds
of light, heat, cold, or darkness,
a sphere in space without markers
spins and spins.

Joseph Brodsky, 1981, translated by Paul Graves.

posted by By the Grace of God 14 December | 06:58

Poor Creatures!

What it takes on this planet
to love each other in peace:
all the world examines the sheets,
all of them trouble your love.

And they say terrible things
about a man and a woman
who, after lots of vacillations,
and lots of deliberations,
do something incomparable,
fall together into one bed.

I ask myself if the frogs
stake out, sneeze at, themselves,
whether they whisper in ponds
against the outlaw frogs
against the joy of spawn.
I ask myself if the birds
make bird enemies
and if the bull listens to oxen
before he pays court to the cows.

Now the streets have eyes,
the parks have police,
the hotels have their spys,
the windows note down names,
troops and guns are sent out
resolute against love,
working incessantly
the throats and the ears,
and a guy and his girl
are forced to burst into flower
while fleeing on a bike.

Pablo Neruda

posted by arse_hat 14 December | 08:49

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
—William Stafford

posted by Lipstick Thespian 14 December | 10:22

Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
I come, my sweet,
to sing to you!
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

-- From Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, by William Carlos Williams, 1955

posted by melissa may 14 December | 12:22

What Work is by Philip Levine

We stand in the rain in a long line
waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work.
You know what work is--if you're
old enough to read this you know what
work is, although you may not do it.
Forget you. This is about waiting,
shifting from one foot to another.
Feeling the light rain falling like mist
into your hair, blurring your vision
until you think you see your own brother
ahead of you, maybe ten places.
You rub your glasses with your fingers,
and of course it's someone else's brother,
narrower across the shoulders than
yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin
that does not hide the stubbornness,
the sad refusal to give in to
rain, to the hours wasted waiting,
to the knowledge that somewhere ahead
a man is waiting who will say, "No,
we're not hiring today," for any
reason he wants. You love your brother,
now suddenly you can hardly stand
the love flooding you for your brother,
who's not beside you or behind or
ahead because he's home trying to
sleep off a miserable night shift
at Cadillac so he can get up
before noon to study his German.
Works eight hours a night so he can sing
Wagner, the opera you hate most,
the worst music ever invented.
How long has it been since you told him
you loved him, held his wide shoulders,
opened your eyes wide and said those words,
and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never
done something so simple, so obvious,
not because you're too young or too dumb,
not because you're jealous or even mean
or incapable of crying in
the presence of another man, no,
just because you don't know what work is.
___________________________________________

posted by omiewise 14 December | 12:43

Axe Handles

One afternoon the last week in April
Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head
Without a handle, in the shop
And go gets it, and wants it for his own.
A broken-off axe handle behind the door
Is long enough for a hatchet,
We cut it to length and take it
With the hatchet head
And working hatchet, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
"When making an axe handle
the pattem is not far off."
And I say this to Kai
"Look: We'll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with-"
And he sees. And I hear it again:
It's in Lu Ji's Wen Fu, fourth century
A.D. "Essay on Literature"-in the
Preface: "In making the handle Of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand.-
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.

-Gary Snyder

posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson 14 December | 12:57

Wow.
That's awesome IRFH.

posted by seanyboy 14 December | 17:04

Glad you liked it, seanyboy. It's easily my favorite by Snyder, who grew up in my neck of the woods.

posted by It's Raining Florence Henderson 14 December | 17:49

THE ALIENS

you may not believe it
but there are people
who go through life with
very little
friction of distress.
they dress well, sleep well.
they are contented with
their family
life.
they are undisturbed
and often feel
very good.
and when they die
it is an easy death, usually in their
sleep.

you may not believe
it
but such people do
exist.

but i am not one of
them.
oh no, I am not one of them,
I am not even near
to being
one of
them.
but they
are there

and I am
here.

Charles Bukowski

posted by arse_hat 15 December | 00:12

← poop. i thought perhaps it had found it's way back south || Residents of Fjuckby demand new name →

HOME || REGISTER || LOGIN