Howard Nemerov: Все стихи поэта

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The Lobster

Here at the Super Duper, in a glass tank

Supplied by a rill of cold fresh water

Running down a glass washboard at one end

And siphoned off at the other, and so

Perpetually renewed, a herd of lobster

Is made available to the customer

Who may choose whichever one he wants

To carry home and drop into boiling water

Howard Nemerov

Learning by Doing

They're taking down a tree at the front door,

The power saw is snarling at some nerves,

Whining at others. Now and then it grunts,

And sawdust falls like snow or a drift of seeds.

Rotten, they tell us, at the fork, and one

Big wind would bring it down. So what they do

They do, as usual, to do us good.

Whatever cannot carry its own weight

Howard Nemerov

Style

Flaubert wanted to write a novel

About nothing. It was to have no subject

And be sustained upon the style alone,

Like the Holy Ghost cruising above

The abyss, or like the little animals

In Disney cartoons who stand upon a branch

That breaks, but do not fall

Till they look down. He never wrote that novel,

Howard Nemerov

Reading Pornography in Old Age

Unbridled licentiousness with no holds barred,

Immediate and mutual lust, satisfiable

In the heat, upon demand, aroused again

And satisfied again, lechery unlimited.

Till space runs out at the bottom of the page

And another pair of lovers, forever young,

Prepotent, endlessly receptive, renews

The daylong, nightlong, interminable grind.

Howard Nemerov

A Spell before Winter

After the red leaf and the gold have gone,

Brought down by the wind, then by hammering rain

Bruised and discolored, when October's flame

Goes blue to guttering in the cusp, this land

Sinks deeper into silence, darker into shade.

There is a knowledge in the look of things,

The old hills hunch before the north wind blows.

Now I can see certain simplicities

Howard Nemerov

The Blue Swallows

Across the millstream below the bridge

Seven blue swallows divide the air

In shapes invisible and evanescent,

Kaleidoscopic beyond the mind’s

Or memory’s power to keep them there.

“History is where tensions were,”

“Form is the diagram of forces.”

Thus, helplessly, there on the bridge,

Howard Nemerov

Poetics

You know the old story Ann Landers tells

About the housewife in her basement doing the wash?

She's wearing her nightie, and she thinks, "Well, hell,

I might's well put this in as well," and then

Being dripped on by a leaky pipe puts on

Her son's football helmet; whereupon

The meter reader happens to walk through

and "Lady," he gravely says, "I sure hope your team wins."

Howard Nemerov

Because You Asked about the Line between Prose and Poetry

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle

That while you watched turned into pieces of snow

Riding a gradient invisible

From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell.

And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

Howard Nemerov was born on February 29th, 1920 in New York. He died of cancer at his home in University City, Missouri on July 5th 1991.

Howard Nemerov

Ozymandias II

I met a guy I used to know, who said:

"You take your '57 Karnak, now,

The model that they called their Coop de Veal

That had the pointy rubber boobs for bumpers—

You take that car, owned by a nigger now

Likelier'n not, with half its chromium teeth

Knocked down its throat and aerial ripped off,

Side stitched with like bullets where the stripping's gone

Howard Nemerov

The Makers

Who can remember back to the first poets,

The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus?

No one has remembered that far back

Or now considers, among the artifacts,

And bones and cantilevered inference

The past is made of, those first and greatest poets,

So lofty and disdainful of renown

They left us not a name to know them by.

Howard Nemerov

September, The First Day Of School

My child and I hold hands on the way to school,

And when I leave him at the first-grade door

He cries a little but is brave; he does

Let go. My selfish tears remind me how

I cried before that door a life ago.

I may have had a hard time letting go.

Each fall the children must endure together

Howard Nemerov

The Goose Fish

On the long shore, lit by the moon

To show them properly alone,

Two lovers suddenly embraced

So that their shadows were as one.

The ordinary night was graced

For them by the swift tide of blood

That silently they took at flood,

And for a little time they prized

Howard Nemerov