The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Tue 9/26/06)

[RetroLounge]

Last Gods

She sits naked on a rock
a few yards out in the water.
He stands on the shore,
also naked, picking blueberries.
She calls. He turns. She opens
her legs showing him her great beauty,
and smiles, a bow of lips
seeming to tie together
the ends of the earth.
Splashing her image
to pieces, he wades out
and stands before her, sunk
to the anklebones in leaf-mush
and bottom-slime--the intimacy
of the visible world. He puts
a berry in its shirt
of mist into her mouth.
She swallows it. Over the lake
two swallows whim, juke, jink,
and when one snatches
an insect they both whirl up
and exult. He is swollen
not with ichor but with blood.
She takes him and sucks him
more swollen. He kneels, opens
the dark, vertical smile
linking heaven with the underneath
and licks her smoothest flesh more smooth.
On top of the rock they join.
Somewhere a frog moans, a crow screams.
The hair of their bodies
startles up. They cry
in the tongue of the last gods,
who refused to go,
chose death, and shuddered
in joy and shattered in pieces,
bequeathing their cries
into the human mouth. Now in the lake
two faces float, looking up
at a great maternal pine whose branches
open out in all directions
explaining everything.

Galway Kinnell

*******************



Galway Kinnell was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1927. He studied at Princeton University and the University of Rochester. His volumes of poetry include A New Selected Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 2000), a finalist for the National Book Award; Imperfect Thirst (1996); When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone (1990); Selected Poems (1980), for which he received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980); The Book of Nightmares (1971); Body Rags (1968); Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964); and What a Kingdom It Was (1960). He has also published translations of works by Yves Bonnefroy, Yvanne Goll, and François Villon, and, this year, Rainer Maria Rilke. Galway Kinnell divides his time between Vermont and New York City, where he is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing at New York University. He is currently a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets.

*******************


RL

If you have a request for a certain Poet, post their name in the thread and I will find a poem by them and post it...

if you want to see some of my poetry, see the blog at:
http://www.myspace.com/retropaul

[speedoo]

1. I cannot believe that in the two hours since RL posted this...

that I am the only one who has read it.

It's quite a poem. I like the intermingling of the graphic description of lovemaking with the notes about the natural surroundings... the swallows, the frog, the crow.

I wish I understood better the "last gods" at the end.

Thanks, RL.

[miss_american_pie]

2. Or the only one to comment

:hi:

[CaliforniaPeggy]

3. My dear RetroLounge!

WOW.........this is such an erotic and compelling image!

And very beautiful as well.....

I love the way the poet links the 'natural' world with ours, the one that people inhabit........

Makes me wish I were that woman.......with that man......:blush:

Thank you.........:hug:

[RetroLounge]

4. My Dear CP...

I am glad you have been liking the poems I have been posting. they have been most erotic, sensual, and just plain hot.

Truth be told, most of them were suggested to me by another DU'er.

She is a poem unto herself...

:hi:

RL