Switched-on Gutenberg Issue 16
Assemblage
The New American Poetry: Cento for Donald Allen
Assembled from poems in Donald Allen's anthology
New American Poets: one line from each poet.

what does not change / is the will to change
 
naked as a line of poetry in a war
 
to forget who I am, what has burned me
 
with the homeliest remembrances
 
of fixture, repeated form, the race renewal
 
the rubbers, poems and busted rosary beads
 
the dreams of joy is only lightning
 
a pleasure for the eye to go to
 
the grass stirs like an androgyne
 
the moon used to, but the moon is
 
when first she murmured adoring words her words did not appall
 
and the sudden eye will swell with the gift of sight
 
if you mistake despair for desire
 
over the river Gone
 
the poet like an acrobat
 
and 1 or 2 objects shine like buttons
 
between the poem and God’s yellow eye
 
the land’s too flat ugly sullen and big
 
such as it is the moon’s face is a flowering
 
I long for the luminous darkness of God
 
in which to discover what, having forgotten is remembered
 
in the crevice of a single thought
 
each a lonely article of blame
 
love’s multitudinous boneyard / of decay
 
all the accumulations of life that wear us out
 
nothing is a house never bought
 
for this drop of time upon my eyes
 
I am closer to you / than land and I am stranger than ocean
 
like a woman who just came to her window / and stands there filling it
 
can I appreciate the miracle that got me out of bed
 
once you dream this dream you will be inconsolable
 
for sentiment is always intruding on form
 
hands that are always writing things / on mirrors for people to see later
 
what we see of the world is the mind’s / invention
 
the moon’s a little arch
 
what is the word for / the language of eye
 
attentive to the real-world flesh & stone
 
to have them make her alive when she is alive
 
the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction
 
let me lay it on you gently,  Mr. Gone
 
each / a recognition / a complete / utterance
 
pushed on by the incompletion / of what goes before me
 
to fill our days with beauty / from whatever faucets available
 
an overdose of beautiful words.
 


Duty Free
Copyright 2010, David Francis

Copyright 2010,  Grace Bauer

Grace Bauer's books include Retreats & RecognitionsBeholding Eye,  and The Women At The Well,  as well as three chapbooks.  She is also co-editor of the anthology Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum: Critical & Creative Responses to Everette Maddox.  She teaches at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.



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