The Invincible Spring

I'm a London-based English Literature graduate hoping to share submitted and stumbled-upon poetry by anyone and everyone. The project, originally planned for a print magazine, will now continue its life as a freewheeling online anthology. Please send submissions to [email protected], or submit below.

[kevincorrado]

[leslieseuffert]

kevincorrado | tumblr

"I stood nearly a thousand feet above sea level to get this perspective and once again put paint on my hand."

[biwanttobelieve]

Do you know what I was, how I lived? You know what despair is; then winter should have meaning for you. I did not expect to survive, earth suppressing me. I didn’t expect to waken again, to feel in damp earth my body able to respond again, remembering after so long how to open again in the cold light of earliest spring— afraid, yes, but among you again crying yes risk joy in the raw wind of the new world.

Snowdrops by Louise Gluck, The Wild Iris (via jsykes)

[theparisreview]

Portrait of Hunter S. Thompson by Ralph Steadman, from the cover of our Fall 2000 issue.

[theinvinciblespring]

'Today' by Frank O'Hara

Oh! Kangaroos, sequins, chocolate sodas! You really are beautiful! Pearls, harmonicas, jujubes, aspirins! all the stuff they've always talked about

still makes a poem a surprise! These things are with us every day even on beachheads and biers. They do have meaning. They're strong as rocks.

[theinvinciblespring]

Our responsibilities did not begin in dreams, though they began in bed. Love is first of all a lesson in utility

Frank O'Hara, 'Memorial Day 1950' from Selected Poems (Borzoi)

[theinvinciblespring]

'Travel' by Frank O'Hara

Sometimes I know I love you better Than all the others I kiss it's funny

but it's true and i wouldn't roll from one to the next so fast if you

hadn't knocked them all down like ninepins when you roared by my bed

I keep trying to race ahead and catch you at the newest station or whistle

stop but you are flighty about schedules and always soar away just

as leaning from my taxicab my breath reaches the back of your neck

[theinvinciblespring]

'Police Business' by Rae Armantrout

The suspect

spat blood and said,

"I love you," causing us

to lose our places.

We had warned him once

that being recognisable

was still

the best way to stay hidden.

Harmless as the hose is turquoise 

where it snakes

around the primroses - 

those pink

satellite dishes,

scanning the columns.

Was that an incarnation there

when say connected

with so? (Was it an angel

or a Big, Big star?)

We're just trying to make sure

that the heart's desire

stays put.

[theinvinciblespring]

'Poem beginning with a line from Proverbs' by Denise Riley

As iron sharpens iron

I sharpen the face of my friend

so hard he sings out

in high delicate notes.

A struggle for mastery to most speak

powerful beauty would run any

attention or kindness clean out

of town in angry rags.

Ringed by darkness the heart pulsates.

And power comes in like lightening.

A lion in the room, fair and flowing

twists with unsparing eyes.

Whitely the glance runs

to it and away. But let it

talk its golden talk if we

don’t understand it.

Grabbed by remote music

I’m frightening myself. Speak

steadily as is needed to

stare down beauty. That calms it.

[theinvinciblespring]

'Early in the Morning' by Li-Young Lee

While the long grain is softening

in the water, gurgling

over a low stove flame, before

the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced

for breakfast, before the birds,

my mother glides an ivory comb

through her hair, heavy

and black as calligrapher’s ink.

She sits at the foot of the bed.

My father watches, listens for

the music of comb

against hair.

My mother combs,

pulls her hair back

tight, rolls it

around two fingers, pins it

in a bun to the back of her head.

For half a hundred years she has done this.

My father likes to see it like this.

He says it is kempt. But I know

it is because of the way

my mother’s hair falls

when he pulls the pins out.

Easily, like the curtains

when they untie them in the evening.

[theinvinciblespring]

'Cameo' by David Chaloner

the radio excuses our dawdling

a plastic alibi protects dreaming statuary

tonight you feel you may never talk again

that sense of self-indulgent excess

the notion strikes you as real

although improper

just because it's late and the lights are turned

off and we're not out

on the streets

being deserted by intention 

staring avidly at the huge and godless prickle of stars

at work with the irreconcilable adversary

we are to ourselves

[theinvinciblespring]

'Earth Light: I' by Lynn Xu

Doors open and shut.

We’ve come to the place where nothing shines.

I hear eternity

Is self-forgetting.  Interiors warm with the nightmare of guests and poetry

And you.  Everything darkly

Reverent years of reading about death eluded.

Bled

Back from the ear sidestepping your bullets bloom in on ye lay

Rock.  Rud.  Spread

So swiftly tastes like mud.  Dredged mud off

The corpse sled hushed down woodsmoke.

Said the stars thrum on Marie

Marie.  Hold on tight.

In the depths of outer space

Is man.

[theinvinciblespring]

'Elegy on Toy Piano' by Dean Young

For Kenneth Koch

You don't need a pony   

to connect you to the unseeable   

or an airplane to connect you to the sky.   

Necessary it is to love to live   

and there are many manuals   

but in all important ways   

one is on one's own.   

You need not cut off your hand.   

No need to eat a bouquet.   

Your head becomes a peach pit.   

Your tongue a honeycomb.   

Necessary it is to live to love,   

to charge into the burning tower   

then charge back out   

and necessary it is to die.   

Even for the trees, even for the pony   

connecting you to what can't be grasped.   

The injured gazelle falls behind the   

herd. One last wild enjambment.   

Because of the sores in his mouth,   

the great poet struggles with a dumpling.   

His work has enlarged the world   

but the world is about to stop including him.   

He is the tower the world runs out of.   

When something becomes ash,   

there's nothing you can do to turn it back.   

About this, even diamonds do not lie.

[theinvinciblespring]

'Rain' by Raymond Carver

Woke up this morning with

a terrific urge to lie in bed all day

and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.

And gave over. Put myself entirely

in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?

Make the same unforgiveable mistakes?

Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

[theinvinciblespring]

'Cut' by Sylvia Plath

What a thrill -  My thumb instead of an onion.  The top quite gone  Except for a sort of hinge  Of skin,  A flap like a hat,  Dead white.  Then that red plush.  Little pilgrim,  The Indian's axed your scalp.  Your turkey wattle  Carpet rolls  Straight from the heart.  I step on it,  Clutching my bottle  Of pink fizz. A celebration, this is.  Out of a gap  A million soldiers run,  Redcoats, every one.  Whose side are they one?  O my  Homunculus, I am ill.  I have taken a pill to kill  The thin  Papery feeling.  Saboteur,  Kamikaze man -  The stain on your  Gauze Ku Klux Klan  Babushka  Darkens and tarnishes and when  The balled  Pulp of your heart  Confronts its small  Mill of silence  How you jump -  Trepanned veteran,  Dirty girl,  Thumb stump.

[theinvinciblespring]

I was just sent this photo of my paternal grandfather: he is in the center, on tour in Bulawayo with conductor Sir John Barbaroli. I never knew him, but the glass and the leopard make for a pretty good photo.

[deadbeatsblog-deactivated202110]

“Words are never ‘only words’; they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.”  ― Slavoj Žižek

[slantedshanty-deactivated201404]

John Ashbery