The soul of swift-soled Achilles hearing me Praise his son, silvered, and then was gone, His long strides causing him to blend, light-bent, Into the shining, maize meadow cloudbank Shadowed by that one solitary tree It takes sixteen years for light, let alone A soul, to cross. The other dead, who thrived Though they had died, rejoiced at seeing me And sang, one by one, to me; and I in Turn said back to one after the other That the song that soul sang was a blessing And that I had never heard anything Like it; which was true, but also, I must Admit, they bored me to tears, tears that their Surprisingly still finite knowledge took As tears of pure joy from hearing them sing. Only Ajax Telamoniades Kept away, arms crossed, refusing to speak, Dim-starred and disappearing into his rage. All because of a simple spar of words, A mere speech, and winning Achilles’ armor. Athena above and those men at the ships Decided that, not me, although it’s true He never stood chance. But by custom Should have been given the matchless metal. How I wish I hadn’t won that contest. How the ground closed over his head for it. What a fool I can be. Ajax. Who knew No equal in action but for the one Man who surpassed him, just-fled Achilles, So capable of happiness despite All that happened because he washed up here, Heaven: this implausible place for us. Strange that Ajax is also in Heaven Despite ending his legendary life. In the end he’s won, but he doesn’t seem To understand that he’s won. Poor Ajax. Like always, I thought I had winning words And so I said to him with unreturned gaze: “Son of great Telamon, mighty Ajax, War tower, shake free of your anger. No one else is to blame but Zeus, and look, He is no longer here, friend. Paradise Has found you and given you an eternal Roof under the one tree of High Heaven. Zeus treated us so terribly, and you, Whom he should have loved like his strongest son, You worst of all. But that is history Now. Come, my strong brother, lord and deserved Winner of all Achilles wore and was, Come, be with us here; let me hear the light Of Heaven in your voice; and let me know, Because I love you, how you (of all men!) Ended up in the keen of this endless berm.” But Ajax, gift-eyed, said nothing to me And took his seat under the rowan tree.
Copyright © 2013 by Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Used with permission of the author. This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on December 19, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it
From The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara by Frank O’Hara, copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara, copyright renewed 1999 by Maureen O’Hara Granville-Smith and Donald Allen. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Saw you walking barefoot taking a long look at the new moon's eyelid later spread sleep-fallen, naked in your dark hair asleep but not oblivious of the unslept unsleeping elsewhere Tonight I think no poetry will serve Syntax of rendition: verb pilots the plane adverb modifies action verb force-feeds noun submerges the subject noun is choking verb disgraced goes on doing now diagram the sentence 2007
From Tonight No Poetry Will Serve, published by W.W. Norton. Copyright © 2011 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.