Rexroth's Latest Poetry

The following poems by dear anarchist poet./lover of classic Chinese and Japanese poetry Kenneth Rexroth appeared in Flower Wreath Hill: Later Poems (New Directions, 1991), a compilation of poems from his later books, including Love Is an Art of Time; Imitations of the Chinese; More Translations from the Chinese; Chinese Poems Translated by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung; and The Morning Star (The Silver Swan; On Flower Wreath Hill; and The Love Poems of Marichiko). These poems in this orange book are much more difficult to get into than his earlier work. There is a sense of peace in these new poems, a sense of the still and ease, a sense of beauty through the stable, that comes perhaps with age. Perhaps it's most difficult because I am not old enough to be okay with them yet. Still, they ring true with that accessible aesthetic that drove me through Rexroth a couple years ago for the first time.

I Dream of Leslie

you entered my sleep,
Come with your immense,
Luminous eyes,
And light brown hair,
Across fifty years,
To sing for me again that song
of Campion's we loved so once.
I kissed your quivering throat./
There was no hint in the dream
That you were long, long since
A new arrived guest,
With blithe Helen, white Iope and the rest--
Only the peace
Of late afternoon
In a compassionate autumn
In youth.
And I forgot
That I was old and you a shade.

Your Birthday in the California Mountains

A broken moon on the cold water,
And wild geese crying high overhead,
The smoke of the campfire rises
Toward the geometry of heaven--
Points of light in the infinite blackness.
I watch across the narrow inlet
Your dark figure comes and goes before the fire.
A loon cries out on the night bound lake.
Then all the world is silent with the
Silence of autumn waiting for
The coming of winter. I enter
The ring of firelight, bringing to you
A string of trout for our dinner.
As we eat by the whispering lake,
I say, "Many years from now we will
Remember this night and talk of it."
Many years have gone by since then, and
Many years again. I remember
That night as though it was last night,
But you have been dead for thirty years.

The Silver Swan XIX

The drowned moon plunges
Through a towering surf
Of storm clouds, and momently
The wet leaves glitter.
Moment by moment an owl cries.
Rodents scurry, building
Their winter nests, in the moments of dark.

The Silver Swan XXVI

Equation

Only truth can explain your eyes
That sow stars in the vault of heaven,
Where the clouds float through a field of tones

(The flowers which are born out of nothing,
When your eyes make fate so simple,
And the stars fly away from the hive
In the blue-green waiting room of heaven)

And explain your rapport with destiny.

Gunnar Ekelof

The Love Poems of Marichiko XIV

On the bridges
And along the banks
Of Kamo River, the crowds
Watch the character "Great"
Burst into red fire on the mountain
And at last die out.
Your arm about me,
I burn with passion.
Suddenly I realize--
It is life I am burning with.
These hands burn,
Your arm about me burns,
And look at the others,
All about us in the crowd, thousands,
They are all burning--
Into embers and then into darkness.
I am happy.
Nothing of mine is burning.