David Shapiro

David Shapiro Poems

I am jealous of the sand
beneath you
around you
what you see
...

If one saves a butterfly, has one saved the world?

Rabbi says: If one saves one butterfly, even with long wings,
one butterfly that has fallen into water, it may be said:
...

1.

My son said Daddy are there words for everything? I said You mean the space between

The clouds?
"Yes!" "No!"

Like those who love to think one word will take care of Maupassant's tree and his landlady.
But it turns out you will get no further than the words that reach and do not touch.

X uses a hard word one per poem like throwing a true diamond sale or throwing a
Ruby on a Corten steel table, a little gold in cardboard. There is a country where
They make their own cardboard. General words the French love, a thousand eyes but only one
Kaleidoscope.
Even Merleau-Ponty not specific enough (said Meyer) like very pretty exit signs
Without numbers.

Paul Valéry said the world was made out of nothing and sometimes a bit of that
Nothing shines through. No grin, no cat.

But I think: The world was made of gold, and every once in a while
Some of that gold shines through.

You. They say it doesn't matter that you can't read the Book of Splendor in Aramaic. "Just leave it in your house." Amazing debilitating magic at the door!

If there were the right word for everything, each young philosopher
Could dream without sleeping. Using the same ruler and we'd all
Have the same measures and ladders without rungs, with regular risers.

Music without words: it does a good job of caring about you,
X-ray of thought the architect wanted. X-ray for the lovers—

I always loved to climb that ladder without rungs, I collect them. I fight over them, I forgive
My antagonist. Even the wild ladder without tongues. Even the literal is a metaphor.
This is not nothing says the boy to the teacher who could care less. Multeity. And if I made up a word
Would it survive like a quark of strangeness? Depends on which dictionary you're using, I told
The president of that company. And if you made it up, like a rare country?

I loved you in the near distance like a word and rare cool blood. What was I thinking?
"You actually think?"

2. family ways


My old dead father put it to me
Women of an "intimate" age
Reconciled all separation
He sung it out

Oh family ways, ah family ways
The song contained a pregnant pause pun praise
Patiently he observed, as the rat jumped out
Patient in music, patient in clay

Patient in love and in death, a satisfied ghost
...

There are those who feed only on oranges.
— S.Y. Agnon

Nothing rhymes in English with an orange.
It stands alone, with luster in a far tinge.
It stands alone, and seems to make a star cringe.

On Saturday it's blue like an orange
Or like a surrealist sight rhyme in a garage.
Nothing rhymes in English with an orange.

But rime riche is rich enough for an orange.
Still my doorman sings, Put it away in storage!
It stands alone, and seems to make a star cringe.

Orange replies: I'm drunk from my last bar-binge
Half-rhymes like hangovers suddenly impinge.
But nothing rhymes in English with an orange.

While my wife in French eats one in her nude linge
Playwrights Synge and Inge flap forward on a car-hinge.
It stands alone, and seems to make a star cringe.

Pronounce it orange and then expunge.
So ends the story of the very violet orange.
Nothing rhymes in English with an orange.
It stands alone, and seems to make a star cringe.
...

Sisyphus had a bad back.
Why? Well, I get up in the morning
And my wife wants me to carry
A big blue bag of garbage
To my son now
Sleeping in a studio in NY. Five flights he will not carry.

Oh I say I'm not supposed to carry
More than five pounds of garbage

And she crosses the border with it

There was a dead body like little Pedro rolled down the
Hill by Buñuel and not the long kiss
Of L'age d'or but the dog and dog-dream
In Los Olvidados. How do you abandon dirt?
The blue bag also rolls down by itself, full of Pedro

Something little Pedro always wanted to do
It's a cold day. Man is garbage.

Sisyphus has a bad back.
...

Owl small be enough

The child for all his feathers was a cold.

Oh wow the owl.

The poem the vowels

The owl, look its vowels

That branch for you

Owl, are you an armature vector

And a large step for mankind?

Owl astronaut burgeoning owl is a gift

You give to me give to you

Terrible other things happen.

We stay on our branch.


A hundred eyes

Two will do
...

7.

The trees have sex,
Teach,
Focus.
Tohu Bohu
Chaos in a green light.
Alone again.
How alone I twist
at the end of thought
when illness is forgot
and the speaker


is punched on the bark
on the soft models.
The old abbot looked at us and laughed.
He loved electronic gadgets for his tomb.
You were as beautiful

as six almonds
as beautiful as
the naked foot
of the messenger of peace.

You sat in a corner of the page.
...

Some see a dove
And think Pigeon
Others see pigeons
And think Dove

Some know that all pigeons are doves
Some angry as if pigeons were not doves

But the city lover knows
And I try to reconstruct
The tattoo on one of your many branches

The more arms the more power
I think of you, O pale tattoo
All pigeons, all doves
You friendly cliff-dwellers
...

O put a hand on her hand
On Exterior Street
The day was full of day
On Exterior Street
Moths drank tears from sleeping birds
On Exterior Street
You could think and look
On Exterior Street
The balls of the sycamore were swinging
On Exterior Street
Storing the definitions loading the differences
Why did I still want to give it away
Why not wait and write about that beautiful green sweater
I was a virgin and learnt all about cells from Penelope
Even the private road is exterior
As one said all breasts are beautiful
The Flower this flower is falling over
It will never be more exalting
It will always be more exalting
On Exterior Street
...

When a poet is weak,
like a broken microphone,
he still has some power,
indicated by a red light.

The weak poet
is fixed to the wall
like an ordinary light.

Dependent and dismal by turns,
he is a nominalist
and a razor blade
and a light.

And the demons cry,
Cast him from the kingdom
for a copy of a copy!

Remove him
like the women who supported the temple —
slaves too free and alive.
His similes are ingenious, like science among lovers.

My friend, however early
you called, you had come
too late, again.

The weak poet
has not gone grey
but his sacrificed similes
lead nowhere.

And his I is like any other word
in the newspaper and he is cut up
like fashion.

Each window was seductive,
but even his diseases could be cured.
Your low voice alone
is major like a skepticism.

We had forgotten
the place and the stories,
and the fiery method, too familiar, too distant.

We had memorized the poems,
but only for prison.
With the first new year celebrated in chaos
above the red waters of Paradise.

Where a clayey groom
hears the bride's voice
like a stronger world —

Sound is all
a snake can do —
and charming sense
and strangeness.

Now the old poet
loses his voice like a garden.
But finds it again, like a street in a garden.

In the injured house
made of local sun and stone —
In the city of numbers
which everyone counts and hates and wants—

We could read together in a dark city garden,
scribbling with language over
screens like lips, scribbling the first mistranslations.
...

1960

Our father
restless afraid of death
would say You will rest
when you're dead

Perhaps not!
And: Practice or you'll eat
in the garage
with the dog

Dead as the light
bulb is living still
A secret for the light bulb
is the nap

of broken music
There are some veins
in brown plaster
But the world emits

a little light
You wore cereal boxes
as a belt
I wore electric light

as another mistake
The search continued
for more veins and
a dented skull

This too had a pedestal
or place
or base or double
door or triple tomb.
...

for Mr. Cong

One word tied to another word — that is all
You know. No cherryblossoms. In this world
The hospice workers visit the dead child.
His lack of a voice startles the sleeping words.

This world, fold upon fold.
Is there a better title for it?
Letting Go, Griefwork, Brightness Falls from the Air,
All the Angels Were There. She said it.

All night I think about my sister.
Galileo plunged into Jupiter.
O clear poetry!
No dust tonight.
...

We make mistakes

For example, I'm reading
The NYC Poetry Calendar
for April on this
metropolitan spring afternoon

And I read that today Cookie Mueller
whom I slightly know from an
argument with another poet
and also a review she did of
my Melancholy show
and Bernadette and Phillip Good
plus Open will be reading
I don't know Open
I think it's not Oppen who's dead
and unfairly objectified
I guess it's a young graffiti
Poet, perhaps taking a single
name, in 19th Century excess
They're reading at the Anarchist Cellar
It's a perfect name for a young
perhaps slightly jejune ethical anarchist
Then I see on the 16th Open is reading
again, this time with my friend Joe
Ceravolo and my former student Joe
Lewis

Now I'm really intrigued
It seems like a blitz, an Open blitz
perhaps he's publishing his first
fundamentally daring volume
I think of my translation of
Baudelaire's Luxe, calme et volupté
Rich calm and open
Why haven't I thought of a decent
nom de plume like Open
Why settle down with four David
Shapiros
another living just a few blocks away
another painting in a style not mine
Perhaps this Open is the new
Rimbaud and uses my poems for
toilet paper, or perhaps we could
be friends, friends with Open

Again he appears at the Manhattan Public
Library
this time in lower case letters
and than again at Maxwell's for $3
But my brain adjusts itself to the light

It's simply an open reading that's implied
This poet does not exist, though he should
Open a young poet I should have invented
as when I thought all of conceptual art
would have been decent as one short story
by B

Oh, Open, you whom I would have read,
and you who would have read me!
...

Henry Hudson turned to me and said:
Be expressionless and strong as me,
Be grim and green, stout as Cortez,
Double lock yourself within
Like a warning wife, and be divorced
From nothing, at last be a statue
Of a self, and threaten at night like a landing,
Turn to your river, like a monist on a raft,
And always found your river on a fault,
Be blind and copper, a mania on a column,
Obscured, finally, by a single cloud of brick.
I love you, that is why I do not talk
About your humorous desire to appease.
Rather complain, like a man, that there is no river.
...

‘I want my son to grow powerful and rich through science.' — Rimbaud


Now that I have given up poetry,
The guest of poetry,
Governed poetry,
Or rather that poetry has given up me,
Has queened my pawn, how green my pawn,
Or rather that poetry died in my lap,
Any lap, like a lousy lover
In another language, and I
A Luddite with a laptop in his lap

And now that my son is subtle
And malicious as a god any god.
And bestrides the dogmatic world
As if it were a tennis court

The clouds pass by, almost inhuman
Like passers-by, the mountains like
Churches and the churches like mountains
Beautiful and untranslatable a woman
Walks past the park like a street
Or a scream or a double and triple
Loss of meaning, and I thank whatever
Nothing we actually worship, to change
Nothing and the important thing: to leave
The world alone, largely uninterpreted
For the wet pavement
On which he may scratch his poems
...

David Shapiro Biography

David Shapiro (born January 2, 1947) is an American poet, literary critic, and art historian. He has written some twenty volumes of poetry, literary, and art criticism. He was first published at the age of thirteen, and his first book was published when he was just eighteen. Born in Newark, New Jersey, Shapiro grew up in Newark and attended Weequahic High School before matriculating at Columbia University at the age of 16 (with the assistance of Kenneth Koch), from which he holds a B.A. (1968) and a Ph.D. (1973) in English. Between 1968-1970, he studied at the University of Cambridge on a Kellett Fellowship, from which he holds an M.A. with honors. Having previously taught at Columbia (in the Department of English and Comparative Literature), Princeton University, and Brooklyn College, Shapiro teaches poetry and literature at Cooper Union and is currently the William Paterson professor of art history at William Paterson University. He achieved brief notoriety during the 1968 student uprising at Columbia, when he was photographed sitting behind the desk of President Grayson L. Kirk wearing dark glasses and smoking a cigar; Shapiro later described the cigar as "horrible".)

The Best Poem Of David Shapiro

Poem For You

I am jealous of the sand

beneath you
around you
what you see

bright things erased lady
sparkling and traveling without luggage
liquidity
before X
you are tattooed on my back music
dies down

I too grew up in
the soft hands
of the gods

and a little donkey will lead them

Tears, tears, and I know
just what they mean
honeysuckles at night

I wrote this poem for you and haven't lost it

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