personal favorites /poetry collections… Of Being Numerous by George Oppen / poems & audio

George Oppen

Of Being Numerous

 
 
 
[Of Being Numerous, 32]

Only that it should be beautiful,
Only that it should be beautiful,

O, beautiful

Red green blue—the wet lips
Laughing

Or the curl of the white shell

And the beauty of women, the perfect tendons
Under the skin, the perfect life

That can twist in a flood
Of desire

Not truth but each other

The bright, bright skin, her hands wavering
In her incredible need

 
 
~

 
Oppen reads from Of Being Numerous

 
~
 
[Of Being Numerous, 13]

           unable to begin
At the beginning, the fortunate
Find everything already here. They are shoppers,
Choosers, judges; . . . And here the brutal
is without issue, a dead end.
                                           They develop
Argument in order to speak, they become
unreal, unreal, life loses
solidity, loses extent, baseball’s their game
because baseball is not a game
but an argument and difference of opinion
makes the horse races. They are ghosts that endanger

One’s soul. There is change
In an air
That smells stale, they will come to the end
Of an era
First of all peoples
And one may honorably keep
His distance
If he can.

~ by samofthetenthousandthings on May 18, 2012.