The Advantages of Learning ... by Rexroth

I am a man with no ambitions
And few friends, wholly incapable
Of making a living, growing no
Younger, fugitive from some just doom.
Lonely, ill-clothed, what does it matter?
At midnight I make myself a jug
Of hot white wine and cardamon seeds.
In a torn grey robe and old beret,
I sit in the cold writing poems,
Drawing nudes on the crooked margins,
Copulating with sixteen year old
Nymphomaniacs of my imagination.


- Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982)

from The Phoenix and the Tortoise (1944)

Make Strong Old Dreams Lest Our World Lose Heart ... by Pound

Make strong old dreams lest this our world lose heart

For man is a skin full of wine
But his soul is a hole full of God
And the song of all time blows through him
As winds through a knot-holed board.

Though man be a skin full of wine
Yet his heart is a little child
That croucheth low beneath the wind
When the God-storm battereth wild.


- Ezra Pound (1885-1972)
from A Lume Spento (1908)

Body, Remember ... by Cavafy

Body, remember not only how much you were loved,
not only the beds you lay on,
but also those desires that glowed openly
in the eyes that looked at you,
trembled for you in the voices--
only some chance obstacle frustrated them.
Now that it's finally in the past,
it seems almost as if you gave yourself
to those desires too--how they glowed,
remember, in the eyes that looked at you,
remember, body, how they trembled for you
in those voices.


- Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933)

translated by Edmund Keeley & Philip Sherrard