Poems that I love

When one of them moved through the marketplace of Selefkia just as it was getting dark—  moved like a young man, tall, extremely handsome,  with the joy of being immortal in his eyes,  with his black and perfumed hair—  the people going by would gaze at him,  and one would ask the other if he knew him,  if he was a Greek from Syria, or a stranger.  But some who looked more carefully  would understand and step aside;  and as he disappeared under the arcades,  among the shadows and the evening lights,  going toward the quarter that lives  only at night, with orgies and debauchery,  with every kind of intoxication and desire,  they would wonder which of Them it could be,  and for what suspicious pleasure  he had come down into the streets of Selefkia  from the August Celestial Mansions.  Reprinted from C.P. CAVAFY: Collected Poems Revised Edition, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edi...

 By Kenneth Rexroth Who are you? Who am I? Haunted By the dead, by the dead and the past and the Falling inertia of unreal, dead Men and things. Haunted by the threat Of the impersonal, that which Never will admit the person, The closed world of things. Who are You? Coming up out of the Mineral earth, one pale leaf Unlike any other unfolding, And then another, strange, new, Utterly different, nothing I ever expected, growing Up out of my warm heart's blood. All new, all strange, all different. Your own leaf pattern, your own Flower and fruit, but fed from One root, the root of our fused flesh. I and thou, from the one to The dual, from the dual To the other, the wonderful, Unending, unfathomable Process of becoming each Our selves for each other. Left to right: Kenneth Rexroth, Allen Ginsberg, and James Laughlin.