Even now when we
can no longer remember
how much of the scent
of the world we gave up
life after life in the hope
of being able to hold
something in our hands
we recognize you at once
every time without fail
day or night wherever
you may be coming from
across the hill or
under the door
and we imagine you
even when you are not there
we can never be sure
you reach all the way to us
out of somewhere we have forgotten
we wake into dreams of you
as the bees do
hoping it is not true
the world is burning
you have always been warning
us too late and only
as you were leaving
ghost of what we have known
something reminds us of you
in the fragrance of morning
in the opening flowers
in a breath at the moment
it seems to be ours
by W. S. Merwin
----------------------
January 15, 2009
Love Compared
I do not resemble your other lovers, my lady
should another give you a cloud
I give you rain
Should he give you a lantern, I
will give you the moon
Should he give you a branch
I will give you the trees
And if another gives you a ship
I shall give you the journey.
Nizar Qabbani
----------------------
December 28, 2008--
since feeling is first
who pays attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
-the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says
we are for eachother: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for lifes not a paragraph
and death i think is no parenthesis
-- ee cummings
----------------------
Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those that trepass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil:
For thine is the kingdom,
The power,
And the glory,
For ever and ever.
----------------------
And that's it. He wants to be inside her then, like breath, like blood. He rolls toward the center of the bed but she's already there and around him with her long white legs and arms, and he's inside her so fast he has to slow down, because he wants it to go so slow it almost doesn't begin, because that way it's never over. So, he thinks, he tries to remember, to picture doing this with Julie, or any other girl, and how that was another thing, all about what's happening outside your skin, not inside your skin, and he tries to picture his poor, schlubby, hairy, sweaty guy and his acned junkie hooker and the guy hitting his head on the light fixture, but he doesn't have to worry about that, because he's down so close on top of Isabel, so deep inside and beside and alongside her there's no space anymore for even the layer of oil, he can feel it thin between them, slide aside, and then he just goes back to how, really, this is the only place he wants to be, or picture, or imagine, ever, where it's royal, crimson, alive where he can feel and be everything, where he can get at and be part of Isabel's heart.
--from "List Item #10: the Motel Room", by Tara Ison
----------------------
Sonnet LXXVI
Why is my verse so barren of new pride,
So far from variation or quick change?
Why with the time do I not glance aside
To new-found methods and to compounds strange?
Why write I still all one, ever the same,
And keep invention in a noted weed,
That every word doth almost tell my name,
Showing their birth and where they did proceed?
O, know, sweet love, I always write of you,
And you and love are still my argument;
So all my best is dressing old words new,
Spending again what is already spent:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.
--William Shakespeare
----------------------
this poem here courtesy of maggie jo:
For Grace, After a Party
You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,
and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn't there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn't
you like the eggs a little
different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.
**************
and this one courtesy of Latherine Kee:
Poem
Instant coffee with slightly sour cream
in it, and a phone call to the beyond
which doesn’t seem to be coming any nearer.
“Ah daddy, I wanna stay drunk many days”
on the poetry of a new friend
my life held precariously in the seeing
hands of others, their and my impossibilities.
Is this love, now that the first love
has finally died, where there were no impossibilities?
--both by Frank O'Hara
----------------------
Hippolytus:
Hate you? I to hate you?
However darkly my fierce pride was painted
Do you supporse a monster gave me birth?
What savage manners, hardened temper, could
Or would not soften at the sight of you?
Could I resist a charm so innocent...
Aricia:
Why, what is this, Sir?
Hippolytus:
I have said too much
Not to say more. Reason I see gives in
To violence of passion. I have broken
Silence at last, and I must tell you now
The secret that my heart can hold no more.
You see before you an unhappy case
Of hasty pride, a prince who claims compassion.
I, who so long the enemy of love,
Mocked at his fetters and despised his slaves,
Who, pitying poor shipwrecked mortals, thought
Always from a safe shore to view their storms,
Now find myself subject to that same law.
By what storm do I see myself whirled off!
One moment vanquished all my foolish pride;
My so proud soul is now a suppliant.
For six months past, ashamed and desperate,
Carrying everywhere the shaft that splits
My heart, I struggle vainly to be free
From you and from myself. I shun you present;
Absent I find you near. Your image haunts
Me in the forest's depth. The light of day.
The shades of night, all bring back to my view
The charms that I avoid; all things conspire
To make rebellious Hippolytus
Your willing slave; and what is more, myself--
For fruit of all my endless futile search--
I can no longer even find myself!
My bow, my chariot, my javelins
Bore me. But worse. I find I have forgot
All lessons taught by Neptune! Only groans
Not shouts of mine re-echo through the woods;
My lazy stallions have forgot my voice.
Perhaps this tale of passion so uncouth
Makes you, in hearing me, blush at your work.
How wild a way to offer you a heart!
How strange a captive for so beautiful
A leash! But dearer to your eyes should be
This offering. Believe I speak a tongue
Unknown to me! Do not reject these vows
So ill-expressed, indeed, which, but for you,
I never would have formed at all.
...
Aricia:
Go, Prince, pursue your generous designs:
Make Athens tributary to my power.
All gifts you offer me I will accept,
But that proud empire, glorious though it be
Is not the one most precious unto me.
**************
Phaedra:
Yes, Prince, I languish and I long for Theseus.
I love him, but not as the Shades know him:
The inconstant lover of so many loves,
Who now would ravish even Pluto's bride!
But faithful, proud, even to a slight disdain;
Young, charming, drawing all hearts after him,
As Gods are painted. Or as I see you now.
He had your walk, your eyes, your way of speaking;
He could blush like you, when to the isle
Of Crete, my childhood's home, he crossed the waves,
Worthy to win the love of Minos' daughters.
What were you doing then? Why, without you
Did he assemble all the flower of Greece?
Oh why were you too young to have embarked
Within the ship that brought him to our shores?
You would have been the monster's killer then,
In spite of all the windings of his maze.
To find your way in that uncertain dark
My sister would have armed you with the thread.
But no! In this design I would have been
Ahead of her, my sister! Me, not her,
It would have been whom Love at first inspired;
And I it would have been, Prince, I, whose aid
Had taught you all the Labyrinth's crooked ways.
Oh, how I should have cared for this dear head!
A single thread would not have been enough
To satisfy your lover's fears for you.
I would myself have wished to lead the way,
And share the perils you were bound to face.
Phaedra, into the Labyrinth, with you
Would have descended, and with you returned,
To safety, or with you have perished!
Woman! when I behold thee flippant, vain,
Inconstant, childish, proud, and full of fancies;
Without that modest softening that enhances
The downcast eye, repentant of the pain
That its mild light creates to heal again:
E’en then, elate, my spirit leaps, and prances,
E’en then my soul with exultation dances
For that to love, so long, I’ve dormant lain:
But when I see thee meek, and kind, and tender,
Heavens! how desperately do I adore
Thy winning graces;—to be thy defender
I hotly burn—to be a Calidore—
A very Red Cross Knight—a stout Leander—
Might I be loved by thee like these of yore.
Light feet, dark violet eyes, and parted hair;
Soft dimpled hands, white neck, and creamy breast,
Are things on which the dazzled senses rest
Till the fond, fixed eyes, forget they stare.
From such fine pictures, heavens! I cannot dare
To turn my admiration, though unpossess’d
They be of what is worthy,—though not drest
In lovely modesty, and virtues rare.
Yet these I leave as thoughtless as a lark;
These lures I straight forget—e’en ere I dine,
Or thrice my palate moisten: but when I mark
Such charms with mild intelligences shine,
My ear is open like a greedy shark,
To catch the tunings of a voice divine.
Ah! who can e’er forget so fair a being?
Who can forget her half retiring sweets?
God! she is like a milk-white lamb that bleats
For man’s protection. Surely the All-seeing,
Who joys to see us with his gifts agreeing,
Will never give him pinions, who intreats
Such innocence to ruin,—who vilely cheats
A dove-like bosom. In truth there is no freeing
One’s thoughts from such a beauty; when I hear
A lay that once I saw her hand awake,
Her form seems floating palpable, and near;
Had I e’er seen her from an arbour take
A dewy flower, oft would that hand appear,
And o’er my eyes the trembling moisture shake.
**************
O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell,
Let it not be among the jumbled heap
Of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,-
Nature’s observatory - whence the dell,
Its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell,
May seem a span; let me thy vigils keep
’Mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap
Startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell.
But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee,
Yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind,
Whose words are images of thoughts refin’d,
Is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be
Almost the highest bliss of human-kind,
When to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.
--John Keats
----------------------
The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures:
he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul:
he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil: for thou art with me;
thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies:
thou anointest my head with oil;
my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life:
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.
--Psalm 23
----------------------
Я вас любил: любовь еще, быть может,
В душе моей угасла не совсем;
Но пусть она вас больше не тревожит;
Я не хочу печалить вас ничем.
Я вас любил безмолвно, безнадежно,
То робостью, то ревностью томим;
Явас любил так искренно, так нежно,
Как дай вам бог любимой быть другим.
--Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
----------------------
Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to decribe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. I can't just sit back and watch from a distance anymore. From here on in, everything I'll tell you is colored by the subjective experience of being part of events. Here's where my story splits, divides, undergoes meiosis. Already the world feels heavier, now I'm in it. I'm talking about bandages and sopped cotton, the smell of mildew in movie theaters, and of all the lousy cats and their stinking litter boxes, of rain on city streets when the dust comes up and the old Italian men take the their folding chairs inside. Up until now it hasn't been my world. Not my America. But here we are, at last.
--from Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
----------------------
To Sleep
O soft embalmer of the still midnight!
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine;
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close,
In midst of this thine hymn, my willing eyes.
Or wait the Amen, ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities;
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes;
Save me from curious conscience, that still hoards
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed casket of my soul.
**************
After dark vapours have oppress'd our plains
For a long dreary season, comes a day
Born of the gentle South, and clears away
From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
The anxious month, relieved of all its pains,
Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May;
The eyelids with the passing coolness play
Like rose leaves with the drip of Summer rains.
The calmest thoughts come round us; as of leaves
Budding - fruit ripening in stillness - Autumn suns
Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves -
Sweet Sappho's cheek - a smiling infant's breath -
The gradual sand through an hour-glass runs -
A woodland rivulet - a poet's death.
--John Keats
----------------------
When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charactry,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the fairy power
Of unreflecting love;--then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.
--John Keats
----------------------
The doorkeeper is a representative of the Law:
"...He has been appointed to his post by the Law, to doubt his dignity is to doubt the Law itself." "I don't agree with that opinion," said K., shaking his head, "for if you accept it, you have to consider everything the doorkeeper says as true. But you've already proved conclusively that that's not possible." "No," said the priest, "you don't have to consider everything true, you just have to consider it necessary." "A depressing opinion," said K. "Lies are made into a universal system."
--from The Trial, by Franz Kafka
----------------------
I like her sonnets too:
You loved me not at all but let it go;
I loved you more than life, but let it be.
As the more injured party, this being so,
The hour's amenities are all to me,
The choice of weapons; and I gravely choose
To let the weapons tarnish where they lie;
And spend the night in eloquent abuse
Of senators and popes and such small fry
And meet the morning standing, and at odds
With heaven and earth and hell and any fool
Who calls his soul his own, and all the gods,
And all the children getting dressed for school...
And you will leave me, and I shall entomb
What's cold by then in an adjoining room.
**************
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply;
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands a lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone;
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
**************
Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year's bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go, so with his memory they brim
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, "There is no memory of him here!"
And so stand stricken, so remembering him!
**************
Thou art not lovelier than lilacs, --- no
Nor honeysuckle; thou art not more fair
Than small white single poppies, --- I can bear
Thy beauty; though I bend before thee, though
From left to right, not knowing where to go,
I turn my troubled eyes, nor here nor there
Find any refuge from thee, yet I swear
So has it been with mist, --- with moonlight so.
Like him who day by day unto his draught
Of delicate poison adds him one drop more
Till he may drink unharmed the death of ten,
Even so, inured to beauty, who have quaffed
Each hour more deeply than the hour before,
I drink --- and live --- what has destroyed some men.
**************
I SHALL forget you presently, my dear,
So make the most of this, your little day,
Your little month, your little half a year,
Ere I forget, or die, or move away,
And we are done forever; by and by
I shall forget you, as I said, but now,
If you entreat me with your loveliest lie
I will protest you with my favorite vow.
I would indeed that love were longer-lived,
And vows were not so brittle as they are,
But so it is, and nature has contrived
To struggle on without a break thus far,
Whether or not we find what we are seeking
Is idle, biologically speaking.
--Edna St. Vincent Millay
----------------------
from Cyrano de Bergerac
CYRANO
All the flirting candles of life are out
And we breathe pure air. This is what life's about:
Not lifting the frail glass to a cautious lip,
But slaking our heartfelt thirst by drinking deep.
ROXANE
And wit?
CYRANO
To catch your ear it could be used,
But now with wit the night would be abused.
Look up at the stars--the great distances there
Strip us of all our pretences. And I fear
Our exquisite art of living only kills
True feeling, and all the waiting miracles.
Make life a pastime, life passes us by,
And dying to live, we only live to die.
ROXANE
But the wit?
CYRANO
In love it's hateful! Who would wish
To turn passion into a fencing-match?
There comes an inevitable moment in a lifetime--
And I pity those to whom it has never come--
When a man achieves a love of such high faith
That every playful word is like a death.
ROXANE
And if it has come, this moment, to us both,
With what words will you say it?
CYRANO
All of them, all words, all
The words my heart knows, like flowers hurled
In wild disorder over a summer world.
I love, I am choked with love, I love, I rave
With love, more love there cannot be, it brims,
And overflows, a cataract of dreams.
Your name rings like a sheep-bell in my heart,
I tremble and it sounds--Roxane! No part
Of any day is forgotten if you were there:
I know that on the tenth of May last year
You had altered a little the way you wore your hair!
To me your hair is the heart of light. And often,
As it is when we stared to long at the sun
Everywhere we look is flecked with red,
I turn away from watching you, and tread
A landscape dancing with your fire.
ROXANE
Indeed
This is love.
CYRANO
This certainly is love,
This merciless power invading me from above,
Certainly love--with all its raging sadness;
Love, indeed, and yet not self-love's madness.
To guard your happiness I'd destroy my own
(Though both deed and reason were never known),
If sometimes, however far away, I thought you
Laughed because of the happiness I had brought you.
--Each look you give me, a new virtue is born,
a greater courage. Do you begin to discern,
to understand now? Are you recognizing?
And feel, do you, my spirit like incense rising
Up through the dark? This night is far too dear
Ever to end. I speak to you--you hear!
I and you! Hope never ran so high,
And nothing now remains except to die!
Has the thought made you tremble as one who grieves?
For you do tremble, a leaf among leaves.
--Edmond Rostand
------------------------
Bright Star
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.
--John Keats
--------------------
In 1787, at an inn near Moulins, an old man was dying, a friend of Diderot, trained by philosophers. The priests of the neighbourhood were nonplussed: they had tried everything in vain; the good man would have no last rites, he was a pantheist. M. de Rollebon, who was passing by and who believed in nothing, bet the Cure of Moulins that he would need less than two hours to bring the sick man back to Christian sentiments. The Cure took the bet and lost: Rollebon began at three in the morning, the sick man confessed at five and died at seven. "Are you so forceful in argument?" asked the Cure, "You outdo even us." "I did not argue," answered M. de Rollebon, "I made him fear Hell."
--from Nausea, by Jean-Paul Sartre
------------------------
The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the lookout?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-en, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fo-Sa.
-- Ezra Pound
------------------------
Tiger-Lily
To have reached
the ultimate top
of the stalk,
single, tall, fragile;
to hang like a bell,
through sheer weight
of oneself,
rather than pride of
it being the top,
no higher to go,
rather than modesty
of it being
only a stalk,
one among myriads;
to have one's six petals,
refusing the straight
for the curve,
dipping mere pin-pricks
around the horizon;
to have six tongues,
which, however the mood
of the wind may blow,
refuse to clap into sound;
and to keep, withal,
one's finest marvel,
one's passionate specks,
invisible:
tiger-lily,
if I bow,
it is not
in imitation;
it is
in recognition
of true being.
--Alfred Kreymborg
------------------------
i love dire straits. romeo and juliet the song is called:
a love struck romeo sings the street a serenade
laying everybody low with a lovesong that he made
finds a convenient streetlight steps out of the shade
says something like you and me babe how about it?
juliet says hey it's romeo you nearly gimme a heart attack
he's underneath the window she's singing hey la my boyfriend's back
you shoudn't come around here singing up at people like that
anyway what you gonna do about it?
juliet the dice were loaded from the start
and i bet and you exploded in my heart
and i forget i forget the movie song
when you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong juliet?
come up on different streets they both were streets of shame
both dirty both mean yes and the dream was just the same
and i dreamed your dream for you and now your dream is real
how can you look at me as i was just another one of your deals?
when you can fall for chains of silver you can fall for chains of gold
you can fall for pretty strangers and the promises they hold
you promised me everything you promised me thick and thin
now you just say oh romeo yeah you know i used to have a scene with him
juliet when we made love you used to cry
you said i love you like the stars above i'll love you till i die
there's a place for us you know the movie song
when you gonna realize it was just that the time was wrong?
i can't do the talk like they talking on the tv
and i can't do a love song like the way its meant to be
i can't do everything but i'd do anything for you
i can't do anything except be in love with you
and all i do is miss you and the way we used to be
all i do is keep the beat and bad company
all i do is kiss you through the bars of a rhyme
julie i'd do the stars with you any time
a lovestruck romeo sings the streets a serenade
laying everybody low with a lovesong that he made
finds a convenient streetlight steps out of the shade
says something like you and me babe how about it?
--------------------
Insomniac
I raise my head off the pillow and study
the half-frosted windows and the clock
with its reluctant to tumble robotic digits
to check on how the night is proceeding.
By the clock's green glow and the light
of the last quarter moon the snow
shines up into our bedroom, I see
that the half of the oceanic comforter
apportioned to her side of the bed
lies completely flat. The words
of the shepherd in "Tristan," "Waste
and empty the sea," come to me.
Where is she? Sprouting in the furrow
where the comforter overlaps her pillow
is a hank of brown hair--she's here, sleeping
somewhere down in the dark underneath.
And now in her sleep she rotates herself
a quarter turn--from strewn all unfolded
on her back to bunched in a bulky Z
on her side, with her back to me.
I squirm closer, taking care not to
break into the immensity of her sleep,
and lie absorbing the astounding
quantity of heat a slender body
ovens up around itself, when need be.
Now her slow, purring, sometimes snorish,
perfectly intelligible sleeping sounds
abruptly stop. A leg darts back
and hooks my ankle with its foot
and draws me closer still. Soon
her sleeping sounds resume, telling me,
"Come, press against me, yes, like that,
put your right elbow on my hip bone, perfect,
and your right hand at my breasts, yes, that's it,
now your left arm, which has become extra,
stow it somewhere out of the way, good.
Entangled with each other so, unsleeping one,
together we will outsleep the night."
--Galway Kinnell
----------------------
All by Margaret Atwood
***
Sekhmet, the Lion-headed Goddess of War, Violent Storms, Pestilence, and Recovery from Illness, Contemplates the Desert in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
He was the sort of man
who wouldn't hurt a fly.
Many flies are now alive
while he is not.
He was not my patron.
He preferred full granaries, I battle.
My roar meant slaughter.
Yet here we are together
in the same museum.
That's not what I see, though, the fitful
crowds of staring children
learning the lesson of multi-
cultural obliteration, sic transit
and so on.
I see the temple where I was born
or built, where I held power.
I see the desert beyond,
where the hot conical tombs, that look
from a distance, frankly, like dunces' hats,
hide my jokes: the dried-out flesh
and bones, the wooden boats
in which the dead sail endlessly
in no direction.
What did you expect from gods
with animal heads?
Though come to think of it
the ones made later, who were fully human
were not such good news either. Favour me and give me riches,
destroy my enemies.
That seems to be the gist.
Oh yes: And save me from death.
In return we're given blood
and bread, flowers and prayer,
and lip service.
Maybe there's something in all of this
I missed. But if it's selfless
love you're looking for,
you've got the wrong goddess.
I just sit where I'm put, composed
of stone and wishful thinking:
that the deity who kills for pleasure
will also heal,
that in the midst of your nightmare,
the final one, a kind lion
will come with bandages in her mouth
and the soft body of a woman,
and lick you clean of fever,
and pick your soul up gently by the nape of the neck
and caress you into darkness and paradise.
**************
February
Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It's his
way of telling whether or not I'm dead.
If I'm not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
he'll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It's all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we'd do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it's love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! And famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You're the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it spring.
***********
Variations on the Word Love
This is a word we use to plug
holes with. It's the right size for those warm
blanks in speech, for those red heart-
shaped vacancies on the page that look nothing
like real hearts. Add lace
and you can sell
it. We insert it also in the one empty
space on the printed form
that comes with no instructions. There are whole
magazines with not much in them
but the word love, you can
rub it all over your body and you
can cook with it too. How do we know
it isn't what goes on at the cool
debaucheries of slugs under damp
pieces of cardboard? As for the weed-
seedlings nosing their tough snouts up
among the lettuces, they shout it.
Love! Love! sing the soldiers, raising
their glittering knives in salute.
Then there's the two
of us. This word
is far too short for us, it has only
four letters, too sparse
to fill those deep bare
vacuums between the stars
that press on us with their deafness.
It's not love we don't wish
to fall into, but that fear.
this word is not enough but it will
have to do. It's a single
vowel in this metallic
silence, a mouth that says
O again and again in wonder
and pain, a breath, a finger
grip on a cliffside. You can
hold on or let go.
*******
In the Secular Night
In the secular night you wander around
alone in your house. It's two-thirty.
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen,
when the others were out somewhere, having a good time,
or so you suspected,
and you had to baby-sit.
You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream
and filled up the glass with grapejuice
and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller
with his big-band sound,
and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney,
and cried for a while because you were not dancing,
and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple.
Now, forty years later, things have changed,
and it's baby lima beans.
It's necessary to reserve a secret vice.
This is what comes from forgetting to eat
at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully,
drain, add cream and pepper,
and amble up and down the stairs,
scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl,
talking to yourself out loud.
You'd be surprised if you got an answer,
but that part will come later.
There is so much silence between the words,
you say. You say, The sensed absence
of God and the sensed presence
amount to much the same thing,
only in reverse.
You say, I have too much white clothing.
You start to hum.
Several hundred years ago
this could have been mysticism
or heresy. It isn't now.
Outside there are sirens.
Someone's been run over.
The century grinds on.
--------------------
Utterance
Sitting over words
very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
not far
like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark
the echo of everything that has ever
been spoken
still spinning its one syllable
between the earth and silence
--W. S. Merwin
--------------------
The Kiss by Auguste Rodin
--------------------
A hundred times I was on the point of killing myself; but still I loved life. This ridiculous foible is perhaps one of our most fatal characteristics; for is there anything more absurd than to wish to carry continually a burdern which one can always throw down? to detest existence and yet to cling to one's existence? in brief, to caress the serpent which devours us, till he has eaten our very heart?
--Candide, by Voltaire
--------------------
The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina
Somewhere in everyone's head something points toward home,
a dashboard's floating compass, turning all the time
to keep from turning. It doesn't matter how we come
to be wherever we are, someplace where nothing goes
the way it went once, where nothing holds fast
to where it belongs, or what you've risen or fallen to.
What the bubble always points to,
whether we notice it or not, is home.
It may be true that if you move fast
everything fades away, that given time
and noise enough, every memory goes
into the blackness, and if new ones come-
small, mole-like memories that come
to live in the furry dark-they, too,
curl up and die. But Carol goes
to high school now. John works at home
what days he can to spend some time
with Sue and the kids. He drives too fast.
Ellen won't eat her breakfast.
Your sister was going to come
but didn't have the time.
Some mornings at one or two
or three I want you home
a lot, but then it goes.
It all goes.
Hold on fast
to thoughts of home
when they come.
They're going to
less with time.
Time
goes
too
fast.
Come
home.
Forgive me that. One time it wasn't fast.
A myth goes that when the years come
then you will, too. Me, I'll still be home.
-- Miller Williams
--------------------
Antigone: ...Your arms around me aren't lying, are they? Your hands, so warm against my back--they're not lying? This warmth that's in me; this confidence, this sense that I am safe, secure, that flows through me as I stand here with my cheek in the hollow of your shoulder: they are not lies, are they?
Haemon: Antigone, darling, I love you exactly as you love me. With all of myself.
...
Antigone: Ah, dearest, I am ashamed of myself. But this morning, this special morning, I must know. Tell me the truth! When you think about me, when it strikes you suddenly that I am going to belong to you--do you have the feeling that--that a great empty space is being hollowed out inside you, that there is something inside you that is just--dying?
Haemon: Yes, I do, I do.
--Jean Anouilh's Antigone
--------------------
Creon:...Life is not what you think it is. Life is a child playing around your feet, a tool you hold firmly in your garden. People will tell you that that's not life, that life is something else. They will tell you that because they need your strength and your fire, and they will want to make use of you. Don't listen to them. Believe me, the only poor consolation that we have in our old age is to discover that what I have just said to you is true. Life is nothing more than the happiness that you get out of it.
Antigone: (murmers, lost in thought) Happiness...
Creon: (suddenly a little self-conscious) Not much of a word, is it?
Antigon: (quietly) What kind of happiness do you foresee for me? Paint me the picture of your happy Antigone. What are the unimportant little sins that I shall have to commit before I am allowed to sink my teeth into life and tear happiness from it? Tell me: to whom shall I have to lie? Upon whom shall I have to fawn? To whom must I sell myself? Whom do you want me to leave dying, while I turn my eyes?
Creon: Antigone, be quiet.
...
Antigone: I spit on your happiness! I spit on your idea of life--that life that must go on, come what may. You are all like dogs that lick everything they smell. You with your promise of a humdrum happiness--provided a person doesn't ask too much of life. I want everything of life, I do; and I want it now! I want it total, complete: otherwise I reject it! I will not be moderate. I will not be satisfied with the bit of cake you offer me if I promise to be a good little girl. I want to be sure of everything this very day; sure that everything will be as beautiful as when I was a little girl. If not, I want to die.
--Jean Anouilh's Antigone
--------------------
This above all,--to thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
--Polonius, from Hamlet
--------------------
Both by Gelett Burgess:
The Purple Cow
I never saw a Purple Cow,
I never hope to see one;
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I'd rather see than be one.
Cinq Ans Apres [Five Years Later]
Ah, yes! I wrote the "Purple Cow"--
I'm sorry, now, I wrote it!
But I can tell you, anyhow,
I'll kill you if you quote it!
--------------------
Wilco was (and continues to be) fucking incredible.
--------------------
In the end, of course, a true war story is never about war. It's about sunlight. It's about the special way that dawn spreads out on a river when you know you must cross the river and march into the mountains and do things you are afraid to do. It's about love and memory. It's about sorrow. It's about sisters who never write back and people who never listen.
--from "How to Tell a True War Story", The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
---
--------------------
The first time she went to Tomas's flat, her insides began to rumble. And no wonder: she had nothing to eat since breakfast but a quick sandwich on the platform before boarding the train. She had concentrated on the daring journey ahead of her and forgotten about food. But when we ignore the body, we are more easily victimized by it. She felt terrible standing there in front of Tomas listening to her belly speak out. She felt like crying.
A long time ago, man would listen in amazement to the sound of regular beats in his chest, never suspecting what they were. He was unable to identify himself with so alien and unfamiliar an object as the body. The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought, and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.
Today, of course, the body is no longer unfamiliar, we know that the beating in our chest is the heart and that the nose is the nozzle of a hose sticking out of the body to take oxygen to the lungs. The face is nothing but an instrument panel registering all the body mechanisms: digestion, sight, hearing, respiration, thought.
Ever since man has learned to give each part of the body a name, the body has given him less trouble. He has also learned that the soul is nothing more than the gray matter of the brain in action. The old duality of body and soul has become shrouded in scientific terminology, and we can laugh at it as merely an obsolete prejudice.
But just make someone who has fallen in love listen to his stomach rumble, and the unity of body and soul, that lyrical illusion of the age of science, instantly fades away.
-- from The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera
--------------------
the following snippets are unrelated (this isn't a Mark Twain disclaimer, they're actually unrelated):
****
Vladimir: There's man all over you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet.
**************
Pozzo: (halting.) You are human beings none the less. (He puts on his glasses.) As far as one can see. (He takes off his glasses.) Of the same species as myself. (He bursts into an enormous laugh.) Of the same species as Pozzo! Made in God's image!
**************
deliberating on whether or not to help a man up after he tripped:
Vladimir: Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we personally are needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say? (Estragon says nothing.) It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our species. The tiger bounds to the help of his congeners without the least reflexion, or else he slinks away into the depths of the thickets. But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come--
-from Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett
--------------------
It came to him now, more forcefully than ever, that maybe every "real" thing in the world was as shabbily protean, underneath, as this electric chair. Maybe his mind was even now doing to the seemingly real hardwood floor on which he knelt exactly what it had done, hours earlier to the unseen chair. Maybe a floor became truly a floor only in his mental reconstruction of it. The floor's nature was to some extent inarguable, of course; the wood definitely existed and had measurable properties. But there was a second floor, the floor as mirrored in his head, and he worried that the beleaguered "reality" that he championed was not the reality of an actual floor in a (sic) actual bedroom but the reality of a floor in his head which was idealized and no more worthy, therefore, than one of Enid's silly fantasies.
--from The Corrections, by Jonathen Franzen
--------------------
I like his sonnets a lot:
you shall above all things be glad and young
For if you're young,whatever life you wear
it will become you;and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
i can entirely her only love
whose any mystery makes every man's
flesh put space on;and his mind take off time
that you should ever think, may god forbid
and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies,the foetal grave
called progress,and negation's dead undoom.
I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance
-------
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)
--both by ee cummings
--------------------
no name no. 5
got bitten fingernails and a head full of the past
and everybody's gone at last
a sweet sweet smile that's fading fast
cause everybody's gone at last
and you don't get upset about it
no not anymore
there's nothing wrong
that wasn't wrong before
had a second alone with a chance let pass
and everybody's gone at last
well i hope you're not waiting
waiting around for me
because i'm not going anywhere
obviously
got a broken heart and your name on my cast
and everybody's gone at last
everybody's gone at last
--elliott smith
--------------------
INEZ: To forget about the others? How utterly absurd! I feel you there, in every pore. Your silence clamors in my ears. You can nail up your mouth, cut your tongue out--but you can't prevent your being there. Can you stop your thoughts? I hear them ticking away like a clock, tick-tock, tick-tock, and I'm certain you hear mine. It's all very well skulking on your sofa, but you're everywhere, and every sound comes to me soiled, because you've intercepted it on its way. Why, you've even stolen my face; you know it and I don't!...No, take your hands from your face, I won't leave you in peace--that would suit your book too well. You'd go on sitting there, in a sort of trance, like a yogi...Well I won't stand for that, I prefer to choose my hell; I prefer to look you in the eyes and fight it out face to face.
....
GARCIN:...So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red hot pokers. Hell is--other people!
--Jean-Paul Sartre, in No Exit
--------------------
what Got him was Noth
ing & nothing's exAct
ly what any
one Living(or some
body Dead
like
even a Poet)could
hardly express what
i Mean is
what knocked him over Wasn't
(for instance)the Knowing your
whole(yes god
damned)life is a Flop or even
to
Feel how
Everything(dreamed
& hoped &
prayed for
months & weeks & days & years
& nights &
forever)is Less Than
Nothing(which would have been
Something)what got him was nothing
--ee cummings
--------------------
The Paper Soldier
Once upon a time there lived
a brave and handsome soldier,
but he was just a children's toy,
for he was just a paper soldier.
He would have liked to change the world
so everyone would be happy,
but he always hung on a thread,
for he was just a paper soldier.
He would have been glad in fire and smoke
to die for you twice over,
but you could only laugh at him,
for he was just a paper soldier.
You never did confide in him
your most important secrets.
But why? Just because
he was a paper soldier.
But he, cursing his destiny,
didn't crave a peaceful life,
and always begged for gunfire and flames,
forgetting he was a paper soldier.
Into the fire? OK then, go! You're going?
And he took one step forward;
and there he perished all for naught,
for he was just a paper solder...
--Bulat Okudzhava, translated from Russian
--------------------
POSTHUMUS.
Is there no way for men to be, but women
Must be half-workers? We are all bastards;
And that most venerable man which I
Did call my father, was I know not where
When I was stamp'd. Some coiner with his tools
Made me a counterfeit; yet my mother seem'd
The Dian of that time. So doth my wife
The nonpareil of this. O, vengeance, vengeance!
Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain'd
And pray'd me oft forbearance; did it with
A pudency so rosy, the sweet view on't
Might well have warm'd old Saturn; that I thought her
As chaste as unsunn'd snow. O, all the devils!
This yellow Iachimo, in an hour,--was't not?--
Or less,--at first?--perchance he spoke not, but,
Like a full-acorn'd boar, a German one,
Cried "O!" and mounted; found no opposition
But what he look'd for should oppose and she
Should from encounter guard. Could I find out
The woman's part in me! For there's no motion
That tends to vice in man, but I affirm
It is the woman's part; be it lying, note it,
The woman's; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers;
Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers;
Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain,
Nice longing, slanders, mutability,
All faults that may be nam'd, nay, that hell knows,
Why, hers, in part or all; but rather, all.
For even to vice
They are not constant, but are changing still
One vice, but of a minute old, for one
Not half so old as that. I'll write against them,
Detest them, curse them; yet 'tis greater skill
In a true hate, to pray they have their will.
The very devils cannot plague them better.
--William Shakespeare; Act II, Scene V of Cymbeline
--------------------
From "Non Sum Qualis Eram Bonae Sub Regno Cynarae"
I have forgot much, Cynara! Gone with the wind,
Flung roses, roses riotously with the throng,
Dancing, to put thy pale, lost lilies out of mind;
But I was desolate and sick of an old passion--
Yea, all the time, because the dance was long:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara!--In my fashion.
I cried for madder music and for stronger wine,
But when the feast is finished and the lamps expire,
Then falls they shadow, Cynara! The night is thine;
And I am desolate and sick of an old passion,
Yea, hungry for the lips of my desire:
I have been faithful to thee, Cynara!--In my fashion.
--Ernest Dowson
--------------------
Time it was, and what a time it was, it was
A time of innocence, a time of confidences
Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph
Preserve your memories, they're all that's left of you.
--Simon and Garfunkel, from Bookends
--------------------
Hamm: One day you'll be blind, like me. You'll be sitting there, a speck in the void, in the dark, for ever, like me.
(Pause)
One day you'll say to yourself, I'm tired, I'll sit down and you'll go and sit down. Then you'll say, I'm hungry, I'll get up and get something to eat. But you won't get up. You'll say, I shouldn't have sat down, but since I have I'll sit on a little longer, then I'll get up and get something to eat. But you won't get up and you won't get anything to eat.
(Pause)
You'll look at the wall a while, then you'll say, I'll close my eyes, perhaps have a little sleep, after that I'll feel better, and you'll close them. And when you open them again there'll be no wall anymore.
(Pause)
Infinite emptiness will be all around you, all the resurrected dead of all ages wouldn't fill it, and there you'll be like a little bit of grit in the middle of the steppe.
(Pause)
Yes, one day you'll know what it is, you'll be like me, except that you won't have anyone with you, because you won't have had pity on anyone and because there won't be anyone left to have pity on.
--Samuel Beckett in Fin de Partie (or the Endgame)
--------------------
I don't run from tears, that's my weakness.
But I know you still love me, though you don't believe it.
And I never thought that you were a loser
Only didn't hear enough of the songs.
Everything was always going to be smoother
All we needed was some time left alone.
Something special is in me dying
Are you punishing me for my weakness
When you know about me girl, I cannot be beaten down too far.
...
Only knew that it felt good at home.
But you left me so disenchanted
...
I'm drowning
I'm fighting
Something special is in me dying
There's an empty place in my bed,
And my heart is beating against my head.
The blood rushing through my veins
Becomes a flood of tears once again.
--Crosby, Stills and Nash
--------------------
"They are loaded -- the clock strikes twelve. I say amen. Charlotte, Charlotte! farewell, farewell!"
A neighbour saw the flash, and heard the report of the pistol; but, as everything remained quiet, he thought no more of it.
In the morning, at six o'clock, the servant went into Werther's room with a candle. He found his master stretched upon the floor, weltering in his blood, and the pistols at his side. He called, he took him in his arms, but received no answer.
--The Sorrows of Young Werther: Johann Wolfgang Goethe
--------------------
Be always drunken. Nothing else matters: that is the only question. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weighing on your shoulders and crushing you to the earth, be drunken continually.
Drunken with what? With wine, poetry, or with virtue, as you will. But be drunken.
And if sometimes, on the stairs of a palace, or on the green side of a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and the drunkennes be half or wholly slipped away from you, ask of the wind, or of the wave, or of the star, or of the bird, or of the clock, of whatever flies, or sighs, or rocks, or sings, or speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, clock, will answer you: 'It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry, or with virtue, as you will.'"
--Baudelaire
--------------------
How her image haunts me! Soon as I close my eyes, here, in my brain, where all the nerves of vision are concentrated, her dark eyes are imprinted. Here--I do not now how to describe it; but, if I shut my eyes, hers are immediately before me: dark as an abyss they open upon me, and absorb my senses.
And now, ye nightly visions, how truly have those mortals understood you, who ascribe your various contradictory effects to some invincible power! This night I tremble at the avowal--I held her in my arms, locked in a close embrace: I pressed her to my bosom, and covered with countless kisses those dear lips which murmured in reply soft protestations of love. My sight became confused by the delicious intoxication of her eyes. Heavens! is it sinful to revel again in such happiness, to recall once more those rapturous moments with intense delight?
--The Sorrows of Young Werther: Johann Wolfgang Goethe
---------------------
Variation on the Word Sleep
I would like to watch you sleeping.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head
and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun and three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear
I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center. I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and you enter
it as easily as breathing in
I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
and that necessary
