Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Let us look for a third tiger. This one will be a form in my dreams like all others, a system, an arrangement of human language, and not the flesh-and-bone tiger that, out of the reach of all mythologies, paces the earth. I know all this; yet something drives me to this ancient, perverse adventure, […]
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience, your eyes have their silence: in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me, or which i cannot touch because they are too near your slightest look easily will unclose me though i have closed myself as fingers, you open always petal by petal myself […]
When the evening light, slanting into the woods somewhere bathes the tree trunks in gold… Singing and thinking are the stems neighbor to poetry. They grow out of Being and reach into its truth. Their relationship makes us think of what Hölderlin sings of the trees of the woods: “And to each other they remain […]
All I can tell you is, when the abscess finally drains the odor is so foul it’s evil. And I’m not sure, driving home later that night, still smelling the pallid citrus, whether it’s merely hallucination, the way her memory inhabits me; or if being in that same room, inhaling that same air, made some […]
Thursday, October 14, 2010
The pure products of America go crazy— mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves old names and promiscuity between devil-may-care men who have taken to railroading out of sheer lust of adventure— and young slatterns, bathed in filth from Monday to Saturday […]
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
I want to remember us this way— late September sun streaming through the window, bread loaves and golden bunches of grapes on the table, spoonfuls of hot soup rising to our lips, filling us with what endures. —Peter Pereira, A Pot of Red Lentils
Saturday, September 11, 2010
After reading Dharma Bums I looked up the poetry of Han Shan, translated by Gary Snyder. A few: In a tangle of cliffs, I chose a place— Bird paths, but no trails for me. What’s beyond the yard? White clouds clinging to vague rocks. Now I’ve lived here—how many years— Again and again, spring and […]
Noble in the sound which marks the pale ease of their dreams, they ride the bel canto of our time: the patient en- circlement of Narcissus & as he pines I too am wan with fever, have fears which set the vanished child above reproach. Cry as you will, take what you need, the night […]
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Thursday, August 19, 2010
A Second Childhood —GK Chesterton When all my days are ending And I have no song to sing, I think that I shall not be too old To stare at everything; As I stared once at a nursery door Or a tall tree and a swing. Wherein God’s ponderous mercy hangs On all my sins […]
And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship, Bore sheep aboard her, and our bodies also Heavy with weeping, so winds from sternward Bore us out onward with bellying canvas, Circe’s this craft, the trim-coifed goddess. […]