May 2012
36 posts
3 tags
My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. “Listen,” he said, “life and no escape.”
2 tags
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
2 tags
The drowning soul was sunk too deep For human tenderness.
2 tags
By Richmond I raised my knees Supine on the floor of a narrow canoe.
My feet are at Moorgate, and my heart Under my feet. After the event He wept. He promised “a new start.” I made no comment. What should I resent?… I can connect Nothing with nothing. The broken fingernails of dirty hands. My people humble people who expect Nothing.
The Waste Land
1 tag
So Grendel waged his lonely war… atrocious hurt.
Beowulf, 164-165
April 2012
48 posts
1 tag
Calypso’s island is magical. It supplies every possible demand Odysseus might have for food, drink, clothing, sex, companionship or conversation. He has only to pay over the coin of his self. His entire self. Calypso wants Odysseus body and soul. She wants everything about him. Physical, moral, and verbal. She wants the work of art that he has made of his own human being. And she wants it for all...
Bob Dylan - One Too Many Mornings
What a heavy way of saying that the peculiarity I seem to have been born with is a character made up of stiffness and disorder, or lethargy and passion. These words are not necessarily the best. The two horses, judgement and emotion perhaps, take many names; but they go together ill at best, and at bad times, one is lying down immobile, the other galloping. Robert Lowell 1951
(via michael)
3 tags
Cruelly at this point, he mentioned a culture he had studied where true and false virgins are identified by ordeal of water. For an intact virgin can develop the skill of diving into deep water but a woman who has known love will drown. “I am not interested in true and false,” I said (one last lie) and we fell silent.
Anthropology is a science of mutual surprise. I wanted to ask him...
If my life has been a series of inadequacies, at least I know by these great whirls of dust how beauty and oblivion never ask permission of anyone. In the book I read before bed, God lowers himself through the dark and funnels his blueprints into the ear of a woman who asked for nothing. Tomorrow night she’ll lead armies, in a few more she’ll burn at the stake and...
1 tag
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no...
1 tag
Thou Art A Vineyard - Shen khar venakhi
“Julia wore the embroidered Chinese robe which she often used when we were dining...”
– Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring that’s landed on your finger, a massive insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt in your voice under a blanket and said there’s two kinds of women—those you write poems about and those you don’t. It’s true. I never brought you a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed....
Badri Jimsheleishvili, Gaprindi Shavo Merckhalo...
3 tags
3 tags
III. Isaiah walked for three years in the valley of vision. In his jacket of glass he crossed deserts and black winter mornings. The icy sun lowered its eyelids against the glare of him. God stayed back. Now Isaiah had a hole in the place where his howl had broken off. All the while Isaiah walked, Isaiah’s heart was pouring out the hole. One day Isaiah stopped. Isaiah put his hand on the...
3 tags
I go out to walk. The bare blue trees and bleached wooden sky of April carve into me with knives of light. Something inside it reminds me of childhood— it is the light of the stalled time after lunch when clocks tick and hearts shut and fathers leave to go back to work and mothers stand at the kitchen sink pondering something they never tell. You remember too much, my mother said to me...
2 tags
3 tags
as usual with men who are blind my ears are sharp, you know you just called me “a man without feelings” don’t go on saying things like that! zeami
The morning is clear. The morning is immediately clear. Lower the lance and lean forward in the saddle. It is time to question him about the loneliness. His answer both surprises me and does not. He has not been...
3 tags
as one turns about the moon understands one’s very heart Sozei
Hills continue to pale and scarify. They look shaved, like old heads of women in an asylum. What is the breaking point of the average pilgrim? I feel so lonely, like childhood again. What kind of ensnaring can touch the loneliness of animals? Nothing can touch it. No, maybe that is not altogether correct. This evening My Cid...
1 tag
sitting by broken trees and dying flowers you were the rose we whirled around
2 tags
1 tag
God owns heaven but He craves the earth.
3 tags
3 tags
