February 2012
27 posts
Angling
by Robert Lowell
Withdrawn to a third your size, and frowning doubts,
you stare in silence through the afterdinner,
when wine takes our liberty and loosens tongues──
fair-face, ball-eyes, profile of a child,
except your eyelashes are always blacked,
each hair colored and quickened like tying a fly.
If a word amuses you, the room includes your voice,
you are audible; none can...
Poppies
by Henri Cole
Waking from comalike sleep, I saw the poppies,
with their limp necks and unregimented beauty.
Pause, I thought, say something true: It was night,
I wanted to kiss your lips, which remained supple,
but all the water in them had been replaced
with embalming compound. So I was angry.
I loved the poppies, with their wide-open faces,
how they carried themselves,...
“Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.”
-W. H. Auden
The Act
There were the roses, in the rain.
Don’t cut them, I pleaded.
They won’t last, she said
But they’re so beautiful
where they are.
Agh, we were all beautiful once, she
said,
and cut them and gave them to me
in my hand.
- William Carlos Williams
A New Year’s Resolution List, AKA A Shaman Made Me...
I recently enlisted the services of a Shaman who performed a cleansing ritual on me. It was quite intense. At the end of the ritual I was instructed to ask for the things I want in life. It was requested that I do this out loud, and then I was motioned to ritualistically raise my fragrant oil-covered hands towards the sky while putting these requests into the universe. (Mind you, I was asked to do...
January 2012
9 posts
“It’s quite an undertaking to start loving somebody. You have to have energy ,generosity, blindness. There is even a moment right at the start where you have to jump across an abyss: if you think about it you don’t do it.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea
“He sent his words to her like letters, as though they left him sometime before they reached her.”
-F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender is the Night)
December 2011
9 posts
Adonis
1.
EACH of us like you
has died once,
has passed through drift of wood-leaves,
cracked and bent
and tortured and unbent
in the winter-frost,
the burnt into gold points,
lighted afresh,
crisp amber, scales of gold-leaf,
gold turned and re-welded
in the sun;
each of us like you
has died once,
each of us has crossed an old wood-path
and found the winter-leaves
so golden in...
HAPPINESS
by Carl Sandburg
I asked professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness.
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool
with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees...
“She would never change, but one day at the touch of a fingertip she would fall to dust.”
— Simone de Beauvoir (The Mandarins)
October 2011
14 posts
“When you caricature and nail down and tear apart, I hate you. I want to answer you, not with weak or stupid poetry but with a wonder as strong as your reality. I want to fight your surgical knife with all the occult and magical forces of the world.”
Anais Nin, Henry and June: From “A Journal of Love” - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin
