From Changing North America by Peter Dale Scott, part I. We Are Not As We Are

From Changing North America by Peter Dale Scott

Having helped initiate
the liberators of Poland
Czeslaw Milosz said to a Harvard audience
that in every era
the task of the inspired poet 
is to transcend his paltry ego 
and remind the soul of the people 
of the open space ahead

http://japanfocus.org/site/view/3553

Faults

Not to suffer fools gladly;
    Not to be tolerant with injustice:
    -to bridle, to rile, when fools exploit us.
    Not to be careful of the conflict betwixt
        ethics & karma:
    though being helpful to others in trouble
    expect nothing but trouble for your pains.
        
    Not to avoid all human intercourse
         beyond purely practical necessity;
    To ever indulge at all the pleasure principle
         however modestly;
    Not to avoid speech of all sorts as much as one can,
         of course, and not to restrict writing
         to purely poetic-inspired utterance only;
    Not to recognize, constantly, that the source of wisdom
         lies only in Silence and Solitude;
    Not to recognize, constantly, that all else we do
         is foolishness, a blind tangle of cause & effect
             that strangles wisdom,
         however appealing or apparently necessary,
             -it strangles the Truth.

    Not to realize instantly when irritated by another's faults
         an indication of our own, not necessarily identical,
             but related & festering.
    Not to appreciate that the eremitic vocation is a pinnacle
        all too easy to fall from and
        all but impossible to ascend:
    Better, in ascetic excess, a hermit-Jerome to be,
         or any who wear their faults upon the sleeve
             struggling with adversity & defeat,
         than in smug comfort smile in hypocrisy
             pontifying upon how a hermit should be.    
    
    Not to use one's faults
    (hubris, pride, anger, sloth, fear, impatience, despair, contempt...)
         to keep one apart, aloof, from others;
    Not to resist the allure of other people's
          apparent interest in you;
    Not to value cynicism: it is an excellent
          litmus test of value-content;
    Not refraining from falling in the feelings-fault
          between feeling exultant one moment
          and in despair the next, of liking this & repellent that,
              All of it is like the weather:
          Rain or shine, cold or hot or dry, storms or snows
          they are all the same thing: changes in the ever-changing firmament;
          none are better or worse, any that seem more convenient or preferable,
        -it is nothing but our foolish feelings fooling us.

    Not to assume there are more faults than we are aware of
          and virtues may also be faulty in application,
              is to neglect to disconnect them.
    
    Not to keep in mind that stupidity is the fault of intelligence:
          Non-intelligence is exempt from stupidity
          as ignorance is exempt from knowledge,
          it has its faults too but stupidity is not one of them.
          Stupidity is a slight of mind, like a slight of hand,
          that slips the truth aside to oblige an hidden agenda,
          often a self-hidden agenda; -a sophistry, a winking at errors & motives,
          a malware to gain a momentary benefit
          at the expense of the truth of the question at hand.
    It is a double fault not to remain alert to our own stupidity.

    Faults are not wrong or immoral or evil
        -they are consequences of karma:
    They balance imbalances, complete incompleteness, rotate the wheel of                   existence;
    Earthquakes are essential to planetary balance as are any natural phenomena.
    It is our indulgence in faults that gives them their moral hue:
    Milarepa conjured a hailstorm to destroy his mother's enemy's crops was evil,
        -not the hailstorm, not the destruction;
    Just gloat over such thoughts or deeds to sink in an immoral wallow.
    The pacifying response to calamity, human or natural,  is compassion &                       succour.    

    To justify anything under the rubric of "Love",
          -that most ambiguous of terms
           in any language and any definition.
    (True love radiates from within,
           without any other outer manifestation required).

    The quintessential fault of all faults is
           Attachment to the dichotomy of self & others.
    Not to pursue, at every point in this existence,
           To conjure up and abide in,
    an hermitude of solitary serene silence,
            in place space and time,
            -a sanctuary of consciousness
            beyond the bedlam of  this worldly whirlpool.

    Not to heed the lessons in our faults
            but to concede to them ceaselessly,
    Is letting out rope to tie up & tangle one in,
        the nemesis of fools.

Outgoing by Matt Rasmussen

Our answering machine still played your message,
and on the day you died Dad asked me to replace it.

I was chosen to save us the shame of dead you
answering calls. Hello, I have just shot myself.

To leave a message for me, call hell. The clear cassette
lay inside the white machine like a tiny patient

being monitored or a miniature glass briefcase
protecting the scroll of lost voices. Everything barely

mattered and then no longer did. I pressed record
and laid my voice over yours, muting it forever

and even now. I'm sorry we are not here, I began.

It Took Time by Shinji Moon

This is a poem about
how you never get the kiss you want
when you want it;

how time twines around your neck, its thorns
digging into your skin so you can never forget
how clinging to a string of hope, threading it
between your spine, and having it unravel before you
in the span of an hour
is worse than any metaphor about nakedness
that you poets will ever write.

This is my reflection in the mirror. This stanza
is the small gap where my fingers try to touch against
the glass.

You can’t even possess yourself; let alone
the person you see standing before you.

The moon
hasn’t come back from the cleaners yet
and I have nothing to slip into tonight that makes my reflection feel
beautiful.

Time is falling through the hole in my pocket. January
is coming soon, and I have a feeling that he’s never going to fall
out of love with this December.

He’ll still write her love letters. He’ll
send her white orchids on every lonely holiday and pretend
that love is a place you can cross state lines to get back to,

but it’s that time of the year again, and
calendar sales keep reminding us all that we can never get back
to where we once wanted so bad to lose ourselves in
for good.

last night I had several non-specific thoughts by Mira Gonzalez

last night i had several nonspecific thoughts
about distance, or sadness, or impermanence

it was as if all sounds and textures existed independently of me
and independently of human experience in general

it was late and we were on drugs
my body felt weak or depleted
you were was facing away from me
my hand was barely touching your arm

we laid in your bed and mumbled together
consciously allowing ourselves to experience the absence of loneliness
resigned to the knowledge that we will never be able to fully express anything

in the morning your breath was sour and i felt angry at you

i imagined the sound of your voice, in the future
when you hate me more than you ever have

then i felt the comforting abrupt movements
of your hand pushing against my face

i was reminded of a hospital waiting room
ten years ago
when i still had asthma attacks

Sonnet by Joseph Ceravolo

In the middle of Autumn
early when the skies
show the dawn
still hovering in trees
and the geese, a series
of arrows break form
for another unknown bird
that catches our eyes,
I can’t return.
While overhead one storm
in the bird’s neck feathers carries
the dampness of the journey

soaked with our laughs and whispers
in the subterfuge of happiness

“On Keeping a Notebook,” Joan Didion, from Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

“Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.”

from The Ecstasy of Influence by Jonathan Lethem

“Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.”

Reflections on Writing by Henry Miller

“I had to grow foul with knowledge, realize the futility of everything; smash everything, grow desperate, then humble, then sponge myself off the slate, as it were, in order to recover my authenticity. I had to arrive at the brink and then take a leap in the dark.”

Don't Write Poems But Sentences by Roberto Bolano

Write prayers that you will whisper

before writing those poems

you will think you never wrote

Strange gratuitous occupation    To go losing your hair

and your teeth     The ancient ways of being educated

Odd complacency     (The poet doesn’t wish to be greater

than others)     Not wealth or fame or even just

poetry     Maybe this is the only way

to avoid fear     Settle into fear

like one inhabiting slowness

Ghosts we all possess    Simply

waiting for someone or something in the ruins

In a Thousand Years... by Roberto Bolano

In a thousand years nothing will be left
of all that's been written in this century.
They'll read loose sentences, traces
of lost women,
fragments of motionless children,
your slow green eyes
simply will not exist.
It will be like the Greek Anthology,
but even further away,
like a beach in winter
for another wonder, another indifference.

The Nightmare by Roberto Bolano

The nightmare begins over there, right there.
Further, up, down, everything's part of the
nightmare. Don't stick your hand in that urn. Don't
stick your hand in that hellish vase. That's
where the nightmare begins and everything you do there
will grow like a hump on your back.
Stay away, don't hang around that equivocal point.
Even if you see the flowering lips of your true
love, even if you see some flowering eyelids
you wanted to forget or get back. Stay away.
Don't run circles around that mistake. Don't
lift a finger. Trust me. The only thing that grows there
is the nightmare.

Solitude by Roberto Bolano

Does it amuse you that I write in third person?
Does it amuse you that I sometimes say in 100 years
we'll be completely alone?
I know nothing about you except you're my sister
In cold apartments by the barrio gótico
Sometimes listening to the rain
Or kissing
Or making faces in the mirror

It's Nighttime and I'm in the Zone Alta by Roberto Bolano

It's nighttime and I'm in the Zone Alta
in Barcelona and I've drunk
more than three cafés con leche
with some people I don't
know beneath a moon that sometimes
seems so miserable and other times
so alone and maybe it's neither
one nor the other and I
haven't drunk coffee but cognac and cognac
and cognac in a glass restaurant
in the Zona Alta and the people I
thought I was with really
don't exist or are faces floating
at the table next to mine
where I'm alone and drunk
spending my money on one edge
of the unknown university.

Now You Walk Alone Along the Piers by Roberto Bolano

Now you walk alone along the piers
of Barcelona.
You smoke a black cigarette and for
a moment think it would be nice
if it rained.
The gods haven't granted you money
but they've granted you strange whims
Look up:
it's raining.

F.B. -- He Dead by Roberto Bolano

Francis Bacon
Learned to live
Alone
Learned to bear
The slowness
Of human dusk
Its unbearable stench
Learned
The art of patience
Similar in many ways
To the art of indifference
Francis Bacon learned
To live with hours
To live with shadows
Masks
Of some illegible
Freedom

Library by Roberto Bolano

Books I buy
Between the strange rains
And heat
Of 1992
Which I've already read
Or will never read
Books for my son to read
Lautaro's library
Which will need to resist
Other rains
And other scorching heats
-- Therefore, the edict is this:
Resist, my dear books,
Cross thy days like medieval knights
And care for my son
In the years to come

Your Distant Heart by Roberto Bolano

I don't feel safe
Anywhere.
The adventure doesn't end.
Your eyes shine in every corner.
I don't feel safe
In words
Or in money
Or in mirrors.
The Adventure never ends
And your eyes are searching for me.

Daybreak by Roberto Bolano

Trust me, I'm in the middle of my room
waiting for rain. I'm alone. I don't care
if I finish my poem or not. I wait for rain,
drinking coffee and through the window watching a beautiful
   landscape
of courtyards, with clothes hanging still,
silent marble clothes in the city, where wind
does not exist and far off you only hear the hum
of a color TV, watched by a family
who's also, at this hour, drinking coffee together around
a table: trust me: the yellow plastic tables
unfold into the horizon and beyond:
into the suburbs where they're building
apartments, and a boy of 16 atop a stack
of red bricks contemplates the machines' movement.
The sky in the boy's hour is an enormous
hollow screw the breeze plays with. And the boy
plays with ideas. With ideas and with frozen scenes.
Inertia is a heavy transparent mist
emerging from his eyes.
Trust me: it isn't love that's drawing near
but beauty with its store of dead dawns.

My gift to you will be an abyss, she said... by Roberto Bolano

My gift to you will be an abyss, she said,
but it will be so subtle you'll perceive it
only after many years have passed
and you are far from Mexico and me.
You'll find it when you need it most,
and that won't be
the happy ending,
but it will be an instant of emptiness and joy.
And maybe then you'll remember me,
if only just a little.

Forty Roberto Bolano quotes

We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.

Literature is a vast forest and the masterpieces are the lakes, the towering trees or strange trees, the lovely eloquent flowers, the hidden caves, but a forest is also made up of ordinary trees, patches of grass, puddles, clinging vines, mushrooms and little wildflowers.

Every hundred feet the world changes.

Reading is pleasure and happiness to be alive or sadness to be alive and above all its knowledge and questions.

Books are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace.

The truth is we never stop being children, terrible children covered in sores and knotty veins and tumors and age spots, but ultimately children, in other words we never stop clinging to life because we are life.

If you’re going to say what you want to say, you’re going to hear what you don’t want to hear.

Great physicists, great mathematicians, great chemists, and publishers knew that one was always feeling one’s way in the dark.

Nothing happened today. And if anything did, I’d rather not talk about it, because I didn’t understand it.

The secret story is the one we’ll never know, although we’re living it from day to day, thinking we’re alive, thinking we’ve got it all under control and the stuff we overlook doesn’t matter.

History, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.

When you know something, you know it, and when you don’t, you’d better learn. And in the meantime, you should keep quiet, or at least speak only when what you say will advance the learning process.

There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.

Only in chaos are we conceivable.

Nothing good ever comes of love. What comes of love is always something better.

There’s no place on earth with more dumb girls per square foot than a college in California.

We interpret life at moments of the deepest desperation.

Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.

I’m an educated man, the prisons I know are subtle ones.

You have to know how to look even if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

We play at believing ourselves immortal. We delude ourselves in the appraisal of our own works and in our perpetual misappraisal of the works of others. See you at the Nobel, writers say, as one might say: see you in hell.

As time goes by, as time goes by, the whip-crack of the years, the precipice of illusions, the ravine that swallows up all human endeavor except the struggle to survive.

In some lost fold of the past, we wanted to be lions and we’re no more than castrated cats.

Reading is more important than writing.

I’ll tell you, my friends: it’s all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love.

The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man’s sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.

The world is alive and no living thing has any remedy. That is our fortune.

Metaphors are our way of losing ourselves in semblances or treading water in a sea of seeming.

Being alone makes us stronger. That’s the honest truth. But it’s cold comfort, since even if I wanted company no one will come near me anymore.

[Castellanos Moya’s] sharp humor, not unlike a Buster Keaton film or a time bomb, threatens the fragile stability of imbeciles who, when they read, have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can’t think of a higher honor for a writer.

We’re artists too, but we do a good job hiding it, don’t we?

…I realized my happiness was artificial. I felt happy because I saw the others were happy and because I knew I should feel happy, but I wasn’t really happy.

Every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me.

One should read Borges more.

When I was done traveling, I returned convinced of one thing: we’re nothing.

You run risks. That’s the plain truth. You run risks and, even in the most unlikely places, you are subject to destiny’s whims.

I decided to tell the truth even if it meant being pointed at.

Life is mysterious as well as vulgar.

I am dying now, but I still have many things to say.

Exile is courage. True exile is the true measure of each writer. 

Resurrection by Roberto Bolano

Poetry slips into dreams
like a diver in a lake.
Poetry, braver than anyone,
slips in and sinks
like lead
through a lake infinite as Loch Ness
or tragic and turbid as Lake Balaton.
Consider it from below:
a diver
innocent
covered in feathers
of will.
Poetry slips into dreams
like a diver who’s dead
in the eyes of God.

Solitude by Umberto Saba

The changing seasons, sunlight and darkness,
alter the world, which, in its sunny aspect
comforts us, and with its clouds brings sadness.

And I, who have looked with infinite
tenderness at so many of its guises,
don’t know whether I ought to be sad today

or gladly go on as if a test had been passed;
I’m sad, and yet the day is so beautiful;
only in my heart is there sun and rain.

I can transform a long winter into spring;
where the pathway in the sun is a ribbon
of gold, I bid myself  ”good evening.”

In me alone are my mists and fine weather,
as in me alone is that perfect love
for which I suffered so much and no longer mourn,

let my eyes suffice me, and my heart

Buddhist New Year Song by Diane di Prima

I saw you in green velvet, wide full sleeves
seated in front of a fireplace, our house
made somehow more gracious, and you said
“There are stars in your hair”— it was truth I
brought down with me

to this sullen and dingy place that we must make golden
make precious and mythical somehow, it is our nature,
and it is truth, that we came here, I told you,
from other planets
where we were lords, we were sent here,
for some purpose

the golden mask I had seen before, that fitted
so beautifully over your face, did not return
nor did that face of a bull you had acquired
amid northern peoples, nomads, the Gobi desert

I did not see those tents again, nor the wagons
infinitely slow on the infinitely windy plains,
so cold, every star in the sky was a different color
the sky itself a tangled tapestry, glowing
but almost, I could see the planet from which we had come

I could not remember (then) what our purpose was
but remembered the name Mahakala, in the dawn

in the dawn confronted Shiva, the cold light
revealed the “mindborn” worlds, as simply that,
I watched them propagated, flowing out,
or, more simply, one mirror reflecting another.
then broke the mirrors, you were no longer in sight
nor any purpose, stared at this new blackness
the mindborn worlds fled, and the mind turned off:

a madness, or a beginning?

The Garden by Ezra Pound

Like a skein of loose silk blown against a wall 
She walks by the railing of a path in Kensington Gardens, 
And she is dying piece-meal 
of a sort of emotional anemia. 
  
And round about there is a rabble 
Of the filthy, sturdy, unkillable infants of the very poor. 
They shall inherit the earth. 
  
In her is the end of breeding. 
Her boredom is exquisite and excessive. 
  
She would like some one to speak to her, 
And is almost afraid that I 
will commit that indiscretion.

The Failure of Language by Jacqueline Berger

First day of class, I ask the students, by way
of introduction, what they believe:
Language is our best tool, or language fails
to express what we know and feel.
We go around the room.
Almost everyone sides with failure.
Is it because they’re young,
still find it hard to say what they mean?
Or are they romantics, holding music and art, the body,
anything wordless as the best way in?
I think about the poet helping his wife to die,
calling his heart helpless as crushed birds
and the soles of her feet the voices of children
calling in the lemon grove, because the tool 
must sometimes be bent to work.

Sitting next to my friend in her hospital bed,
she tells me she’s not going to make it,
doesn’t think she wants to,
all year running from the deep she’s now drowning in.
I change the flowers in the vase,
rub cream into her hands and feet.
When I lean down to kiss her goodbye,
I whisper I love you, words that maybe
have lost their meaning, being asked to stand
for so many unspoken particulars.

The sky when I walk to the parking lot
this last weekend of summer
is an opal, the heat pinkening above the trees
which dusk turns the color of ash.

Everything we love fails, I didn’t tell my students,
if by fails we mean ends or changes,
if by love we mean what sustains us.
Language is what honors the vanishing.
Or is language what slows the leaving?
Or does it only deepen what we know of loss?

My students believe it’s important
to get the words right.
Once said, they can never be retrieved.
It takes years to learn to be awkward.
At their age, each word must be carefully chosen
to communicate the yes, but also leave room
for the not really, just kidding, a gateway car
with the engine running.

Inside us, constellations,
bit thread knotted into night’s black drape.
There are no right words,
if by right we mean perfect,
if by perfect we mean able to save us.

Four of us pack up our friend’s apartment.
Suddenly she can’t live unassisted.
I remember this glass, part of a set
I bought her years ago
when she became for a time a scotch drinker.
I bought it for its weight, something
solid to hold, and for the way an inch or two
of amber would look against its etched walls.
I wrap it in newspaper and add it to the box marked Kitchen.

It’s my friend herself who is fragile.
When I take her out to eat, each step is work.
The restaurant is loud and bright.
She wants to know if she looks normal.
I make my words soft. Fine,
which might be the most useless word in English,
everything is going to be fine.