1
Slow ebbing away
Of a languorous summer
Light begins to fade.

2
Slow falling of leaves
Bronze and russet drifting down
Autumn gift to Earth.

3
Darkness grows, cold creeps
Into life's interstices
Fading of the year

4
Cold sea-breeze morning
Atlantic hints in the air
Autumn leaves quiver

5
Encroaching darkness
Day penned into shrinking cage
Light flees South. Autumn

This by Maitreyabandhu

There’s no law against my listening

to this thrush behind the barn,

the song so loud it echoes like a bell,

then it’s further off beyond the lawn.

Whatever else there is, there’s this as well.

There’s no law against this singing –

nesting I suppose – up in the silver birch,

even though we build a common hell,

have done, and will make it worse.

Whatever else there is, there’s this as well.

The Woodpigeon's Instruction by Maitreyabandhu

She’s been there so long,

a patch of ash grey on the bending branch,

head tucked in against the wind

as she rises and falls with it.

She steadies herself

as the smaller branches flick.

She says: This is the time of disappointment. 

All the willows bow at once.

Rain pelts quietly into the soaking grass

Umbrian Summer by Maitreyabandhu

there were beech leaves
            on the swimming pool-

            chrome yellow
on a zone of blue,
             like something Japanese.

            The sun 
had seemed to shine
             through lemonade-

Bible Study 71 BCE by Sharon Olds

After Marcus Licinius Crassus
defeated the army of Spartacus,
he crucified 6,000 men.
That is what the records say,
as if he drove in the 18,000
nails himself. I wonder how
he felt, that day, if he went outside
among them, if he walked that human
woods. I think he stayed in his tent
and drank, and maybe copulated,
hearing the singing being done for him,
the woodwind-tuning he was doing at one
remove, to the six-thousandth power.
And maybe he looked out, sometimes,
to see the rows of instruments,
his orchard, the earth bristling with it
as if a patch in his brain had itched
and this was his way of scratching it
directly. Maybe it gave him pleasure,
and a sense of balance, as if he had suffered,
and now had found redress for it,
and voice for it. I speak as a monster,
someone who today has thought at length
about Crassus, his ecstasy of feeling
nothing while so much is being
felt, his hot lightness of spirit
in being free to walk around
while other are nailed above the earth.
It may have been the happiest day
of his life. If he had suddenly cut
his hand on a wineglass, I doubt he would
have woken up to what he was doing.
It is frightening to think of him suddenly
seeing what he was, to think of him running
outside, to try to take them down,
one man to save 6,000.
If he could have lowered one,
and seen the eyes when the level of pain
dropped like a sudden soaring into pleasure,
wouldn’t that have opened in him
the wild terror of understanding
the other? But then he would have had
5,999
to go. Probably it almost never
happens, that a Marcus Crassus
wakes. I think he dozed, and was roused
to his living dream, lifted the flap
and stood and looked out, at the rustling, creaking
living field—his, like an external
organ, a heart.

the systems novel

The second-best way to begin defining the "systems novel" is to consider this passage from Fredric Jameson's thought-provoking early book, The Prison-House of Language:

"The deeper justification for the use of the linguistic model or metaphor [Jameson is writing about the 'linguistic turn' in 20th-century philosophy, specifically Structuralism] must, I think, be sought elsewhere, outside the claims and counterclaims for scientific validity and technological progress. It lies in the concrete character of the social life of the so-called advanced countries today, which offer the spectacle of a world from which nature as such has been eliminated, a world saturated with messages and information, whose intricate commodity network may be seen as the very prototype of a system of signs. There is therefore a profound consonance between linguistics as a method and that systematized and disembodied nightmare which is our culture today."

From 'The Origins of Capitalism: A Longer View' by Ellen Meiksins Wood

"Marxists advocate bourgeois revolution to break the fetters of feudalism. Capitalist market is only the most advanced form of exchange. Industrialization was the inevitable outcome of human instincts.

Cyclical recessions and meltdowns are inbred in capitalism. Capitalism recovers from recurrent crisis at the cost of suffering of hundreds of millions of people.

Human labor is a commodity for sale. Bulk of work is done by property less laborers who create profit for those who purchase their labor.

The capitalists exercise control by financing the election campaigns, obliging the officials to do their bidding, purchasing the media so people hear only what they want them to".

Piya Sutta

What follows behind you
  like a shadow
  that never leaves?

    Both the merit & evil
    that you as a mortal
    perform here:

that's      what's truly your own,
        what you take along when you go;
that's      what follows behind you
    like a shadow
    that never leaves.

So do what is admirable,
as an accumulation
    for the future life.

Deeds of merit 
are the support for    beings
    when they arise
    in the other world

In Mid Life by Friedrich Holderlin

Laden with yellow pears
And full of wild roses
The land dips down to the lake,
You noble swans,
And drunk with kisses
You dip your heads
Into the pure hallowed waters.
Where, oh where, when it is winter
Will I find the flowers and where
The sunshine and shadow of earth?
The walls stand
Speechless and cold, in the wind
The weather-vanes clatter

FALL IN LOVE ALL OVER AGAIN by Sam Riviere

much against everyone's advice

I have decided to live the life

I want to read about and write it

not by visiting the graves of authors

or moving to london to hear

in my sleep its gothic lullaby

not by going for coastal walks

or being from the north and lathing

every line as an approach it's

way outmoded I run a bath turn

off the lights I think only of

lathering the pale arms of my wife

for now a girl who dreads weekends

then I guess I might as well teach

squandering so as not to squander

this marvellous opportunity right?

EA: One of your characters says, "One has the moral obligation to be responsible for one's actions and for one's words but also for one's silence."

RB: One of my characters says that? It sounds so good it hardly seems written by me.

EA: Is it fair to say that about writers.

RB: No, for writers that isn't fair, but without a doubt, in predetermined moments, yes. If I'm walking down the street and see a paedophile molesting a kid and I stop and silently stare, not only am I responsible for my silence but I am also a complete son of a bitch. However, there is a certain type of silence in which -

EA: Are there literary silences?

RB: Yes, there are literary silences. Kafka's, for example, which is a silence that cannot be. When he asks for his papers to be burned, Kafka is opting for silence, opting for a literary silence, all in a literary era. That is to say, he was completely moral. Kafka's literature, aside from being the best work, the highest literary work of the twentieth century, is of an extreme morality and of an extreme gentility, things that do not that usually do not go together either.

EA: And what of (Juan) Rulfo's silence?

RB: Rulfo's silence, I think, is obedient to something so quotidian that explaining it is a waste of time. There are several versions: One told by Monterosso is that Rulfo had an uncle so-and-so who told him stories and when Rulfo was asked why he didn't write anymore, his answer was that uncle so-and-so had died. And I believe it too. Another explanation is simple and natural and that it is that everything has an expiration date. For example, I am more worried about Rimbaudian silence than I am about Rulfian silence. Rulfo stopped writing because he had already written everything he wanted to write and because he see's himself incapable of writing anything better, he simply stops. Rimbaud would probably have been able to write something much better, which is to say bringing his words up even higher, but his silence is a silence that raises questions for Westerners. Rulfo's silence doesn't raise questions; it is a close silence, quotidian. After dessert, what the hell else are you going to eat. There is a third literary silence - one doesn't seek it - of the shade which one is sure was there under the threshold and which has never been made tangible. There stands the silence of Georg Buchner, for example. He died at twenty five or twenty four years of age, he leaves behind three or four stage plays, masterworks. One of them is Woyzeck, an absolute masterwork. Another is about the death of Danton, which is an enormous masterwork, not absolute but quite notable. The other two - one is called Leonce y Lena, I can't remember the other one - are fundementally important. All before he turned twenty five. What might have happened had Buchner not died; what kind of writer might he have been? The kind of silence that isn't sought out is the silence of ... I do not dare call it destiny ... a manifestation of impotence. The silence of death is the worst kind of silence, because Rulfian silence is accepted and Rimbaudian silence is sought, but the silence of death is one that cuts the edge off what could have been and what never will be, that which we will never know. We'll never know if Buchner would have been bigger than Goethe. I think so, but we'll never know. We'll never know what he might have written at age thirty. And that extends across the whole planet like a stain, an atrocious illness that in one way or another puts our habits in check, our most ingrained certainties.

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Proverbial by Jane Griffiths

Twice now, this road. So the sign
at the crossing has a familiar slant
and ashes are beside themselves under
a weight of leaves that last visit were

nerve-ends, the first lines in history.
You’ve settled here lightly, the way
a river runs together all the places
it’s passed. And if we correspond

it is as water parts into umber, lapis,
terracotta, all the colours of the earth –
as, looking back, you’ll see someone
catching the sun on a wide, amphibious

verandah, and see your way clear
to the inlet, the stepping stones, to taking
your life in your hands and crossing here.
And the way it is not the same river.

Amnesiac by Jane Griffiths

The night fog's come down.
The known edge of the world unselved,
the white-out against the window

and the radio histing the full
atmospheric scale between stations
comprehensively out of tune.

Someone's talking out there
but the night fog's come down:
a car comes and goes out of nowhere,

lighting the invisible and its afterglow.
Off, there's a town: its solids,
its muted soundings below

the sudden broadsides and dark
enormity of the nightlife,
the near miss of the eyes,

below the rough selvage of road
or cloud where you are seeing the wood
through the trees the fog has made

ragged, open-ended. Somewhere
in your house there is a forest.
Someone is talking there.

bleeding edge

Maxine’s father explains that the Internet, her generation’s “magical convenience,” grew out of Defense Department research during the cold war, and he rants that it “creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time.” He adds, darkly, that “as it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet.”

Clear in September Light

A man stands under a tree, looking at a small house not far away. He flaps his arms as if he were a bird, maybe signaling someone we cannot see. He could be yelling, but since we hear nothing, he probably is not. Now the wind sends a shiver through the tree, and flattens the grass. The man falls to his knees and pounds the ground with his fists. A dog comes and sits beside him, and the man stands, once again flapping his arms. What he does has nothing to do with me. His desperation is not my desperation. I do not stand under trees and look at small houses. I have no dog.

Coming to This by Mark Strand

We have done what we wanted.
We have discarded dreams, preferring the heavy industry
of each other, and we have welcomed grief
and called ruin the impossible habit to break.

And now we are here.
The dinner is ready and we cannot eat.
The meat sits in the white lake of its dish.
The wine waits.

Coming to this
has its rewards: nothing is promised, nothing is taken away.
We have no heart or saving grace,
no place to go, no reason to remain.

Breath by Mark Strand

When you see them
tell them I am still here,
that I stand on one leg while the other one dreams,
that this is the only way,

that the lies I tell them are different
from the lies I tell myself,
that by being both here and beyond
I am becoming a horizon,

that as the sun rises and sets I know my place,
that breath is what saves me,
that even the forced syllables of decline are breath,
that if the body is a coffin it is also a closet of breath,

that breath is a mirror clouded by words,
that breath is all that survives the cry for help
as it enters the stranger's ear
and stays long after the world is gone,

that breath is the beginning again, that from it
all resistance falls away, as meaning falls
away from life, or darkness fall from light,
that breath is what I give them when I send my love

Lines for Winter by Mark Strand

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

God's Window by Michael Blumenthal

  They are gazing at God's windows.
                                         —Czech proverb describing the easy
                                         indolence of the loafing, vagabond
                                         heroes of Czech folk songs

I sit in the garden listening
to my inner voice. What
could my inner voice be saying?
The birds are singing, says my inner voice,
the storks are nesting. My inner voice
looks up at the sky. The moon
is waning, it says, the sun
is setting. My inner voice
says nothing about ambition, nothing
about love. It's been a beautiful day,
it says, the moles are tunneling
through the earth. A scent of honeysuckle
wafts between the trees. It's getting dark,
says my inner voice. It's time
to go to bed.

Lucky by Michael Blumenthal

Off to the market to buy a lottery ticket,
I consider the possibilities of luck: good luck.
bad luck, beginner's luck, hard luck, the luck
of the draw, and I realize I am lucky, in fact,
to be here at all, on this benignly lit street
on a night in October, as luck would have it,
and I know that it's not just the luck of
the Irish, but any man's, to walk the streets
of his town, beneath the shapely moon,
and ponder the dumb luck that brought him here,
against all odds, into the vast lottery of minnow
and ovum, and to know he has once again lucked out,
this very night, spent as it has been without
accident or incident, a small testimonial
to the quietudes that are still possible,
the only half-felt wish for some grand stroke
of luck that will change everything, that will
change, really, nothing at all, our lives being,
in some sense, beyond the vicissitudes
of luck and yearning, the night being lovely,
the day finite, many of those we know whose luck
has already run out, and we not yet among them,
thank the beneficence of Lady Luck, our stars
just now flickering into flame
as the night lucks in.

How to Write a Poem by Michael Blumenthal

Forget, now, for a moment
that you were the blond boy
whose father jumped from the bridge
when you were only ten. Forget
that you are the broken-hearted,
the cuckolded, the windswept lover
alone beneath the dangling pines.
Forget that you are the girl
of the godless cry, that no one
took you into his hapless arms
during the cold night, that you have
cried from the fathomless depths
like a blue whale and the world
has called back to you only its oracles
of moonlight and relinquishment.
Forget, now, my young friends,
everything you can never forget,
and hear, in the untamed wind,
in the peroration of the ravishing ari,
the words for your life: omelette,
investiture, Prokofiev, stars.
Forget, even as you look up at them,
the astral bodies and the heavenly bodies,
forget, even, you own ravenous body
and call out, into the beckoning light,
the names of everything you have
never known: flesh and blood, stone
and interlude, marmalade and owl
those first syllables of your new world:
your clear and forgotten life.

Days We Would Rather Know by Michael Blumenthal

There are days we would rather know
than these, as there is always, later,
a woman we would rather have married
than whom we did, in that severe nowness
time push, imperfectly, to then. Whether,
standing in the museum before Rembrandt's "Juno,"
we stand before beauty, or only a consensus
about beauty, is a question that makes all beauty
suspect... and all marriages. Last night,
leaves circled the base of the gingko as if
the sun had shattered during the night
into a million gold coins no one had the sense
to claim. And now, there are days we would
rather know than these, days when to stand
before beauty and before "Juno" are, convincingly,
the same, days when the shattered sunlight
rests in the trees and the women we marry
remain interesting and beautiful both at once,
and their men. And though there are days
we would rather know than now, I am,
at heart, a scared and simple man. So I tighten
my arms around the woman I love, now
and imperfectly, stand before "Juno" whispering
beautiful beautiful until I believe it, and -
when I come home at night - run out
into the day's pale dusk with my broom
and my dustpan, sweeping the coins from the base
of the gingko, something to keep for a better tomorrow:
days we rather know that never come.

What I Believe by Michael Blumenthal

I believe there is no justice,
but that cottongrass and bunchberry
grow on the mountain.

I believe that a scorpion's sting
will kill a man,
but that his wife will remarry.

I believe that, the older we get,
the weaker the body,
but the stronger the soul.

I believe that if you roll over at night
in an empty bed,
the air consoles you.

I believe that no one is spared
the darkness,
and no one gets all of it.

I believe we all drown eventually
in a sea of our making,
but that the land belongs to someone else.

I believe in destiny.
And I believe in free will.

I believe that, when all
the clocks break,
time goes on without them.

And I believe that whatever
pulls us under,
will do so gently.

so as not to disturb anyone,
so as not to interfere
with what we believe in.

A Marriage by Michael Blumenthal

You are holding up a ceiling
with both arms. It is very heavy,
but you must hold it up, or else
it will fall down on you. Your arms
are tired, terribly tired,
and, as the day goes on, it feels
as if either your arms or the ceiling
will soon collapse.

But then,
unexpectedly,
something wonderful happens:
Someone,
a man or a woman,
walks into the room
and holds their arms up
to the ceiling beside you.

So you finally get
to take down your arms.
You feel the relief of respite,
the blood flowing back
to your fingers and arms.
And when your partner's arms tire,
you hold up your own
to relieve him again.

And it can go on like this
for many years
without the house falling.

No Hurry by Michael Blumenthal

—For C.K. Williams

This morning waiting for the paint on the fence to dry
I realized there was no hurry, no hurry waiting
for the bus to come no hurry for the sun to set
or the moon to rise no hurry, even, to arrive at orgasm,
your own or anyone else's. There was no hurry,
certainly, for the protoplasm of decline to make its way
homewards, no hurry on the divorce decree no hurry
for the new marriage certificate no hurry for the blossoms
on the butterfly bush outside this window to bloom
or the apples to fall no hurry for the ant just now making
its way across this room to get to the other side, though
thousands of its little brethren are impatiently waiting.
There was no hurry, I realized, for these very fingers
to make their way over the keys no hurry for the brave
little homunculus of the day to reach afternoon no hurry
for the wrinkles around my eyes to widen no hurry
for impotence bladder problems mutating cancer cells
no hurry, darling, for anything to become or not become
of us no hurry for the plane to depart no hurry no hurry
no hurry since, sooner or later, everything will arrive
at breath's finish line and we will all be winners,
and all will be still, and everything we had always
been hurrying towards will finally be ours.

Manners by Michael Blumenthal

Just because a man pulls out your chair for you
and takes your coat at an elegant restaurant
is no guarantee that he really loves you. You know this,
and so whether he burps or farts over the dinner
like some sort of Chinese compliment
does not much matter to you, whether he subscribes
to the high sanctimony of the right thing
leaves you unmoved and lonely. Once,
like a Turkish princess, you were feted and dined
by all sorts of mannerly people, in a high castle
on the cliffs of Scotland. Now, so many thank-yous
and sincerelies later, it's the things unsaid,
the warm rudities of late night, that most move you
and you are wild for slurped sounds of the truly decent,
the I-chew-with-my-mouth-open look of the one
you will love forever. Whatever it is that might be said
for the predictable thing, the good manners
you were taught in childhood, it's more and more
the case of the auspicious oddity that excites you now,
the cool flippancy of the one who invents
his own decencies. Darling, I say to you,
fall to the floor all you want, I ain't pulling
chairs out for anyone. But what I'll whisper to you later,
in the orderly dark that comes every night like a good butler,
 will be sweeter than all that, believe me,
something you can write home to mom about
as if I were the man who had sent you a, dozen roses
on Valentine's Day, or smiled in the pretty picture,
or paid you the most beautiful compliment in the world—
only more slovenly, baby, more kind.

Be Kind by Michael Blumenthal

Not merely because Henry James said
there were but four rules of life—
be kind be kind be kind be kind—but
because it's good for the soul, and,
what's more, for others, it may be
that kindness is our best audition
for a worthier world, and, despite
the vagueness  and uncertainty of
its recompense, a bird may yet  wander
into a bush before our very houses,
gratitude may not manifest itself in deeds
entirely equal to our own, still there's
weather arriving from every direction,
the feasts of famine and feasts of plenty
may yet prove to be one,  so why not
allow the little sacrificial squinches and
squigulas to prevail? Why not inundate
the particular world with minute particulars?
Dust's certainly all our fate, so why not
make it the happiest possible dust,
a detritus of blessedness? Surely
the hedgehog, furling and unfurling
into its spiked little ball, knows something
that, with gentle touch and unthreatening
tone, can inure to our benefit, surely the wicked
witches of our childhood have died and,
from where they are buried, a great kindness
has eclipsed their misdeeds. Yes, of course,
in the end so much comes down to privilege
and its various penumbras, but too much
of our unruly animus has already been
wasted on reprisals, too much of the
unblessed air is filled with smoke from
undignified fires. Oh friends, take
whatever kindness you can find
and be profligate in its expenditure:
It will not drain your limited resources,
I assure you, it will not leave you vulnerable
and unfurled, with only your sweet little claws
to defend yourselves, and your wet little noses,
and your eyes to the ground, and your little feet.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest

A Sunflower Seed's Line of Negation by Yang Lian

For Ai Weiwei

unimaginable that Du Fu’s little boat was once
moored on this ceramic river
I don’t know the moonlight     see only the poem’s clarity
attenuated line by line     to a non-person
to the symbols    discussing and avoiding everything
I’m no symbol     a sun dying under the sunflower seed’s hard shell
nor is the sun     snow-white collapsed meat of children
nor have I disappeared     daybreak’s horizon impossibly
forgot that pain     bones like glass sliced by glass
I didn't scream, so must scream at each first light
an earthquake never stands still
no need to suffocate the dead     planting rows of fences to the ends of the earth
handcuffing ever more shameful silence    so     I don’t fear
the young policewoman interrogating my naked body
it was formed by fire     no different to yours
knowing no other way to shatter but a hundred million shatterings within myself
falling into no soil     only into the river that can’t flow
that cares nothing for the yellow flower within the stone     having to go on
to hold back     like a drop of Du Fu’s old tears
refusing to let the poem sink into dead indifferent beauty

London by Yang Lian

reality is part of my nature
spring has accepted the overflowing green of the dead again
streets     accept more funerals which are blacker yet beneath the flowers
red phone boxes in the rain like a warning
time is part of the internal organs bird voices
open every rusting face on the benches
watching night’s eyes a prolonged flying accident
when yet another day is blotted out      London

write out all my madness     lick out all the brown beer’s froth
the bell’s toll in a little bird’s brain vibrates like a gloomy verse unemployed
city is part of the word   the most terrifying part of me
showing my insignificance     accepting
blue mildewed sheepskin slip-cover outside the window
sheep meat’s memory diligently binding
its own death    dying      in the unconvulsing lens
when between two pages of newsprint is a grave     behind the grave is the ocean

Sunlight by Ko Un

It's absolutely inevitable!
So just take a deep breath
and accept this adversity.
But look!
A distinguished visitor deigns to visit
my tiny north-facing cell.
Not the chief making his rounds, no,
but a ray of sunlight as evening falls,
a gleam no bigger than a screwed-up stamp.
A sweetheart fit to go crazy about.
It settles there on the palm of a hand,
warms the toes of a shyly bared foot.
Then as I kneel and, undevoutly,
offer it a dry, parched face to kiss,
in a moment that scrap of sunlight slips away.
After the guest has departed through the bars,
the room feels several times colder and darker.
This military prison special cell
is a photographer's darkroom.
Without any sunlight I laughed like a fool.
One day it was a coffin holding a corpse.
One day it was altogether the sea.
A wonderful thing!
A few people survive here.

Being alive is a sea
     without a single sail in sight.

Indangsu sea, shine dark blue by Ko Un

Indangsu sea, shine dark blue,
come rising as a cloudlike drumbeat.
The waters, the sailors who know the waters, may know
the dark fate of the world beyond
that lies past the path that sometimes appears,
the weeping of children born into this world,
and the sailors may know my daughter's path.
How can the waters exist without the world beyond?
Full-bodied fear
has now become the most yearned-for thing in the world,
and my daughter's whimpering stillness in the lotus bud will be such;
might love be a bright world and my eyes be plunged in utter darkness?
Daughter, already now the waters' own mother,
advance over the waters,
advance over the waters
like the mists that come dropping over the waters.
My daughter, advance and travel through every world.
Shine dark blue, Indangsu. Weep dark blue.

A Smile by Ko Un

Shakyamuni held up a lotus
so Kashyapa smiled.
Not at all.
The lotus smiled
so Kashyapa smiled.

Nowhere was Shakyamuni!

Two Beggars by Ko Un

Two beggars
sharing a meal of the food they've been given

The new moon shines intensely

Stories by Ko Un

There are stories.
There are people telling stories
and people listening to them.

The room is full
of the breath of the stories.

That is enough.

Eight months of winter at minus 40.
A weaned baby froze to death;
the grieving did not last long.

Soon there are stories.
Between prayers and more prayers
between one meal and the next
there are stories.
This kind of state is a perfect state.

The Himalayas by Ko Un

Recollection is short, fantasy long!
A place where I'd never been born,
must never be born—
the Himalayas.

On whose behalf
did I go there?
I went with all ten fingers trembling.

With so many kinds of foolishness left back home,
I gazed up toward a few peaks
brilliant at eight thousand meters, their golden blades piled high.
Before that, and after,
I could not help but be an orphan.

I had but one hope:
to stay as far from the Himalayas as humanly possible,
and from the world of troublesome questions.
Yes, that was it.

Your Pilgrimage by Ko Un

A slower pace, a somewhat slower pace will do.
Of a sudden, should it start to rain,
let yourself get soaked.
An old friend, the rain.

One thing alone is beautiful: setting off.
The world's too vast
to live in a single place,
or three or four.

Walk on and on
until the sun sets,
with your old accomplice,
shadow, late as ever.
If the day clouds over,
go on anyway
regardless.

August 1968 by WH Auden

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach:
The Ogre cannot master Speech.

About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

F

Cast Hexagram:

38 - Thirty-Eight

K'uei / Estrangement

Fire distances itself from its nemesis, the Lake:
No matter how large or diverse the group, the Superior Person remains uniquely himself.

Small accomplishments are possible.

SITUATION ANALYSIS:

You are working at cross-purposes with another.
The distance between you is very wide.
The gap can be closed, however, with no compromise of your integrity.
You are not adversaries in this case -- just two persons addressing individual needs.
Ask yourself: are these needs mutually exclusive?
Is there common ground here?
Must there be one winner and one loser?
Could you become partners in seeking a solution that would allow for two winners?