out of sight

Not only is this accurate, but I feel like this is also something that would actually happen. Frying balls, in the snow, when suddenly...
A wild wolf appears...
You stare at it for what seems like two hours as it gets a drink of water from the river. It looks up at you and you look into its eyes.
You are no longer in the forest.
You are now a child in your parents kitchen, and all around you strangers are engaged in conversation. It's a party. None of the guests are familiar, so you go looking for your parents to ask them what is happening. You see a man you think is your father, but when he turns around he is just a stranger. You see a woman you think is your mother, but when she turns around she, too, is but another stranger. This happens over and over again, and it fills your mind with confusion.
Finally, you decide to talk to one of the strangers.
"Hello."
"Hello." says the stranger.
"Who are you? What is going on?"
"We are the wolf. We were thirsty. We were just drinking some water. Welcome."
"Welcome? Welcome where?"
"Where? Where indeed!"
"I don't understand?"
"None of us understand, but for perhaps this fleeting moment."
"What do you mean?"
"We are all here, always, all of us. In this moment, we are all experiencing feelings congruent to that of this wolf, here, in the snow, drinking this water from the river. But as this moment passes, some have already started to move on... see them leaving, over there?"
"Yes."
"And others are arriving. Everyone visits, and everyone who stands where you are standing now has a face like yours. Everyone one who stands in my place has a face like mine."
"I, I don't understand."
"We share this hallucination. We each take our turns wearing each others shoes, walking each others paths, even speaking each others words. I, again, will one day be asking these questions to you, just as you are asking them to me. We are the same."
"Oh, um, yeah I know."
You feel an awkward uneasiness wash over you. Although you know these things you were hearing are true, you rush to put up a wall of denial. It is your ego that fears this... truth? What does this mean? Am I not me? No. I am me. I am just dreaming. How did I get here..."
Someone is getting a glass of water from the faucet... you remember the river. You look over to a framed picture on the wall... it is a picture of a wolf! The kitchen walls fade, and the forest outside seems to come in through the windows.
The wolf blinks, turns away, and walks into the forest, out of sight.
Everything fresh in your mind, your ego quickly goes to work rebuilding the wall between your self and the universe.
Was the wolf real? It seemed real. But what about everything else? Of course not! How could it be!
"Did you see that wolf!" says a friend of yours, who is nearby and also tripping balls.
"Yeah. That was amazing."

cast hexagram 33

33 - Thirty-Three

Tun / Retreat

The tranquil Mountain towers overhead, yet remains this side of Heaven:
The Superior Person avoids the petty and superficial by keeping shallow men at a distance, not in anger but with dignity.

Such a retreat sweeps the path clear to Success.
Occupy yourself with minute detail.

SITUATION ANALYSIS:

Retreat in this instance is not a desperate flight in disarray, but a conscious choice to distance yourself from forces that would rob you of your peace.
It is not a surrender, but a regrouping.
Retreat from this conflict is actually an advance toward your own center.
You move toward balance, and thus a much stronger position

When I began reading Marx, I was surprised never to have heard his name mentioned at school. When I began to understand Marx, I was no longer surprised in the least.

TJ Clark in the Foreword to 'Guy Debord' by Anselm Jappe

Political writing of the highest order is rare. Moments at which a particular language is opened to a further range of possibilities - a new tone, a new conception of human purposes, a sharper or wilder rhetorical ascent - in any case happen infrequently. And moments at which this opening depends on the creation of a specifically political voice, rather than an ethical, lyric or epic one, are truly few and far between.

at dusk by Roberto Bolano

No one sends you letters now          Under the lighthouse
at dusk          Lips parted by wind
They're making a revolution in the East         A cat
sleeps in your arms
Sometimes you're incredibly happy

Not Trees by Roberto Bolano

Violence is like poetry, it doesn't correct itself
You can't change the path of a switchblade
nor the image of dusk, forever imperfect

Amidst these trees I've invented
which are not trees
am I.

Clear Morning by Ho Chi Minh

The morning sun
shines over the prison wall,

And drives away the shadows
and miasma of hopelessness.

A life-giving breeze
blows across the earth.

A hundred imprisoned faces
smile once more.

Good Days Coming by Ho Chi Minh

Everything changes, the wheel
of the law turns without pause.

After the rain, good weather.
In the wink of an eye

The universe throws off
its muddy cloths.

For ten thousand miles
the landscape

Spreads out like
a beautiful brocade.

Gentle sunshine.
Light breezes. Smiling flowers,

Hang in the trees, amongst the
sparkling leaves,

All the birds sing at once.
Men and animals rise up reborn.

What could be more natural?
After sorrow comes happiness.

Holzweg

"Wood" is an old name for forest. In the wood there are paths,
mostly overgrown, that come to an abrupt stop where the wood is
untrodden.
They are called Holzwege.
Each goes its separate way, though within the same forest. It often
appears as if one is identical to another. But it only appears so.
Woodcutters and forest keepers know these paths. They know what
it means to be on a Holzweg.

by Po P'u

I've known glory, I've known shame
I keep my mouth shut tight
Who's right? Who's wrong?
I nod my head in silence,
as I ponder poems and histories.
I fold my hands, keep them clean.
I'm as poor as can be,
yet elegant, and free:
the wind freely flowing...

Wine this morning, drunk by noon...
this finite cup is empty.
Some shore is promised to the turning head
I turn and find cold sea.
Dust flies.
Suns set, moons wane:
My friends, white haired, and few.

If wine doesn't get me then poetry must...
spirit wars with spirits, poetry with wine.
All year long I idle with the breeze and moon,
a useless man.
But poems and wine, the music
of the truth within.

guy davenport

"The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all else a difference of imagination. The imagination is like the drunk man who has lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it. It is as intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we need to re-educate our eyes."

Danse Russe by William Carlos Williams

If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees, —
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades, —

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota by James Wright

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Watermelons by Charles Simic

Green Buddhas
On the fruit stand.
We eat the smile
And spit out the teeth.

Santa Fe Sky by Ann Lauterbach

A spare radiance blooms, blooms again, expires.
This is the radical mark
Of an insatiable wish.
Things look like other things, as was said.
Those that are unleashed
Come upon the hot earth
Toward the toward, violently
Unproven. Thrall is a curse,
A woven rival place indissolubly conditioned.
This you may have seen and endured
As it came nearer, threading its term.
But to act would be the vanishing we know:
Ocean in its wholeness, river in its time,
Lake holding the persistent, domestic sky,
Each an episode in the will to be parted.
But to be that, to be weather
In the distance, fallen, dreamed of; also imagined.

Poetry Is A Kind Of Money by Kay Ryan

Poetry is a kind of money
whose value depends on reserves.
It's not the paper it's written on
or its self-announced denomination,
but the bullion, sweated from the earth
and hidden, which preserves its worth.
Nobody knows how this works,
and how can it? Why does something
stacked in some secret bank or cabinet,
some miser's trove, far back, lambent,
and gloated over by its golem, make us
so solemnly convinced of the transaction
when Mandelstam says love, even
in translation?

Mysteries by Terance Winch

All last night I kept speaking in this
archaic language, because I had been reading
Poe and thinking about him. I read "The Murders
in the Rue Morgue" which is supposedly the first
detective story. Who dun it? I wondered.
It turns out an orangutan was the murderer.
It looks to me like the detective story got off
to a pretty ridiculous start. I used to visit
Poe's house in the Bronx. I used to think,
God, Poe must have been a midget. Everything
was so small. Poe died in Baltimore and I can see why.
In Baltimore, all the people are very big and sincere.
During dinner last night, I told Doug and Susan
about "Murders in the Rue Morgue." I said I hadn't
finished it yet, but it looked like the murderer
was going to turn out to be an orangutan, unless
the plot took a surprising new twist. Then Doug
suggested that he and I collaborate
on a series of detective stories in which
the murderer is always an orangutan.

Dream of Rimbaud by Patti Smith

I am a widow, could be charleville could be anywhere,
move behind the plow, the fields, young arthur lurks
about the farmhouse (roche?) the pump the artesian
well, throws green glass alias crystal broken,
gets me in the eye.

I am upstairs, in the bedroom bandaging my wound, he
enters, leans against the four-poster, his ruddy cheeks,
contemptuous air big hands. I find him sexy as hell,
how did this happen he asks casually, too casually.
I lift the bandage, reveal my eye a bloodied mess;
a dream of Poe. he gasps.

I deliver it hard and fast, someone did it. you did it.
he falls prostrate, he weeps he clasps my knees. I grab
his hair, it all but burns my fingers, thick fox fire,
soft yellow hair, yet that unmistakable red tinge,
rubedo. red dazzle, hair of the One.

Oh jesus I desire him. filthy son of a bitch, he licks
my hand. I sober, leave quickly your mother waits, he
rises, he's leaving, but not without the glance, from
those cold blue eyes, that shatters, he who hesitates
is mine, we're on the bed. I have a knife to his smooth
throat. I let it drop, we embrace. I devour his scalp,
lice fat as baby thumbs, lice the skulls caviar.

Oh arthur arthur. we are in Abyssinia Aden, making love
smoking cigarettes, we kiss, but its much more, azure,
blue pool, oil slick lake, sensations telescope, animate,
crystalline gulf, balls of colored glass exploding,
seam of berber tent splitting, openings, open as a cave,
open wider, total surrender.

Riverside Park by Rachel Hadas

I've always loved the autumn. Trees bleed amber,
the sun moves south to sink into the river.
For several of these seasons you were here —
if not precisely this noon, bench, or air,
still in New York, October, and inside
my heart. Our timing's trick
was elegantly simple: although sick,
you had not yet died.

How could I resist the chance to share
(shyly at first; more freely the last year)
fusses, ideas, encounters, daily weather?
So for a space we took life in together
reciprocally, since what came your way
you passed along to me.
Experience doubled and then halved kept giving
itself to both as long as both were living.

I pause to watch the afternoon's red ray
advance another notch. Across the way
a mother tends her toddler, and a pair
of strolling lovers vanish in the glare
flung from the river by the westering sun.
I can hardly claim to be alone.
Nevertheless, of all whom autumn's new
russet brocades are draping, none is you.

The Decipherment of Linear B, John Chadwick

The urge to discover secrets is deeply ingrained in human nature; even the least curious mind is roused by the promise of sharing knowledge withheld from others. Some are fortunate enough to find a job which consists in the solution of mysteries, but most of us are driven to sublimate this urge by the solving of artificial puzzles devised for our entertainment. Detective stories or crossword puzzles cater for the majority; the solution of secret codes may be the pursuit of a few.

from Cold Mountain by Han Shan (Cold Mountain

13.

Han-shan has his critics too:
‘Your poems, there’s nothing in them!’
I think of men of ancient times,
Poor, humble, but not ashamed.
Let him laugh at me and say:
‘It’s all foolishness, your work!’
Let him go on as he is,
All his life lost making money.

Words spoken to P’ei Ti by Wang Wei

How can we break out of the net,
Be free of all this sound and dust,
Swinging a thorn-branch, find the way
Back to Peach Blossom Spring?

From The Mountain by Wang Wei

        Here there are others like me
        Sitting alone in meditation.
        Look out here from the city.
        All you will see is White Clouds.

In Answer by Wang Wei

In these quiet years growing calmer,
Lacking knowledge of the world’s affairs,
I stop worrying how things will turn out.
My quiet mind makes no subtle plans.
Returning to the woods I love
A pine-tree breeze rustles in my robes.
Mountain moonlight fills the lute’s bowl,
Shows up what learning I have left.
If you ask what makes us rich or poor
Hear the Fisherman’s voice float to shore.

Walter Benjamin writes about a conversion with Bertolt Brecht

He thinks that Marx and Engels, had they read "Le Bateau ivre," would have sensed the great historical movement of which it is the expression. They would have clearly recognized that what it describes is not an eccentric poet going for a walk, but the flight, the escape of a man who cannot live any longer inside the barriers of a class which - with the Crimean war, the Mexican adventure - was then beginning to open up even the most exotic lands to mercantile interests.

Some Contributions to the Sociology of Numbers by Robert Dawson

The ones you notice first are the natural  numbers.
Everybody knows their names; they are the anchors,
the stars, the alphas, the reference points. And of course
the rational numbers, who hang out with them,
sit next to them in arithmetic class.
It must be admitted that some are sidekicks,
spear carriers;  11/17  for instance
is never likely to make headlines.
But the Grade Eight teacher makes sure they all fit in.
Then in high school you start to notice the others, the misfits.
They have weird names, refuse to conform,
are the subjects of sinister rumors:
Did you hear about that Pythagorean ritual murder?
Yeah, creepy: something like that happens,
you bet there’s an irrational mixed up in it. You want
to watch yourself around them. One numerator,
one denominator, that’s what I say.

But not all irrational numbers are the same.
Consider  e : poster child for “It Gets Better”.
Awkward and poorly approximated for the first few terms,
but  ¹⁄_n!  gets small so fast
that soon  e  is accepted among the rationals
almost as one of their own. They privately feel
that e ’s exotic air of the transcendental
indicates their own cosmopolitan taste.
Good marks in calculus, outstanding in Theory of Interest.
Ambition:  to get an MBA.

And π :  happy-go-lucky, Whole-Earth-Catalog spirit,
equally at home in Stats or Industrial Arts.
No one can really explain why  π  gets on
so flirtingly well with some denominators,
the sevenths, say, or the hundredandthirteenths.
and not with others. That’s just how things are.
But the fit’s never perfect, and some day you’ll see  π  
leaning against a signpost,  thumb-out by the side of the highway,
living in the moment, destination anywhere,
waiting for the wind to change.

φ , long-haired, dressed in black, with a pentacle pendant,
and ill-fitting T-shirt depicting Stonehenge or the Pyramids.
Talks about sunflowers, crystals, numerology,
doesn’t get on with any fractions at all.
It’s hard to be sure if they avoid  φ  or  φ  them; but every chance
for approximation misses by the largest possible margin.
1 + ¹⁄_{(1 + ¹⁄(1 + ¹⁄(1 + ...)))}    is the loneliest number.

Everything the Power of the World does is done in a circle by Black Elk (translated from Sioux)

Everything the Power of the World does
is done in a circle.  The sky is round,
and I have heard that the earth is round
like a ball, and so are all the stars.
The wind, in its greatest power, whirls.

Fractals by Diana Der-Hovanessian

                             Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare
                                                    --Edna St. Vincent Millay

Euclid alone began to formulate
the relation of circle, plane and sphere
in equations making it quite clear
that symmetry is what we celebrate.

From Treatise on Infinite Series by Jacob Bernoulli

Even as the finite encloses an infinite series
      And in the unlimited limits appear,
So the soul of immensity dwells in minutia
      And in narrowest limits no limits inhere.
What joy to discern the minute in infinity!
      The vast to perceive in the small, what divinity!

How my daddy changed when he gave up teaching for selling insurance by Roseann Lloyd

Once Daddy enthralled his students at SMS --
handsome in his navy blue suit and dusty hands,
chalk clicking out equations lickety-split.
A third-grader, I waited for him every day
in the cool marble hall.  Listened to the rhythm
of the chalk on the board.   Even then I knew
that pure math is an art equal to music, second
only to poetry in the realm of beauty.    

Geometry by Rita Dove

       I prove a theorem and the house expands:
       the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,
       the ceiling floats away with a sigh.

Lines from Enheduanna (2285-2250 BCE

The true woman who possesses exceeding wisdom,
     She consults a tablet of lapis lazuli,
     She gives advice to all lands,
     She measures off the heavens, she places the
               measuring cords on the earth.

Enheduanna (2285-2250 BCE), the earliest woman known to me who was both poet and mathematician

Gravity & Levity by Bin Ramke

This is a bigger world than it was once
it expands an explosion it can't help it it has

nothing to do with us with whether we know or
not whether our theories can be proved

whether or not a mathematician
knew a better class of circles

(he has a name, Taniyama, a Conjecture)
than was ever known before before—

not circles, elliptic curves. Not doughnuts.
Not anything that is nearly, only is, such

a world is hard to imagine, harder to live in,
harder still to leave. A little like love, Dear.

A Prime Rhyme by Kenneth Falconer

If you want to show the primes go on for ever,
There's a trick that Euclid taught us long ago.
Suppose not: then multiply these primes together,
And add one to get a number, call it rho.
Just take a careful look at this big number,
Rho has to have a factor which is prime,
And it can't be one of those you've got already,
So there's your contradiction shown in rhyme.

Altruism by Molly Peacock

What if we got outside ourselves and there  
really was an outside out there, not just  
our insides turned inside out? What if there  
really were a you beyond me, not just  
the waves off my own fire, like those waves off  
the backyard grill you can see the next yard through,  
though not well -- just enough to know that off  
to the right belongs to someone else, not you.  
What if, when we said I love you, there were  
a you to love as there is a yard beyond  
to walk past the grill and get to? To endure  
the endless walk through the self, knowing through a bond  
that has no basis (for ourselves are all we know)  
is altruism: not giving, but coming to know  
someone is there through the wavy vision  
of the self's heat, love become a decision.

Why I Am Not A Buddhist by Molly Peacock

I love desire, the state of want and thought
of how to get; building a kingdom in a soul
requires desire. I love the things I've sought-
you in your beltless bathrobe, tongues of cash that loll
from my billfold- and love what I want: clothes,
houses, redemption. Can a new mauve suit
equal God? Oh no, desire is ranked. To lose
a loved pen is not like losing faith. Acute
desire for nut gateau is driven out by death,
but the cake on its plate has meaning,
even when love is endangered and nothing matters.
For my mother, health; for my sister, bereft,
wholeness. But why is desire suffering?
Because want leaves a world in tatters?
How else but in tatters should a world be?
A columned porch set high above a lake.
Here, take my money. A loved face in agony,
the spirit gone. Here, use my rags of love.

September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the
Just Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass

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 one thing

to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,

a word is elegy to what it signifies.

We talked about it late last night and in the voice

of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone

almost querulous. After a while I understood that,

talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,

pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman

I made love to and I remembered how, holding

her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,

I felt a violent wonder at her presence

like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river

with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,

muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish

called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.

Longing, we say, because desire is full

of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.

But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,

the thing her father said that hurt her, what

she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous

as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.

Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,

saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Two Quotes

The most unfailing herald, companion, or follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. . . . [Poets] measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

- Shelley

All poets adore explosions, thunderstorms, tornadoes, conflagrations, ruins, scenes of spectacular carnage. The poetic imagination is not at all a desirable quality in a statesman. In a war or revolution, a poet may do very well as a guerrilla fighter or a spy, but it is unlikely that he will make a good regular soldier, or, in peacetime, a conscientious member of a parliamentary committee.

- Auden

My Factless Autobiography by Alli Warren

The grammarian chooses a place in the open
air for arguments fiction runs sweet
in my nostrils I inhale
a failing air fleet
four of them for to eat
the milky crab the pudding
proof is found in

I am the Assayer of Weights and Measures
I am what I am because I am not
something else I hold a lily
in my hands it is not gross
As a fabric is a historic surface I am propelled
I touch bone & traffic in salt
like minefields & the people we inhabit

Who but the most despairing among us
will dwell on that point tonight?
Good brother, take me to the place
where I may meet ghosts and protein
Where hiatus does not interrupt
the phrasal unit and International Agencies
in which the State participates
consider a lover a stash

My freedom is represented by my desire
to twiddle beard & make face
at women in their apartment windows
I poke my snout through the underbrush
and keep a stash of guilt I unleash
when a red-face appears
When her hat flies off and out
the convertible I grab my pants
My member is being severed
My stomach is so concave
various kinds of hardships ensue

Dear Exploited and Missing Persons
I don’t want to lose access
to fresh luncheon meat at a fair and low price
I have never seen the star you call the sun
I grasp bills like pebbles
and my brow? abounding grief
I would like to take this opportunity
to dig-out the sack
I has the booze she has the chronic
You heat water to a rolling placebo
till truth telling makes a terror threat
What with the dust and human remains
The ferry accidents the bombs
the fast-drying three feet of concrete
What makes this night different
from all other mauls?

At the dog park in the club
People from the valleys from the uplands
from the highest slopes betroth
This play houses countless characters
Young men will stick you up
Imagine walking around the market
not knowing what the seahorse is for

What Kind Of Times Are These? By Adrienne Rich

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

Praise Song for the Day by Elizabeth Alexander

Each day we go about our business,
walking past each other, catching each other’s
eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is
noise and bramble, thorn and din, each
one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning
a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,
repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,
with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,
with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.
A farmer considers the changing sky.
A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words
spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,
words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark
the will of some one and then others, who said
I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.
We need to find a place where we are safe.
We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.
Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,
who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built
brick by brick the glittering edifices
they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

A Moment Of Happiness by Rumi

A moment of happiness,
you and I sitting on the verandah,
apparently two, but one in soul, you and I.
We feel the flowing water of life here,
you and I, with the garden's beauty
and the birds singing.
The stars will be watching us,
and we will show them
what it is to be a thin crescent moon.
You and I unselfed, will be together,
indifferent to idle speculation, you and I.
The parrots of heaven will be cracking sugar
as we laugh together, you and I.
In one form upon this earth,
and in another form in a timeless sweet land.

Expect Nothing by Alice Miller

Expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.
become a stranger
To need of pity
Or, if compassion be freely
Given out
Take only enough
Stop short of urge to plead
Then purge away the need.

Wish for nothing larger
Than your own small heart
Or greater than a star;
Tame wild disappointment
With caress unmoved and cold
Make of it a parka
For your soul.

Discover the reason why
So tiny human midget
Exists at all
So scared unwise
But expect nothing. Live frugally
On surprise.

Alone Looking At The Mountain by Li Po

All the birds have flown up and gone;
A lonely cloud floats leisurely by.
We never tire of looking at each other -
Only the mountain and I.

A Walk by Rainer Maria Rilke

My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far ahead of the road I have begun.
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has inner light, even from a distance-

and charges us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave...
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.

Rain by Edward Thomas

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

Peaches by Donald Hall

A mouthful of language to swallow:
stretches of beach, sweet clinches,
breaches in walls, pleached branche;
britches hauled over haunches;
hunched leeches, wrenched teachers.
What English can do: ransack
the warmth that chuckles beneath
fuzzed surfaces, smooth velvet
richness, plashy juices.
I beseech to you peach,
clench me into the sweetness
of your reaches

Quiz by Linh Dinh

Invaders invariably call themselves:

a) berserkers
b) marauders
c) frankincense
d) liberators

Our enemies hate us because:

a) we’re sadists
b) we’re hypocrites
c) we shafted them
d) we value freedom

Our friends hate us because:

a) we’re bullies
b) we hate them
c) we’re hypocrites
d) we value freedom

Pushed to the ground and kicked by a gang of soldiers, about to be shot, you can save your life by brandishing:

a) an uzi
b) a crucifix
c) the Constitution
d) a poem

A poem can:

a) start a war
b) stanch a wound
c) titillate the masses
d) shame a nation

Poets are:

a) clowns
b) parasites
c) legislators
d) terrorists

A nation’s standing in the world is determined by:

a) its buying power
b) its military might
c) its cultural heritage
d) God

A country is rich because of:

a) its enlightened population
b) its political system
c) its small stick
d) its geography

A country is poor because of:

a) its ignorant population
b) its political system
c) its small stick
d) its geography

A man’s dignity is determined by:

a) his appearance (skin color, height, etc)
b) his willingness to use violence
c) his command of English
d) his blue passport

Those willing to die for their beliefs are:

a) idealists
b) terrorists
c) suckers
d) insane

Those willing to die for nothing are:

a) principled
b) patriotic
c) insane
d) cowards

Terrorists:

a) abuse language
b) hit and run
c) shock and awe
d) rely on ingenuity

Smart weapons:

a) render hopeless and dormant kinetic objects
b) kill softly
c) save lives
d) slaughter by science

Pain is:

a) payback for evil-doers
b) a common misfortune
c) compelling drama
d) suck it up!

Humiliation is:

a) the ultimate thrill for bored perverts
b) inevitable in an unequal relationship
c) a fear factor
d) sexy and cathartic

The media’s job is:

a) to seduce
b) to spread
c) to sell
d) to drug

The Internet:

a) allows us to be pure minds
b) connects us to distant bodies
c) disconnects us from the nearest minds and bodies
d) improves illiteracy

Pornography is:

a) a lie that exposes the truth
b) a needed breather from civilization
c) class warfare
d) nostalgia for the garden of Eden



Correct answers: c,d,d,b,b,a,b,a,a,c,b,b,b,c,b,d,b,d,c.
—If you scored 14-19, you’re a well adjusted person, a home-owner, with and income of at least $50,000 a year.
—If you scored 8-13, you either rent or live with your parents, never exercise, and consume at least a 6-pack a day.
—if you scored 7 or less, you’re in trouble with the FBI and/or the IRS, cut your own hair, and use public transit as your primary mode of transportation.

Anima Sola by Ezra Pound

I die in the tears of the morning
I kiss the wail of the dead...
Exquisite, alone, untrammeled
I kiss the nameless sign
And the laws of my inmost being
Chant to the nameless shrine.

Rarely, rarely, comest thou by Percy Bysshe Shelley

Rarely, rarely, comest thou,
Spirit of Delight!
Wherefore hast thou left me now
Many a day and night?
Many a weary night and day
'Tis since thou are fled away.

How shall ever one like me
Win thee back again?
With the joyous and the free
Thou wilt scoff at pain.
Spirit false! thou hast forgot
All but those who need thee not.

As a lizard with the shade
Of a trembling leaf,
Thou with sorrow art dismay'd;
Even the sighs of grief
Reproach thee, that thou art not near,
And reproach thou wilt not hear.

Let me set my mournful ditty
To a merry measure;
Thou wilt never come for pity,
Thou wilt come for pleasure;
Pity then will cut away
Those cruel wings, and thou wilt stay.

I love all that thou lovest,
Spirit of Delight!
The fresh Earth in new leaves dress'd,
And the starry night;
Autumn evening, and the morn
When the golden mists are born.

I love snow, and all the forms
Of the radiant frost;
I love waves, and winds, and storms,
Everything almost
Which is Nature's, and may be
Untainted by man's misery.

I love tranquil solitude,
And such society
As is quiet, wise, and good;
Between thee and me
What difference? but thou dost possess
The things I seek, not love them less.

I love Love—though he has wings,
And like light can flee,
But above all other things,
Spirit, I love thee—
Thou art love and life! Oh come,
Make once more my heart thy home.

What is the realm of the five eyes?

What is the realm of the five eyes?

dharma-eye (法眼). The spiritual eye that not only penetrates the true reality of all things but also discriminates all things. Bodhisattvas who have realized the no birth of dharmas ascend to the first ground and acquire the pure dharma-eye, with which they continue to help sentient beings according to their natures and preferences (see five eyes).

five eyes (pañca-cakṣu, 五眼). These are (1) the physical-eye, which a sentient being is born with; (2) the god-eye, which can see anything anywhere; (3) the wisdom-eye, which can see the emptiness of dharmas; (4) the dharma-eye, which can discriminate all dharmas; and (5) the Buddha-eye of omniscience, which includes the preceding four at the highest level emptiness (see three kinds of wisdom-knowledge).

http://www.sutrasmantras.info/glossary.html#eye

The United Kingdom – United States of America Agreement (UKUSA, /juːkuːˈsɑː/ ew-koo-sah)^[1][2] is a multilateral agreement for cooperation in signals intelligence between the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The alliance of intelligence operations is also known as Five Eyes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UKUSA_Agreement

Bright Star’ by John Keats

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

Chanson d’automne’ (‘Autumn Song’) by Paul Verlaine

Les sanglots longs
Des violons
De l’automne
Blessent mon coeur
D’une langueur
Monotone.

Tout suffocant
Et blême, quand
Sonne l’heure,
Je me souviens
Des jours anciens
Et je pleure

Et je m’en vais
Au vent mauvais
Qui m’emporte
Deçà, delà,
Pareil à la
Feuille morte.

.

The long sobs
Of violins
Of autumn
Wound my heart
With a monotonous
Languor.

All suffocating
And pale, when
The hour chimes,
I remember
The old days
And I weep.

And I go off
In the cold wind
Which carries me
Hither, thither,
As a
Dead leaf.

The Bright Field’ by R. S. Thomas

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

‘Their Lonely Betters’ by W.H. Auden

As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.

A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.

Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.

Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.

Winter by Clarissa Aykroyd

Winter
after Rilke

I love the light of winters gone by. They weren’t so carefree,
and we cringed at their hard, bright strength;
we breathed in the cold air of courage
to face them: they crowned us magi of the snows.
And the fire that withstood those winters
was all flame and flow, true fire.
Writing came hard. We couldn’t even feel our fingers.
But we dreamed, we hid memories in our mind palace,
tried to trap them in cages of light…
and they came close, so close, we saw them with a sharpness
not known in summer, we gave them colours out of time.
Inside, a palace painted bright as pain.
Outside, the frugal etchings of the frost.

And the trees, receding past lamplight, at work in their hearts…