Variation on the Word Sleep by Margaret Atwood

I would like to watch you sleeping,
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter
your sleep as its smooth dark wave
slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent
wavering forest of bluegreen leaves
with its watery sun & three moons
towards the cave where you must descend,
towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands
to where your body lies
beside me, and as you enter
it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary

As Real as Life by Ruth Stone

Say to the mild melancholy of regret
That seizes the Sunday afternoon,
I will not let your charm be sullied
By those tears that wet
The first ten years from June.
June was my birthday, likely from then
Until I can remember, Sunday was slow
Like a praying mantis climbing an oak
And tears, like tea, had formal cause to flow.
I will not regret the stereoptic world
Seen through Sunday windows
Baffled by depths that overlapped dismay.
But I will say, I have seen many a photograph, 
As real as life, and I have saved
A clipping about mountaineers who froze

Into the Day by JH Prynne

What swims in the eye
is mortal dread, solar
flare. The ear spins
with sharp cries, there
is shear at the flowline.
Honour thy father,
anguish as the sign
deflects through water,
into port. The shell
crossing is sport,
they are childlike
and their limbs intact.

Love by JH Prynne

Noble in the sound which
marks the pale ease
of their dreams, they ride
the bel canto of our time: the patient en-
circlement of Narcissus &
as he pines I too
am wan with fever,
have fears which set
the vanished child above
reproach. Cry as you
will, take what you
need, the night is young
and limitless our greed.

Dream Song 100: How this woman came by the courage by John Berryman

How this woman came by the courage, how she got
the courage, Henry bemused himself in a frantic hot
night of the eight of July,
where it came from, did once the Lord frown down
upon her ancient cradle thinking 'This one
will do before she die

for two and seventy years of chipped indignities
at least,' and with his thunder clapped a promise?
In that far away town
who looked upon my mother with shame & rage
that any should endure such pilgrimage,
growled Henry sweating, grown

but not grown used to the goodness of this woman
in her great strength, in her hope superhuman,
no, no, not used at all.
I declare a mystery, he mumbled to himself,
of love, and took the bourbon from the shelf
and drank her a tall one, tall.

Futility by Wilfred Owen

Move him into the sun -
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds, -
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved - still warm - too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
- O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

Regarding Wave by Gary Snyder

The voice of the Dharma
       the voice
          now

A shimmering bell
       through all.

Every hill,    still.
Every tree alive. Every leaf.
All the slopes  flow.
       old woods, new seedlings,
       tall grasses plumes.

Dark hollows;  peaks of light.
  wind stirs    the cool side
Each leaf living.
       All the hills.

         The Voice
         is a wife
            to

         

         him still.

two english poems by jorge luis borges

                         I
   
   The useless dawn finds me in a deserted street-
      corner; I have outlived the night.
   Nights are proud waves; darkblue topheavy waves
      laden with all the hues of deep spoil, laden with
      things unlikely and desirable.
   Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and refusals,
      of things half given away, half withheld,
      of joys with a dark hemisphere. Nights act
      that way, I tell you.
   The surge, that night, left me the customary shreds
      and odd ends: some hated friends to chat
      with, music for dreams, and the smoking of
      bitter ashes.  The things my hungry heart
      has no use for.
   The big wave brought you.
   Words, any words, your laughter; and you so lazily
      and incessantly beautiful.  We talked and you
      have forgotten the words.
   The shattering dawn finds me in a deserted street
      of my city.
   Your profile turned away, the sounds that go to
      make your name, the lilt of your laughter:
      these are the illustrious toys you have left me.
   I turn them over in the dawn, I lose them, I find
      them; I tell them to the few stray dogs and
      to the few stray stars of the dawn.
   Your dark rich life ... 
   I must get at you, somehow; I put away those 
      illustrious toys you have left me, I want your
      hidden look, your real smile -- that lonely,
      mocking smile your cool mirror knows.
   
                       II
   
   What can I hold you with?
   I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the
      moon of the jagged suburbs.
   I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked
      long and long at the lonely moon.
   I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts
      that living men have honoured in bronze:
      my father's father killed in the frontier of
      Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,
      bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in
      the hide of a cow; my mother's grandfather
      --just twentyfour-- heading a charge of
      three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on
      vanished horses.
   I offer you whatever insight my books may hold, 
      whatever manliness or humour my life.
   I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never
      been loyal.
   I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved,
      somehow --the central heart that deals not
      in words, traffics not with dreams, and is
      untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.
   I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at
      sunset, years before you were born.
   I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about
      yourself, authentic and surprising news of 
      yourself.
   I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the
      hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you 
      with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat

Through a Glass Darkly by Arthur Hugh Clough

What we, when face to face we see
The Father of our souls, shall be,
John tells us, doth not yet appear;
Ah! did he tell what we are here!

A mind for thoughts to pass into,
A heart for loves to travel through,
Five senses to detect things near,
Is this the whole that we are here?

Rules baffle instincts--instinct rules,
Wise men are bad--and good are fools,
Facts evil--wishes vain appear,
We cannot go, why are we here?

O may we for assurance's sake,
Some arbitrary judgement take,
And wilfully pronounce it clear,
For this or that 'tis we are here?

Or is it right, and will it do,
To pace the sad confusion through,
And say:--It doth not yet appear,
What we shall be, what we are here?

Ah yet, when all is thought and said,
The heart still overrules the head;
Still what we hope we must believe,
And what is given us receive;

Must still believe, for still we hope
That in a world of larger scope,
What here is faithfully begun
Will be completed, not undone.

My child, we still must think, when we
That ampler life together see,
Some true result will yet appear
Of what we are, together, here.

Some Trees by John Ashberry

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

Into The Dusk Charged Air by John Ashberry

Far from the Rappahannock, the silent
Danube moves along toward the sea.
The brown and green Nile rolls slowly
Like the Niagara's welling descent.
Tractors stood on the green banks of the Loire
Near where it joined the Cher.
The St. Lawrence prods among black stones
And mud. But the Arno is all stones.
Wind ruffles the Hudson's
Surface. The Irawaddy is overflowing.
But the yellowish, gray Tiber
Is contained within steep banks. The Isar
Flows too fast to swim in, the Jordan's water
Courses over the flat land. The Allegheny and its boats
Were dark blue. The Moskowa is
Gray boats. The Amstel flows slowly.
Leaves fall into the Connecticut as it passes
Underneath. The Liffey is full of sewage,
Like the Seine, but unlike
The brownish-yellow Dordogne.
Mountains hem in the Colorado
And the Oder is very deep, almost
As deep as the Congo is wide.
The plain banks of the Neva are
Gray. The dark Saône flows silently.
And the Volga is long and wide
As it flows across the brownish land. The Ebro
Is blue, and slow. The Shannon flows
Swiftly between its banks. The Mississippi
Is one of the world's longest rivers, like the Amazon.
It has the Missouri for a tributary.
The Harlem flows amid factories
And buildings. The Nelson is in Canada,
Flowing. Through hard banks the Dubawnt
Forces its way. People walk near the Trent.
The landscape around the Mohawk stretches away;
The Rubicon is merely a brook.
In winter the Main
Surges; the Rhine sings its eternal song.
The Rhône slogs along through whitish banks
And the Rio Grande spins tales of the past.
The Loir bursts its frozen shackles
But the Moldau's wet mud ensnares it.
The East catches the light.
Near the Escaut the noise of factories echoes
And the sinuous Humboldt gurgles wildly.
The Po too flows, and the many-colored
Thames. Into the Atlantic Ocean
Pours the Garonne. Few ships navigate
On the Housatonic, but quite a few can be seen
On the Elbe. For centuries
The Afton has flowed.
If the Rio Negro
Could abandon its song, and the Magdalena
The jungle flowers, the Tagus
Would still flow serenely, and the Ohio
Abrade its slate banks. The tan Euphrates would
Sidle silently across the world. The Yukon
Was choked with ice, but the Susquehanna still pushed
Bravely along. The Dee caught the day's last flares
Like the Pilcomayo's carrion rose.
The Peace offered eternal fragrance
Perhaps, but the Mackenzie churned livid mud
Like tan chalk-marks. Near where
The Brahmaputra slapped swollen dikes
And the Pechora? The São Francisco
Skulks amid gray, rubbery nettles. The Liard's
Reflexes are slow, and the Arkansas erodes
Anthracite hummocks. The Paraná stinks.
The Ottawa is light emerald green
Among grays. Better that the Indus fade
In steaming sands! Let the Brazos
Freeze solid! And the Wabash turn to a leaden
Cinder of ice! The Marañón is too tepid, we must
Find a way to freeze it hard. The Ural
Is freezing slowly in the blasts. The black Yonne
Congeals nicely. And the Petit-Morin
Curls up on the solid earth. The Inn
Does not remember better times, and the Merrimack's
Galvanized. The Ganges is liquid snow by now;
The Vyatka's ice-gray. The once-molten Tennessee s
Curdled. The Japurá is a pack of ice. Gelid
The Columbia's gray loam banks. The Don's merely
A giant icicle. The Niger freezes, slowly.
The interminable Lena plods on
But the Purus' mercurial waters are icy, grim
With cold. The Loing is choked with fragments of ice.
The Weser is frozen, like liquid air.
And so is the Kama. And the beige, thickly flowing
Tocantins. The rivers bask in the cold.
The stern Uruguay chafes its banks,
A mass of ice. The Hooghly is solid
Ice. The Adour is silent, motionless.
The lovely Tigris is nothing but scratchy ice
Like the Yellowstone, with its osier-clustered banks.
The Mekong is beginning to thaw out a little
And the Donets gurgles beneath the
Huge blocks of ice. The Manzanares gushes free.
The Illinois darts through the sunny air again.
But the Dnieper is still ice-bound. Somewhere
The Salado propels irs floes, but the Roosevelt's
Frozen. The Oka is frozen solider
Than the Somme. The Minho slumbers
In winter, nor does the Snake
Remember August. Hilarious, the Canadian
Is solid ice. The Madeira slavers
Across the thawing fields, and the Plata laughs.
The Dvina soaks up the snow. The Sava's
Temperature is above freezing. The Avon
Carols noiselessly. The Drôme presses
Grass banks; the Adige's frozen
Surface is like gray pebbles.

Birds circle the Ticino. In winter
The Var was dark blue, unfrozen. The
Thwaite, cold, is choked with sandy ice;
The Ardèche glistens feebly through the freezing rain.

Song by Allen Ginsberg

The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction

the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.

Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human--
looks out of the heart
burning with purity--
for the burden of life
is love,

but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.

No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love--
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
--cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:

the weight is too heavy

--must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.

The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye--

yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.

Cosmopolitan Greetings by Allen Ginsberg

Stand up against governments, against God.
Stay irresponsible.
Say only what we know & imagine.
Absolutes are Coercion.
Change is absolute.
Ordinary mind includes eternal perceptions.
Observe what’s vivid.
Notice what you notice.
Catch yourself thinking.
Vividness is self-selecting.
If we don’t show anyone, we’re free to write anything.
Remember the future.
Freedom costs little in the U.S.
Asvise only myself.
Don’t drink yourself to death.
Two molecules clanking us against each other require an observer to become
scientific data.
The measuring instrument determines the appearance of the phenomenal
world (after Einstein).
The universe is subjective..
Walt Whitman celebrated Person.
We are observer, measuring instrument, eye, subject, Person.
Universe is Person.
Inside skull is vast as outside skull.
What’s in between thoughts?
Mind is outer space.
What do we say to ourselves in bed at night, making no sound?
“First thought, best thought.”
Mind is shapely, Art is shapely.
Maximum information, minimum number of syllables.
Syntax condensed, sound is solid.
Intense fragments of spoken idiom, best.
Move with rhythm, roll with vowels.
Consonants around vowels make sense.
Savour vowels, appreciate consonants.
Subject is known by what she sees.
Others can measure their vision by what we see.
Candour ends paranoia.

An Eastern Ballad by Allen Ginsberg

I speak of love that comes to mind:
The moon is faithful, although blind;
She moves in thought she cannot speak.
Perfect care has made her bleak.

I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.

From The Acid Diaries by Christopher GrayDuring

During those brief periods when ordinary people seize power, the ego is the first thing out of the window. Not a demonstration, not a riot, not an occupation that does not testify to the end of "isolating, self enclosing activity." Boundaries dissolve beteween people and their world. Read any eyewitness account of historic revolutions, and the first vast surge of collective energy is always characterized by the appearance of a radically different ontology. Expressing it verbally may be difficult, but you can sense it immediatly in the streets. There's exuberance, magic in the air. Time dilates. People give things away. Friends and lovers meet. You do things for the hell of it...

From The Acid Diaries by Christopher Gray

For Toynbee's first point about the breakdown of civilizations was that it always takes place when the civilization is apparently at the height of its power. And it always takes the same form, the ruling elite's psychopathic need to control absolutely everything - on the level of everyday life, every pettifogging little detail; and, expressed on the level of economy and politics, the obssesive need to construct a "universal" or single world state. This, according to Toynbee, inevitably sets the scene for the doom of the dominant civilization.

From The Acid Diaries by Christopher Gray

I stood back to watch the crowds, and as I looked, I felt sick to the gut. These weren't the shabby middle aged people I had assumed. They were all young men and women, in what should have been the prime of their youth - falling in love, wanting to hitch around South America, afire with new ideas - and here they were, shuffling along like tired old people, with the last bit of fight long kicked out of them.

Had they really known that all of them, every single one, was going to die, they would have woken up as though sluiced with a bucket of cold water. They would have told their bosses to shove their stupid jobs. They would have started to talk to each other from their hearts, because nothing could be worse than to go on living like this.

p160

Fragments from a letter by Hunter S Thompson

To give advice to a man who asks what to do with his life implies something very close to egomania. To presume to point a man to the right and ultimate goal — to point with a trembling finger in the RIGHT direction is something only a fool would take upon himself.

...

To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles…”

And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you’ve ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don’t see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect — between the two things I’ve mentioned: the floating or the swimming.

...

The answer — and, in a sense, the tragedy of life — is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid. When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It’s not the fireman who has changed, but you.

...

Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.

So it would seem foolish, would it not, to adjust our lives to the demands of a goal we see from a different angle every day? How could we ever hope to accomplish anything other than galloping neurosis?

The answer, then, must not deal with goals at all, or not with tangible goals, anyway. It would take reams of paper to develop this subject to fulfillment. God only knows how many books have been written on “the meaning of man” and that sort of thing, and god only knows how many people have pondered the subject. (I use the term “god only knows” purely as an expression.)* There’s very little sense in my trying to give it up to you in the proverbial nutshell, because I’m the first to admit my absolute lack of qualifications for reducing the meaning of life to one or two paragraphs.

...

To put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.

But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors—but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal. In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires—including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.

As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal) he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development), and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it (rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks, he has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires).

In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man MUST function in a pattern of his own choosing; for to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life — the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual.

...

A man who procrastinates in his CHOOSING will inevitably have his choice made for him by circumstance. So if you now number yourself among the disenchanted, then you have no choice but to accept things as they are, or to seriously seek something else. But beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life. But you say, “I don’t know where to look; I don’t know what to look for.”

And there’s the crux. Is it worth giving up what I have to look for something better? I don’t know—is it? Who can make that decision but you? But even by DECIDING TO LOOK, you go a long way toward making the choice.

...

I’m not trying to send you out “on the road” in search of Valhalla, but merely pointing out that it is not necessary to accept the choices handed down to you by life as you know it. There is more to it than that — no one HAS to do something he doesn’t want to do for the rest of his life.

http://www . brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/11/04/hunter-s-thomspon-letters-of-note-advice/

from Illuminations by Arthur Rimbaud

“My turn now. The story of one of my insanities.

For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes-- and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.

What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children's books, old operas, silly old songs, the naive rhythms of country rimes.

I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents; I used to believe in every kind of magic.

I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.

I began it as an investigation. I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.”

Archaic Torso of Apollo by Rainer Maria Rilke

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Der Ister by Friedrich Holderlin

Now is the time for fire!
Impatient for the daylight,
We’re on our knees,
Exhausted with waiting.
It’s then, in that silence,
We hear the woods’ strange call.
Meanwhile, we sing from the Indus,
Which comes from far away, and
From the Alpheus, since we’ve
Long desired decorum.
It’s not without dramatic flourish
That one grasps
Straight ahead
What is closest
To reach the other side.
But here we want to build.
Rivers make the land fertile
And allow the foliage to grow.
And if in the summer
Animals gather at a watering place
People will go there, too.

This river is called the Ister.
It lives in beauty. Columns of leaves burn
And stir. They stand in the forest
Supporting each other; above,
A second dimension juts out
From a dome of stones. So I’m
Not surprised that the distantly gleaming river
Made Hercules its guest,
When in search of shadows
He came down from Olympus
And up from the heat of Isthmus.


They were full of courage there,
Which always comes in handy, like cool water
And a path for the spirit to follow.
That’s why the hero preferred
To come to the water’s source, its fragrant yellow banks
Black with fir trees, in whose depths
The hunter likes to roam
At noon and the resinous trees
Moan as they grow.

Yet the river almost seems
To flow backwards, and I
Think it must come
From the East.
Much could
Be said further. But why does
It hang so straight from the mountain? That other river,
The Rhine, has gone away
Sideways. Not for nothing rivers
Flow in dryness. But how? We need a sign,
Nothing more, something plain and simple,
To remind us of sun and moon, so inseparable,
Which go away — day and night also —
And warm each other in heaven.
They give joy to the highest god. For how
Can he descend to them? And like earth’s ancient greenness
They are the children of heaven. But he seems
Too indulgent to me, not freer,
And almost scornful. For when

Day begins in youth,
Where it commences growing,
Another is already there
To further enhance the beauty, and chafes
At the bit like foals. And if he is happy
Distant breezes hear the commotion;
But the rock needs engraving
And the earth needs its furrows;
If not, an endless desolation;
But what a river will do,
Nobody knows.

Alfieri, Epigrams

They find me difficult?
I know it well:
I obligate them to think

from the Divine Comedy

Then it replied: ‘A conscience that is clouded
By its own shame or by that of another,
Will certainly feel that your words are sharp.

But none the less, all lying set aside,
Make clear to everyone the whole vision;
And let them scratch wherever they may itch.

For if your words are objectionable
For the first taste, they will yield nourishment
Afterwards, once they have been digested.

This cry of yours will do as the wind does,
Strike hardest on the summits that are highest;
And that is no small argument of honor.'

Dante, Paradiso, XVII, 124-135.

http://www.notbored.org/censor.html

What I believe by J.G. Ballard

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.

I believe in the forgotten runways of Wake Island, pointing towards the Pacifics of our imaginations.

I believe in the mysterious beauty of Margaret Thatcher, in the arch of her nostrils and the sheen on her lower lip; in the melancholy of wounded Argentine conscripts; in the haunted smiles of filling station personnel; in my dream of Margaret Thatcher caressed by that young Argentine soldier in a forgotten motel watched by a tubercular filling station attendant.

I believe in the beauty of all women, in the treachery of their imaginations, so close to my heart; in the junction of their disenchanted bodies with the enchanted chromium rails of supermarket counters; in their warm tolerance of my perversions.

I believe in the death of tomorrow, in the exhaustion of time, in our search for a new time within the smiles of auto-route waitresses and the tired eyes of air-traffic controllers at out-of-season airports.

I believe in the genital organs of great men and women, in the body postures of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher and Princess Di, in the sweet odors emanating from their lips as they regard the cameras of the entire world.

I believe in madness, in the truth of the inexplicable, in the common sense of stones, in the lunacy of flowers, in the disease stored up for the human race by the Apollo astronauts.

I believe in nothing.

I believe in Max Ernst, Delvaux, Dali, Titian, Goya, Leonardo, Vermeer, Chirico, Magritte, Redon, Duerer, Tanguy, the Facteur Cheval, the Watts Towers, Boecklin, Francis Bacon, and all the invisible artists within the psychiatric institutions of the planet.

I believe in the impossibility of existence, in the humour of mountains, in the absurdity of electromagnetism, in the farce of geometry, in the cruelty of arithmetic, in the murderous intent of logic.

I believe in adolescent women, in their corruption by their own leg stances, in the purity of their disheveled bodies, in the traces of their pudenda left in the bathrooms of shabby motels.

I believe in flight, in the beauty of the wing, and in the beauty of everything that has ever flown, in the stone thrown by a small child that carries with it the wisdom of statesmen and midwives.

I believe in the gentleness of the surgeon's knife, in the limitless geometry of the cinema screen, in the hidden universe within supermarkets, in the loneliness of the sun, in the garrulousness of planets, in the repetitiveness or ourselves, in the inexistence of the universe and the boredom of the atom.

I believe in the light cast by video-recorders in department store windows, in the messianic insights of the radiator grilles of showroom automobiles, in the elegance of the oil stains on the engine nacelles of 747s parked on airport tarmacs.

I believe in the non-existence of the past, in the death of the future, and the infinite possibilities of the present.

I believe in the derangement of the senses: in Rimbaud, William Burroughs, Huysmans, Genet, Celine, Swift, Defoe, Carroll, Coleridge, Kafka.

I believe in the designers of the Pyramids, the Empire State Building, the Berlin Fuehrerbunker, the Wake Island runways.

I believe in the body odors of Princess Di.

I believe in the next five minutes.

I believe in the history of my feet.

I believe in migraines, the boredom of afternoons, the fear of calendars, the treachery of clocks.

I believe in anxiety, psychosis and despair.

I believe in the perversions, in the infatuations with trees, princesses, prime ministers, derelict filling stations (more beautiful than the Taj Mahal), clouds and birds.

I believe in the death of the emotions and the triumph of the imagination.

I believe in Tokyo, Benidorm, La Grande Motte, Wake Island, Eniwetok, Dealey Plaza.

I believe in alcoholism, venereal disease, fever and exhaustion.

I believe in pain.

I believe in despair.

I believe in all children.

I believe in maps, diagrams, codes, chess-games, puzzles, airline timetables, airport indicator signs.

I believe all excuses.

I believe all reasons.

I believe all hallucinations.

I believe all anger.

I believe all mythologies, memories, lies, fantasies, evasions.

I believe in the mystery and melancholy of a hand, in the kindness of trees, in the wisdom of light.

lines from the first Duino Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke

Who, if I cried, would hear me among the angelic
orders? And even if one of them suddenly
pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the
strength of his stronger existence. For beauty's nothing
but the beginning of terror we're still just able to bear
and why we adore it so is because it serenely
disdains to destroy us. Every angel is terrible.

October by Jean Sprackland

Skies, big skies, careening over in the wind

great shoals of cloud pitching and jostling

in their rush to be anywhere other than here

You hesitate on your doorstep, glance up

and something tugs in your chest, rips free like a leaf

and is sucked up and away. Everything’s

finished here: raw-boned sycamores,

fields scalped and sodden. The houses are shut

and dustbins roll in their own filth in the street

So you would take your chances, risk it all…

You stand for a moment with the keys in your hand

Feeling the hard pull of the sky and the moment passing

From the Inferno

You readers, who are of sound mind and memory,
Pay attention to the lessons woven into the fabric
Of these strange poetic lines

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?