Archaic Torso of Apollo:

We never knew his head and all the light
that ripened in his fabled eyes. But
his torso still glows like a candelabra,
in which his gazing, turned down low,

holds fast and shines. Otherwise the surge
of the breast could not blind you, nor a smile
run through the slight twist of the loins
toward that center where procreation thrived.

Otherwise this stone would stand deformed and curt
under the shoulders' invisible plunge
and not glisten just like wild beasts' fur;

and not burst forth from all its contours
like a star: for there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

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Beside the maple
stands a dogwood
Beside the dogwood
stands an oak
And beside the oak
stands my wife

- Ko Un,
from Flowers of a Moment

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Etymology: (Anglo-Norman and Middle French mortgage, mort gage (1283 in Old French; also as gage mort (1267); French mort-gage (now arch.)) < mort (mort adj.) + gage (gage n.1), after post-classical Latin mortuum vadium (from 12th cent. in British sources) (mortuum, accusative of mortuus dead (see mort adj.) + vadium pledge (see invadiate v.).))

(from OED.)

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Small Song: Laundry:

Bellied out, aloft, and flush with sun,
like meadow-mist beside the morning river:
how tired we made you!
And how tired we had become.

Now, emptied of our restlessness,
you breathe your own white life.
--And there, like ghosts of meadow-grass,
our shadows shining through.


- Jan Zwicky,
from Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences

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Tea.

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Apple Song:

Red one, how strange
the leavings of desire:
the knife;
the satin ribbons of the skin;
the star chambers of the heart, its eight thoughts
brown as moles.
The small snout of your stem,
stiff with dreaming of that other world.

- Jan Zwicky,
from Thirty-seven Small Songs & Thirteen Silences

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Merlot.

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