Entrance:
Whoever you are: in the evening step out
of your room, where you know everything;
yours is the last house before the far-off:
whoever you are.
With your eyes, which in their weariness
barely free themselves from the worn-out threshold,
you lift very slowly one black tree
and place it against the sky: slender, alone.
And you have made the world. And it is huge
and like a word which grows ripe in silence.
And as your will seizes on its meaning,
tenderly your eyes let it go...
- Rilke
Wednesday, December 5, 2012
Closing the Cabin:
You can see how it will be:
the stillness in the light,
the vacant squares it makes on the kitchen floor
now the leaves are gone.
The way it gathers the room
into itself: the cups, the empty cuphooks,
the dent in the breadbox --- an eloquence
we'll never manage, language
without tense.
Not ours: we speak
and then our lungs fill up with air again.
We're only passing through.
- Jan Zwicky
Light:
Light's on
now
in three
sided balcony
window mid-
building, a floor
up from street.
Wait.
Watch it.
What light
on drab earth,
place on earth---
Continue?
Where to go so
far away
from here?
Friends?
Forgotten?
Movement?
A hand just
flesh, fingers?
White---
Who threads fantastic tapestry
just for me, for me?
- Robert Creeley
Sound of raindrops falling from eaves
I
and a spider are speechless half the day
- Ko Un
You can see how it will be:
the stillness in the light,
the vacant squares it makes on the kitchen floor
now the leaves are gone.
The way it gathers the room
into itself: the cups, the empty cuphooks,
the dent in the breadbox --- an eloquence
we'll never manage, language
without tense.
Not ours: we speak
and then our lungs fill up with air again.
We're only passing through.
- Jan Zwicky
Light:
Light's on
now
in three
sided balcony
window mid-
building, a floor
up from street.
Wait.
Watch it.
What light
on drab earth,
place on earth---
Continue?
Where to go so
far away
from here?
Friends?
Forgotten?
Movement?
A hand just
flesh, fingers?
White---
Who threads fantastic tapestry
just for me, for me?
- Robert Creeley
Sound of raindrops falling from eaves
I
and a spider are speechless half the day
- Ko Un
Tuesday, December 4, 2012
History
-- after J.S. Bach, Concerto in D Minor, BMV 1052
Someone is running
fingers through their hair.
The fingers
are like fish, they flicker
upstream while the current
purls around their backs
and falls away.
The fish
resemble wind inside a field
of wheat, resemble
solar flares, the fish
are water
that is trying to flow
up itself, the gravity
that hauls and tumbles it
deaf as the grief
inside perfection.
Do not ask.
You are running fingers
through your hair. This
is what you do sometimes
because you cannot put your hands
around your heart.
- Jan Zwicky
-- after J.S. Bach, Concerto in D Minor, BMV 1052
Someone is running
fingers through their hair.
The fingers
are like fish, they flicker
upstream while the current
purls around their backs
and falls away.
The fish
resemble wind inside a field
of wheat, resemble
solar flares, the fish
are water
that is trying to flow
up itself, the gravity
that hauls and tumbles it
deaf as the grief
inside perfection.
Do not ask.
You are running fingers
through your hair. This
is what you do sometimes
because you cannot put your hands
around your heart.
- Jan Zwicky
Monday, December 3, 2012
People
No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.
To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.
And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.
They are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.
But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.
Whom we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures.
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?
Brother of a brother? Friend of friends?
Lover of lover?
We who knew our fathers
in everything, in nothing.
They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret worlds are not regenerated.
And every time again and again
I make my lament against destruction.
- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.
Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.
And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.
To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.
And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.
In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.
They are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.
But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.
Whom we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures.
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?
Brother of a brother? Friend of friends?
Lover of lover?
We who knew our fathers
in everything, in nothing.
They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret worlds are not regenerated.
And every time again and again
I make my lament against destruction.
- Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Saturday, December 1, 2012
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Tuesday, November 27, 2012
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