Monday, January 25, 2021
“Inside the pear there’s a paradise we will never know, our only hint the sweetness of its taste.” - Comice, Below Cold Mountain
If we have no aptitude or natural taste for geometry this does not mean that our faculty for attention will not be developed by wrestling with a problem or studying a theorem. On the contrary it is almost an advantage. ... Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul. ... Every time that a human being succeeds in making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing his grasp of truth, he acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it, even if his effort produces no visible fruit.
Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” (1942)
https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/weil-reflections-on-the-right-use
"To write a poem you must first create a pen that will write what you want to say. For better or worse, this is the work of a lifetime."
- Jim Harrison
“"What can I but enumerate old themes."[6] yeats
“Our very life depends on everything’s
Recurring till we answer from within.
The thousandth time may prove the charm.”
― Robert Frost
If there is a real desire, if the thing desired is really light, the desire for light produces it. There is a real desire when there is an effort of attention. It is really light that is desired if all other incentives are absent. Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul. Every effort adds a little gold to a treasure no power on earth can take away. -Simone Weil
Sunday, January 03, 2021
Burning the Old Year
Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.
So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.
Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.
Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.
Thursday, June 04, 2009
cinquain
NOVEMBER NIGHT
Listen…
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.
Adelaide Crapsey
Listen…
With faint dry sound,
Like steps of passing ghosts,
The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees
And fall.
Adelaide Crapsey
Shamanism 101
Shamanism 101
Like everyone, I wanted my animal
to be the hawk.
I thought I wanted the strength
to eat the eyes first then tear
into the fuse box of the chest
and soar away.
I needed help because I still
cowered under the shadow of my father,
a man who inspected picture tubes
five out of seven nights,
who woke to breakfast on burnt roast
except the two weeks he’d sleep
on a Jersey beach and throw me
into the gasoline-sheened waves.
I loved him dying indebted
not knowing to what,
thinking his pension would be enough,
released not knowing from what,
gumming at something I was afraid
to get close enough to hear, afraid
of what I was co-signing. So maybe
the elephant. The elephant knows
when one of its own is suffering
up to six miles away. Charges across
the desert cognizant of the futility.
How can I be forgiven when I don’t know
what I need forgiving for? Sometimes
the urges are too extreme: to slap
on the brakes and scream, to bite the haunch
of some passing perfume, so maybe my animal
is the tiger. Or shark.
Or centipede.
But I know I’m smaller than that,
filling notebooks with clumsy versions
of one plaint, one pheromonal call,
clamoring over a crumb that I think
is the world, baffled by the splotch
of one of my own crushed kind,
almost sweet, a sort of tar,
following a trail of one or two molecules,
leaving a trail
of one or two molecules.
Bouquet
Bouquet
When Dean Young Talks About Wine
The worm thrashes when it enters the tequila.
The grape cries out in the wine vat crusher.
But when Dean Young talks about wine, his voice is strangely calm.
Yet it seems that wine is rarely mentioned.
He says, Great first chapter but no plot.
He says, Long runway, short flight.
He says, This one never had a secret.
He says, You can't wear stripes with that.
He squints as if recalling his childhood in France.
He purses his lips and shakes his head at the glass.
Eight-four was a naughty year, he says,
and for a second I worry that California has turned him
into a sushi-eater in a cravat.
Then he says,
This one makes clear the difference
between a thoughtless remark
and an unwarranted intrusion.
Then he says, In this one the pacific last light of afternoon
stains the wings of the seagull pink
at the very edge of the postcard.
But where is the Cabernet of rent checks and asthma medication?
Where is the Burgundy of orthopedic shoes?
Where is the Chablis of skinned knees and jelly sandwiches?
with the aftertaste of cruel Little League coaches?
and the undertone of rusty stationwagon?
His mouth is purple as if from his own ventricle
he had drunk.
He sways like a fishing rod.
When a beast is hurt it roars in incomprehension.
When a bird is hurt it huddles in its nest.
But when a man is hurt,
he makes himself an expert.
Then he stands there with a glass in his hand
staring into nothing
as if he were forming an opinion.
—Tony Hoagland, 2003
Aperture
by Gary Short
From behind the screen door I watch the cat
in the bunchgrass stalking at dusk.
With the pure attention of religion,
he waits for the skitter of a field mouse,
a shiver in an owl's dream.
The cat delivers his limp prey
to the chipped gray paint of the porch.
I step outside, not knowing
if I will punish the cat
or accept the mouse.
At the edge of the porch I kneel and see
the map of red capillaries
in the delicate mouse ear.
I lift it by the tail to toss,
but in the blink of a smug cat's eye
I feel a tug—an escape
back into life.
In the African journals, Livingston tells
of the charging lion that knocked him down.
When he was held in the lion's mouth,
the human body's trance-like response
was to go limp in an ecstatic giving up
that saved. To assume death
to stay alive.
A Confederate soldier at Antietam
played dead when his battalion was overrun.
for a moment he thought he was safe,
but to make sure, the Union infantryman
drove a bayonet into each body on the ground.
When I pick up the mouse
and it jerks from terror-induced sleep,
I feel all that fear
in a small heartbeat.
My panicked fingers let go
and the mouse slips into the brush where it may be
safe for awhile. Though the cat
is all tension now and ready
to pounce again. I shut him in the house,
stand on the porch and watch the first stars
burn holes in the sky.
Dark enlarging around me,
the pupil in a cat's eye.
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