This Is Just to Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold


~William Carlos Williams

Never Let Me Go

"I was thinking," I said, "about back then, at Hailsham, when you used to go bonkers like that, and we couldn't understand it. We couldn't understand how you could ever get like that. And I was just having this idea, just a thought really. I was thinking maybe the reason you used to get like that was because at some level you always knew."
Tommy thought about this, then shook his head. "Don't think so, Kath. No, it was always just me. Me being an idiot. That's all it ever was." Then after a moment, he did a small laugh and said: "But that's a funny idea. Maybe I did know, somewhere deep down. Something the rest of you didn't."

~ Kazuo Ishiguro

November 1968

Stripped
you're beginning to float free
up through the smoke of brushfires
and incinerators
the unleafed branches won't hold you
nor the radar aerials

You're what the autumn knew would happen
after the last collapse
of primary color
once the last absolutes were torn to pieces
you could begin

How you broke open, what sheathed you
until this moment
I know nothing about it
my ignorance of you amazes me
now that I watch you
starting to give yourself away
to the wind


~ Adrienne Rich

The Stranger

With him gone, I was able to calm down again. I was exhausted and threw myself on my bunk. I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up with the stars in my face. Sounds of the countryside were drifting in. Smells of night, earth, and salt air were cooling my temples. The wondrous peace of that sleeping summer flowed through me like a tide. Then, in the dark hour before dawn, sirens blasted. They were announcing departures for a world that now and forever meant nothing to me. For the first time in a long time I thought about Maman. I felt as if I understood why at the end of her life she had taken a "fiance," why she had played at beginning again. Even there, in that home where lives were fading out, evening was a kind of wistful respite. So close to death, Maman must have felt free then and ready to live it all again. Nobody, nobody had the right to cry over her. And I felt ready to live it all again too. As if that blind rage had washed me clean, ride me of hope; for the first time, in that night alive with signs and stars, I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world. Finding it so much like myself-so like a brother, really-I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.


~Albert Camus

L'amoureuse

Elle est debour sur mes paupières
Et ses cheveux sont dans les miens,
Elle a la forme de mes mains,
Elle a la couleur de mes yeux,
Elle s'engloutit dan mon ombre
Comme une pierre sur le ciel.

Elle a toujours les yeux ouverts
Et ne me laisse pas dormir.
Ses rêves en pleine lumière
Font s'évaporer les soleils,
Me font rire, pleurer et rire,
Parler sans avoir rien à dire

(tr. by Samuel Beckett)

She is standing on my lids
And her hair is in my hair
She has the colour of my eye
She has the body of my hand
In my shade she is engulfed
As a stone against the sky

She will never close her eyes
And she does not let me sleep
And her dreams in the bright day
Make the suns evaporate
And me laugh cry and laugh
Speak when I have nothing to say

~ Paul Eluard

The Picture of Dorian Gray

"it is an interesting question," said Lord Henry, who found an exquisite pleasure in playing on the lad's egotism-"an extremely interesting question. I fancy that the true explanation is this. It often happens that the real tragedies of life occur in such an inartistic manner that they hurt us by their crude violence, their absolute incoherence, their absurd want of meaning, their entire lack of style. They affect us just as vulgarity affects us. They give us an impression of sheer brute force, and we revolt against that. Sometimes, however, a tragedy that possesses artistic elements of beauty crosses our lives. If these elements of beauty are real, the whole thing simply appeals to our sense of dramatic effect. Suddenly we find that we are no longer the actors, but the spectators of the play. Or rather we are both. We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthralls us. In the present case, what is it that has really happened? Some one has killed herself for love of you. I wish I ever had such an experience. It would have made me in love with love for the rest of my life. The people who have adored me-there have not been very many, but there have been some-have always insisted on living on, long after I had ceased to care for them, or they care for me. They have become stout and tedious, and when I meet them they go in at once for reminiscences. That awful memory of that woman! What a fearful thing it is! And what an utter intellectual stagnation it reveals! One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.


~Oscar Wilde

XIII (Dedications)

I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains' enormous spaces around you.

I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running
up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.

I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in the waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.

I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
who count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.

I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.

I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which ones they are.

I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.

I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.




~ Adrienne Rich

Eros, the Bittersweet

Aidos ('shamefastness') is a sort of voltage of decorum discharged between two people approaching one another for the crisis of human contact, an instinctive and mutual sensitivity to the boundary between them. It is the shame suitably felt by a suppliant at the hearth, a guest before his host, youth making way for old age, as well as a shared shyness that radiates between lover and beloved. The proverbial residence of aidos upon sensitive eyelids is a way of saying that aidos exploits the power of the glance by withholding it, and also that one must watch one's feet to avoid the misstep called hybris. In erotic contexts aidos can demarcate like a third presence, as in a fragment of Sappho that records the overture of a man to a woman:

I want to say something to you, but aidos prevents me.

The static electricity of erotic "shame" is a very discreet way of marking that two are not one.


~ Anne Carson

II

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming:
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,
you've been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:
our friend the poet comes into my room
where I've been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake. You've kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone...
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.


~ Adrienne Rich

The Sensible Thing

All the time in the world-his life and hers. But for an instant as he kissed her he knew that though he search through eternity he could never recapture those lost April hours. He might press her close now till the muscles knotted in his arms-she was something desirable and rare that he had fought for and made his own-but never again an intangible whisper in the dusk, or on the breeze of the night...
Well, let it pass, he thought; April is over, April is over. There are all kinds of love in this world, but never the same love twice.


~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

Hysteria

As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved
in her laughter and being a part of it, until her teeth
were only accidental stars with a talent for
squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled
at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the
dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of
unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling
hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white
checked cloth over the rusty green iron table,
saying: 'If the lady and gentleman wish to take
her tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman
wish to take their tea in the garden...' I decided
that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped,
some of the fragments of the afternoon might be
collected, and I concentrated my attention with
careful subtlety to this end.


~ T.S. Eliot

Variations on an Idea of Pascal

Since what we see in the sky, and what we find in the depths of our hearts are both equally removed from our actions, with the one shining far above our undertakings, and the other existing far beneath our expressions, a kind of relationship is formed between the thought we give to the most distant things and our most intimate introspections. They seem to be extremes of our expectation which echo one another and resemble each other in hoping for some decisive event in the heavens or in the heart.
To this galaxy of stars which is stupendous to our eyes, the depths of our being opposes a dismayed feeling of being itself, of being unique,-and, moreover of being alone. I am all, and incomplete. I am all, and a part.
The darkness which surrounds us completely bares our soul.


~ Paul Valery

At the Window

I have not always had this certainty, this pessimism which reassures the best among
us. There was
a time when my friends laughed at me. I was not the master of my words. A certain
indifference, I
have not always known well what I wanted to say, but most often it was because I had
nothing to
say. The necessity of speaking and the desire not to be heard. My life hanging only by
a thread.

There was a time when I seemed to understand nothing. My chains floated on the
water.

All my desires are born of my dreams. And I have proven my love with words. To what
fantastic
creatures have I entrusted myself, in what dolorous and ravishing world had my
imagination enclosed me? I am sure of having been loved in the most mysterious domains, my
own. The
language of my love does not belong to human language, my human body does not
touch the flesh
of my love. My amorous imagination has always been constant and high enough so
that nothing
could attempt to convince me of error.


~ Paul Eluard

Popular Music from Vittula

Gradually my body filled more and more of the cramped space. Several years must have passed. The damp given off my body had started the iron rusting, and I had flakes of rust in my tousled hair. I could no longer move up and down, only sway side to side like a duck. If the doors were to open now, the hole would be too small for me to climb out anyway.
Eventually it became almost unbearable. I couldn't even move from side to side any more. My head was jammed in between my knees. There was no room for my shoulders to grow any broader.
For several weeks I was convinced it was all over.
In the end everything came to a full stop. I occupied the whole of the space. There was no room to breathe properly any more, all I could manage was a series of short gasps. But I kept growing even so.
Then it happened one night. A faint cracking noise. Like when a pocket mirror breaks. A brief pause, then a slow crunching noise from behind me. When I tensed my muscles and pressed backward, the wall gave way. Bulged out, then burst open in a cloud of splinters, and I shot out into the world.
Naked, newly born, I crawled through the rubbish. Stood up on shaky legs and supported myself against a bookcase. To my surprise, I noticed that the whole world had shrunk. No, it was me who'd doubled in size. I'd sprouted pubic hair. I'd grown up.

~ Mikael Niemi

Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.


~ Dylan Thomas

Wuthering Heights

'You suppose she has nearly forgotten me?' he said. 'Oh, Nelly! you know she has not! You know as well as I do, that for every thought she spends on Linton, she spends a thousand on me! At a most miserable period of my life, I had a notion of the kind: it haunted me on my return to the neighborhood last summer; but only her own assurance could make me admit the horrible idea again. And then, Linton would be nothing, nor Hindley, nor all the dreams ever I dreamt. Two words would comprehend my future--death and hell: existence, after losing her, would be hell. Yet I was a fool to fancy for a moment that she valued Edgar Linton's attachment more than mine. If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn't love as much in eighty years as I could in a day. And Catherine has a heart as deep as I have: the sea could be as readily contained in that horse-trough, as her whole affection be mononpolized by him! Tush! He is scarcely a degree dearer to her than her dog, or her horse. It is not in him to be loved like me: how can she love in him what he has not?


~ Emily Bronte

Three Interpretations of Basho

Ah, summer grasses!
All that remains
Of the warriors dreams.

~ R.H. Blyth

Summer grasses
all that remains
of soldiers dreams.

~ Stryck

Here where a thousand
captains swore grand conquest
Tall grasses their monument.

~ Beilenson

Almost Transparent Blue

Kill me quick, kill me quick! I touched her red-striped neck.
Then one side of the sky lit up.
For an instant the blue-white flash made everything transparent. Lilly's body and my arms and the Base and the mountains and the cloudy sky were transparent. And then I discovered a single curved line running through the transparency there. It had a shape I'd never seen before, a white curving, a white curving that made splendid arcs.
Ryu, you know you're a baby? You're just a baby after all.
I took my hand from Lilly's neck, and scooped the white froth from her mouth with my tongue. She took off my clothes and embraced me.
Oil flowing from somewhere separated around our bodies; it was colored like a rainbow.


~ Ryu Murakami

Dreamed for Winter

In the winter, we shall travel in a little pink railway carriage
With blue cushions.
We shall be comfortable. A nest of mad kisses lies in wait
In each soft corner.

You will close your eyes, so as not to see, through the glass,
The evening shadows pulling faces.
Those snarling monsters, a population
Of black devils and black wolves.

Then you'll feel your cheek scratched...
A little kiss, like a crazy spider,
Will run round your neck...

And you'll say to me: "Find it!" bending your head
And we'll take a long time to find that creature
Which travels a lot...


~ Arthur Rimbaud

Tropic of Cancer

Today I awoke from a sound sleep with curses of joy on my lips, with gibberish on my tongue, repeating to myself like a litany-"Fay ce que vouldras!...fay ce que vouldras!" Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy. So much crowds into my head when I say this to myself: images, gay ones, terrible ones, maddening ones, the wolf and the goat, the spider, the crab, the syphilis with her wings outstretched and the door of the womb always on the latch, always open, ready like the tomb. Lust, crime, holiness: the lives of my adored ones, the failures of my adored ones, the words they left behind them, the words they left unfinished; the good they dragged after them and the evil, the sorrow, the discord, the rancor, the strife they created. But above all, the ecstasy!


~ Henry Miller

To Elsie

The pure products of America
go crazy--
mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of
Jersey
with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
old names
and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken
to railroading
out of sheer lust of adventure--

and young slatterns, bathed
in filth
from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night
with gauds
from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them
character
but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags-succumbing without
emotion
save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry
or viburnum-
which they cannot express--

Unless it be that marriage
perhaps
with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate
so hemmed round
with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an
agent--
reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in
some hard-pressed
house in the suburbs--

some doctor's family, some Elsie--
a voluptuous water
expressing with broken

brain the truth about us--
her great
ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap
jewelry
and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet
were
an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners
destined
to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains
after deer
going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September
Somehow
it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that
something
is given off

No one
to witness
and adjust, no one to drive the car


~ William Carlos Williams

Tender is the Night

But Dick Diver-he was all complete there. Silently she admired him. His complexion was reddish and weather-burned, so was his short hair-a light growth of it rolled down his arms and hands. His eyes were a bright, hard blue. His nose was somewhat pointed and there was never any doubt at whom he was looking or talking-and this is a flattering attention, for who looks at us?-glances fall upon us, curious or disinterested, nothing more. His voice, with some faint Irish melody running through it, wooed the world, yet she felt the layer of hardness in him, of self-control and of self-discipline, her own virtues. Oh, she chose him, and Nicole, lifting her head saw her choose him, heard the little sigh at the fact that he was already possessed.


~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Light In The Moon

A light in the moon the only light is on Sunday. What was the sensible decision. The sensible decision was that notwithstanding many declarations and more music, not even withstanding the choice and a torch and a collection, notwithstanding the celebrating hat and a vacation and even more noise than cutting, notwithstanding Europe and Asia and being overbearing, not even withstanding an elephant and a strict occasion, not even withstanding more cultivation and some seasoning, not even with drowning and with the ocean being encircling, not even with more likeness and any cloud, not even with terrific sacrifice of pedestrianism and a special resolution, not even more likely to be pleasing. The care with which the rain is wrong and the green is wrong and the white is wrong, the care with which there is a chair and plenty of breathing. The care with which there is incredible justice and likeness, all this makes a magnificent asparagus, and also a fountain.

1914


~ Gertrude Stein

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

I always say that you cannot tell what a picture really is or what an object really is until you dust it every day and you cannot tell what a book is until you type it or proof-read it. It then does something to you that only reading never can do. A good many years later Jane Heap said that she had never appreciated the quality of Gertrude Stein's work until she proof-read it.
When the Making of Americans was finished, Gertrude Stein began another which also was to be long and which she called A Long Gay Book but it did not turn out to be long, neither that nor one begun at the same time Many Many Women because they were both interrupted by portrait writing. This is how portrait writing began.

1907-1914


~ Gertrude Stein

Fred Had Watched a Lot of Kung Fu Episodes

so when the policeman asked
to see his driver's license, he said,
Does the wind need permission

from the hedgehog to blow?
which resulted in a search of his car
which miraculously yielded nothing

since Fred had swallowed all the mescaline already
and was just beginning to fall in love
with the busy caterpillar eyebrows
of the officer in question.

In those days we could identify
the fingerprints on a guitar string
by the third note of the song
broadcast from the window of a passing car,

but we couldn't tell the difference
between a personal disaster
and "having an experience,"

so Fred thought being locked up for the night
was kind of fun,
with the graffiti on the drunk-tank wall
chattering in Mandarin
and the sentient cockroaches coming out to visit
in triplicate.

Back then it wasn't a question of pleasure or pain,
it wasn't a question of getting to the top
then trying not to fall at all cost.

It was a question of staying tuned in,
one episode at a time,
said Fred to himself

as he walked home the next morning
under the spreading lotus trees on Walnut Street
feeling Oriental.


~ Tony Hoagland

The Water-Method Man

I had a rare thesis topic, I confess. My thesis was going to be an original translation of Akthelt and Gunnel, a ballad in Old Low Norse; in fact, it was going to be the only translation. Old Low Norse is not well known. It's referred to, scornfully, in some some satirical poems in Old East Norse and Old West Norse. Old East Norse is a dead language, North Germanic, which grew into Icelandic and Faroese. Old West Norse is also dead, and also North Germanic. It grew into Swedish and Danish. Norwegian evolved out of something between Old East Norse and Old West Norse. But the deadest of them all, old Old Low Norse, came to nothing. In fact, it's a crude dialect that only one thing ever was actually written in it: Akthelt and Gunnel.

~ John Irving

Words

Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes travelling
Off from the centre like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road -

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.


~ Sylvia Plath

The Journals of Sylvia Plath

So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down. I went to the bronze boy whom I love, partly because no one really cares for him, and brushed a clot of snow from his delicate smiling face. He stood there in the moonlight, dark, with snow etching his limbs in white, in the semicircle of the privet hedge, bearing his undulant dolphin, balancing on one dimpled foot.

Cambridge 1955-1957

~ Sylvia Plath

A Certain Slant of Sunlight

In Africa the wine is cheap, and it is
on St. Mark's Place too, beneath a white moon.
I'll go there tomorrow, dark bulk hooded
against what is hurled down at me in my no hat
which is weather: the tall pretty girl in the print dress
under the fur collar of her cloth coat will be standing
by the wire fence where the wild flowers grow not too tall
her eyes will be deep brown and her hair styled 1941 American
will be too; but
I'll be shattered by then
But now I'm not and can also picture white clouds
impossibly high in blue sky over small boy heartbroken
to be dressed in black knickers, black coat, white shirt,
buster-brown collar, flowing black bow-tie
her hand lightly fallen on his shoulder, faded sunlight falling
across the picture, mother & son, 33 & 7, First Communion Day, 1941--
I'll go out for a drink with one of my demons tonight
they are dry in Colorado 1980 spring snow.


~ Ted Berrigan

Lolita

Annabel was, like the writer, of mixed parentage: half-English, half-Dutch, in her case. I remember her features far less distinctly today than I did a few years ago, before I knew Lolita. There are two kinds of visual memory: one when you skillfully recreate an image in the laboratory of your mind, with your eyes open (and then I see Annabel in such general terms as: "honey-colored skin," "thin arms," "brown bobbed hair," "long lashes," "big bright mouth"); and the other when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face, a little ghost in natural colors (and this is how I see Lolita).

~ Vladimir Nabokov

from A Coney Island of the Mind

What could she say to the foolybear
and what could she say to brother
and what could she say
to the cat with future feet
and what could she say to mother
after that time that she lay lush
among the lolly flowers
on that hot riverbank
where ferns fell away in the broken air
of the breath of her lover
and birds went mad
and threw themselves from trees
to taste still hot upon the ground
the spilled sperm seed


~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

from Letters to a Young Poet

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation. That is why young people, who are beginners in everything, are not yet capable of love: it is something they must learn. With their whole being, with all their forces, gatherd around their solitary, anxious, upward-beating heart, they must learn to love. But learning-time is always a long, secluded time, and therefore loving, for a long time ahead and far on into life, is-: solitude, a heightened and deepened kind of aloneness for the person who loves. Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent-?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances. Only in this sense, as the task of working on themselves ("to hearken and to hammer day and night"), may young people use the love that is given to them. Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

My Sad Self

To Frank O'Hara

Sometimes when my eyes are red
I go up on top of the RCA Building
and gaze at the world, Manhattan-
my buildings, streets I've done feats in,
lofts, beds, coldwater flats
-on Fifth Ave below which I also bear in mind,
its ant cars, little yellow taxis, men
walking the size of specks of wool-
Panorama of the bridges, sunrise over Brooklyn machine,
sun go down over New Jersey where I was born
& Paterson where I played with ants-
my later loves on 15th Street,
my greater loves of Lower East Side,
my once fabulous amours in the Bronx
faraway-
paths crossing in these hidden streets,
my history summed up, my absences
and ecstasies in Harlem-
-sun shining down on all I own
in one eyeblink to the horizon
in my last eternity-
matter is water.

Sad,
I take the elevator and go
down, pondering,
and walk on the pavements staring into all man's
plateglass, faces,
questioning after who loves,
and stop, bemused
in front of an automobile shopwindow
standing lost in calm thought,
traffic moving up & down 5th Avenue blocks behind me
waiting for a moment when...

Time to go home & cook supper & listen to
the romantic war news on the radio
...all movement stops
& I walk in the timeless sadness of existence,
tenderness flowing thru the buildings,
my fingertips touching reality's face,
my own face streaked with tears in the mirror
of some window-at dusk-
where I have no desire-
for bonbons-or to own the dresses or Japanese
lampshades of intellection-

Confused by the spectacle around me,
Man struggling up the street
with packages, newspapers,
ties, beautiful suits
toward his desire
Man, woman, streaming over the pavements
red lights clocking hurried watches &
movements at the curb-

And all these streets leading
so crosswise, honking, lengthily,
by avenues
stalked by high buildings or crusted into slums
thru such halting traffic
screaming cars and engines

so painfully to this
countryside, this graveyard
this stillness
on deathbed or mountain
once seen
never regained or desired
in the mind to come
where all Manhattan that I've seen must disappear.


New York, October 1958

~ Allen Ginsberg

Everything That Rises Must Converge

The vision of the two hats, identical, broke upon him with the radiance of a brilliant surprise. His face was suddenly lit with joy. He could not believe that Fate had thrust upon his mother such a lesson. He gave a loud chuckle so that she would look at him and see that he saw. She turned her eyes on him slowly. The blue in them seemed to have turned a bruised purple. For a moment he had an uncomfortable sense of her innocence, but it lasted only a second before principle rescued him. Justice entitled him to laugh. His grin hardened until it said to her as plainly as if he were saying aloud: Your punishment exactly fits your pettiness. This should teach you a permanent lesson.

~ Flannery O'Connor

from A Coney Island of the Mind

Don't let that horse

eat that violin

cried Chagall's mother

But he

kept right on

painting

And became famous

And kept on painting

The Horse With Violin in Mouth

And when he finally finished it
he jumped up upon the horse
and rode way
waving the violin

And then with a low bow gave it
to the first naked nude he ran across

And there were no strings
attached

~Lawrence Ferlinghetti

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

The cheapest way to travel, and the way to travel the furthest in the shortest distance, is to go afoot, carrying a dipper, a spoon, and a fish-line, some Indian meal, some salt, and some sugar. When you come to a brook or pond, you can catch fish and cook them; or you can boil a hasty-pudding; or you can buy a loaf of bread at a farmer's house for fourpence, moisten it in the next brook that crosses the road, and dip it into your sugar-this alone will last you a whole day-or, if you are accustomed to heartier living, you can buy a quart of milk for two cents, crumb your bread or cold pudding into it, and eat it with your own spoon out of your own dish. Any one of these things I mean, not all together. I have traveled thus some hundreds of miles without taking any meal in a house, sleeping on the ground when convenient, and found it cheaper, and in many respects more profitable, than staying at home. So that some have inquired why it would not be best to travel always. But I never thought of traveling simply as a means of getting a livelihood....The traveler must be born again on the the road, and earn a passport from the elements, the principal powers that be for him.

~ Henry David Thoreau

It Would

it would be that
but only if I knew how
again
Could something like
that get lost? no only
a little a little lost

but if only I remember
how I mean she or I
oh a freight train goes by
& they always do & did
do
I mean a real one too
that I'm not on & am it
very seriously

in this serious love world
that one
where something oddly music
will pass through your
night
and it will be me
sweet me

~ Alice Notley

Wants, from Enormous Changes at the Last Minute

I saw my ex-husband in the street. I was sitting on the steps of the new library.
Hello, my life, I said. We had once been married for twenty-seven years, so I felt justified.
He said, What? What life? No life of mine.
I said, O.K. I don't argue when there's real disagreement. I got up and went into the library to see how much I owed them.
The librarian said $32 even and you've owed it for eighteen years. I didn't deny anything. Because I don't understand how time passes. I have had those books. I have often thought of them. The library is only two blocks away.

~ Grace Paley

from W {Viva}

if there are any heavens my mother will(all by herself)have
one. It will not be a pansy heaven nor
a fragile heaven of lilies-of-the-valley but
it will be a heaven of blackred roses

my father will be(deep like a rose
tall like a rose)

standing near my

(swaying over her
silent)
with eyes which are really petals and see

nothing with the face of a poet really which
is a flower and not a face with
hands
which whisper
This is my beloved

(suddenly in sunlight

he will bow,

& the whole garden will bow)


~ e e cummings

The Road

Rich dreams now which he was loathe to wake from. Things no longer known in the world. The cold drove him forth to mend the fire. Memory of her crossing the lawn toward the house in the early morning in a thin rose gown that clung to her breasts. He thought each memory recalled must do violence to its origins. As in a party game. Say the word and pass it on. So be sparing. What you alter in the remembering has yet a reality, known or not.

~ Cormac McCarthy

The Fascination of What's Difficult

The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

~ W.B. Yeats

The Dead

She was walking on before him so lightly and so erect that he longed to run after her noiselessly, catch her by the shoulders and say something foolish and affectionate in her ear. She seemed to him so frail that he longed to defend her against something and then to be alone with her. Moments of their secret life together burst like stars upon his memory. A heliotrope envelope was lying beside his breakfast-cup and he was caressing it with his hand. Birds were twittering in the ivy and the sunny web of the curtain was shimmering along the floor: he could not eat for happiness. They were standing on the crowded platform and he was placing a ticket inside the warm palm of her glove. He was standing with her in the cold, looking in through a grated window at a man making bottles in a roaring furnace. It was very cold. Her face, fragrant in the cold air, was quite close to his; and suddenly he called out to the man at the furnace:
"Is the fire hot, sir?"

~ James Joyce

Poetry

And it was at that age...
Poetry arrived in search of me.
I don't know, I don't know where it came from,
from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices,
they were not words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of the night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say,
my mouth had no way with names
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering that fire
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance,
pure nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw the heavens unfastened and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations
shadow perforated,
riddled with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry void,
likeness, image of mystery,
I felt myself a pure part of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke free on the open sky.

~ Pablo Neruda

Light on Life

Many people focus on the past or the future to avoid experiencing the present, often because the present is painful or difficult to endure. In yoga class, many students think that they must simply "grit their teeth and bear it" until the teacher tells them they can come out of the asana. This is seeing yoga as calisthenics and is the wrong attitude. The pain is there as a teacher, because life is filled with pain. In the struggle alone, there is knowledge. Only when there is pain will you see the light. Pain is your guru. As we experience pleasures happily, we must also learn not to lose our happiness when pain comes. As we see good in pleasure, we should learn to see good in pain. Learn to find comfort even in discomfort. We must not try to run from the pain but to move through and beyond it. This is the cultivation of tenacity and perseverance, which is a spiritual attitude toward yoga. This is also the spiritual attitude toward life.

~ B.K.S. Iyengar

Preludes

I

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in the passageways.
Six o'clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And the the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited:
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed's edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o'clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

~ T.S. Eliot

Jesus' Son

At one of the stops down the line there was a problem with the doors. We were delayed, those of us who had destinations, anyway. The train waited and waited in a troubling sleep. Then it hummed softly. You can tell it's going to move before it moves.
A guy stepped in just as the doors closed. The train had waited for him all this time, not a second longer than his arrival, not even half a second, and then it broke the mysterious crystal of its inertia. We'd picked him up and now we were moving. He sat down near the front of the car, completely unaware of his importance. With what kind of miserable or happy fate did he have an appointment across the river?
I decided to follow him.
Several stops later he left the train and went down into a section of squat, repetitive brownstone buildings.
He walked with a bounce, his shoulders looped and his chin scooping forward rhythmically. He didn't look right or left. I suppose he'd walked this route twelve thousand times. He didn't sense or feel me following half a block behind him.
It was a Polish neighborhood somewhere or other. The Polish neighborhoods have that snow. They have that fruit with the light on it, they have that music you can't find. We ended up in a laundromat, where the guy took off his shirt and put it in a washer. He bought some coffee in a paper cup out of a coin machine.
He read the notices on the wall and watched his machine tremble, walking around the place with only his sharkskin sports jacket on. His chest was narrow and white and hair sprouted from around the small nipples.
There were a couple other men in the laundromat. He chatted with them a little. I could hear one of them say, "The cops wanted to talk to Benny."
"How come? What'd he do?"
"He had a hood up. They were looking for a guy with a hood up."
"What he'd do?"
"Nut'n. Nut'n. Some guy got murdered last night."
And now the man I was following walked right up to me. "You were on the El," he said. He hefted his cup, tossing a sip of coffee between his lips.
I turned away because my throat was closing up. Suddenly I had an erection. I knew men got that way about men, but I didn't know I did. His chest was like Christ's. That's probably who he was.
I could have followed anybody off that train.
It would have been the same.

~ Denis Johnson

Poem for Haruko

I never thought I'd keep a record of my pain
or happiness
like candles lighting the entire soft lace
of the air
around the full length of your hair/a shower
organized by God
in brown and auburn
undulations luminous like particles
of flame

But now I do
retrieve an afternoon of apricots
and water interspersed with cigarettes
and sand and rocks
we walked across:
How easily you held
my hand
beside the low tide
of the world

Now I do
relive an evening of retreat
a bridge I left behind
where all the solid heat
of lust and tender trembling
lay as cruel and as kind
as passion spins its infinite
tergiversations in between the bitter
and the sweet

Alone and longing for you
now I do

1991-1992

~ June Jordan

The Modern Library Writer's Workshop

It is only a seeming paradox that a search for the nerve to say it your way can be served by a parallel search for guidance. You find your way through others. When he encountered Kafka, Garcia Marquez experienced what Melville said he encountered when he read his mentor Nathaniel Hawthorne: "the shock of recognition." It knocked him out of bed. This "shock of recognition" usually hits when it is least expected, and the jolt it delivers is a signal event in the life of any artist. Whenever it strikes, it is invariably telling you something vital about yourself. Do not confuse it with mere liking for another writer's work, or even with respect or reverence. The shock of recognition is a moment of excitement that shakes the soul. It may be hard to describe, but like other forms of love, you will know it when you feel it. Whenever and wherever you experience it, something important has occurred in your artistic life.

~ Stephen Koch

from W {Viva}

somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond
any experience,your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully,mysteriously)her first rose

or if your wish be to close me,i and
my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens;only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands

1931

~ e e cummings

Henry & June

I cannot help feeling today that some part of me stands aside watching me live and marveling. Thrown into life without experience, naive, I feel that something has saved me. I feel equal to life. It is like the scenes of an exceptional play. Henry guided me. No. He waited. He watched me. I moved, I acted. I did unexpected things, surprising to myself-that moment, Henry mentions, when I sat at the edge of the bed. I had been standing before the mirror combing my hair. He lay in bed and said, "I do not feel at ease with you yet." Impulsively, swiftly, I went to the bed, sat near him, put my face very near his. My coat slipped off, and the straps of my chemise, too, and in the whole gesture, in what I said, there was something so naturally giving, pliant, human that he couldn't talk.

1931-1932

~ Anais Nin

Origins and History of Consciousness

I

Night-life. Letters, journals, bourbon
sloshed in the glass. Poems crucified on the wall,
dissected, their bird-wings severed
like trophies. No one lives in this room
without living through some kind of crisis.

No one lives in this room
without confronting the whiteness of the wall
behind the poems, planks of books,
photographs of dead heroines.
Without contemplating last and late
the true nature of poetry. The drive
to connect. The dream of a common language.

Thinking of lovers, their blind faith, their
experienced crucifixions,
my envy is not simple. I have dreamed of going to bed
as walking into clear water ringed by a snowy wood
white as cold sheets, thinking, I'll freeze in there.
My bare feet are numbed already by the snow
but the water
is mild, I sink and float
like a warm amphibious animal
that has broken the net, has run
through fields of snow leaving no print;
this water washes off the scent-
You are clear now
of the hunter, the trapper
the wardens of the mind-

yet the warm animal dreams on
of another animal
swimming under the snow-flecked surface of the pool,
and wakes, and sleeps again.

No one sleeps in this room without
the dream of a common language.

II

It was simple to meet you, simple to take your eyes
into mine, saying: these are eyes I have known
from the first....It was simple to touch you
against the hacked background, the grain of what we
had been, the choices, years....It was even simple
to take each other's lives in our hands, as bodies.

What is not simple: to wake from drowning
from where the ocean beat inside us like an afterbirth
into this common, acute particularity
these two selves who walked half a lifetime untouching-
to wake to something deceptively simple: a glass
sweated with dew, a ring of the telephone, a scream
of someone beaten up far down in the street
causing each of us to listen to her own inward scream

knowing the mind of the mugger and the mugged
as any woman must who stands to survive this city,
this century, this life...

each of us having loved the flesh in its clenched or loosened beauty
better than trees or music (yet loving those too
as if they were flesh-and they are-but the flesh
of beings unfathomed as yet in our roughly literal life).

III

It's simple to wake from sleep with a stranger,
dress, go out, drink coffee,
enter a life again. It isn't simple
to wake from sleep into the neighborhood
of one neither strange nor familiar
whom we have chosen to trust. Trusting, untrusting,
we lowered ourselves into this, let ourselves
downward hand over hand as on a rope that quivered
over the unsearched.... We did this. Conceived
of each other, conceived each other in a darkness
which I remember as drenched in light.

I want to call this, life.

But I can't call it life until we start to move
beyond this secret circle of fire
where our bodies are giant shadows flung on a wall
where the night becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps
like a dumb beast, head on her paws, in the corner.

1972-1974

~ Adrienne Rich

Giovanni's Room

I can see her, very elegant, tense, and glittering, surrounded by the light which fills the salon of the ocean liner, drinking rather too fast, and laughing, and watching the men. That was how I met her, in a bar in Saint-Germain-des-Pres, she was drinking and watching, and that was why I liked her, I thought she would be fun to have fun with. That was how it began, that was all it meant to me; I am not sure now, in spite of everything, that it ever really meant more than that to me. And I don't think it really ever meant more than that to her-at least not until she made that trip to Spain and, finding herself there, alone, began to wonder, perhaps, if a lifetime of drinking and watching men was exactly what she wanted. But it was too late by that time. I was already with Giovanni. I had asked her to marry me before she went away to Spain; and she laughed and I laughed but that, somehow, all the same, made it more serious for me, and I persisted; and then she said she would have to go away and think about it. And the very last time she was here, the very last time I saw her, as she was packing her bag, I told her that I loved her once and I made myself believe it. But I wonder if I had. I was thinking, no doubt, of our nights in bed, of the peculiar innocence and confidence, which will never come again, which had made those nights so delightful, so unrelated to the past, present, or anything to come, so unrelated, finally, to my life since it was not necessary for me to take any but the most mechanical responsibility for them. And these nights were being acted out under a foreign sky, with no one to watch, no penalties attached-it was this last fact which was our undoing, for nothing is more unbearable, once one has it, than freedom. I suppose this was why I asked her to marry me: to give myself something to be moored to. Perhaps this was why, in Spain, she decided that she wanted to marry me. But people can't, unhappily, invent their mooring posts, their lovers and their friends, anymore than they can invent their parents. Life gives these and also takes them away and the great difficulty is to say Yes to life.

~ James Baldwin

For Grace, After a Party

You do not always know what I am feeling.
Last night in the warm spring air while I was
blazing my tirade against someone who doesn't
interest
me, it was love for you that set me
afire,

and isn't it odd? for in rooms full of
strangers my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn't there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn't
you like the eggs a little

different today?
And when they arrive they are
just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather
is holding.

~ Frank O'Hara

Letters to a Young Poet

No one can advise or help you-no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself. Find out the reason that commands you to write; see whether it has spread its roots into the very depth of your heart; confess to yourself whether you would have to die if you were forbidden to write. This most of all: ask yourself in the most silent hour of the night: must I write? Dig into yourself for a deep answer. And if this answer rings out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong simple "I must," then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to Nature. Then, as if no one had ever tried before, try to say what you see and feel and love and lose. Don't write love poems; avoid those forms that are too facile and ordinary: they are the hardest to work with, and it takes a great, fully ripened power to create something individual where good, even glorious, traditions exist in abundance. So rescue yourself from these general themes and write about what everyday life offers you; describe your sorrows and desires, the thoughts that pass through your mind and your belief in some kind of beauty-describe all these with heartfelt, silent, humble sincerity and, when you express yourself, use the Things around you, the images from your dreams, and the object you remember. If your everyday life seems poor, don't blame it: blame yourself; admit to yourself that you are not enough of a poet to call forth its riches; because for the creator there is no poverty and no poor, indifferent place. And even if you found yourself in some prison, whose walls let in none of the world's sounds-wouldn't you still have your childhood, that jewel beyond all price, that treasure house of memories? Turn your attention towards it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the twilight, where the noise of other people passes by, far in the distance.-And if out of this turning-within, out of this immersion in your own world, poems come, then you will not think of asking anyone whether they are good or not. Nor will you try to interest magazines in these works: for you will see them as your dear natural possession, a piece of your life, a voice from it. A work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity. That is the only way one can judge it. So, dear Sir, I can't give you any advice but this: to go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows; at its source you will find the answer to the question of whether you must create. Accept that answer, just as it is given to you, without trying to interpret it. Perhaps you will discover that you are called to be an artist. Then take that destiny upon yourself, and bear it, its burden and its greatness, without ever asking what reward might come from the outside. For the creator must be a world for himself and must find everything in himself and in Nature, to whom his whole life is devoted.

~Rainer Maria Rilke
(translated by Stephen Mitchell)