light made from nothing

I'll tell you what love of this life is.
It's looking up
through trees newly bare of leaves
and seeing there the oldest road,
a broken line of white stars
stretching out across the sky.

It's thinking,
this could be enough.
- Susan Elbe
Light Made From Nothing

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Happy, Happy New Year 2012 

Still time.

Aren't we enlarged
by the scale of what we're able
to desire? Everything,
. the choir insists,

. might flame;
inside these wrappings
burns another, brighter life,
. quickened, now,

. by song: hear how
it cascades, in overlapping,
lapidary waves of praise? Still time.
. Still time to change.
- Mark Doty
from Messiah (Christmas Portions)
Sweet Machine: Poems

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"Be not inhospitable to strangers / Lest they be angels in disguise."

GEORGE WHITMAN

On Wednesday 14th December, 2011, George Whitman died peacefully at home in the apartment above his bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, in Paris. George suffered a stroke two months ago, but showed incredible strength and determination up to the end, continpany of his daughter, Sylvia, his friends and his cat and dog.  He died two days after his 98th birthday.

Born on Dec. 12, 1913, in East Orange, New Jersey, George moved to Paris in 1948 and opened his bookshop Le Mistral, later renamed Shakespeare and Company, in 1951.  Packed wall-to-wall with books and beds for roaming writers, the store quickly grew to be a haven for book lovers and authors while George became an unusual Paris literary institution. In 2006 he was awarded the Officier des Arts et Lettres by the French Minister of Culture for his lifelong contribution to the arts.

After a life entirely dedicated to books, authors and readers, George will be sorely missed by all his loved ones and by bibliophiles around the world who have read, written and stayed in his bookshop for over 60 years. Nicknamed the Don Quixote of the Latin Quarter, George will be remembered for his free spirit, his eccentricity and his generosity  —  all three summarised in the Yeats verses written on the walls of his open, much-visited library : "Be not inhospitable to strangers / Lest they be angels in disguise." 
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Everything that Acts Is Actual

From the tawny light
from the rainy nights
from the imagination finding
itself and more than itself
alone and more than alone
at the bottom of the well where the moon lives,
can you pull me

into December? a lowland
of space, perception of space
towering of shadows of clouds blown upon
clouds over
… … … . new ground, new made
under heavy December footsteps? the only
way to live?

The flawed moon
acts on the truth, and makes
an autumn of tentative
silences.
You lived, but somewhere else,
your presence touched others, ring upon ring,
and changed. Did you think
I would not change?

… … … … … . The black moon
turns away, its work done. A tenderness,
unspoken autumn.
We are faithful
only to the imagination. What the
imagination
… … . seizes
as beauty must be truth. What holds you
to what you see of me is
that grasp alone.
- Denise Levertov
Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960
wood s lot

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(via lolinif)