Monday, December 17, 2012

Born but to smile


O life of this our spring! Why fades the lotus of the water?
Why fade these children of the spring? Born but to smile and fall?


The Book of Thel, William Blake
image: Robert Doisneau 
for Newtown, CT.

should have caught some ghost of us

No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone.
The accidents happen, we’re not heroines,
they happen in our lives like car crashes,
books that change us, neighborhoods
we move into and come to love.
Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story,
women at least should know the difference
between love and death. No poison cup,
no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder
should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder
not merely played but should have listened to us,
and could instruct those after us:
this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us
within us and against us, against us and within us.

 
text: Adrienne Rich
image: thebeautythelight/poetbabble

Saturday, December 1, 2012

december

The Darkling Thrush

 

Thomas Hardy

I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-gray, And Winter’s dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires.

The land’s sharp features seemed to be The Century’s corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervorless as I.

At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.
Dec. 31, 1900
Hardy
The Darkling Thrush

Thomas Hardy
I leant upon a coppice gate
When Frost was spectre-gray,
And Winter’s dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land’s sharp features seemed to be
The Century’s corpse outleant,
His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death-lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervorless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full-hearted evensong
Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.
So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
Dec. 31, 1900
Hardy
(via seabois)

Monday, November 26, 2012

everywhere

“I couldn’t see you when you were here, and now that you’re gone, I see you everywhere.” - Ruby Sparks

Erich Hartmann, Hurrying travellers in Grand Central Station, NYC, 1976

Friday, September 28, 2012

awake


Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Le souvenir est un poète


“Memory is a poet, not an historian.”
rchardes:
indubio:

Tuesday, September 4, 2012

like a storm



"...like a storm across the sky of everything."

Matthew Dickman, lines from “Cloud” -  The American Poetry Review (v.41   July/August 2012)

Thursday, August 30, 2012

You are everything that has not yet been lost

(via end-of-may)


Scissors     embers       misnomers       Are you this
loneliness of hands      Do you burrow past kindness    
Are you no less than a cell dividing no more     than an arboretum    
Who has visited you    Who has kept your dark eyes in thrall    
Is there a clear sound     threading through      What you want               
What you say     What you do     Do you know what you are losing
when the dusk seals off the center of things    in the parks     
Hour of dismissal           Nobody stops to sit       as they did during day
I am listening     to the peace that gathers       in the husky throats of
mourning doves     the children     with no need of goods
They told us what our eyes feel     being outside is enough
The moon moves quickly     The years         could shut us out
There is an ache in the lungs     so deep        it can't be heard
A floating-inward     rush of air     Are you rosin     wax
Are you alizarin-crimson         the spiraling glitters of pelicans
over the cone marsh the threshold      at which change becomes
unstoppable     We are traveling     through the unmanifest dark
and have only our skin     to glide by     I will vouch for you
when you make a place for me     in the city of soft gray-bodied trees           
If I have a wish     it is to find you     where I find poetry
Do you ever     close your eyes in full sunlight     Here close your eyes          
You are everything      that has not yet been lost

Joanna Klink's "Aerial"

It is a wonderful gift.



"Words that come out of history are complicated; they are cluttered with etymology and connotation. And that slows us down when we try to understand them.... But words that make up their histories as they come into existence leap at us unchaperoned. First they are in our leader's mouth, then they are in ours. It is a wonderful gift. We can hum along with the words passing through us; we can clap, we can jump. And as we respond to the music we make, we will feel ourselves coming into being. We will be wrong, but we will believe that we know at last who we are."


Jonathan Morse, Word by Word: The Language of Memory (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press) 1990: 2.
image: Banksy

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

stories

Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.
Significant Objects
Stories are the only enchantment possible, for when we begin to see our suffering as a story, we are saved.
Anaïs Nin
image (workman) 


Tuesday, August 14, 2012

“She believed in angels, and, because she believed, they existed” ― Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star”


Angels, Philadelphia, 1961 - George Krause  
Angels, Philadelphia, 1961 - George Krause
"I'm for mystery, not interpretive answers.
The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you'll always be seeking. I've never seen anybody really find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer."
- Ken Kesey
link TEXT:  acorda eu
IMAGE: HERE 

Sunday, August 5, 2012

as far as memory

image/alexey titarenko
from; Time Standing Still," (1998-2000)
"...you are as far as invention, and I am as far as memory." 
 
From Yellow Stars and Ice 
Susan Stewart
link
 more Titarenko:

Thursday, August 2, 2012

my entrance

It was my entrance into the radiance of imagination.
Patti Smith, Just Kids (via starswithplanets)
image source: beingyourhero

Thursday, July 12, 2012

we were not home

“A la recherché du temps perdu is the constant attempt to charge an entire lifetime with utmost awareness. Proust’s method is actualization, not reflection. He is filled with the insight that none of us has time to live the true dramas of life that we are destined for. This is what ages us – this and nothing else. The wrinkle and creases on our faces are the registration of the great passions, vices, and insights that called on us: but we, the masters were not home.”

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

the border

“The woman he loved most in the world (he was thirty at the time) used to tell him (it would make him desperate to hear it) that her life was hanging by a thread. Oh yes, she wanted to live, she loved life, but she also knew that her ‘I want to live’ was spun from the threads of a cobweb. It takes so little, so infinitely little, for  a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life – and herein lies its secret – takes place in immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.”

Milan Kundera, “The Border,” The Book of Laughter and Forgetting p. 206-207
link
“The woman he loved most in the world (he was thirty at the time) used to tell him (it would make him desperate to hear it) that her life was hanging by a thread. Oh yes, she wanted to live, she loved life, but she also knew that her ‘I want to live’ was spun from the threads of a cobweb. It takes so little, so infinitely little, for  a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life – and herein lies its secret – takes place in immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch.”

Milan Kundera, “The Border,” The Book of Laughter and Forgetting p. 206-207

link
(via journalofanobody)

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

train your memory to fail


learn to say “I don’t know”learn to say “I can’t say” “I don’t remember”learn to say nothingtrain your memory to failrecognize that you have the right to make mistakesto stay muteinsist that the noise in your ears is due merelyto history’s winds or to the changes in pressurethat make mirages out of daily life
 link  - Urszula KoziolTo a Young ManA Polish Lessontranslated by Stanisław Barańczak and Claire Cavanaghgrowing orbits

learn to say “I don’t know”
learn to say “I can’t say” “I don’t remember”
learn to say nothing

train your memory to fail
recognize that you have the right to make mistakes
to stay mute

insist that the noise in your ears is due merely
to history’s winds or to the changes in pressure
that make mirages out of daily life

link  - Urszula Koziol
To a Young Man
A Polish Lesson
translated by Stanisław Barańczak and Claire Cavanagh
growing orbits
Image Source: inthewronggalaxy)

Monday, April 2, 2012

Sonnet II - Time Does Not Bring Relief: You All Have Lied



Funeral (Beerdigung). 1988. Oil on canvas 200 x 320 cm

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied   
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!   
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,   
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;   
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.   
There are a hundred places where I fear   
To go,—so with his memory they brim.   
And entering with relief some quiet place   
Where never fell his foot or shone his face   
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”   
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Time Does Not Bring Relief” from Collected Poems. Copyright 1931, © 1958 by Edna St. Vincent Millay 
Oil on canvas 200 x 320 cm

Monday, March 26, 2012

The Midnight Club



The gifted have told us for years
that they want to be loved
For what they are, that they,
in whatever fullness is theirs,
Are perishable in twilight,
just like us. So they work all night
in rooms that are cold and
webbed with the moon’s light;
Sometimes, during the day,
they lean on their cars,
And stare into the blistering
valley, glassy and golden,
But mainly they sit, hunched
in the dark, feet on the floor,
Hands on the table, shirts with a
bloodstain over the heart.
- Mark Strand
The Continuous Life

image/workman

Saturday, January 21, 2012

it was like that

 


 


It was like the moment when a bird decides not to eat from your hand,
and flies, just before it flies, the moment the rivers seem to still
and stop because a storm is coming, but there is no storm, as when
a hundred starlings lift and bank together before they wheel and drop,
very much like the moment, driving on bad ice, when it occurs to you
your car could spin, just before it slowly begins to spin, like
the moment just before you forgot what it was you were about to say,
it was like that, and after that, it was still like that, only
all the time.
Part of Eve's Discussion by Marie Howe
image: chapeaunoir:by Beth Moon

Saturday, January 14, 2012

What you get is to be changed.

 "

Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed. More and more by
each glistening minute, through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at sea. Here, hands full of sand, letting it sift through
in the wind, I look in and say take this, this is
what I have saved, take this, hurry. And if I listen
now? Listen, I was not saying anything. It was only
something I did. I could not choose words. I am free to go.
I cannot of course come back. Not to this. Never.
It is a ghost posed on my lips. Here: never.

Jorie Graham, from Prayer
image
here via (Source: meltinglight)
for Stephanie~

Sunday, January 8, 2012

for my sister, Stephanie: January 6, 2012

  http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lf8kxpm6TB1qdfb8co1_500.png 
 
          What though the radiance which was once so bright
          Be now for ever taken from my sight,
              Though nothing can bring back the hour
          Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
              We will grieve not, rather find
              Strength in what remains behind;

William Wordworth,536.Ode 
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
image here: anhelos via vintague 

Thursday, January 5, 2012

for my sister, Stephanie: You think you will never forget any of this


"You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can’t remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.

But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. You have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive."

— Wendell Berry,

Wednesday, January 4, 2012

space lint and star dust

http://lukestorms.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/tumblr_lwkpv8wgfa1qd29m4o1_1280.jpg?w=529


"Within all of us is a varying amount of space lint and star dust, the residue from our creation. Most are too busy to notice it, and it is stronger in some than others. It is strongest in those of us who fly and is responsible for an unconscious, subtle desire to slip into some wings and try for the elusive boundaries of our origin."
- K. O. Eckland
Footprints on Clouds

 
image - intense city