haikubotany

2011-06-16T19:27:00.002-04:00

the sea, suicidal
cannot unlearn how to swim
can never drown its-self

2010-12-15T18:25:00.009-05:00

Seventeen syllables
Start a poem... A door closes -
And then there are none

2010-11-16T10:17:00.001-05:00

Like a mannequin
A tree undressed awaits
next season's fashions.

Seven Syllables Press

2010-05-18T23:54:00.002-04:00

Check it out:

http://sevensyllables.blogspot.com/

James Lee's Wife Speaks at the Window

2008-07-30T03:48:00.002-04:00

Thou art a man,
But I am thy love.
For the lake, its swan;
For the dell, its dove.

- Robert Browning

Colorful Austin Skyline (Sunset)

2008-05-23T03:49:00.002-04:00

Screenshots from Ridley Scott's "The Duellists"

2008-01-21T02:51:00.000-05:00

2007-12-08T15:12:00.001-05:00

But all the people had been alive, and all of them were dead: he felt for them the undifferentiating sorrow, the elegaic, unforced acceptance, that man feels in the end for all his kind.

- Randall Jarrall, Pictures from an Institution

2007-11-20T10:33:00.000-05:00

My chapbook, available for order at Hex Presse:

http://hexpresse.blogspot.com/2007/11/resurrection-party.html

1907 New York Times Circus Article

2007-10-08T01:38:00.000-04:00

CIRCUS IN UNDRESS BEATS A REAL SHOW; The Trapeze Performer Looks as If He Might Chance to Slip. CLOWNS' SILENT REHEARSAL That's a Funny Effect -- So Are Circus Queen and Ringmaster In Mufti. (March 21, 1907)

There was a circus performance in Madison Square Garden yesterday morning such as will not be repeated until the show returns to New York on its next annual tour. In many ways there is no other performance which equals it in interest, and yet it was given to an absolutely empty house. Act for act, stunt for stunt, it was the same circus that the public sees, but with this big difference - it was in negligee. There were no spangles, no gauze, no tinsel, no glare, and glitter. And can you imagine a real circus stripped of these?

For rest of article, click here: Full Article

2007-09-14T16:46:00.001-04:00

A ruined museum
With one exhibit – my name
Crossed off a tablet

2007-08-23T10:38:00.000-04:00

Daily Tarot
Five of Pentacles
The Five of Pentacles card suggests that my power today lies in defiance. We are willing to reject the sure thing or accept excommunication to try to make it on our own rather than endure the status quo or submit to conditions that assume we are invisible -- in this, we have nothing to lose. We accept responsibility for the difficulties ahead and do not seek pity for having chosen against the grain. I am empowered by mutual support and my assets are self-worth, hope, and pride.

2007-08-22T18:09:00.001-04:00

LXXI
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
- Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

2007-08-21T10:55:00.001-04:00

What lovely trespass
That Fall of feathers - wild migration
From the First rookery

My New Friend

2007-08-17T04:06:00.000-04:00

2007-07-28T11:41:00.001-04:00

Our sins are eggs
Hatched fledglings leave the nest
Chickens home to roost

2007-07-26T06:53:00.000-04:00

Faith and Doubt
Like Boulders grinding each other
into Dust.

2007-07-23T04:03:00.000-04:00

2007-07-20T00:59:00.000-04:00

New Haiku

2007-07-16T04:12:00.000-04:00

O heart made hard!
Too hard to feel its own beat
An eleventh plague

2007-07-07T00:21:00.000-04:00

2007-06-23T16:48:00.000-04:00

Fragmentary Blue

Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)--
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

- Robert Frost

2007-06-19T03:08:00.000-04:00

2007-06-19T03:07:00.000-04:00

2007-06-19T03:06:00.000-04:00

Low - Death of a Salesman

2007-06-16T14:12:00.001-04:00

death of a salesman

So I took my guitar
And I threw down some chords
And some words I could sing without shame

And I soon had a song
I played it around
For some friends but they all said the same

They said music's for fools
You should go back to school
The future is prisms and math

So I did what they said
Now my children are fed
'Cause they pay me to do what I'm asked

I forgot all my songs
The words now are wrong
And I burned my guitar in a rage

But the fire came to rest
In your white velvet breast
So somehow I just know that it's safe

2007-06-16T01:15:00.000-04:00

... a convention is essentially a theory of conduct and all human conduct implies some theory of conduct. Therefore, although it may be that no convention is any longer coercive, conventions remain, are adopted, revised, and debated. They embody the considered results of experience: perhaps the experience of a lonely pioneer or perhaps the collective experience of the dominant members of a community. In any event, they are as necessary to a society which recognizes no authority as to one which does. For the inexperienced must be offered some kind of hypothesis when they are confronted with the necessity of making choices: they cannot be so utterly open-minded that they stand inert until something collides with them. In the modern world, therefore, the function of conventions is to declare the meaning of experience. A good convention is one which will most probably show the inexperienced the way to happy experience.

- Walter Lippman Explains the Use of Convention

Fort Worth Botanical Garden (Japanese Garden)

2007-06-15T23:00:00.000-04:00

Fort Worth Botanical Garden (June 10)

2007-06-15T22:53:00.000-04:00

2007-05-31T06:00:00.000-04:00

Little Fish
D. H. Lawrence

The tiny little fish enjoy themselves
in the sea.
Quick little splinters of life,
their little lives are fun to them
in the sea.

2007-05-30T02:22:00.000-04:00

My chapbook, coming soon:

Hex Presse

Walter Lippman Explains Prayer

2007-05-26T23:03:00.000-04:00

It is not necessary to dogmatize by saying that prayer is magic, or soliloquy, or communion, or petition for this and that, in order to see that it is the expression of a human need. The quality of the need varies. It may be anything from a desire for rain to a desire for friendship with unseen spirits, but always it illustrates the saying that "all men stand in need of God."

If we ask ourselves what we mean by 'need,' we must answer, I suppose, that the resources of our own natures and the power we are able to exercise over events are insufficient to satisfy the cravings of our natures. We must eat, but we cannot be sure that drought will not destroy the crops. We are beset by enemies, and we are not sure we can conquer them. We are threatened by earthquake, storm, and disease against which we cannot wholly protect ourselves. We become deeply attached to other persons. But they must die and we must die, and we cannot stay the doom. In brief, we find ourselves in a world in which our hopes are defeated.

- A Preface to Morals (1929), Walter Lippman

2007-05-20T22:37:00.000-04:00

New poems can be found at the following locations:

WOMB

Little Red Leaves

Perfection!!

2007-05-14T02:54:00.000-04:00

FOOTNOTE

All of us who lived on earth
and all our loves and wars
will never even be mentioned in
the moon's memoirs.

- by Bill Knott

2007-05-02T13:47:00.000-04:00

They are likely to point to the world about them, and to ask whether the modern man possesses any criterion by which he can measure the value of his own desires, whether there is any standard he really believes in which permits him to put a term upon that pursuit of money, of power, and of excitement which has created so much of the turmoil and the squalor and the explosiveness of modern civilization.

These are, perhaps, merely the rationalizations of the modern man's discontent. At the heart of it there are likely to be moments of blank misgiving in which he finds that the civilization of which he is a part leaves a dusty taste in his mouth. He may be very busy with many things, but he discovers one day that he is no longer sure they are worth doing. He has been much preoccupied; but he is no longer sure he knows why. He has become involved in an elaborate routine of pleasures; and they do not seem to amuse him very much. He finds it hard to believe that doing any one thing is better than doing any other thing, or, in fact, that it is better than doing nothing at all. It occurs to him that it is a great deal of trouble to live, and that even in the best of lives the thrills are few and far between. He begins more or less consciously to seek satisfactions, because he is no longer satisfied, and all the while he realizes that the pusuit of happiness was always a most unhappy quest.

A Preface to Morals, Walter Lippmann (Time-Life Books)

2007-04-21T22:05:00.001-04:00

They became friends easily, amused, perhaps, by each other's peculiarities. He felt that this wise girl was making an effort to read him as if he was a new, rather surprising book, and this delighted him. There are women, may the good lord help them, who have a mania for regarding people as if they were psychological novels: they expect people to be either types or characters, endeavor to read their souls, make profound judgments about them with singular self-assurance, and consequently arrive at conclusions that are either plain and simple injustices or enormously complicated mistakes.

Helena, Karel Capek (Cross Roads)

from Clive James on Valery

2007-04-10T11:18:00.000-04:00

In my own experience, a phrase will wait decades for a poem to form around it. There is a mystery, and an insoluble one, to how the smaller unit of inspiration sets off in search of the larger one that will incorporate it. Artists spend a lot of time waiting for that to happen: While they wait, they must trust to luck; and it is no wonder that some of them get very nervous, and fall into bad habits.

http://www.slate.com/id/2163822/

George Othen sings "Death is my Doom"

2007-04-09T14:01:00.002-04:00

Twas early one morning I rode over the ranches
Twas early one morning, I rode over there
I saw a young cowboy dressed in white linen
With cold black eyes and wavy hair

My friends and relations I’d left out in Boston
My parents knew not where I had roamed
I first went to Texas hard as a ranchman
Got shot in the bosom, death is my doom

Go write me a letter to my grey-haired mother
Go break the news to my sister so dear
Oh there is another dear as my mother
Who’d weep if she knew I was lying out here

So take me to the graveyard, place the earth over me
And play the dead marches that carry me on
Beat the drum o’er me, play the fife slowly
For I am a dead cowboy, I know I done wrong

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Z1GYEF3Wfo

2007-03-18T18:48:00.001-04:00

He wishes for the cloths of heaven

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

 -- William Butler Yeats

from The Towers of Trebizond (Rose Macauley)

2007-03-05T11:49:00.000-05:00

Hagia Sophia stands alone above the sea, derelict and deserted, with a tall bell tower standing near it, and I found it usually shut, except at the times when they were doing something inside it with the ladders and buckets and planks. I did not mind, because it was the outside, and particularly the south front, that I liked to look at and to paint. I would try and make out the figures on the frieze, and could do this most easily when sitting on the camel, and there were various Genesis creatures, such as Adam and Eve and the serpent, very toughly carved among the trees and fruit and animals. It took me some time to make out the Greek inscription, which was about saving me from my sins, and I hesitated to say this prayer, as I did not really want to be saved from my sins, not for the time being, it would make things too difficult and too sad. I was getting into a stage when I was not quite sure what sin was, I was in a kind of fog, drifting about without clues, and this is liable to happen when you go on and on doing something, it makes a confused sort of twilight in which everything is blurred, and the next thing you know you might be stealing or anything, because right and wrong have become things you do not look at, you are afraid to, and it seems better to live in a blur. Then comes the times when you wake suddenly up, and the fog breaks, and right and wrong loom through it, sharp and clear like peaks of rock, and you are on the wrong peak and know that, unless you can manage to leave it now, you may be marooned there for life and ever after. Then, as you don't leave it, the mist swirls round again, and hides the other peak, and you turn your back on it and try to forget it and succeed.

The Towers of Trebizond, Rose Macauley

2007-02-14T15:47:00.000-05:00

The Martyrdom of Saint Valentine

(A) Hand unfolds inside
of me... Veins plunge through my heart
like massive fingers

2007-01-24T03:27:00.000-05:00

Mr. Edwards and the Spider
by Robert Lowell

I saw the spiders marching through the air,
Swimming from tree to tree that mildewed day
In latter August when the hay
Came creaking to the barn. But where
The wind is westerly,
Where gnarled November makes the spiders fly
Into the apparitions of the sky,
They purpose nothing but their ease and die
Urgently beating east to sunrise and the sea;

What are we in the hands of the great God?
It was in vain you set up thorn and briar
In battle array against the fire
And treason crackling in your blood;
For the wild thorns grow tame
And will do nothing to oppose the flame;
Your lacerations tell the losing game
You play against a sickness past your cure.
How will the hands be strong? How will the heart endure?

A very little thing, a little worm,
Or hourglass-blazoned spider, it is said,
Can kill a tiger. Will the dead
Hold up his mirror and affirm
To the four winds the smell
And flash of his authority? It’s well
If God who holds you to the pit of hell,
Much as one holds a spider, will destroy,
Baffle and dissipate your soul. As a small boy

On Windsor Marsh, I saw the spider die
When thrown into the bowels of fierce fire:
There’s no long struggle, no desire
To get up on its feet and fly
It stretches out its feet
And dies. This is the sinner’s last retreat;
Yes, and no strength exerted on the heat
Then sinews the abolished will, when sick
And full of burning, it will whistle on a brick.

But who can plumb the sinking of that soul?
Josiah Hawley, picture yourself cast
Into a brick-kiln where the blast
Fans your quick vitals to a coal—
If measured by a glass,
How long would it seem burning! Let there pass
A minute, ten, ten trillion; but the blaze
Is infinite, eternal: this is death,
To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.

from Denton Welch's "Maiden Voyage"

2007-01-16T19:43:00.000-05:00

The white cat Sal-al was lying on the straw matting in the empty conservatory. She looked at us with a wicked, conceited expression as if all her appetites had just been satisfied. She was beautiful. Vesta and I both said, "I wish I were a cat!" Before we got to the last word we smiled at each other in annoyance, not liking the idea that most human beings think very much alike.

I sat down in front of the fire with a sheaf of Vesta's poems, and began to read. I thought them very good, almost better than my own; besides, they were typed!

Your heart manholed

2007-01-09T22:20:00.000-05:00

Your heart manholed
for the installation of feeling.

Your motherland’s parts
prefabricated.

Your milk-sister
a shovel.

–Paul Celan

(translated from the German by Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh)

H.G. Wells writes that "God is Not Providence"

2007-01-04T04:28:00.000-05:00

from "God The Invisible King" (H.G. Wells)

God is Not Providence

Closely related to this heresy that God is magic, is the heresy that calls him Providence, that declares the apparent adequacy of cause and effect to be a sham, and that all the time, incalculably, he is pulling about the order of events for our personal advantages.

The idea of Providence was very gaily travested by Daudet in "Tartarin in the Alps." You will remember how Tartarin's friend assured him that all Switzerland was one great Trust, intent upon attracting tourists and far too wise and kind to permit them to venture into real danger, that all the precipices were netted invisibly, and all the loose rocks guarded against falling, that avalanches were prearranged spectacles and the crevasses at their worst slippery ways down into kindly catchment bags. If the mountaineer tried to get into real danger he was turned back by specious excuses. Inspired by this persuasion Tartarin behaved with incredible daring. . . . That is exactly the Providence theory of the whole world. There can be no doubt that it does enable many a timid soul to get through life with a certain recklessness. And provided there is no slip into a crevasse, the Providence theory works well. It would work altogether well if there were no crevasses.

Tartarin was reckless because of his faith in Providence, and escaped. But what would have happened to him if he had fallen into a crevasse?

There exists a very touching and remarkable book by Sir Francis Younghusband called "Within." [Williams and Norgate, 1912.] It is the confession of a man who lived with a complete confidence in Providence until he was already well advanced in years. He went through battles and campaigns, he filled positions of great honour and responsibility, he saw much of the life of men, without altogether losing his faith. The loss of a child, an Indian famine, could shake it but not overthrow it. Then coming back one day from some races in France, he was knocked down by an automobile and hurt very cruelly. He suffered terribly in body and mind. His sufferings caused much suffering to others. He did his utmost to see the hand of a loving Providence in his and their disaster and the torment it inflicted, and being a man of sterling honesty and a fine essential simplicity of mind, he confessed at last that he could not do so. His confidence in the benevolent intervention of God was altogether destroyed. His book tells of this shattering, and how labouriously he reconstructed his religion upon less confident lines. It is a book typical of an age and of a very English sort of mind, a book well worth reading.

That he came to a full sense of the true God cannot be asserted, but how near he came to God, let one quotation witness.

"The existence of an outside Providence," he writes, "who created us, who watches over us, and who guides our lives like a Merciful Father, we have found impossible longer to believe in. But of the existence of a Holy Spirit radiating upward through all animate beings, and finding its fullest expression, in man in love, and in the flowers in beauty, we can be as certain as of anything in the world. This fiery spiritual impulsion at the centre and the source of things, ever burning in us, is the supremely important factor in our existence. It does not always attain to light. In many directions it fails; the conditions are too hard and it is utterly blocked. In others it only partially succeeds. But in a few it bursts forth into radiant light. There are few who in some heavenly moment of their lives have not been conscious of its presence. We may not be able to give it outward expression, but we know that it is there." . . .

God does not guide our feet. He is no sedulous governess restraining and correcting the wayward steps of men. If you would fly into the air, there is no God to bank your aeroplane correctly for you or keep an ill-tended engine going; if you would cross a glacier, no God nor angel guides your steps amidst the slippery places. He will not even mind your innocent children for you if you leave them before an unguarded fire. Cherish no delusions; for yourself and others you challenge danger and chance on your own strength; no talisman, no God, can help you or those you care for. Nothing of such things will God do; it is an idle dream. But God will be with you nevertheless. In the reeling aeroplane or the dark ice-cave God will be your courage. Though you suffer or are killed, it is not an end. He will be with you as you face death; he will die with you as he has died already countless myriads of brave deaths. He will come so close to you that at the last you will not know whether it is you or he who dies, and the present death will be swallowed up in his victory.

2006-12-24T04:36:00.000-05:00

Meanwhile the glowing sun gradually came up on the horizon, brightening the entire countryside. Its radiance had an exhilarating effect on all things. The trees and the grass welcomed it, smiling through their tears of dew, like children bursting into laughter through their tears when shown a gaudy plaything.

- The Travels and Adventures of Benjamin the Third (Mendele Mocher Seforim)

Elder Solomon Lightfoot Michaux preaches "So Happy Am I"

2006-12-18T04:25:00.000-05:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iehaLLChm3c

Forugh Farrokhzad

2006-12-18T04:23:00.000-05:00

in my small night, what mounting
regret!
wind has a rendezvous with the trees'
leaves
in my small night, there is terror
of desolation

listen! do you hear
the wind of darkness howling?
I watch breathless
-ly and wondrously this alien happiness
I am addicted to my own hopelessness
listen! listen well!
can you hear the darkness
howling? -- the dark hell
-wind scything
its way towards us?

in the night now, there is something
passing
the moon is red restless and uneasy
and on this roof -- which fears
any moment
-- it may cave in --
clouds like crowds of mourners
await to break in rain
ruin
a moment
and then after that, nothing.
behind this window, night shivers
and the earth stands still
behind this window an unknown
something fears for me and you
O you who are green from head to toe!
put your hands
-- like a burning
memory into my loving hands --
lover's hands!
entrust your lips -- your lips
like a warm sense of being! --
entrust! -- your lips to the caresses of my
-- loving lips -- lover's lips!
the wind will carry us with it
the wind will carry us with it

Excerpt from Marina Tsvetaeva's Homesickness

2006-12-07T22:32:00.000-05:00

They are at home

in the twentieth century,

but I am prior

to time, a log left in the axed

avenue of trees.

from F. Scott Fitzgerald's letters

2006-11-14T12:56:00.000-05:00

In this silence there was a vast irresponsibility toward every obligation, a deflation of all my values. A passionate belief in order, a disregard of motives or consequences in favor of guess work and prophecy, a feeling that craft and industry would have a place in any world - one by one, these and other convictions were swept away. I saw that the novel, which at my maturity was the strongest and supplest medium for conveying thought and emotion from one human being to another, was becoming subordinated to a mechanical and communal art that, whether in the hands of Hollywood merchants or Russian idealists, was capable of reflecting only the tritest thought, the most obvious emotion. It was an art in which words were subordinate to images, where personality was worn down to the inevitable low gear of collaboration... there was a rankling indignity, that to me had become almost an obsession, in seeing the power of the written word subordinated to another power, a more glittering, a grosser power...

2006-11-04T21:59:00.000-05:00

One fine day you decide to talk less and less about the things that you care about most, and when you have to say something, it costs you an effort... You're good and sick of hearing yourself talk... you abridge... You give up... For thirty years you've been talking... You don't care about being right any more. You even lose your desire to keep hold of the small place you'd reserved for yourself among the pleasures of life... You're fed up... From that time on you're content to eat a little something, cadge a little warmth, and sleep as much as possible on the road to nowhere. To rekindle your interest, you'd have to think of some new grimaces to put on in the presence of others... But you no longer have the strength to renew your repertory. You stammer. Sure, you still look for excuses for hanging around with the boys, but death is there too, stinking, right beside you, it's there the whole time, less mysterious than a game of poker. The only thing you continue to value is petty regrets, like not finding time to run out to Bois-Colombes to see your uncle while he was still alive, the one whose little song died forever one afternoon in February. That horrible little regret is all we have left of life, we've vomited up the rest along the way, with a good deal of effort and misery. We're nothing now but an old lamp-post with memories on a street where hardly anyone passes any more.
(Journey to the End of the Night), Celine

From Poetry, Dec. 2003

2006-10-30T03:02:00.000-05:00

What It Means to be Alive at the Time of the Resurrection

No one tells you it’s here.
A perfunctory knock on the door
awaits no answer, they enter
and crowd at your table, their
boots are damp and spore-
ridden. “Hard work,” says your father,
“Being dead. If you could bring some water?”
“But what was it like?” you ask, unhappy to have missed
it, alone among your family. Your mother sighs,
like a girl remembering her lover,
“Different than I expected.” In her wrist
the blood runs again – a boy at school once bit all the girls there,
except you, because the bell rang. How you cried that night
in your bed! As if you hadn’t been kissed.

Le Condition Humaine?

2006-10-26T12:25:00.000-04:00

2006-09-26T21:45:00.001-04:00

Dueling Trains!

2006-09-26T21:45:00.000-04:00

Blue Train

2006-09-26T01:12:00.001-04:00

Saturated bridge

2006-09-26T01:12:00.000-04:00

Super-saturated Town Lake

2006-09-24T22:38:00.000-04:00

Novel reading produces a morbid appetite for excitement. The object
of the novelist, generally, is to produce the highest possible degree
of excitement, both of the mind and the passions. The object is very
similar to that of intoxicating liquors on the body; hence, the
confirmed novel-reader becomes a kind of literary inebriate, to whom
the things of entity have no attractions and whose thirst cannot be
slaked...

Novel reading strengthens the passions, weakens the virtues and
diminishes the power of self-control. Multitudes may date their ruin
from the commencement of this kind of reading; and many more, who have
been rescued from the snare, will regret, to the end of their days,
its influence in the early formation of their character.

If you wish to becme weak-headed, nervous and good for nothing, read novels.

- The Ladies Vase or Polite Manual for Young Ladies, 1847

Getting Used to the New Camera

2006-08-27T22:04:00.000-04:00

2006-07-13T00:07:00.000-04:00

The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall,
The fly her spleen, the little spark his heat,
And slender hairs cast shadows though but small,
And bees have stings although they be not great.
Seas have their source, and so have shallow springs.
And love is love in beggars and in kings.

Where waters smoothest run, deep are the fords.
The dial stirs, yet none perceives it move.
The firmest faith is in the fewest words.
The turtles cannot sing, and yet they love.
True hearts have eyes and ears,no tongues to speak:
They hear, and see, and sigh, and then they break.
-- attributed to Sir Edward Dyer (1543?–1607)

2006-06-24T22:22:00.000-04:00

(Linda's voice-over) Nobody's perfect. There was never a perfect person around. You just got half-devil and half-angel in ya. She promised herself she'd lead a good life from now on. She blamed it all on herself...She didn't care if she was happy or not. She just wanted to make up for what she did wrong...The sun looks ghostly when there's a mist on the river and everything's quiet. I never knowed it before. You could see people on the shore but it was far off and you couldn't see what they were doin'. They were probably callin' for help or somethin', or they were tryin' to bury somebody or somethin'. We seen trees that the leaves are shakin' and it looks like shadows of guys comin' at you and stuff. We heard owls squawkin' away, oonin' away. We didn't know where we were goin', what we were goin' to do. I've never been on a boat before. That was the first time...

From "Days of Heaven", by Terence Malick

2006-05-26T21:45:00.000-04:00

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell.

- The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler

2006-05-15T14:59:00.000-04:00

But now it was spring again. And spring was almost unbearable for sensitive hearts. It drove creation to its utmost limits, it wafted its spice-laden breath even into the nostrils of the innocent.

Knut Hamsun, Dreamers

2006-04-24T02:44:00.000-04:00

What dying is like
the sound of the bell fading
after it is struck

2006-04-04T12:54:00.000-04:00

A hand creeps from the earth
The first bamboo of spring
segments of green
join(t)ed up by fat white rings
knuckles on unripened bones

note, passed to superman (Lucille Clifton)

2006-03-27T22:51:00.000-05:00

sweet jesus, superman
if i had seen you
dressed in your blue suit
i would have known you.
maybe that choirboy clark
can stand around
listening to stories
but not you, not with
metropolis to save
and every crook in town
filthy with kryptonite.
lord, man of steel,
i understand the cape,
the leggings, the whole
ball of wax.
you can trust me,
there is no planet stranger
than the one i'm from.

The Book of Light, Lucille Clifton

2006-03-20T20:39:00.000-05:00

Apples sway along
the breeze, duck behind the leaves
Drunkards stealing home

2006-03-14T21:08:00.000-05:00

Pyramids fracture
The world divides in two
without remainder

2006-03-13T18:56:00.000-05:00

The economical function appears most plainly in very ancient and modern science. In the beginning, all economy had in immediate view the satisfaction simply of bodily wants. With the artisan, and still more so with the investigator, the most concise and simplest possible knowledge of a given province of natural phenomena - a knowledge that is attained with the least intellectual expenditure - naturally becomes in itself an aim; but though knowledge was at first a means to an end, yet, when the mental motives connected therewith are once developed and demand their satisfaction, all thought of its original purpose disappears. It is one great object of science to replace, or save the trouble of making, experiments, by the reproduction and anticipation of facts in thought. Memory is handier than experience, and often answers the same purpose. Science is communicated by instruction, in order that one man may profit by the experience of another and be spared the trouble of accumulating it for himself; and thus, to spare the efforts of posterity, the experiences of whole generations are stored up in libraries. And further, yet another function of this economy is the preparation for fresh investigation.

Philip E.B. Jourdain, The Nature of Mathematics

2006-03-03T01:45:00.000-05:00

It seems obvious to theologians like Richard Swinburne that a world of limited freedom and absolute transparency of knowledge, in which not one of us is in any doubt about our creator, would be a limited, useless place. But it would not, presumably, be useless to God. It is what heaven would be like; and why, before heaven, must we live? Why must we move through this unhappy, painful, rehearsal for heaven, this desperate antechamber, this foreword written by an anonymous author, this hard prelude in which so few of us can find our way?

James Wood, The Broken Estate (p. 279)

2006-02-21T02:26:00.000-05:00

Like tiny tigers
Bees spring into the air
to mate in flight
Like rival pilots... battling
as if one must die there

The Martyrdom of Saint Valentine

2006-02-14T22:59:00.000-05:00

(A) Hand unfolds inside
of me... Veins plunge through my heart
like massive fingers

Tolstoy, War and Peace, p. 646 (Oxford World Classics)

2006-02-14T01:38:00.000-05:00

Had Napoleon not taken offence at the demand that he should withdraw beyond the Vistula, and not ordered his troops to advance, there would have been no war; but had all his sergeants objected to serving a second term then also there could have been no war. Nor could there have been a war had there been no English intrigues and no Duke of Oldenburg, and had Alexander not felt insulted, and had there not been an autocratic government in Russia, or a Revolution in France and a subsequent dictatorship and Empire, or all the things that produced the French Revolution, and so on. Wthout each of these causes nothing could have happened. So all these causes - myriads of causes - coincided to bring it about. And so there was no one cause for that occurrence, but it had to occur because it had to. Millions of men, renouncing their human feeling and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to the west slaying their fellows.

Late Haiku

2006-02-12T03:41:00.000-05:00

Love-lonely ghosts
cannot even touch themselves
(the) lost('s) consolation

2006-02-02T03:49:00.000-05:00

what dangling cherries
hung like horse-thieves from cruel stems
on gallows-trees

2006-01-23T23:07:00.000-05:00

Summer Home?

2006-01-23T23:06:00.000-05:00

The Church of the Holy Desert

Italo Calvino, "If on a winter's night a traveler"

2006-01-19T01:41:00.000-05:00

Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it's all a matter of getting started. Once you've succeeded in dispensing with something you once thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things. So here I am walking along this empty surface that is the world.

Home Away from Home

2006-01-16T02:11:00.000-05:00

Home Away from Home

Basho haiku

2006-01-16T01:30:00.000-05:00

Though I'm in Kyoto,
when the cuckoo sings
I long for Kyoto

Zuleikha Dobson, by Max Beerbohm

2006-01-09T21:46:00.000-05:00

p. 52:

"Oh," said Zuleika, "of course I like being admired. Oh yes, I like that very much indeed. In a way, I suppose, I'm even pleased that you admire me. But oh, what a little miserable pleasure that is in comparison with the rapture I have forfeited! I had never known the rapture of being in love. I had longed for it, but I had never guessed how wonderfully wonderful it was. It came to me. I shuddered and wavered like a fountain in the wind. I was more helpless and flew lightlier than a shred of thistledown among the stars. All night long, I could not sleep for love of you; nor had I any desire of sleep, save that it might take me to you in a dream. I remember nothing that happened to me this morning before I found myself at your door."

Denton Welch's "A Voice Through a Cloud"

2006-01-08T14:40:00.001-05:00

p. 158, first full paragraph:

I stopped to look at the shells, the pink ones delicate and papery as a mouse's ears, the pointed iridescent ones, and the voluted ones that presented themselves to me as purple, cruelly twisted nipples. All the shells stared back at me, coldly repulsing my interest, so I moved on to the glass pavilion on the edge of the cliff.

Marfa Nights

2006-01-02T00:19:00.000-05:00

o crippled sunset
the flame precedes the gas
o radiator

2005-12-29T17:52:00.000-05:00

o holy table...
what juices spilled to sanctify
you, what loaves are split
in two, what fish are gutted
through - gnashing of teeth - amen!

High Noon

2005-12-27T12:03:00.000-05:00

The harps unstrung
(a) halo on a rusted nail
the gates swing open

6/5ths of a Tanka

2005-12-26T16:03:00.000-05:00

What fearsome angels
tremble me...crumple-winged wings
bat ear-ly pleated
their sex a tubal root stub
of a hollow tree... bearing no seed

o shiver! Hallelujah...

Marfa Haiku

2005-12-26T11:20:00.000-05:00

Lavish us, o tongue(s)
of cloud, your licks un-fear (for) us
the fist of lightning

D.H. Lawrence - The Elephant Is Slow To Mate

2005-12-21T04:04:00.000-05:00

The elephant, the huge old beast,
is slow to mate;
he finds a female, they show no haste
they wait

for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts
slowly, slowly to rouse
as they loiter along the river-beds
and drink and browse

and dash in panic through the brake
of forest with the herd,
and sleep in massive silence, and wake
together, without a word.

So slowly the great hot elephant hearts
grow full of desire,
and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
hiding their fire.

Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts
so they know at last
how to wait for the loneliest of feasts
for the full repast.

They do not snatch, they do not tear;
their massive blood
moves as the moon-tides, near, more near
till they touch in flood.

He wishes for the cloths of heaven

2005-12-12T12:46:00.000-05:00

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly, because you tread on my dreams.

-- William Butler Yeats

And death shall have no dominion (Dylan Thomas)

2005-12-08T13:47:00.000-05:00

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead mean naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Through they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

2005-12-07T19:58:00.000-05:00

Outside, the freezing desert night.
This other night inside grows warm, kindling.
Let the landscape be covered with thorny crust.
We have a soft garden in here.
The continents blasted,
cities and little towns, everything
becomes a scorched, blackened ball.

The news we hear is full of grief for that future,
but the real news inside here
is there's no news at all.

-Rumi

Night Ray (Paul Celan)

2005-12-06T17:00:00.000-05:00

Night Ray
Paul Celan
Most brightly of all burned the hair of my evening loved one:
to her I send the coffin of lightest wood.
Waves billow round it as round the bed of our dream in Rome;
it wears a white wig as I do and speaks hoarsely:
it talks as I do when I grant admittance to hearts.
It knows a French song about love, I sang it in autumn
when I stopped as a tourist in Lateland and wrote my letters
to morning.

A fine boat is that coffin carved in the coppice of feelings.
I too drift in it downbloodstream, younger still than your eye.
Now you are young as a bird dropped dead in March snow,
now it comes to you, sings you its love song from France.
You are light: you will sleep through my spring till it's over.
I am lighter:
in front of strangers I sing.

XXXVIII from the Black Riders (Stephen Crane)

2005-12-05T01:52:00.000-05:00

Stephen Crane poem from the Black Riders
XXXVIII

The ocean said to me once,
"Look!
Yonder on the shore
Is a woman, weeping.
I have watched her.
Go you and tell her this --
Her lover I have laid
In cool green hall.
There is wealth of golden sand
And pillars, coral-red;
Two white fish stand guard at his bier.

"Tell her this
And more --
That the king of the seas
Weeps too, old, helpless man.
The bustling fates
Heap his hands with corpses
Until he stands like a child
With a surplus of toys.

2005-11-03T19:00:00.000-05:00

The trees lay down their arms
along the grass, the leaves prepare
their leaving. Night falls.
The forest wakes: octopi
surrounded by blushing starfish.

2005-10-28T17:42:00.000-04:00

A sleeping dog lies
pretending to dream of birds:
it is his own leaping
he dreams, removed from this shell,
as if it were an over-ripe egg.

2005-10-24T18:16:00.000-04:00

A shoe must sometimes
accept a foot, a hand is made
to become a fist
A womb sometimes is made a tomb
But sometimes, a tomb becomes a womb

Eclipse

2005-10-23T17:47:00.000-04:00

Halfway through the game
the green and blue marble withdrawn
to a velvet bag
No sore loser, the universe
soon allows it back out again

Adolescence

2005-10-23T17:41:00.000-04:00

Tip-toe-ing, planets
in a binary system
approach each other
The wind of one passing may
knock the other from the sky

2005-10-23T17:40:00.000-04:00

Time is relative
minutes fathering hours
hours conceive days
To make a year, weeks and months
are spent in fornication

2005-10-22T20:43:00.000-04:00

An inked fermata
the earth surrounded by a
waning crescent moon
An ominous pictogram
A stage stretching beyond its station