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Abril 30, 2009
Description of Her Eyes
Two teaspoonfuls,
and my mind goes
everyone can kiss my ass now—
then it’s changed,
I change my mind.
Eyes so sad, and infinitely kind.
Franz Wright
Posted by sarita at 7:31 PM
Seagulls
A gull, up close,
looks surprisingly stuffed.
His fluffy chest seems filled
with an inexpensive taxidermist’s material
rather lumpily inserted. The legs,
unbent, are childish crayon strokes—
too simple to be workable.
And even the feather-markings,
whose intricate symmetry is the usual glory of birds,
are in the gull slovenly,
as if God makes too many
to make them very well.
Are they intelligent?
We imagine so, because they are ugly.
The sardonic one-eyed profile, slightly cross,
the narrow, ectomorphic head, badly combed,
the wide and nervous and well-muscled rump
all suggest deskwork: shipping rates
by day, Schopenhauer
by night, and endless coffee.
At that hour on the beach
when flies begin biting in the renewed coolness
and the backsliding skin of the after-surf
reflects a pink shimmer before being blotted,
the gulls stand around in the dimpled sand
like those melancholy European crowds
that gather in cobbled public squares in the wake
of assassinations and invasions,
heads cocked to hear the latest radio reports.
It is also this hour when plump young couples
walk down to the water, bumping together,
and stand thigh-deep in the rhythmic glass.
Then they walk back toward the car,
tugging as if at a secret between them,
but which neither quite knows—
walk capricious paths through scattering gulls,
as in some mythologies
beautiful gods stroll unconcerned
among our mortal apprehensions.
John Updike
Posted by sarita at 11:02 AM
Abril 20, 2009
Storm
Cattle egrets in the dry grass waded
like white clerics at the hooves
of brood cows, heifers, and new calves.
Forked lightning. Calm.
The darkness in the cattle tank welled up
and flooded the reflection of the trees.
Turkey vultures wheeled, and wheeled away.
No swifts, no swallows, children gone indoors.
Rain seethed into the willowtops,
sky flashing, while the black bull
under the water locust glowed
with an inward surge of darkness.
Brooks Haxton
Posted by sarita at 9:33 AM
Abril 19, 2009
Be angry..
Irascimini et nolite peccare
Be angry, but sin not
King David, in a psalm
from Galileo's Daughter, in a letter from Suor Maria Celeste to Galileo
Posted by sarita at 10:47 PM
Fragment on Dissembling
Curious in your dark
Frock-coat, do everything
That you have to,
If it is time;
Leave nothing
Still unsaid.
Once, to make of nothing
Something, was divine.
To have made
Of something
Nothing, was sublime.
Lucie Brock-Broido
Posted by sarita at 10:42 AM
To See My Mother
It was like witnessing the earth being formed,
to see my mother die, like seeing
the dry lands be separated
from the oceans, and all the mists bear up
on one side, and all the solids
be borne down, on the other, until
the body was all there, all bronze and
petrified redwood opal, and the soul all
gone. If she hadn't looked so exalted, so
beast-exalted and refreshed and suddenly
hopeful, more than hopeful—beyond
hope, relieved—if she had not been suffering so
much, since I had met her, I do not
know how I would have stood it, without
fighting someone, though no one was there
to fight, death was not there except
as her, my task was to hold her tiny
crown in one cupped hand, and her near
birdbone shoulder. Lakes, clouds,
nests. Winds, stems, tongues.
Embryo, zygote, blastocele, atom,
my mother's dying was like an end
of life on earth, some end of water
and moisture salt and sweet, and vapor,
till only that still, ocher moon
shone, in the room, mouth open, no song.
Sharon Olds
Posted by sarita at 10:42 AM
Children in a Field
They don't wade in so much as they are taken.
Deep in the day, in the deep of the field,
every current in the grasses whispers hurry
hurry, every yellow spreads its perfume
like a rumor, impelling them further on.
It is the way of girls. It is the sway
of their dresses in the summer trance-
light, their bare calves already far-gone
in green. What songs will they follow?
Whatever the wood warbles, whatever storm
or harm the border promises, whatever
calm. Let them go. Let them go traceless
through the high grass and into the willow-
blur, traceless across the lean blue glint
of the river, to the long dark bodies
of the conifers, and over the welcoming
threshold of nightfall.
Angela Shaw
Posted by sarita at 10:22 AM
Hunger
I had a canoe that took me into the forest I read about. It was fleet and I asked no questions. I saw the careless embroidery of the sky above me. I was small. I was embracing. And I was dear all my life. My instrument is silent. I never learned to play. But it sits poised in my arms like an amber deer that I'll give my life for. What does it sound like? Why haven't I tried?
She crept into my arms like a red flower a stranger gives me. She is tame and soft. In a low voice, I tell her stories of when I was a girl. I bring her fruit from the brook of my own glad tidings. I overflow and I almost forget her. My hair is wet and I feel I can be alone. I know other songs. But what about my deer? She's sleeping. I fit an arrow through my bow. I kill so she eats. She says if only I'd been a better mother.
Sarah Gambito
Posted by sarita at 10:19 AM
Abril 15, 2009
The ambition for broad acres...
"The ambition for broad acres leads to poor farming, even with men of energy. I scarcely ever knew a mammoth farm to sustain itself; much less to return a profit upon the outlay. I have more than once known a man to spend a respectable fortune upon one; fail and leave it; and then some man of more modest aims, get a small fraction of the ground, and make a good living upon it. Mammoth farms are like tools or weapons, which are too heavy to be handled. Ere long they are thrown aside, at a great loss."
Source: Abraham Lincoln, Sept 30, 1859, Wisconsin State Fair
Posted by sarita at 3:04 PM
Abril 14, 2009
You must be able to do three things:
To live in this world, you must be able to do three things: to love what is mortal; to hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, to let it go.
Mary Oliver
Posted by sarita at 12:01 AM
Abril 13, 2009
Ode to Pepper Vinegar
You sat in the tomb
of our family fridge
for years, without
fail. You were all
I wanted covering
my greens, satisfaction
I’ve since sought
for years in restaurants
which claimed soul, but neither
knew you nor
your vinegar prayer.
Baby brother
of bitterness, soothsayer,
you taught
me the difference between loss
& holding on. Next to the neon
of the maraschino cherries,
you floated & stayed
constant as a flame
on an unknown soldier’s grave—
I never did know
how you got here
you just were. Adrift
in your mason jar
you were a briny bit of where
we came from, rusty lid
awaiting our touch
& tongue—you were faith
in the everyday, not rare
as the sugarcane
my grandparents sent north
come Christmas, drained
sweet & dry, delicious, gone
by New Year's—
no, you were nearer,
familiar, the thump
thump of an upright bass
or the brass
of a funeral band
bringing us home.
Kevin Young
Posted by sarita at 2:26 PM
Spring Song II
And now my spring beauties,
Things of the earth,
Beetles, shards and wings of moth
And snail houses left
From last summer's wreck,
Now spring smoke
Of the burned dead leaves
And veils of the scent
Of some secret plant,
Come, my beauties, teach me,
Let me have your wild surprise,
Yes, and tell me on my knees
Of your new life.
Jean Garrigue
Posted by sarita at 12:44 PM
Abril 12, 2009
A History of Night
Through the course of generations
men brought the night into being.
In the beginning were blindness and dream
and thorns which gash the bare foot
and fear of wolves.
We shall never know who fashioned the word
for the interval of darkness
which divides the two half-lights.
We shall never know in what century it stood
for the starry spaces.
Others began the myth.
They made night mother of the tranquil Fates
who weave all destiny
and sacrificed black sheep to her
and the rooster which announced her end.
The Chaldeans gave her twelve houses;
infinite worlds, the Stoic Portico.
Latin hexameters molded her,
and Pascal's dread.
Luis de León saw in her the homeland
of his shivering soul.
Now we feel her inexhaustible
as an old wine
and no one can think of her without vertigo,
and time has charged her with eternity.
And to think that night would not exist
without those tenuous instruments, the eyes.
By Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Alastair Reid
Posted by sarita at 11:41 PM
Abril 7, 2009
Untitled [This is what was bequeathed us]
An excerpt from How Beautiful the Beloved
This is what was bequeathed us:
This earth the beloved left
And, leaving,
Left to us.
No other world
But this one:
Willows and the river
And the factory
With its black smokestacks.
No other shore, only this bank
On which the living gather.
No meaning but what we find here.
No purpose but what we make.
That, and the beloved's clear instructions:
Turn me into song; sing me awake.
David Orr
Posted by sarita at 3:41 PM
Waiting On Elvis, 1956
This place up in Charlotte called Chuck’s where I
used to waitress and who came in one night
but Elvis and some of his friends before his concert
at the Arena, I was twenty-six married but still
waiting tables and we got to joking around like you
do, and he was fingering the lace edge of my slip
where it showed below my hemline and I hadn’t even
seen it and I slapped at him a little saying, You
sure are the one aren’t you feeling my face burn but
he was the kind of boy even meanness turned sweet in
his mouth.
Smiled at me and said, Yeah honey I guess I sure am.
Joyce Carol Oates
Posted by sarita at 3:38 PM
Abril 6, 2009
This Lunar Beauty
This lunar beauty
Has no history
Is complete and early;
If beauty later
Bear any feature
It had a lover
And is another.
This like a dream
Keeps other time,
And daytime is
The loss of this;
For time is inches
And the heart's changes
Where ghost has haunted,
Lost and wanted.
But this was never
A ghost's endeavour
Nor, finished this,
Was ghost at ease;
And till it pass
Love shall not near
The sweetness here
Nor sorrow take
His endless look.
W. H. Auden
Posted by sarita at 11:25 AM
Abril 3, 2009
The Peace of Wild Things
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
— Wendell Berry
Posted by sarita at 1:48 PM