"Poem"

I remember once, when you were ahead of me walking through the main square, after you had dropped a scoop of ice cream, pistachio it should have been, onto the solid black coffee stone sitting at the bottom of that porcelain thimble and had sat there sipping, taken out of space and time, your face like a child seen hiding the secret mirth of a stolen cookie; and you had already postulated to the air (i just so happened to hear) that you feared the seagulls would impale us on their beaks (those bags of flying pools genetically shallow; don't worry i said they are just jealous) and we already tried to lounge languidly on those large concrete jackstones that some giant tumbled into the sea but I feigned cool because you weren't looking; it was then, passed the port where the fish were gutted and the squid were peeled and the manta rays were wacked against the undulating concrete punished for some crime unknown, their thousand eyes bulging and lifeless; it was as we walked back with the sun at our backs back through the square heavy with milling people and with beggars parading their wizened palms and broken backs, there that the smile set from your magnetic countenance that beguiles those lost planets orbiting the uncharted star. I remember once, when the smile set, that I was lost suddenly in the unknown sea, calm and deep, a sky of a sea, with neither stars nor sense to guide me and I threw these tired hands soaked with salt and rubbed raw with the sands of one too many dunes, sent them as a weed pushes from the earth to rotten air, sent them without sending them and you saw, because you looked at me, your tender eyes flying into mine like two seagulls big and brown with glistening heads and sharpened beaks and I saw the shadow of a smile shimmer, a time of long ago echoed in the present, felt but not touched, heard but not listened to. I remember, when that smile set, the last yawn of the morning.

Hildebrandt Trumble

The Messiah: is it real?

"[Stewart] Pollens, the 51-year-old conservator of musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum, has ignited a most undignified firestorm of rancor and name-calling in this insular area of collecting. He did so by uttering the worst kind of blasphemy: He suggested that arguably the world's most celebrated Stradivarius violin is a fake. This so-called Messiah, or Le Messie, is housed in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University and estimated to be worth some $20 million."





Read on here...

Gertrude Anscombe @ SEP

Some of Anscombe's most influential work was on the nature of causation. The relation between cause and effect has been notoriously difficult to analyze. Anscombe's work in “Causality and Determination” challenged some of the empiricist orthodoxy of Hume's account. For example, she challenged the view that the causal relation is characterized by constant conjunction in discussing Feynman's Geiger counter case:

An example of a non-necessitating cause is mentioned by Feynman: a bomb is connected to a Geiger counter, so that it will go off if the Geiger counter registers a certain reading; whether it will or not is not determined, for it is so placed near some radioactive material that it may or may not register that reading.

And yet, if the bomb explodes it was caused by the Geiger counter arrangement. Causation does not involve determination, or necessity. Since the radioactive decay was not sufficient for this effect, the case tells against viewing causes as sufficient conditions. There is no general causal connection between cause and effect.

From a new entry on Anscombe at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

"Your Goodbye"

And I read your goodbye
anonymously, my insides
sinking slowly, unbelieving,
down deep into a sinkhole
that I was not there;
and the dewy-eyed sun rises
everyday, Hope dawning on my sheets,
a reddish glow spreading from my thorax
begging you to remember;

but your sheet was painfully void,
highlighting the blank charade
with pregnant words sprinkled
lithely on my page:
seagulls, orange marmalade, wild gestures
but no brief hint of mine
as if our time reared not the smallest leaf,
(leaving only that which my mind enshrines
and sings to those sorrowing birds)
none of the wise words uttered before death;
remember, remember what you whispered
through the waves' soft mist?
or the little boy outside who tried to sell us
children's shoes, meandering from table to table,
remember? I am like him, pandering
to a girl with too many shoes;

for sailing with sails unfurled
saying what æther fills my lungs
what wakes my dreams from slumber
would burst the seams and cost too much to bare;
so i choose this, i prefer this,
this plebeian oblivion.
Yet we know that children grow
that shoes get worn and weary
and new ones take their place;
then, it seems, the shoe-panderer,
though breathless and fallen
by a melancholy fit, will find
a quiet corner to sit and breath
and review the feast and the wine and
the many-crowned carouse.


Viduus Moore

"Poem"

If Time be a stream
bittered by the wet rocks
swept into sand,
the sorrowful current,
then let me be a beaver
hungry with impatience
and this damned clubtail (dragging like a thick willow clinging to the water)
to stop its flow, to live,
to feel a moment's repose
in this loveliness
forlorn.
These months,
these long weeks
illimitable day hours
like patterns in the cove's
bank or tears on a
glistening face, they pass
unseen. The innocent Moon
and its bed of stars slide
in vain, for my thoughts are
water, both moving and unmoving,
filling the stream bed.


Marcel Xavier

"NOBLESSE OBLIGE"

I always put on a whole-slick tuxedo
when I jump off tall buildings so

when I'm sprawl in the streetdust
that passersby can say, "Oh no: and just

when he was at the height of his success;
look at that tux—now that's the way to dress."



Bill Knott (his blog)(you can also download his books free(!) from here)

"BEDDYBYE" by Knott

Just hope that when you lie down your toes are a firing-squad

"Lovelade"

The sea is the cargo of empty ships
Moon bears the sun when it’s gone
My face with the trace of your lips
Will fare from now on and on


Bill Knott (you can download his books free(!) from here)

"What would happen"

What would happen if the sun never shone?
he, against the splintered boards
rubbing two palms by the concave waves
drip drip dripping salt into the red,
he lives here now, and asks

Don't you miss the warmth
of its blinding smile, ringing the vast,
that soars through air wisteria-soaked
the blazing arms to the very towers that beg the sun,
the one, that sun
that will never shine again?

"I think of you"

In the airport
waiting with lost beetles
eyes, suspicious, lash out;
our leggy model saunters by
which makes me laugh and turn to my side
to tell the closest; but there was no one,
and I think of you.

Fingers lash the strings
like crashing crests to the shore
and the bow whistling the burnished box
of wood and glue, sweating,
what might have been and what has been
are nothing; the beauty of music,
and I think of you.

I see you in the clarity of stars in the night black,
and they purr pure gold from afar.
I see you twice in the shimmering sparks of the ocean
deep from the hustle-bustle life brimming with nothing
worse than nothing, everything;
hiding in your castle town, your own kingdom
of hypnotized monkeys, and the gate stays shut;
below, the branches of the fig
and the quince intertwine, but the fruit do not touch;
I cling to these like ink to paper
and think of naught but you.

"Tonight I can write"

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write for example, 'The night is full of stars
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like these I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think I do not have her, to feel I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to a pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is full of stars and she is not with me.

That is all. Far away, someone sings. Far away.
My soul is lost without her.

As if to bring her near, my eyes search for her.
My heart searches for her and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, we who were, we are the same no longer.

Surely I no longer love her, but how I once loved her.
My voice searched the wind to touch her ear.

Another's. She will be another's. As she once belonged to my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

Surely I no longer love her, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short and forgetting so long.

Because on nights like these I held her in my arms,
my soul is lost without her.

Though this be the last pain she makes me suffer
and these the last verses I write for her.


Pablo Neruda

"Your Laughter"

Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.

Do not take away the rose,
the lance flower that you pluck,
the water that suddenly
bursts forth in joy,
the sudden wave
of silver born in you.

My struggle is harsh and I come back
with eyes tired
at times from having seen
the unchanging earth,
but when your laughter enters
it rises to the sky seeking me
and it opens for me all
the doors of life.

My love, in the darkest
hour your laughter
opens, and if suddenly
you see my blood staining
the stones of the street,
laugh, because your laughter
will be for my hands
like a fresh sword.

Next to the sea in the autumn,
your laughter must raise
its foamy cascade,
and in the spring, love,
I want your laughter like
the flower I was waiting for,
the blue flower, the rose
of my echoing country.

Laugh at the night,
at the day, at the moon,
laugh at the twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy
boy who loves you,
but when I open
my eyes and close them,
when my steps go,
when my steps return,
deny me bread, air,
light, spring,
but never your laughter
for I would die.


Pablo Neruda

translated by Donald Walsh