"It is getting further away"

It is getting further away
The bliss of that bleak year

The blank kiss of that warm beer;
Know I captured the square when leaves

Filtered the sun a blindman's sieve
Through to the damp grass where we lay

That year, and that late-summer's day
stayed as an aroma of fresh pie

Or a distant balloon in the eastern sky
Then buoyed by a twitter of pigeons;

And when it was softly hidden
By pillows and pastures, a snow garden

In which we never went, ever uncertain,
For the square spoke for us instead:

"The real message was misread
From the white quiet nights, laid bare

By the auburn of her silken hair
And the bliss of that bleak year".

"Lubrication works best"

Lubrication works best
On my barren cornea,

One of Leiningen's defenses here
Against nagging limbs, thorny fingers,

A cornucopia of me purging
The lunar surface of my eye

Of turgid gunk
Clogging lacrimal ducts,

A spring cleaning
In the falling snow.

It is a summer afternoon in October.
I am sitting on a wooden bench, looking out
At the lake through a tall screen of evergreens,
Or rather, looking out across the plane of the lake,
Seeing the light shaking upon the water
As if it were a shimmering of heat.
Yesterday, when I sat here, it was the same,
The same displace out-of-season effect.
Seen twice it seemed a truth was being told.
Some of the trees I can see across the lake
Have begun to change, but it is as if the air
Had entirely given itself over to summer,
With the intention of denying its own proper nature.

There is a breeze perfectly steading and persistent
Blowing in toward shore from the other side
Or from the world beyond the other side.
The mild sound of the little tapping waves
The breeze has caused — there’s something infantile
About it, a baby at the breast.  The light
Is moving and not moving upon the water.

The breeze picks up slightly but still steadily,
The increase in the breeze becomes the mild
Dominant event, compelling with sweet oblivious
Authority alterations in light and shadow,
Alterations in the light of the sun on the water,
Which becomes at once denser and more quietly
Excited, like a concentration of emotions
That had been dispersed and scattered and now were not.
Then there’s the mitigation of the shadow of a cloud,
And the light subsides a little, into itself.

Although this is a lake it is as if
A tide were running mildly into shore.
The sound of the water so softly battering
Against the shore is decidedly sexual,
In its liquidity, its regularity,
Its persistence, its infantile obliviousness.
It is as if it had come back to being
A beginning, an origination of life.

The plane of the water is like a page on which
Phrases and even sentences are written,
But because of the breeze, and the turning of the year,
And the sense that this lake water, as it is being
Experienced on a particular day, comes from
Some source somewhere, beneath, within, itself,
Or from somewhere else, nearby, a spring, a brook,
Its pure origination somewhere else
It is like an idea for a poem not yet written
And maybe never to be completed, because
The surface of the page is like lake water,
That takes back what is written on its surface,
And all my language about the lake and its
Emotions or its sweet obliviousness,
Or even its being like an origination,
Is all erased with the changing of the breeze
Or because of the heedless passing of a cloud.

When, moments after she died, I looked into
Her face, it was as untelling as something natural,
A lake, say, the surface of it unreadable,
Its sources of meaning unfindable anymore.
Her mouth was open as if she had something to say;
But maybe my saying so is a figure of speech.

By David Ferry


Thanks to Dan Chiasson at The New Yorker. Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/01/david-ferrys-beautiful-thefts.html#ixzz2HsmzowCg

Finding Flowers

Now I dreamt of you sleeping and dreaming,
beside me, in my bed, and of how it all was,
nothing happened except you sleeping and dreaming,
beside me, in my bed, and my looking at you,
and seeing how inexorably and all-pervasively
beautiful you were, how you were: all sleep and
dream and time, which gave itself ample time,
and how I knew that this immaculate waking
needs no kisses of shushing nostalgia,
when we think we’re dreaming of dreams
and religiously do the work, unseen by anyone.

by Pieter Boskma
from Het violette uur
publisher: Prometheus, Amsterdam, 2008
translation: 2012, Paul Vincent

Thanks 3quarksdaily!

Hugging the coast

Tomorrow, I will embark on a 4-day hiking challenge starting in the Exmoor National Park, at the northeastern tip of the Southwest Coastal Path. The challenge is an open-ended one, made to breakdown the physical body into its elements, wrest the spiritual body out of its lovelorn orbit, nourish the mind with space and time, and paint the bitter end with a sea of sweet brine and jellyfish.

"Dignity and Impudence" by Sir Edwin Landseer

"Why Explore Space?"

From 'Letters of Note':

'In 1970, a Zambia-based nun named Sister Mary Jucunda wrote to Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then-associate director of science at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, in response to his ongoing research into a piloted mission to Mars. Specifically, she asked how he could suggest spending billions of dollars on such a project at a time when so many children were starving on Earth.Stuhlinger soon sent the following letter of explanation to Sister Jucunda, along with a copy of "Earthrise," the iconic photograph of Earth taken in 1968 by astronaut William Anders, from the Moon (also embedded in the transcript). His thoughtful reply was later published by NASA, and titled, "Why Explore Space?"'

Read the letter here...

"Praise be"

And He decreed Man to be holy and saw his work be done. He, who may be named or unnamed, praised or defiled, walked this land with bootstraps trailing, shedding blessings like soaked leaves after a shower and notes of blue cheese staining his nostrils and His mouth dried of wizened lips. His mind, like a bee's comb, rattled with winged pits that bled honey, was spread upon the land a tough woollen thread, embroidered with confusion grown bald and too few ladyfingers, spread and tugged into the four corners, tucked into the quiet limits of the mattress, and accepted by the people. For it is He, they say, Who colours the chalk white and He who begs the rivers to flow for His people, and He Who caresses your cried out reddened throat with golden honey lozenges; and He Who listens.

To his lost lover
     by Simon Armitage

Now they are no longer
any trouble to each other

he can turn things over, get down to that list
of things that never happened, all of the lost

unfinishable business.
For instance… for instance,

how he never clipped and kept her hair, or drew a hairbrush
through that style of hers, and never knew how not to blush

at the fall of her name in close company.
How they never slept like buried cutlery –

two spoons or forks cupped perfectly together,
or made the most of some heavy weather –

walked out into hard rain under sheet lightning,
or did the gears while the other was driving.

How he never raised his fingertips
to stop the segments of her lips

from breaking the news,
or tasted the fruit

or picked for himself the pear of her heart,
or lifted her hand to where his own heart

was a small, dark, terrified bird
in her grip. Where it hurt.

Or said the right thing,
or put it in writing.

And never fled the black mile back to his house
before midnight, or coaxed another button of her blouse,

then another,
or knew her

favourite colour,
her taste, her flavour,

and never ran a bath or held a towel for her,
or soft-soaped her, or whipped her hair

into an ice-cream cornet or a beehive
of lather, or acted out of turn, or misbehaved

when he might have, or worked a comb
where no comb had been, or walked back home

through a black mile hugging a punctured heart,
where it hurt, where it hurt, or helped her hand

to his butterfly heart
in its two blue halves.

And never almost cried,
and never once described

an attack of the heart,
or under a silk shirt

nursed in his hand her breast,
her left, like a tear of flesh

wept by the heart,
where it hurts,

or brushed with his thumb the nut of her nipple,
or drank intoxicating liquors from her navel.

Or christened the Pole Star in her name,
or shielded the mask of her face like a flame,

a pilot light,
or stayed the night,

or steered her back to that house of his,
or said “Don’t ask me how it is

I like you.
I just might do.”

How he never figured out a fireproof plan,
or unravelled her hand, as if her hand

were a solid ball
of silver foil

and discovered a lifeline hiding inside it,
and measured the trace of his own alongside it.

But said some things and never meant them –
sweet nothings anybody could have mentioned.

And left unsaid some things he should have spoken,
about the heart, where it hurt exactly, and how often.

"The Pillow"

The pillow said:
at the end of the long day
only I know
the confident man’s confusion,
the nun’s desire,
the slight quiver in the tyrant’s eyelash,
the preacher’s obscenity,
the soul’s longing
for a warm body where flying sparks
become a glowing coal.
Only I know
the grandeur of unnoticed little things;
only I know the loser’s dignity,
the winner’s loneliness
and the stupid coldness one feels
when a wish has been granted.


by Mourid Barghouti

translation Radwa Ashour
from Midnight and Other Poems
Publisher: Arc Publications, Todmorden, Lancashire, 2009


When I read this for the first time, I thought "I don't want to be dignified, for dignity only shows itself in defeat. It is a remedy for failure."