2025-07-18

 
--Richard Brautigan

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.


2025-07-16

 
--Richard Brautigan

O beautiful
was the werewolf
in his evil forest.
We took him
to the carnival
and he started
     crying
when he saw
the Ferris wheel.
Electric
green and red tears
flowed down
his furry cheeks.
He looked
like a boat
out on the dark
water.


2025-07-14

 

[ Zonnegloed ; Emile Claus (1905) ]



 

2025-07-12

 
-- JJJJJerome Ellis

The name of that silence is these grasses in this wind, and the name of these grasses in this wind is that other place on the other side of this instant. This instant is divided by curtains of water and the sound of shuddering time. A sunflower reeling with sun, six hands stretched in offering. This unsearchable, uncancellable instant wraps the shoulders of the grasses like a shawl stilled by the stoppage. White pines whistle skyward. “With our beings shaped to songs of praise,” writes the fifth-century theologian Pseudo-Dionysius. “What the scripture writers have to say regarding the divine names refers, in revealing praises, to the beneficent processions of God.” What processes from the instant? Find the ceremony in every instant. “Every condition, movement, life, imagination, conjecture, name, discourse, thought, inception, being, rest, dwelling, unity, limit, infinity, the totality of existence.” What is the name of this instant? Where is the name of this instant? Swimming in the Rappahannock, clinging to the swollen belly of that ruby-throated hummingbird. 

“Bring anonymity,” writes poet Tim Lilburn.

This morning come shyly or boldly into the fertile field, however you are, come, come and stay in the rearrangement, the pressure of thumb on fescue blade, a year wheeling within a day, two round moments of warm mouth, finally at peace. The psalm is a key if only we can find the door. Do not swallow your dysfluent voice. Let it erupt in its volcanic flowering. Stoppage thence passage, aporia, poppy bursting with fragrant seed. 


2025-07-10

 
--Conrad Aiken

Absolute zero: the locust sings:
summer’s caught in eternity’s rings:
the rock explodes, the planet dies,
we shovel up our verities.

The razor rasps across the face
and in the glass our fleeting race
lit by infinity’s lightning wink
under the thunder tries to think.

In this frail gourd the granite pours
the timeless howls like all outdoors
the sensuous moment builds a wall
open as wind, no wall at all:

while still obedient to valves and knobs
the vascular jukebox throbs and sobs
expounding hope propounding yearning
proposing love, but never learning

or only learning at zero’s gate
like summer’s locust the final hate
formless ice on a formless plain
that was and is and comes again.


2025-07-08

 

If you smell iodine, the captain is nearby.
The pines support heaven upon their needles.
An aquamarine July strolls along the seashore,
Its ever-returning feet massaged by pebbles.
You dilute the climate with tears. Carving melons
Smells of vacation ... just as the inevitable captain.
Hello! I know this well: summer has come. Henceforth,
It will knock at my threshold. I will prepare. I change
Unnecessarily so many times each day. The soul
Immaculate gasps when you bring her to the glassy sea.
When summer ends, I will spill iodine. Let it smell,
To make the captain believe his sea is my flat.

--Lyudmyla Diadchenko (trans. Padma Thornlyre)



2025-07-06

 
[ Landscape with a Red House ; Aristarkh Lentulov (1917) ]




2025-07-05

 
--Pam Rehm

It happens like this:

Majestically,
the pigeons spill down
a few steps away

on a hot summer’s day
on Broadway

jostling one another
All the dust and the mess

I’ve become
overtaken

by unevenness
Within the days

Between the hours

I’m bewildered by
all the dollars I’ve spent

on a life out of balance
when there’s all this

cosmic consciousness

within a kiss
and the 1 AM

that haunts the hand
in my pocket

searching for the key
hole

All those mistakes ago

Like everyone else,
I feed them

A few cents of bread
But it’s the thirst

no one thinks about
When I look out

YOU are
always
The landscape within


2025-07-03

 
--Pam Rehm

If endear is earned
and is meant to identify   
two halves

then it composes   
one meaning

which means   
a token

a knot   
a note

a noting in the head   
of how it feels

to have your heart   
be the dear one


2025-07-01

 
--Pam Rehm

The only thing under the sun
I can run to
is Ecclesiastes

for there is nothing gathered into one self
that can be kept

Want is humbled by death
as every purpose manifests it

Feeling this all my life
a piercing fright
gathers in the stomach's pit

This is it and this is not the end
of the road

for even despair is a kind of goad
to wisdom

The beauty of the world
over one's own anguish

The day that I lost all feeling

I was both a Fool and a Goddess


2025-06-29

 
[ Butterflies ; Piroska Szanto ]
 

2025-06-27

 
--Nathan Spoon

I shouldn’t be doing this the room said. I didn’t
know rooms could do anything much less
talk about it I said. Well that’s on you the room
said but at least you know better now. A person
wearing a pink shirt gray jacket and beige pants
was stroking their chin. Another one was wearing
a mask. A big part of living is matching what
you do or say to what else is being done or said
by others. The difficulty is in knowing where to
draw the line. For example the philosophical and
conceptual mind desires to be included with its
casual counterparts such as the need for rest and
idleness. We are living through imperfect times
and clearly deserve all the shit we’ll give ourselves.


2025-06-25

 
--Nathan Spoon

Stemming brightly from a small jar : four flowers. It is like 
the ontology of being unaware of how many selves 
can be contained within a single individual. Be brief 
and then forget what happens next given the theory of 
the lyric driving sheep along in their natural orders. 
That character Parmenides started it sliding to plain 
after plain of natural versus dominator hierarchies like

these. Next came all the rest. Some days it is difficult 
to remember how much a stranger might remember.
Now the hero is gone. They were so great all four flowering
selves are still learning from them. Water is a yarn so hard 
that magic infuses even the corners and crevices of
every sticky law. People are always conflating love 
with new skies and new skies with cunning harmonies.


2025-06-24

 
--Nathan Spoon 
Here comes rain on our roof!
It stays just long enough
to tickle me into writing this.

It stays just long enough
for everybody to get into
a pair of PJs (silk-cotton blend)

and then goes poof! At our best
we exude awesomeness. At our best
we are destined to turn pale

with the rest of humanity.
We are awesome and quick as
decomposing sticks at a trail’s

end. We bend dreams into circles
of green zone satire. We have
mahogany stuffed in our mahogany

ears. To all who are not us
we are sorry to say You’re welcome!
Nature thankfully adores a rumor!

A sunset! A glacier! Clouds
glimmer and cast inevitable
shadows off the groundswell

footrest. I remember you from
that time before we first met
when our eyes were wet

like summertime coasters
as we Ubered noiselessly
between pews. The aristocrats

are failing to panhandle via email.
One aristocrat is sleepily winding
through the face of another.


2025-06-22

 
[ Summer Sky ; David Hockney (2008) ]
 

2025-06-20

 
--Shuntaro Tanikawa

“I gave birth to a fish”
says the woman
“I freed it in the sea right away”
 
Giggling under the breath
I am downtown
people are sick of other people
 
What shall we do now?
Shall we go see
our dead friends?
 
Here I am, not understanding anything
not knowing anything
I open a pocket paperback for now, but
 
All that comes to
my mind is:
It’s a fine day


2025-06-18

 
--Shuntaro Tanikawa

Earth-colored water hesitates, flows
I realize it is a river
The descendant of formless underground dwellers,
the water is heading toward the sea, that much I know
but I don’t know when and how it welled up

As the train crosses the river a young woman next to me yawns
There is something welling up, too, from the shadowy depth of her mouth
Suddenly I realize my brain is more dull-witted than my flesh

Feeling uneasy that I, the flesh, riding a train,
am made mostly of water
I, the brain, prop myself up with words

Sometime in a distant past, somewhere in a distant place
words were much less voluminous, but
their ties to the nether world were perhaps much stronger

Water remains on this planet
morphing into seas, clouds, rains and ice
Words, too, cling to this planet
morphing into speeches, poems, contracts and treaties

I, too, cling to this planet


2025-06-16

 
--Shuntaro Tanikawa (t. by Martin Rock)

1 Shade Tree

In any case, joy lives inside this day
as in the heart of the new sun—
and in dining tables, and in guns,
and even in gods, though they remain oblivious.

In the tree’s shade, human hearts return
to embrace the day’s humility.
Freely, in this place,
one stands for a moment

to read the sky,
to sing the clouds’ song,
to pray, simply because it is time to summon pleasure.

I must forget
that which is beyond forgetting.
The sun glares. The trees glare back.

2 Yearning

In the shadow of the June sun, I accept my fate.
I’ve become alienated even from my own desires.
My yearning dashes about
vainly, with no time to look back.

I’ve made the mistake of loving without conviction.
All the while, just this charming exterior—
flattery without the knowledge of who flatters.
Fields and clouds are such simple things.

Soon, around my small grave,
only people, rocks, and sky will remain. And yet—
what immortal soul remembers tomorrow?

I’ve made the mistake of forgetting the gods.
Without life, how on earth can anything happen?
In the obscure early summer sun, my fate casts a shadow.

3 Homecoming

This was an alien land.
Through the side entrance of this miserable planet,
I was drawn to the darkness of its innermost part
by the profound, mysterious shapes of its rooms.

Who am I?
I have no means to return,
and will continue writing these dispatches
as long as I am here.

I have ceased yearning for other planets.
There is more amusement here than in eternity,
and yet someday, as a postscript, I’ll return.

Most likely, I’ll be called back unexpectedly
from this intimate, foreign land —
My own homecoming, and yet I will not be there.

10 Unknown Person

The car spoke.
The pencil spoke.
Chemistry, itself, spoke.
“You have made us,” they said. “You human.”

I wonder, what would Tanuki think of this?
What would the stars think?
What might the gods think
of this overflowing of passion, this foolish arrogance?

We move toward death, all in a line,
beginning with he who has forgotten how to be alone,
until the unknown person, here, is erased.

The wind blows over the earth at dusk and again over an unknown star.
The gods walk the earth at dusk, the earth which belongs to dusk.
Even over the unknown stars, they walk.


2025-06-13

[ The Blue Chairs II ; Panayiotis Tetsis (1976) ]
 

2025-06-11

 
--Derek Mong

        begin from above. The first line wrote itself
in eraser. Your entrance refills with its cloud.

Can you feel now a dull tug on your pant leg?
You have shadows within shadows.

The poem strips them off like spare parachutes.
Watch their dark mouths briefly glisten

like guardrail reflectors. Leave silence
between them like warm loaves of bread.

Whatever small truth the poem hurtles toward
is already in your pockets. Release it here

and stop breathing. Watch it rain down
like disco ball light. If a story comes in, cold

from the margins, you alone can warm
its feet. To do so you must hold it

beneath the voice that trails you.
You offer the one it becomes on the ground.

The seamless transfer of two people
humming is one scenario in which the poem

successfully ends. In another these couplets empty
and you are a diver climbing their cool tubes

back up to the start. From there you see its finale
clearly, but do nothing to alter its course.

You'll soon crash through a tenth story window.
Do not worry. The poem's safe.

See its thousand shards glint at your feet.


2025-06-09

 
--John Surowiecki

As the light goes, go.
Be the rustling in the grass, the fall from
convention's good graces: learn, or someone
will have you filing files or writing writs,
demonstrating cutlery or selling knowledge

door to door; someone might even drop
your lovely life into a factory and have you
derusting rings on the coolant-spouting
turntable of a vertical lathe.
It's best for everyone that what you know

is generally thought of as general knowledge.
You can find it in pool rooms and roadside bars,
in meadows as inviting as beds, in bedrooms
where it whispers like a ribbon untying;
you can even find it in schools. But be careful:

it's dangerous, inescapable and exact
down to every atom of everything there is,
to every name each thing goes by and every
law each thing obeys. And the best part is,
you always know more than you know.


2025-06-07

 
I want to talk about happiness and well-being, about those rare, unexpected moments when the voice in your head goes silent and you feel at one with the world.

I want to talk about the early June weather, about harmony and blissful repose, about robins and yellow finches and bluebirds darting past the green leaves of trees.

I want to talk about the benefits of sleep, about the pleasures of food and alcohol, about what happens to your mind when you step into the light of the two o'clock sun and feel the warm embrace of air around your body.

--from 'The Brooklyn Follies'; Paul Auster


2025-06-05

 
[ Untitled, June ; Stanley Whitney (1999) ]
 

2025-05-31

 
Haiku- Spring 2025
 

with bitter coffee,
I watch the window cleaner
make a masterpiece



new but no so new,
the scent of cherry blossoms
falling in the rain



2025-05-29

 
At Fulton Cemetery 

Moss filled inscriptions, spring time,
the bareness broken by a fertile
ground, common grackles foraging
their worms, The Conqueror Worm...,
as was said before so I can say again

through meanderings of my own 
within this middle age of life, mild
mundanity with a hint of obliviousness,
that dull momentum of city traffic,
while somehow, swift brevity praised

with hands I  build for an assured
sanctity of transience, extending
some hours where they'll provide
access for a few new memories,
to create off what has been made

before its all spent back down into 
the freedom of specious eternity,
which won't be known but digested
by what's been polished, fragrant,
born in thousandths with a ripe sun.


 

2025-05-27

 
[ Hand ; Abidin Dino (1950) ]


2025-05-25

 
--William Matthews

How easily happiness begins by   
dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter   
slithers and swirls across the floor   
of the sauté pan, especially if its   
errant path crosses a tiny slick
of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.

This could mean soup or risotto   
or chutney (from the Sanskrit
chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions   
go limp and then nacreous
and then what cookbooks call clear,   
though if they were eyes you could see

clearly the cataracts in them.
It’s true it can make you weep
to peel them, to unfurl and to tease   
from the taut ball first the brittle,   
caramel-colored and decrepit
papery outside layer, the least

recent the reticent onion
wrapped around its growing body,   
for there’s nothing to an onion
but skin, and it’s true you can go on   
weeping as you go on in, through   
the moist middle skins, the sweetest

and thickest, and you can go on   
in to the core, to the bud-like,   
acrid, fibrous skins densely   
clustered there, stalky and in-
complete, and these are the most   
pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare

and rage and murmury animal   
comfort that infant humans secrete.   
This is the best domestic perfume.   
You sit down to eat with a rumor
of onions still on your twice-washed   
hands and lift to your mouth a hint

of a story about loam and usual   
endurance. It’s there when you clean up   
and rinse the wine glasses and make   
a joke, and you leave the minutest   
whiff of it on the light switch,
later, when you climb the stairs.



2025-05-23

 
I have been willing to consider the possibility that pleasure in itself, with regard for it as something that lessens our suffering, offers a consolation, a relief—I wanted to be able to avoid a vocabulary that insists on the secondariness or the tertiariness of pleasure. I would like to say that one of the primary reasons for being alive is to experience the pleasure of being alive. I would like to write as if it were a given to rise and look out the window on a particularly beautiful light on a summer morning, or on one of those winter mornings when snow has fallen and made the whole of New York City quiet, or you name your favorite such sight. To write of the experience of these things without any instinct to translate them into a relationship to humanism or God or philosophy or any idea, but simply because these impressions or perceptions were part of what it means to be human, and maybe because they are as close as we come to understanding the relationship of the human to the divine. That would be fine. I would love to be able to do that. Pleasure is in itself and by itself valuable and important.

--William Matthews (shortly before his death in 1997)


 

2025-05-21

 
--William Matthews

There’s a crack in this glass so fine we can’t see it,
and in the blue eye of the candleflame’s needle
there’s a dark fleck, a speck of imperfection

that could contain, like a microchip, an epic
treatise on beauty, except it’s in the eye of the beheld.
And at the base of our glass there’s nothing

so big as a tiny puddle, but an ooze, a viscous
patina like liquefied tarnish. It’s like a text
so short it consists only of the author’s signature,

which has to stand, like the future, for what might
have been: a novel, let’s say, thick with ambiguous life.
Its hero forgets his goal as he nears it, so that it’s

like rain evaporating in the very sight of parched
Saharans on the desert floor. There, by chance, he meets
a thirsty and beautiful woman. What a small world!


2025-05-20

 
[ Irises ; Kateryna Bilokur ]