--Maggie SmithAll we ever talk of is light—let there be light, there was light then,good light—but what I considerdawn is darker than all that.So many hours between the dayreceding and what we recognizeas morning, the sun crestinglike a wave that won’t breakover us—as if light were protective,as if no hearts were flayed,no bodies broken on a daylike today. In any film,the sunrise tells us everythingwill be all right. Danger wouldn’tdare show up now, draggingits shadow across the screen.We talk so much of light, pleaselet me speak on behalfof the good dark. Let ustalk more of how darkthe beginning of a day is.
Five Branch Tree
2025-02-08
2025-02-06
--Maggie Smith
In what I think is a dream,
I look at some manifestation of the past
& say, I know you’re not real. Someone has to.
As most dream-things do, the past
shapeshifts, reconstitutes itself with new
eyes & a new haircut—the past
made over—& then I forget its name.
I forget what I’m doing with the past.
What is that joke about the river?
It’s not really a joke, no more than the past
is really past—the one about water never
being the same water. As it flows past,
the river’s current—now that’s a joke—
is always flowing now, now, now. Past
seven, when I wake from what I think
is a dream—a dream where I tell the past
the truth about itself—it is the present
as it always is. There is no past.
2025-02-04
--Maggie Smith
my daughter says. Unless the car could float.
Unless by car you mean boat. Unless the ocean
turned to ice and promised not to crack.
Unless Greenland floated over here,
having lifted its anchor. Unless we could row
our country there. Our whole continent
would have to come along, wouldn't it? Unless
we cut ourselves free. What kind of saw
could we use for that? What kind of oars
could deliver one country to another?
She asks, Why is Greenland called Greenland
if it’s not green? Why is Iceland called
Iceland if it’s greener than Greenland?
Unless it’s a trick, a lie: the name Greenland
is an ad for Greenland. Who would go
promised nothing but ice? Who would cut
her home to pieces and row away for that?
2025-02-02
2025-01-31
2025-01-29
2025-01-27
2025-01-25
2025-01-23
--Charles Wright
Back here, old snow like lace cakes,
Candescent and brittle now and then through the tall grass.
Remorse, remorse, the dark drones.
The body’s the affliction,
No resting place in the black pews of the winter trees,
No resting place in the clouds.
Mercy upon us, old man,
You in the China dust, I this side of my past life,
Salt in the light of heaven.
Isolate landscape. World’s grip.
The absolute, as small as a poker chip, moves off,
Bright moon shining between pines.
2025-01-21
--Charles Wright
Last night’s stars and last night’s wind
are west of the mountains now, and east of the river.
Here, under the branches of the nine trees,
how small the world seems.
Should we lament, in winter, our shadow’s solitude,
our names spelled out like snowflakes?
Where is it written, “the season’s decrease diminishes me?”
Should we long for stillness,
a hush for the trivial body
washed in the colors of paradise,
dirt-colored water-colored match-flame-and-wind-colored?
As one who has never understood the void,
should I
give counsel to the darkness, honor the condor’s wing?
Should we keep on bowing to
an inch of this and an inch of that?
The world is a handkerchief.
Today I spread it across my knees.
Tomorrow they’ll fold it into my breast pocket,
white on my dark suit.
2025-01-19
2025-01-17
2025-01-15
The Perfect Journey Is-- A. R. AmmonsThe perfect journey isno need to goanother nothingly clear day andI wentto walk between the pinecolonnadesup the road on the hill and therehill-high in dry coldI saw the weaves of glittermentairborne, so fine,the breeze siftingfigurations from the snowreservoirs of the boughs
2025-01-13
Snow of the-- A. R. AmmonsSnow of theright consistency,temperature, andvelocity willfall in a leeslopebuilding out overspace apromontory ofconsiderablereach indownward curvature:and snowwill do thisnot oncebut wherever possible,a similarity of effectextendedto diversity'sexact numeration* * *here a month of snow,more January thanFebruary, intervenesduring whichI wrotenothing: it isthe winter-deep, theannual sink:leave it unwritten,as snow unwritesthe landscape* * *
2025-01-11
2025-01-10
2025-01-08
--Donald Justice
It's snowing this afternoon and there are no flowers.
There is only this sound of falling, quiet and remote,
Like the memory of scales descending the white keys
Of a childhood piano—outside the window, palms!
And the heavy head of the cereus, inclining,
Soon to let down its white or yellow-white.
Now, only these poor snow-flowers in a heap,
Like the memory of a white dress cast down . . .
So much has fallen.
And I, who have listened for a step
All afternoon, hear it now, but already falling away,
Already in memory. And the terrible scales descending
On the silent piano; the snow; and the absent flowers
abounding.
2025-01-06
--Linda PastanAs if I had dreamed the snowinto falling,I wake to a worldblanked outin its particulars,nearly erased.The is the silenceof absolute whiteness- the mutebirds nowherein sight, the caran animal tracksfilled in,all boundaries,as in love,ambiguous.Sometimes all we haveto go byis the weather:a messagethe snow writesan invisible ink,what the sky meansby its litmuscolors.Now my breathon the chilly windowforms a cloudwhich may turnto rain later,somewhere else.
2025-01-04
--Cynthia CruzIf you leave,he said,keep who you are.Don’t let the worldand its desiresruin you.But after the dreamcomes the habit.And no way to fix it.What is gonecannot be put back.Damagefrom the inside.What I have becomeis warmed overwith that nowancient dream.What I wasis vanished.I came back homebut I came backgone.
2025-01-02
2024-12-31
--Simone Weil (tr. by Noah Rawlings)Blazing stars, dotting the night sky’s distant plain,Mute stars, forever frozen, forever spinning blind.You tear from our hearts the days of yesteryear,You toss us to tomorrow, heedless of our will,And we weep, and all our cries to you are vain.Since we must, we’ll follow you, our arms entwined,Our eyes turned toward your brightness pure but bitter.By your light, all sorrows matter little.We fall silent, we stumble on our way.Suddenly it’s there in our hearts: their divine flame.
2024-12-29
--Andrea Jurjević
I fall asleep under the tremolo voice box of the moon
I fall asleep under the scratched cymbal of the moon
The moon that’s the stone lodged in the throat of the night
The night so exiled it wants to find its way back home
I dream about the tough heel of a walnut roll from 1975
And sharing its sweet December bits with a clan of crows
I dream about a crow that’s my imaginary older brother
And a girl dance-swaying her bovine hips into widowhood
I dream of sun shooting itself up between the sharp shanks of hills
Down the ravine a woeful snake rent with a blunt fish knife
I dream of pouring woe into mugs and topping it with red wine
The river man that’s parched and all I have is that wine
In a dream I’m lying on a salamander-sleek slab inside a cave
Beside a skinless drum simmering with fat carp
The fish leaping in and out of the stew are soldiers in a foxhole
In a dream my love stirs that stew with long white oars
I have a native tongue and I grow a foreign one too
I have a need for closed captions when I talk to people
I have no feelings about god and a shipyard of suspicions about men
I also have rooms filled with clocks riffing in double time
I have a longing for the coiling shadows of cypresses
And a pull toward the soft gray hook of the moon
I have memory drawers filled with sweet chicory root
A pull to the purple lip of the sea and its theremin breath
In a naked dream I fall on the dock mum as cargo
Beg the rain to drop song on the pillows of my palms
The moon slips away like a pearly soap bubble
A glistening nipple pulled from a wet mouth
I winter in that waver
My bones are oars and within me a shady lady rows
I wake seasick from the sloshing in my veins
In another country I’m rain
2024-12-27
--Cole Swensen
erodes the line between being and place becomes the place of being
.......time and so
the house turns in the snow is why a ghost always has the architecture of
.......a storm
The architect tore down room after room until the sound stopped. A
.......ghost is one
among the ages at the edge of a cliff empty sails on the bay even when
.......a ship
or the house moves off in fog asks you out loud to let the stranger in
2024-12-25
2024-12-23
--David Ray
Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought...
The future, yes, and even for the past,
that it will become something we can bear.
And I too, and my children, so I hope,
will recall as not too heavy the tug
of those albatrosses I sadly placed
upon their tender necks. Hope for the past,
yes, old Frost, your words provide that courage,
and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.
2024-12-21
--Carl PhillipsThe way the present cuts into history,or how the future can look at firstlike the past sweeping through, thereare blizzards, and there are blizzards.Some contain us; some we carrywithin us until they die, when we do.The snow falls there, barely snowing,into a long wooden trough wherethe cattle feed on those apples weused to call medieval, or I did,for their smallish size, as if medievalmeant the world in miniature butnot so different otherwise fromour own, just smaller, a bit sweeter,more prone therefore to rot quickly,which is maybe not the worst thing.Revelation is not disclosure. I lovehow the snow, taking itself now moreseriously, makes the cattle look softer,for a moment, than their hard bodies are.
2024-12-19
--Louise Glück
Toward world's end, through the bare
beginnings of winter, they are traveling again.
How many winters have we seen it happen,
watched the same sign, come forward as they pass
cities sprung around this route their gold
engraved on the desert, and yet
held our peace, these
being the Wise, come to see at the accustomed hour
nothing changed: roofs, the barn
blazing in darkness, all they wish to see.
2024-12-17
2024-12-15
*
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
*
--from Ars Poetica; Archibald Maleish
2024-12-13
--Archibald MacLeish
The star dissolved in evening—the one star
The silently
and night O soon now, soon
And still the light now
and still now the large
Relinquishing
and through the pools of blue
Still, still the swallows
and a wind now
and the tree
Gathering darkness:
I was small. I lay
Beside my mother on the grass, and sleep
Came—
slow hooves and dripping with the dark
The velvet muzzles, the white feet that move
In a dream water
and O soon now soon
Sleep and the night.
And I was not afraid.
Her hand lay over mine. Her fingers knew
Darkness,—and sleep—the silent lands, the far
Far off of morning where I should awake.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)