Death makes strangers of us all

I met her first in high school. Her name then was Alice Cyan. We dated and did what teenagers usually do, being full of hormones. When we went off to college, we wished each other luck and that was it. I met her again in law school, though her name now was Francine Bedower. She didn’t remember me, but I knew her the first moment I heard her laugh. It was like wind rattling through dry leaves. She was beautiful. I mean, really beautiful, statuesque, as they say. I slept with her once then, but so did almost everyone else. We didn’t see each other all that much and, though we graduated from law school in the same class, there was really no reason to stay in touch. When I met her the third time, her name now Townsy Harper, she was working for a law firm in San Francisco and I happened to be close by. We would meet for drinks. She was divorced, had two kids, a daughter and a son, and a lot of cats, but no dogs. She had made a point of that, no dogs. She had grown so thin I almost didn’t recognize her, but she knew me. She reminded me that when she and I were dating back in high school, her father had died and that’s why she liked me. That puzzled me a little, but okay, that’s as good a reason as any I suppose. Then she stopped coming by. When we met for the fourth and last time, I was in the hospital for what I was assured would be a routine colonoscopy. Her name was now Sally Caulder, same last name as mine, though spelled differently as it turned out. It startled me at the time. She was stooped over, staring down at me as I lay there, waiting my turn. I had recognized her right off, that same laugh, but tart. When I asked her who she was now, she spat her name Caulder in my face and told me she didn’t know me and that she never wanted to see me again, biting down finally on "asshole" but seeming to look through me like glass. I can't say I blame her. After all, as I was soon to learn, she did not have long to live either.

One and done

You sit across the page, spelling

Your name like mine

Except it rhymes

And no one suspects you are lonely

Or looney or so hungry

you could eat this paper,

folding it into a star

popping it in the microwave

where you and I and the universe

will be one and done.

Rilke on writing poetry when one is no longer a young man

Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simple emotions (one has emotions early enough)--they are experiences. For the sake of a simple poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighbourhoods, to unexpected encounters and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else--); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,--and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. You must have memories of many nights of love, each one different from all the others, memories of women screaming in labour, and of light, pale, sleeping girls who have just given birth and are closing again. But you must also have been beside the dying, must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the scattered noises. And it is not yet enough to have memories. You must be able to forget them when they are many, and you must have the immense patience to wait until they return. For the memories themselves are not important. Only when they have changed into our very well blood, into glance and gesture, and are nameless, no longer to be distinguished from ourselves-only then can it happen that in some very rare hour the first word of a poem arises in their midst and goes forth from them.

Excerpt from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge.

The Fall

He fell (he was always falling)

Or rather, he jumped, missing the water

That would have taken him, leaving his remains

to flow in the rhythms of his speech,

Washed clean like one hoping to please

Instead of what was, a silent heap,

Though there was heard from a nearby street

What some would call a melodious scream.

For Alex Thomas Coming To My House

The thought of Alex Thomas coming to my house

Could make an old man cry. Not me! Round

The back my grandson plays hide and seek.

I’ve not the slightest idea what that means

But, Alex, you will know! I can only dream

And look for nuts on airy ground.

You see, I’ve placed a charm about the house

And made my home among earthbound clouds.

Alex, you deserve this stupid poem. Take the blame!

If you were me, you would do the same.

If that’s confusing, Lord, just let it rain.

"Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas

Every once and a while

I force myself to read

a truly great poem

before I go to bed

where I will lie awake

all night and dream.

"Fern Hill" by Dylan Thomas, text and reading

For Rachel

I do not know the pain you feel, dear one,

But it must be more than a soul can bear --

I feel that and would say no more

Than what the towering tree nearby

Would have me say: we feel it,

Earth and root, leaf and wind,

The sky itself would fall for you

and comfort you. It knows

no other blue.

For Mary and Emma

Video Recording: For Mary and Emma

Hey Mary, Hey Emma,

Let’s say together

what we have made our own:

κοινὰ τὰ τῶν φίλων.

Those who know no Greek

will understand what is essential:

we are friends.

In class, you let me ramble,

which I do well,

while you do all the work,

if you call it work

to play qui, quae, quod

and quack like ducks.

Some folks say Latin and Homer’s Greek are dead.

They’ll know better

when they hear angels like you

speak only bella Latina

and reckon things by the Αlpha and 0mega.

Those who know no Latin or ancient Greek

will find themselves back in school.

Not you!

Valete, vos amo magis quam dicere possum.

For Christine -- May, 2020

In times like these

Christine is our Christine

Not for better or worse

But for her gift not to dwell

On what’s not possible

But on what is

and do it so well.

Leonora's Photography: 51-55

"Par gros temps, s'emmitoufler de lectures avant de repartir au combat"

(Correspondance -Walter Benjamin à Hannah Arendt)

(In rough weather wrap yourself up in reading matter before returning to battle)

Ces éléphants rugueux, voyageurs lents et rudes..

(At the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage in Sri Lanka)

Vulnérabilité

youtu.be/7fdqF4XIUsE (Bob Dylan -High Water- )

Bananier

Réseau

You can find more of Leonora's superb work at https://www.flickr.com/photos/150410475@N04/.

It's Greek to me!

Sidewalk Greek by Mary Farmer

A Flea

for Charles

Having not heard from you in days

(seems like years to a flea like me),

I worry, no doubt needlessly,

but there it is – the worry

worrying me, knowing

it will do no good,

and that’s a worry too,

so let’s call it prayer,

which likewise does no good

except it makes me feel better

or worse about myself,

depending, as it does,

on a dog.

Nocte

He tripped and fell
and had a tale to tell

But all you could hear
was a door closing.

O there were whistles
and wolves and owls

But all anyone could hear
was an old man gasping,

alone at last
with a tale to tell.

Kiss and Tell

Who but a god

Could look at you

Sweetly laughing

And not die

For a kiss, dying

Again and again

Like gods of spring

that never truly

Die. Your lips

Like night

hold back the day

And close my eyes . . .

Awake! Awake!

You are no god

To kiss and tell

Of life and death.

Where is that?

During a thunderstorm when everyone else was running for cover, one woman remained outside and seemed not to be bothered in the least. They all looked out from their hiding places and wondered at her. It didn’t hurt that she was strikingly beautiful. Well, soon enough they all came out into the storm, feeling a bit ashamed, I suppose. At first, they couldn’t keep their eyes off her, glistening as she was in the rain and flash of light. Eventually, however, their eyes followed hers to the sky and what they saw was only a roiling grayness that seemed to envelop the earth. They asked her what she saw.. Home, she said. And they, like the dumb little fish of another story, asked, “Where is that?”

Ber's Photography: 276-280

a dead-wall reverie

Ibidom. Is no thinking thing here but the peepinghouse round it goes is there nothing there from sea to rounda coda no knowing no browbeating to hoedown the adamses and damses looking roundaway the wailing goes awagginawaning about the off wall but there shebares all to what is not there the museymusik makes you trot and drop so rainruns and her lastofall. There!

now east now west

the road has a mind of its own

and my feet obey

the rest of me stays behind
treelike

above

the sky grows gentle

MY HEART OPENS

the road goes on

as if not knowing

which way is best

Leonora's Photography: 46-50

Going with the flow

The Way Out

Rocking

Volcanique

Cratère du volcan Tangkuban Perahu, toujours en activité sur l'île indonésienne de Java (Ouest)
Altitude: 2 084m

L'énigme

You can find more of Leonora's superb work at https://www.flickr.com/photos/150410475@N04/.

Ber's Photography: 271-275

Ber's Photography.

Going Home: Song of Comfort

"Written in pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car: Dan Pagis

WRITTEN IN PENCIL IN THE SEALED RAILWAY-CAR

here in this carload

i am eve

with abel my son

if you see my other son

cain son of man

tell him that i

-- Dan Pagis

A broken wing

Who will stop and weep for you,
Who will sing your song,
Who will call a rose a rose
And trace her love in sand?

If still you breathe in silence
And look upon the stars,
Yet you may lift up your voice
And match the wind in time.

Does the storm overwhelm you,
Does day turn dark to black?
There’s none here to see you
Fall and find a sudden light.

The End of the Journey: A Conversation with Neil Longenbaugh

Neil Longenbaugh: Socrates knows he is wiser than the common man because he does not profess to know what he does not. This creates a few problems for me. How can Socrates know for sure that he doesn’t know something? I think the only thing he can be certain of is that he knows nothing for certain, and if this is true then how can someone be wiser than another person if both know equally nothing? This idea is a paradox that can’t be clearly answered unless Socrates is claiming that the craftsman and poets claim to know something and he nothing.

Mr. Himwich: Problem is that the craftsmen and especially those muse-inspired poets think that they do in fact know – but, of course, they don’t, as is revealed under Socratic questioning. You do touch on a difficult issue: Does knowledge require that we know that we know and perhaps even to be able to articulate what we know and be able to teach it to someone else. Absent this kind of knowledge we might categorize our “knowledge” as belief, hypothesis, intuition, educated guess, etc.

Mr. Longenbaugh: I think that knowing something for certain is an impossibility. We can know that we can think, and articulate this to other people, but we cannot know that we know something as it truly is. I agree that we can classify our knowledge as hypothesis, intuition, etc… What is truth though? If it is impossible to know for certain then can we find truth in our educated guesses and such?

Mr. Himwich: So much depends on what one means by "truth," as you well know. For me, the truth is paradoxically the very activity of a mind that searches for understanding. This activity of mind is the very truth it searches for. It is always thus, e.g. we create the very world that we seek to understand as if it were separate from us. The truth is as close as thought itself. I know this will sound mystical or worse -- plain nonsense. What is your idea of truth?

Mr. Longenbaugh: I feel that truth is something sought after. I think that there are elements that we must find within ourselves, but I think that the physical world also contains truth. I think one can find a balance between retrospection and examining the world they live in for truth. I think that truth is perhaps what you do not know, even if what you think is the truth is not really how it is. Since you believe truth to be activity of mind, do you believe that everything we perceive and experience is some sort of dream or separate experience or reality based on your mind’s bias towards the world?

Mr. Himwich: I think your understanding of truth is sound. I must admit that mine is a work in progress. When I say 'activity of the mind', I mean just that: not the products of that activity, just the pure activity itself. That activity is the existential answer to the mind/body question (how the brain and consciousness relate). If we thereby solve the mind/body question, then we will also solve the mind's relationship to the external world. I know this sounds weird. Truth for me is not this and that bit of knowledge or even the collection of such bits into a whole. It is what actually happens. Again, not what physics tells us about the nature of the universe, but the universe itself as it happens. If we could understand our own activity (our own happening), then we could understand everything else. We are part of the happening of things. Again, I admit I am exploring ideas here. Let me try one more time: we are already what we seek to understand. In our very attempt to understand what we already are is the Truth. (I am laughing at myself. Feel free to laugh at me as well.)

Mr. Longenbaugh: I can accept your argument (for lack of a better word), but it does bring about a few more questions. These examples seem to be contradictory or perhaps by the nature of the activity itself they aren’t. Take someone who is in a coma for example or a dream that persists indefinitely, is their understanding subconscious because dreams to me seem to be more of a ride than activity. Should we try to understand these, knowing we can’t control them, or should we try to learn to control them? What about out of body experiences while awake? (I won’t give any examples) These provide a little trouble for me and I’m sure for you too. I think that I can understand what I believe to be awake reality and activity.

Mr. Himwich: This is becoming more about my wayward ideas than yours (not to say yours are wayward). But I am happy to continue. It seems to me that the Truth only appears when we are actively in search for it, but it remains paradoxically and necessarily elusive. The search and Truth are like the sun and the moon, the moon’s reflected light derives from the sunlike mind. (I am expressing ideas here I have never expressed before.) What we want to understand is not the moon itself but the light that illuminates it, yet we fail to recognize the source of the light comes from our own consciousness. This little analogy must be read allegorically.

Mr. Longenbaugh: That is a good analogy. This raises an interesting question. Is the moon necessary? Can we simply look straight into the sun and try and find Truth? I think that before we can journey to the sun, we must first understand the moon, or start searching. It seems maybe that the moon is more tangible than the sun. We can travel, and search for what the moon and its light mean, but I don’t think its ever possible to make it to the sun. In the context of this analogy, we can keep getting closer to the sun or Truth, but the closer we are, the hotter it is. This slows us down and eventually burns us before we can ever get there.

Mr. Himwich: I think that consciousness, before it is consciousness of something, is nonexistent, or rather exists as a potentiality only. This goes back to that question in class: if you stop thinking, i.e. stop being conscious, do you cease to exist. That is a very live question. I would hasten to add that in the mystic traditions, especially with respect to meditation practice, there is a possible turning away from the object to consciousness itself. The reported experience is the usual wonderful mystic nonsense (of which I have a great share): a sense of unity with all things and then joy.

Mr. Longenbaugh: I’m turned toward thinking that consciousness is existence. And going away from this consciousness I think is a good thing, because I’m not sure even if there is necessarily one direction that you must head. Turning away could very well be just as real as going in the “normal” direction if we have to call it that. I can’t say I’ve experienced many of these traditions but I have a basic understanding. Do you believe that there is a certain direction, or is there a possibility or two, even an infinite amount of suns, or levels of consciousness?

Mr. Himwich: I am thunderstruck by your statement that consciousness is existence. I have made that very same statement on another occasion. First, there are some esoteric eastern philosophies that do in fact speak of levels, e.g. personal consciousness and transcendental consciousness, in which one experiences the loss of the self that the personal consciousness has constructed. I hardly know what to say about such things. I would rather discuss this "turning away" that you speak of. Speaking for myself, the "turning away" is the journey that, through experience, leads back to the sun. This means that only by going away from the sun can we ever really know it as the source of our being. Thus, the journey, as in epic journeys, always leads through the Underworld where there is little or no light at all. That may sound poetic, but it involves real suffering. Is such a journey the good? Yes, but I speak only for myself here.

Mr. Longenbaugh: I think that 'the turning away' is a perspective. If you turn away from the sun, you can see how far you have come and what you have experienced. I think it can help you appreciate the sun more. I am concerned whether it is possible to turn away and never go back? Hopefully, death doesn’t bring this but I think that a loss of consciousness means that there is no more journey.

Mr. Himwich: Just to sum up: There is both an objective and subjective aspect to this: reality is and is not what we are aware of: there must be something that is apart from consciousness itself and yet that there is anything at all, existence itself, is due to consciousness. This is why we both search for truth/reality as something external to our consciousness and why we keep returning to consciousness as the ground of being. It is the paradox upon which the journey hinges. The journey is the effort to return to oneself. It gives meaning to our life, precisely because we never arrive.

It's March but spring it's not

It’s March but spring it's not,

Not the preamble or invocation

Of a pleuraplenty of sight and sound --

This time there’s choking

And thoughts best forgot:

A friend who's gone,

A cough, am lost.

O well – there's time,

hard rain, a simple rime.

Ber Himwich Photography: 266-270

Ber's Photography.

Joy Harjo -- reading at the Library of Congress

For Rita Dove

Not psyche but a nail

that bites hard, holds

true and rusts into

spring ahead of

the flowers, she

outlasts the wood

the pain

me.

"Cholera" by Rita Dove

Download Cholera +

"Cholera", as you ask questions of it, becomes progressively more terrifying. Rita also reads three other poems of great note: "Canary," "Teach Us to Number Our Days," and "The Spring Cricket Considers the Question of Negritude."

Uva uvam vivendo varia fit (explained)

Uva uvam vivendo varia fit.

This Latin phrase from Lonesome Dove is neither nonsense nor bad Latin. It means "A grape becomes mottled by being a grape," with the sense: it is the nature of a grape to become "mottled" as it ripens. In the context of the novel, this means, "Character is destiny" -- the truth of which is illustrated time and again in the novel. The repetition of the 'v' strengthens the point. It is lovely Latin.

vivendo here is a gerund of vivo, in the ablative (instrumental).

uvam is a cognate (a play on vitam vivendo) or internal accusative, a not uncommon feature of ancient Latin.

Just as a grape or a man can become nothing other than what each is, pigs remain true to themselves. "We don't rent pigs. . . Goats and donkeys are neither bought nor sold," only cattle and horses whose character man has fundamentally changed.

Tags: HH Latin

In libra rerum

In rerum libra lacrimae auro gravius pendunt.

The Mask: Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Maya Angelou

Poetry Matters

Lawrence Dunbar with Maya Angelou, WE WEAR THE MASK:

Download The Mask- Lawrence Dunbar Maya Angelou

Leonora's Photography: 41-45

♫♪ (Saint-Saëns - Le cygne-) youtu.be/zNbXuFBjncw

You can find more of Leonora's superb work at https://www.flickr.com/photos/150410475@N04/.

Spring before spring

The spring before spring

is in the eye,

Awake in the deepest

sleep of winter.

"America" by Henry Dumas

America
by Henry Dumas

          If an eagle be imprisoned
            On the back of a coin
            And the coin is tossed into the sky,
            That coin will spin,
            That coin will flutter,
            But the eagle will never fly.

Henry Dumas: Background

SEVEN SINILITIES

SEVEN SINILITIES that PREPARE YOU for the AFTER-LIFE

Talking to no one
No longer celebrating your birthday
Not recognizing yourself in the mirror
Not getting the joke
Forgetting your SSN
Wearing out your welcome
Falling asleep with your eyes open

Night Birds

Black stone white rain
Blue smoke soft pain.

Night comes. I do not sleep
Yet dream of birds climbing
The sky to find the sea.
I fall like fire and sing

To strange boys and girls
Who close their eyes and turn
To the sea and hear

The birds singing like rain.

When they wake, they dream.

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Yo-Yo Ma -- The Swan

https://youtu.be/3qrKjywjo7Q

Where the Pino Trail ascends to the Crescent Trail, cloud settling

in Hugh's Photos

Ber Himwich Photography: 261-265

You can find more of Ber's Photography at https://www.flickr.com/photos/berhimwich/.

My safe place

I would go the woods, looking for my father, who died forty years ago, and now lives in the roots of an old oak and talks to me through the leaves and casts his shadow in the light. There! a bird telling me in my father’s voice all is well and that in every tree and shadow and every winged thing I see is his promise to keep me safe. But, I say, what if there is no sun or winter comes or the trees die or the birds all fly away? What then? He says, you have much to learn about storms and the cold and the silence of a night where not even a bird sings. Storm, winter and silence, all these will keep you safe as well. All things are a comfort – that there is anything at all, and not nothing, is the first thing you must learn. You will understand more when you hear thunder and discover the lightning within yourself. All is well.

Laughing at the dawn

You arrive in college out of an all boy’s boarding school and in the first week meet your assigned mentor, the professor who will guide you through your undergraduate years. The professor has published books that are lauded by fellow scholars as groundbreaking and brilliant. It turns out that this celebrated scholar is to be your teacher in an advanced course for which your high school background has qualified you. You are enthralled – the professor’s wit, teaching style, and knowledge of literature are of a caliber you have never before encountered. As it happens, during the day you occasionally meet your professor by chance, have coffee, chat about family and literature, etc. You also sometimes visit him in his office to discuss insights you hope he will find of value. He is invariably pleased, offers guidance and encouragement and tells you how much he enjoys these sessions. By the second semester, you dare to think you and the professor are friends. He takes you out to dinner and introduces you to fine Italian wine and cuisine and entertains you with gossip about colleagues. The professor increasingly commends you for your ‘wild’ ideas and insouciance. You don’t know what the word means but take it as a compliment. One evening at a restaurant where they always reserve a private table for the professore, he mentions a composer, Nielsen, of whom you have never heard, and invites you to his apartment later that week to listen to the music. You eagerly accept and when you hear selections from Nielsen's glorious symphonies. you are thunderstruck and grateful and say so. He then tells you that he would like you to come up with him to his cabin in Maine. He also mentions other occasions when he will introduce you to influential friends at Harvard. They will enjoy getting to know you, he says, and will help you advance professionally. He then reads a high talking poem by W.B. Yeats and asks you what you think about the last line, “Those great sea-horses bare their teeth and laugh at the dawn.” Whatever you said, if anything more than a stunned shrug of the shoulders, is now lost to memory, but you do remember his praise for your comments being out of proportion to even your own grandiose sense of self. He repeats his invitation to come to Maine. And then everything suddenly becomes unreal or rather all too real like having your face slammed against a wall. What do you do?

Buttons

Smoke rising burnt orange then down around the edge until the tenderness binding flung into the night curving endlessly, her gift her fire dying in my arms her body rising until nothing but the bloom of sighing herself to sleep tight as the moon and flying.

The Man Who Couldn't Love Someone Like You

He had once been a happy man. He had loved everybody, boys, girls, old women who thought themselves still vibrant and sexy, and old men with dangerously foul breath. He found lovable what others considered obscene, like protruding teeth or flapping ears or a nasty looking scar across the forehead. He even found drooling as naturally becoming as sweat. He couldn’t help himself. Others thought he was delusional or simply a dirty old man, until one day, he suffered a head injury, having slipped off a ledge while ogling sagging sunbathers. After he recovered, he now found crippling fault with everyone. His constant refrain was, “Who could love someone like you?” He said this whether the person was overweight, stuttered or blinked too much or had dull brown hair or had one too many eyes. He reserved a special place in hell for redheads, whom he previously had loved to distraction. Some remembered the “dirty old man,' but now putting their full faith in what had before been but a naive myth, that he had once been a lovely human being. They asked him what had changed and he said, “I woke up.” One day he took a good look at himself in the mirror and saw the faults he found in others in himself: unruly hair, yellowing and missing teeth, wrinkles that made his flaccid face look like a prune -- he even thought his skin had turned dark purple. So be it, he concluded, and banged his head as hard as he could against the glass. This time he didn’t wake up.

The Sound that Wind Makes

(for Maya)

I want words to breathe like I do, weep when I do, and bruise easily.

I want words to dream and remember those dreams that first set me on this path.

I want words to grow old with me and become like the lines in my face and tell me
old stories that keep my stumbling spirit from falling and new ones that tell of
love forever young and freely given.
I want words of no regret even for the sorry waste of all I have left undone, unsaid.

I want words to hold up a mirror and see there all who at some time have gone hand
in hand with me through this life.

O what a wondrously crowded reflection that would be, all of them in the morning
of their lives, young and old alike.

O that words would fall like these tears and mark the page in silver and gold, the true
colors of night, that these words would live on in their hearts and find some rest there,
though I myself be nothing but the sound the restless wind makes on a cold night,
the wind that sweeps down the mountainside and past all the houses in which loved ones
have died and gathers up all those lost souls and scatters what is but dust and ash
through the deep space of time.

Two Part Invention

If all there is and comes to be
A child to hold a dying sun
Then let the world our night to know
And let this song be what we love.

If all there is and cannot be
Two to bind a trinity
Then let our love forever shine
And hope for dark eternity.

Rise, O child, as a single note!
Lift this song on the desert sea
And make us all forget-me-not
That all may know love's levity!

The question yet I put to thee:
Does Death herself sing harmony?

River Notes

As I sit here writing tonight at my desk I am on the river and see myself in the flow of all things . . . the sounds of water, bird and wind are my voice, and all my senses are alive as though the stars were at elbow and foot . . . I breathe in the night and orion, aldebaran, and procyon come closer, and there you are again, musa, luna puella, your body curving and folding in the current, laughing and inviting me to dive with you beneath the rippling and lose myself at last, these words nothing but the falling rain.

Somewhere Else

I am thinking, my friend, that you have already seen this article: The Art of Dying.

It's a long, rambling read. I haven’t read every word, didn’t need to, very familiar. I’ve been comatose for the last four days, though I expect any time now to wake up and be somewhere else:

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

    I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
    And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
    Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
    And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

    And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
    Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
    There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
    And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

    I will arise and go now, for always night and day
    I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
    While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
    I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

As it happens, breaks from the routines of teaching are not good for me or rather not good for the first week or so until I can think about something other than tomorrow, which I am trying to do now, the ‘something other’. The words begin to write themselves, yours truly not really there at all, but there is a prophecy I’ve heard: If you are patient, you really will not be here at all or the words Which brings me back to the New Yorker article. May you be doing better than I am, and dear Pauline.

Hugh

    If the sky should fall
    Or worse, there will be no one
    To know and no one to care
    That there ever was an open space
    Where old love comes to rest
    and pretends still to be,

    though I would not that
    be the final word
    or any word at all.

Dry Grass

It was not you I was looking for or needed nor was I the Ramon or Ramona you hoped for. We made do, as they say, and built a house and a life several miles from the Itacah River to be safe when the spring rains came. There were no children, of course, but there was a garden of stone, sand, and stalks of jibati that kept the land and constellations in place. When you died, we went right on living together in the house built when you were as young and old as you would ever be. The folks on the other side of the Itacah never come this far west. They say these are the badlands, but we call it home. There's no need for talking. There's nothing to say. Don’t mistake these words for speech. It's just wind sweeping through tall dry grass.

December 12: Arthur's Day

Arthur's Day

for Arthur Sze, December 12

To you, who’ve written

Some slip of verse

That made me fall,

A fool in love

With words and you --

To you, who’ve hidden songs

In a worn-out sock

That now you use just for rocks--

I say, Barefoot and all,

Come out and play:

It’s Arthur’s Day,

When all who sing

Shall sing along.

Download Arthur Sze Poster

Download Poetry Matters 2

Download Arthur the Owl and the Dragon

hhimwich is the author of all poems and other writing unless indicated otherwise.

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The Lake Isle of Innisfree BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

The Lake Isle of Innisfree
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS