its unfurling— Rather than the kvetch,
the caterpillar tent that billows—
Sheer wave combed open in the wind—
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Charles Simic on poets and money
In a country that now regards money as the highest good, doing something for the love of it is not just odd, but downright perverse. Imagine the horror and anger felt by parents of a son or daughter who was destined for the Harvard Business School and a career in finance but discovered an interest in poetry instead. Imagine their enticing descriptions of the future riches and power awaiting their child while trying to make him or her reconsider the decision. “Who has recognized you as a poet? Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets?,” the trial judge shouted at the Russian poet Josef Brodsky, before sentencing him to five years of hard labor. “No one,” Brodsky replied. He could have been speaking for all the sons and daughters who had to face their parents’ wrath.
Knob
Finite snail evolved from a peg,
all twist & no spiral, turning
neither inward nor upward: here’s
a key to our egalitarian metaphysics.
The knob involves us in the machine’s
unfinished business, it turns us
into connoisseurs of the abstract.
And hell, it’s fun to roll things
between the fingers—
they were made for this.
The caveman in me says
smash it & suck out the marrow.
The Medieval peasant says
splash it with holy water
to drive out the small devil
whose millstone it must be.
But I say alas that our machines
are surrendering their squat manhood
to a remote.
The Trials
May all beings be free from suffering and the causes of suffering.
~ from The Four Immeasurables
And in that tale, like bits of broken teeth,
like gems or brittle tears, a thousand grains
are spilled upon dark ground. Because the soul
looked full upon love’s face, it now must count
and gather, harvest shredded wool among the bramble,
stitch its craft of mortal longings to the impossible.
The stars, as always, withhold commentary.
Only the blossoms along the fence offer
sweet worth, stubborn hope; the thorns,
their pointed epistle: I wound to heal.
In response to thus: Night prayer.
The spell of Moominland
These days, the Moomin characters have turned into a global franchise; and yet when I think about my own relationship with these books that were so formative of my imagination, I realise that what I owe these books is something much more private and intimate, a philosophy of sorts. Because in Tove Jansson’s books, when I re-read them now, I find a fierce recognition of the importance of solitude; an expansive sense of friendship—not a friendship that erases solitude, but one that is a kind of mutual recognition within it; a sense of delight in the world, its seasons and its changes, that doesn’t require any form of transcendence; and a hospitable generosity of spirit that manages, in one way or another, to accommodate even the most awkward and tricky of characters—not just eccentrics, stove-dwelling ancestors, hemulens, free spirits and oddballs, but also genuinely alarming creatures such as grokes and philosophers.
Remnant heat in flickering pools
below the horizon— Driving back
once more in the haze of evening,
it seems so simple— The engine
of intention presses forward
into the dark, the road unfurls
like breath. A line of white
reflects the right-hand border.
Steady at the wheel, all curves
taken in increments. At higher
speeds, the windshield stipples
with dusty ochre and green.
In response to small stone (132).
Self-portrait with new blue socks
Yes, it’s cool enough here for wool socks (and today, long underwear).
This is my favorite self-portrait to date, I think. The blues make me happy. “ASUS” is one letter away from “ASS,” which I often am. It shows my front porch at mid-morning, which is where and when I feel most at home in the universe. And I like the comic inversion here and the suggestion of asinine ears. The only way this could’ve been improved, I think, would’ve been if I’d thought to take my shirt off and use a compact digital camera, as if this were a “sexting” shot.
The photo was both planned and unplanned. Rachel had asked me several weeks ago for front-porch photos of both pairs of socks she’s knitted for me so far. (The other and far more glorious pair can be seen on Flickr.) The light conditions yesterday morning were perfect, and since I was wearing the blue socks already, I was inspired to grab the camera and snap some pictures. But then I set the camera down and picked up the laptop… You can imagine the rest. Curiously, when I went to upload the photos to my laptop for processing, I discovered that the initial two or three shots of just my feet in the blue socks were missing, I’m not sure how or why. So I was forced to take seriously a photo I’d shot as a joke, on a whim.
Pitcher plant heaven
(August 18) I’ve decided to remove the original introduction to this post to try and hide the location of the bog from plant thieves. My apologies for those who didn’t get a chance to read it before the re-write.
Continue reading “Pitcher plant heaven”
A hawk circles over the ridge
higher and higher, until the line it draws
is thinner, fainter— Plumed, taloned, sprung,
targeting; on the way to becoming gone, out
of sight, and finally out of feeling’s range.
Something of that wild heartbeat once burned
its bronze tattoo from the inside of my chest.
See the gouge-marks on leathered flesh?
Evidence it wasn’t all fetters and stays.
But oh that velvet hood is soft and hides so well
the liquid glint in the corner of each eye.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.
Words on the Street
