The Nature of Daylight

Waiting for the past


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keepin the feet on the ground

Sometimes all anyone needs is
one hand; five warm fingers
a forever something

nothing else.


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"I'll make a broken music, or I'll die."

- Roethke

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ON THE BEACH AT NIGHT

by: Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

On the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.

Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.

From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,
Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,
Watching, silently weeps.

Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears,
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.

Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter?
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.



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"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle.

The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours."


-Ayn Rand


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Water


A raindrop fell on my hand,
crafted from the Ganges and the Nile,

from the ascended frost of a seal's whiskers,
from water in broken pots in the cities of Ys and Tyre.

On my index finger
the Caspian Sea isn't landlocked,

and the Pacific flows meekly into the Rudava,
the one that flew in a cloud over Paris

in seventeen sixty four
on the seventh of May at three in the morning.

There are not enough lips to pronounce
your transient names, O water.

I would have to say them in every language
pronouncing all the vowels at once,

at the same time keeping silent for the sake of a lake
that waited in vain for a name,

and is no longer on earth as it is in the heavens,
whose stars are no longer reflected in it.

Someone was drowning; someone dying
called out for you. That was long ago and yesterday.

You extinguished houses; you carried them off
like trees, forests like cities.

You were in baptismal fonts and in the bathtubs of courtesans,
in kisses, in shrouds.

Eating away at stones, fueling rainbows.
In the sweat and dew of pyramids and lilacs.

How light all this is in the raindrop.
How delicately the world touches me.

Whenever wherever whatever has happened
is written on the water of Babel.


-Wislawa Szymborska


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Last Edited by siteless on 02/16/2011 04:44 PM

I took the heaviness of your absence and wrapped it around me securely,
a robe of absents covers me still like the sweet decay of autumn leaves.
You are poplar, yes, yes you are.


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I read through your letters today,
they worried me tense and I missed you for moments and moments.
Studied water colours, my eyes felt at the textures, marveled at that tearful art, journals worth keeping beyond bland texts.



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to be content in that window on the world
and to be happy to leave it wide open...

:Keith


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And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

--Jane Hirshfield
from "For What Binds Us"



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I dont get it.


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It's not like everyone has to understand everything.

“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”
Elisabeth Kubler-Ross


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the bard's tongue will always find a truth some place,
and a curb to stub their toe on.



aint life grand

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Trust a happy song, and the fact the sun'll rise in the morning.

the chances are good arnt they?

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The lyricist would still sing across a plain old page,
Notes would be marked in a g’s tail and against a tearful apostrophe,
In the pause of a comma, it would be heard against the page.

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"Granite and Wineglass"

You are granite.
I am an empty wineglass.
You know what happens when we touch!
You laugh like the sun coming up laughs
at a star that disappears into it.
Love opens my chest, and thought
returns to its confines.
Patient and rational considerations leave.
Only passion stays, whimpering and feverish.
Some men fall down in the road like dregs thrown out.
Then, totally reckless, the next morning
they gallop out with new purposes. Love
is the reality, and poetry is the drum
that calls us to that. Don't keep complaining
about loneliness! Let the fear-language of that theme
crack open and float away. Let the priest come down
from his tower, and not go back up!

: Rumi

Last Edited by siteless on 03/03/2011 09:29 PM

Things can be--
and their Being is grounded
in Nothing's ability to noth.

--Kenneth Burke
Language as Symbolic Action




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The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
-- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Stop thinking then your brain has room to fill up with... pretty things, profound things, purposeful things, prophetics, phonetics... peace.


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Yooooowwwwwwwwww for treasure


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I can feel it.
Flowing through me, twisting, taking root.
In the mirror, my eyes blaze green fire.
If you snapped one of my arms, it would smell like dew, new
Like fresh green twig.

I am surprised that passerbys don’t notice.
My hair sets the air afire as I walk down the street:
Not even tears of rain dampen the burning strands.
They say you can’t mix fire and water,
But I whip both into a glowing froth and emerge reborn.

You wouldn’t recognize me now.
I am pure spirit, stripped earth air sea and fire.
True, daily I smooth on calm agreeability, pleasant smiles.
But do not be fooled. Look closer, the phoenix rises in my eyes.
Nothing can touch me.

Can you feel it?
I doubt it. You who tried to trim me back with pointed words
And thought you’d won.
Well it’s spring now, the spring of my soul.
And I am laughing, bursting into bloom.

But I am more dangerous than any flower.
I am raw soil, sharp breeze, foamy wave, searing flame.
All the elements are alive in me.
Bubbled up from the womb of the earth,
I am uncooked power, newly-picked strength.
I am Woman
Goddess
Gaia.


:D



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Happy international womens day

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Man is what he loves.

If he loves a stone he is a stone;

If he loves a man he is a man;

If he loves God--I dare not say more,

for if I said that he would then be God,

ye might stone me!


:St. Augustine

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Columns of Light:


They cannot see these calligraphic columns of light dappled with voices and hope. They cannot shiver at the feel of cracks flaking off with years of ruin and love, cannot grasp that erosion, that affair of these grounds, the light.

Leave me to write!

When will the face branded hot, hot religion crumble, the beards scorch off, the robes possess lightning and illuminate more than a flash of barren land thirsty for rain? When will prayer be a ritual of light, a dare of fire, a construct of Forces celebrated with wine and lovemaking, seashells and the comfort within ourselves, our birthright voices hissing . . . and responding?

Love . . . it was the moment. Do you understand?

Columns of Light. From intimate trenches of night, a temple emerges. Then you. Domes in our mouths, domes in our ribs separate the aura from the stone. Tracing skin with skin, a presence trembles like love’s religion in this naked garden. If only the moment and the moment alone would stay; if only the man and the man himself would remain a statue to be treasured and touched without the blinding light behind him shivering godlike and unreal—
I will celebrate when it fades, await to write pure calligraphy where flowers can bloom from his creases and

lightning can illuminate more than a flash of barren land thirsty for rain.

I am always alone in this place, but there is never a lonesome convulsion felt as echoes in an empty palace. I hear secrets and whispers that blow away the locks of hair around my ears. There are no iron gates. There is nothing to lock away. Breathe with me now as Autumn leaves swirl in gusts and tickle my chest, tricksters of darkness and light. Your shadowy fingers and defined pen. A journey of linkages, stones upon pathways to hop like children only to love the place. Alone. As long as we love light together, our love for each other will . . .

Fury, see with me. Walk with me. Now the fountain is flowing and nothing could be grander than a misty sunset caught in a web of colorful skyline. When rain hurries a spider to create, creation itself pours down and winks prisms in a silken gallery.

Adore me, preserve me,
for they cannot see this omnipresence, this duality of love, of light.


:AH

The loveliness of that inner wilderness,
it does not reduce me;
well springs recharge, tears cascade,
I do not miss you, but the idea of you.


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"Life can be read as a continuous upheaval of knowledge and equilibrium in the attempt to gather meaning. During the gradual process of growth we must at some point lose our identity as individuals: we lose ourselves in life, in outer reality; but much of what we find outside is self-constructed. When I am ready to risk my life to possess someone - even to the point of committing the most vile actions - I certainly forsake objective reality, but I gain a new understanding of myself. Those who go through this experience abolish the world's truth and substitute an hallucinatory image; and they seldom realize that those emotionally overwhelming forms that appear to come from outside are precisely their own."

~Eros and Pathos: Shades of Love and Suffering

PRAYING FOR HUNGER
~~by Merrit Malloy

The younger men are coming up for your promises, Mary
Young men with no moods/no guilt/no gold in their teeth
They are so beautiful you cannot tell
them apart

They have no old music pressed into their eyes
they will give you white dresses and stars
you can stretch your mouth over them
in one bite

Pray for hunger, Mary
this is food/this is what grows
You can weep this pleasure in
there is birth on your instrument
hold him where he is held
You will feel no love for him
except this
yielding

These boys cannot be your heroes, Mary
Their love is too red and
they have no needles in their eyes

Pray for a mistake, Mary
go falling and
go fast


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BACK TO THE BELLY
~~by Merrit Malloy

Ah Captain, take me on your travels
I am so tired of the wounded
so full of the land

I want to be a sailor
I cannot hold on to the shoreman
I am moored by their weeping
white is missing from everything

Ah Captain, let me be your second girl
I could ride your wild part/I can make up for hurting you last year
I could be your seawhore/I will let you be my wetboy
I will teach you to beg again
I will be your bible/Captain please/take me across the line
You can be a skinkiller
Give me your hardness and I will return your
childhood with fevers

Take me where I cannot leave you
we can untie the thick, brown knot and
unfold the dead end

You can give me everything I ever wanted in this one move
I can be your hand
I can be that part that moves you up and down

We can go back to the belly
I will bear you joy
I will birth you, Captain
I will let you come and
I will let you
go

something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire
and wrote the first faint line,
faint without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom,
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open."

:Pablo Neruda
“”From "Poetry", Memorial de isla negra (1964)


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^
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~Dandelion~

Golden tufted chenille
coat buttons
freckling the lawn.

Spires with globes
of airy seeds,
fragile as vapor to the wind.

Oh, Springs most
molested flower,
spurned by paupers and prince lings;

unwanted, unheralded and unsung,
yet touching every suburban
child’s life

with fragrant memories of halcyon days
of ringlets made to crowns
and wishes blown to the wind.

With the sweet smell of
sticky nectar perfuming
young fingertips

as they explore delight
and discover the joy
of this unassuming vagrant,

before they learn to spurn
his unwanted advances,
as most frequent of flowers maligned;

the droll and lovely dandelion.


:Gerard A. Geiger

For the most part the human race has become a worthless commodity, put that in someones capitalist pipe and smoke it.


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The washing of the bodies

by David R. Slavitt

----

The Trojans . . . found it hard to recognize each dead man,
so they washed away the blood that was on them and, weeping warm tears,
hefted their bodies up onto the wagons.
—Iliad, VII
-----
The temptation is not to look, to let the names
go as the life had gone from each of them.
What difference does it make anymore?
But you can’t do that.
You have to know. It hurts, but you have to
and you wash away the blood, for them of course,
but for yourself, too, so you know whom you have lost,
and the salt sea water you use begets salt tears.

Heros, yes, but others, cowards, fools,
a kid you barely remember from school whose face
brings back the kid you were, for a moment alive,
and then, like him, gone again and forgotten.

But do not mourn too long. There is work to do;
the wagons are waiting; the sun will soon go down;
and tomorrow we will return to the shedding of blood
that hides so much that we could not otherwise bear.

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August


...I am burdened as the sky,
clouds, upset buckets pour
their varnish onto earth.

Last year you asked if I was
faint because of the blood. The tomatoes
bristled in their improbable skins,
eavesdropping.

*

This is one way to say it.
The girl gone, you left.

& this another.
Last year in August I hung
my head between my knees, looked up
flirting with atmosphere
but you were here
& the sky had no gravity.

Now love falls from me,
walls from a besieged city.
When I move the mountains shrug off
skin, the horizon shudders, I wear the moon
a cowbell.

My symptom:
the earth's
constant rotation.

On the surface the sea argues.
The tide pulls water like a cloth
from the table, beached boats, dishes
left standing. Without apology
nature abandons us.
Returns, promiscuous, & slides between
sheets, unspooling the length
of our bodies...

:Esta Spalding

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Sweet things under glass, dust for fingerprints;
hold your breath assailants, hold it fast.