tag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-04:2841179are you dreaming, Frederick?oh no, I am gathering wordsscrapofpaper2013-12-28T02:20:00Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-04:2841179:154974ext_52714am i really all the things that are outside of me?2013-12-28T02:20:00Z2013-12-28T02:20:00Z"Taste," by Animal Collectivecontentpublic0Posted by: <span lj:user='two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com' style='white-space: nowrap;' class='ljuser'><a href='https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?userid=54349&t=I'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png' alt='[identity profile] ' width='16' height='16' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='http://two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com/' rel='nofollow'><b>two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com</b></a></span><br /><br />"The purpose of literature is to turn blood into ink."<br />--T. S. Eliot<br /><br /><br />"self-exam (my body is a cage)"<br />Do this: take two fingers, place them on<br />the spot behind your ear, either<br /><br />ear, the spot where your skull drops off<br /><br />into that valley of muscle<br />& nerve--that is the muscle that holds up<br /><br />the skull, that turns the dumb bone<br />this way & that, that nods your face up &<br /><br />down when you think you<br />get it--press deeper, touch the little bundle of<br /><br />nerves buried there, buried in<br />the gristle--the nerves that make you blink<br /><br />when the light bewilders you, that make your tongue<br />slide in & out when you think you're in<br /><br />love, when you think you need a drink, touch<br />that spot as if you have an itch, close your eyes &<br /><br />listen, please, close<br />your eyes—can you hear it? We think our souls live<br /><br />in boxes, we think someone sits behind our eyes,<br />lording in his little throne, steering the fork to<br /><br />the mouth, the mouth to the tit, we think<br />hungry children live in our bellies & run out with their<br /><br />empty bowls as the food rains<br />down, we sometimes think we are those<br /><br />hungry children, we think<br />we can think anything & it won't<br /><br />matter, we think we can think cut out her tongue,<br />& then ask her to sing.<br />--Nick Flynn<br /><br /><br />"You remember too much,<br />my mother said to me recently.<br />Why hold onto all that?<br /><br />And I said,<br />Where do I put it down?"<br />--Anne Carson, "The Glass Essay"<br /><br /><br />"raving: i"<br />Once I wrote a poem larger than any man, even Jesus.<br />So tall the furrow of hair couldn't be tousled,<br />feet large as lakes. I titled it Personification so it<br />would live, Godzilla in parenthesis so it would kill.<br /><br />There was blood. Testicles lay in the streets<br />like confetti post-parade. I was glad: Diana<br />after Actaeon's own salivating pack consumed him--<br />limb by limb licked, tendons trailing.<br /><br />I rode the shoulder of my poem, wanting to see<br />their faces, none specific, all malevolent, calling out<br />last moments in ridiculous language--<i>love, affection,<br />Tender,</i> one screamed. Not loudly enough and too late.<br /><br />I wore red paint, salvaging neither plated breast,<br />nor firm mouth. Not once was I tender.<br />I wanted them wasted--him, him, him, him, him<br />--CM Burroughs<br /><br /><br />"I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game."<br />--Toni Morrison<br /><br /><br />"I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart."<br />--Albert Camus, <i>The Myth of Sisyphus</i><br /><br /><br />"Nobody is as powerful as we make them out to be."<br />--Alice Walker <br /><br /><br />"Books are meat and medicine<br />and flame and flight and flower<br />steel, stitch, cloud and clout,<br />and drumbeats on the air."<br />--Gwendolyn Brooks<br /><br /><br />"The best way to keep a prisoner from escaping is to make sure he never knows he's in prison."<br />--Fyodor Dostoyevsky <br /><br />"Nothing I accept about myself can be used against me to diminish me. I am who I am, doing what I came to do, acting upon you like a drug or a chisel to remind you of your me-ness, as I discover you in myself."<br />--Audre Lorde, "Eye to Eye"<br /><br /><br />"The bed was warm and ordinary and perfect, and it had been such a long, long day. Probably the longest day of my life. I felt like I had proof that not all days are the same length, not all time has the same weight. Proof that there are worlds and worlds and worlds on top of worlds, if you want them to be there."<br />--Carol Rifka Brunt, <i>Tell the Wolves I'm Home</i><br /><br /><br />"Night and Sleep"<br />At the time of night-prayer, as the sun slides down,<br />the route the senses walk on closes, the route to the invisible opens.<br />The angel of sleep then gathers and drives along the spirits;<br />just as the mountain keeper gathers his sheep on a slope.<br />And what amazing sights he offers to the descending sheep!<br />Cities with sparkling streets, hyacinth gardens, emerald pastures!<br />The spirit sees astounding beings, turtles turned to men,<br />men turned to angels, when sleep erases the banal.<br />I think one could say the spirit goes back to its old home:<br />it no longer remembers where it lives, and loses its fatigue.<br />It carries around in life so many griefs and loads<br />and trembles under their weight; but now they are gone,<br />and it is all well.<br />--Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks and Robert Bly<br /><br /><br />"An Appendix to the Vision of Peace"<br />Don't stop after beating the swords<br />Into ploughshares, don't stop! Go on beating<br />And make musical instruments out of them.<br />Whoever wants to make war again<br />Will have to turn them into ploughshares first.<br />--Yehuda Amichai, translated by Glenda Abramson and Tudor Parfitt<br /><br /><br />"The Task Never Completed"<br />No task is ever completed,<br />only abandoned or pressed into use.<br />Tinkering can be a form of prayer.<br /><br />Twenty-six botched worlds preceded<br />Genesis we are told in ancient commentary,<br />and ha-Shem said not only,<br />of this particular attempt,<br />It is good, but muttered,<br />if only it will hold.<br /><br />Incomplete, becoming, the world<br />was given to us to fix, to complete<br />and we've almost worn it out.<br /><br />My house was hastily built,<br />on the cheap. Leaks, rotting<br />sills, the floor a relief map of Idaho.<br /><br />Whenever I get some money, I stove<br />up, repair, add on, replace.<br />This improvisation permits me to squat<br />here on the land that owns me.<br /><br />We evolve through mistakes, wrong<br />genes, imitation gone wild.<br /><br />Each night sleep unravels me into wool,<br />then into sheep and wolf. Walls and fire<br />pass through me. I birth stones.<br /><br />Every dawn I stumble from the roaring<br />vat of dreams and make myself up<br />remembering and forgetting by halves.<br /><br />Every dawn I choose to take a knife<br />to the world's flank or a sewing kit,<br />rough improvisation, but a start.<br />--Marge Piercy<br /><br /><br />"To the extent that it is possible you must live in the world today as you wish everyone to live in the world to come. That can be your contribution. Otherwise, the world you want will never be formed. Why? Because you are waiting for others to do what you are not doing; and they are waiting for you, and so on."<br />--Alice Walker, <i>The Temple of My Familiar</i><br /><br /><br />"[Faith] means that, from the very roots of our being, we should always be prepared to live with this mystery as one being lives with another. Real faith means the ability to endure life in the face of this mystery."<br />--Martin Buber<br /><br /><br />"On the Death of a Parent"<br />Move to the front<br />of the line<br />a voice says, and suddenly<br />there is nobody<br />left standing between you<br />and the world, to take<br />the first blows<br />on their shoulders.<br />This is the place in books<br />where part one ends, and<br />part two begins,<br />and there is no part three.<br />The slate is wiped<br />not clean but like a canvas<br />painted over in white<br />so that a whole new landscape<br />must be started,<br />bits of the old<br />still showing underneath--<br />those colors sadness lends<br />to a certain hour of evening.<br />Now the line of light<br />at the horizon<br />is the hinge between earth<br />and heaven, only visible<br />a few moments<br />as the sun drops<br />its rusted padlock<br />into place.<br />--Linda Pastan<br /><br /><br />"Every October it becomes important, no, <i>necessary</i> to see the leaves turning, to be surrounded by leaves turning...You'll be driving along depressed when suddenly a cloud will move and the sun will muscle through and ignite the hills. It may not last. Probably won't last. But for a moment the whole world comes to. Wakes up. Proves it lives. It lives--<i>red, yellow, orange, brown, russet, ocher, vermillion, gold</i>. Flame and rust. Flame and rust, the permutations of burning. You're on fire. Your eyes are on fire.<br /><br />"It won't last, you don't want it to last. You can't stand any more. But you don't want it to stop. It's what you've come for. It's what you'll come back for. It won't stay with you, but you'll remember that it felt like nothing else you've felt or something you've felt that also didn't last."<br />--Lloyd Schwartz<br /><br /><br />"A Short History of Judaic Thought in the Twentieth Century"<br />The rabbis wrote:<br />although it is forbidden<br />to touch a dying person,<br />nevertheless, if the house<br />catches fire<br />he must be removed<br />from the house.<br /><br />Barbaric!<br />I say,<br />and whom may I touch then,<br />aren't we all<br />dying?<br /><br />You smile<br />your old negotiator's smile<br />and ask:<br />but aren't all our houses<br />burning?<br />--Linda Pastan<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=scrapofpaper&ditemid=154974" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-04:2841179:150842ext_52714i don't have a hawk in my heart, no dumb-ass dove in my brain2013-06-05T00:12:00Z2013-06-05T00:12:00Z"Thirsty," by the Nationalrejuvenatedpublic2Posted by: <span lj:user='two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com' style='white-space: nowrap;' class='ljuser'><a href='https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?userid=54349&t=I'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png' alt='[identity profile] ' width='16' height='16' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='http://two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com/' rel='nofollow'><b>two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com</b></a></span><br /><br />"You don't fall in love like you fall in a hole. You fall like falling through space. It's like you jump off your own private planet to visit someone else's planet. And when you get there it all looks different: the flowers, the animals, the colours people wear. It is a big surprise falling in love because you thought you had everything just right on your own planet, and that was true, in a way, but then somebody signalled to you across space and the only way you could visit was to take a giant jump. Away you go, falling into someone else's orbit and after a while you might decide to pull your two planets together and call it home. And you can bring your dog. Or your cat. Your goldfish, hamster, collection of stones, all your odd socks. (The ones you lost, including the holes, are on the new planet you found.)<br /><br />"And you can bring your friends to visit. And read your favourite stories to each other. And the falling was really the big jump that you had to make to be with someone you don't want to be without. That's it.<br /><br />"PS You have to be brave."<br />--Jeanette Winterson, explaining to children how we fall in love<br /><br /><br />"We starve at the banquet: We cannot see that there is a banquet because seeing the banquet requires that we see also ourselves sitting there starving--seeing ourselves clearly, even for a moment, is shattering. <br /><br />"We are not dead but asleep, dreaming of ourselves."<br />--David Foster Wallace, <i>The Pale King</i><br /><br /><br />"You Are Tired"<br />You are tired <br />(I think)<br />Of the always puzzle of living and doing;<br />And so am I.<br />Come with me then <br />And we'll leave it far and far away--<br />(Only you and I understand!)<br /><br />You have played <br />(I think)<br />And broke the toys you were fondest of <br />And are a little tired now;<br />Tired of things that break and-<br />Just tired.<br />So am I.<br /><br />But I come with a dream in my eyes tonight <br />And knock with a rose at the hopeless gate of your heart--<br />Open to me!<br />For I will show you the places Nobody knows <br />And if you like <br />The perfect places of Sleep.<br /><br />Ah come with me!<br />I'll blow you that wonderful bubble the moon <br />That floats forever and a day;<br />I'll sing you the jacinth song<br />Of the probable stars;<br />I will attempt the unstartled steppes of dream <br />Until I find the Only Flower <br />Which shall keep (I think) your little heart<br />While the moon comes out of the sea.<br />--e. e. cummings<br /><br /><br />"People without hope not only don't write novels, but what is more to the point, they don't read them. They don't take long looks at anything, because they lack the courage. The way to despair is to refuse to have any kind of experience, and the novel, of course, is a way to have experience. The lady that only read books that improved her mind was taking a safe course--and a hopeless one. She'll never know whether her mind is improved or not, but should she ever, by some mistake, read a great novel, she'll know mighty well that something is happening to her."<br />--Flannery O'Connor, <i>Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose</i><br /><br /><br />"We would often be ashamed of our best actions if the world only knew the motives behind them."<br />--François de La Rochefoucauld<br /><br /><br />It might be lonelier<br />Without the Loneliness--<br />I'm so accustomed to my Fate--<br />Perhaps the Other--Peace--<br /><br />Would interrupt the Dark--<br />And crowd the little Room--<br />Too scant--by Cubits--to contain<br />The Sacrament--of Him--<br /><br />I am not used to Hope--<br />It might intrude upon--<br />Its sweet parade--blaspheme the place--<br />Ordained to Suffering--<br /><br />It might be easier<br />To fail--with Land in Sight--<br />Than gain--My Blue Peninsula--<br />To perish--of Delight--<br />--Emily Dickinson<br /><br /><br />"You none of you understand how old you are<br />And death will come to you as a mild surprise,<br />A momentary shudder in a vacant room."<br />--T. S. Eliot, <i>The Family Reunion</i><br /><br /><br />"I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something."<br />--Richard Feynman <br /><br /><br />"War Photograph"<br /><span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://scrapofpaper.dreamwidth.org/150842.html#cutid1">trigger warning: wartime violence, Vietnam War</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div><br />--Kate Daniels<br /><br /><br />"<i>Saint Catherine in an O:</i> a Song about Knives"<br /><span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___2" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://scrapofpaper.dreamwidth.org/150842.html#cutid2">trigger warning: wartime violence, mutilation</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___2" aria-live="assertive"></div><br />--Matt Donovan<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=scrapofpaper&ditemid=150842" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-04:2841179:148797ext_52714if the fire doesn't die, can the kid keep his eyes?2013-02-19T21:14:00Z2013-02-19T21:14:00Z"They Took a Vote and Said No," by Sunset Rubdowndepressedpublic0Posted by: <span lj:user='two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com' style='white-space: nowrap;' class='ljuser'><a href='https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?userid=54349&t=I'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png' alt='[identity profile] ' width='16' height='16' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='http://two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com/' rel='nofollow'><b>two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com</b></a></span><br /><br />"The invariable mark of wisdom is seeing the miraculous in the common."<br />--Ralph Waldo Emerson<br /><br /><br />"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."<br />--Dorothy Parker <br /><br /><br />"Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don't mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves."<br />--T. S. Eliot <br /><br /><br />"Whatever is the lot of humankind<br />I want to taste within my deepest self.<br />I want to seize the highest and the lowest,<br />to load its woe and bliss upon my breast,<br />and thus expand my single self titanically<br />and in the end go down with all the rest."<br />--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, <i>Faust</i><br /><br /><br />"XVI"<br />I love the handful of the earth you are.<br />Because of its meadows, vast as a planet,<br />I have no other star. You are my replica<br />of the multiplying universe.<br /><br />Your wide eyes are the only light I know<br />from extinguished constellations;<br />your skin throbs like the streak<br />of a meteor through rain.<br /><br />Your hips were that much of the moon for me;<br />your deep mouth and its delights, that much sun;<br />your heart, fiery with its long red rays,<br /><br />was that much ardent light, like honey in the shade.<br />So I pass across your burning form, kissing<br />you--compact and planetary, my dove, my globe.<br />--Pablo Neruda<br /><br /><br />"The mountains appalled me with their 'permanence,' with that awful and irrefutable <i>rock</i>-ness that seemed to intensify my sense of my own transience. Perhaps this dread of transience explains our greed for the few gobbets of raw experience in modern life, why violence is libidinous, why lust devours us, why soldiers choose not to forget their days of horror: we cling to such extreme moments, in which we seem to die, yet are reborn. In sexual abandon as in danger we are impelled, however briefly, into that vital present in which we do not stand apart from life, we <i>are</i> life, our being fills us; ecstasy with another being, loneliness falls away into eternity. But in other days, such union was attainable through simple awe."<br />--Peter Matthiessen, <i>The Snow Leopard</i><br /><br /><br />"If There Is Something to Desire"<br />If there is something to desire,<br />there will be something to regret.<br />If there is something to regret,<br />there will be something to recall.<br />If there is something to recall,<br />there was nothing to regret.<br />If there was nothing to regret,<br />there was nothing to desire.<br />--Vera Pavlova<br /><br /><br />"It must be those brief moments<br />when nothing has happened--nor is going to.<br />Tiny moments, like islands in the ocean<br />beyond the grey continent of our ordinary days.<br />There, sometimes, you meet your own heart<br />like someone you've never known."<br />--Hans Børli<br /><br /><br />"We Alone"<br />We alone can devalue gold<br />by not caring<br />if it falls or rises<br />in the marketplace.<br />Wherever there is gold<br />there is a chain, you know,<br />and if your chain<br />is gold<br />so much the worse<br />for you.<br /><br />Feathers, shells<br />and sea-shaped stones<br />are all as rare.<br /><br />This could be our revolution:<br />to love what is plentiful<br />as much as<br />what's scarce.<br />--Alice Walker<br /><br /><br />"No man should escape our universities without knowing how little he knows."<br />--J. Robert Oppenheimer<br /><br /><br />"...happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory...we are all kings in exile."<br />--G. K. Chesterton<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=scrapofpaper&ditemid=148797" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-04:2841179:148414ext_52714crowds grow denser by the second as we near the center of the town2013-01-29T22:20:00Z2013-01-29T22:20:00Z"Heretic Pride," by the Mountain Goatsmelancholypublic0Posted by: <span lj:user='two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com' style='white-space: nowrap;' class='ljuser'><a href='https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?userid=54349&t=I'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png' alt='[identity profile] ' width='16' height='16' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='http://two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com/' rel='nofollow'><b>two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com</b></a></span><br /><br />"Song of Childhood"<br />When the child was a child<br />It walked with its arms swinging,<br />wanted the brook to be a river,<br />the river to be a torrent,<br />and this puddle to be the sea.<br /><br />When the child was a child,<br />it didn’t know that it was a child,<br />everything was soulful,<br />and all souls were one.<br /><br />When the child was a child,<br />it had no opinion about anything,<br />had no habits,<br />it often sat cross-legged,<br />took off running,<br />had a cowlick in its hair,<br />and made no faces when photographed.<br /><br />When the child was a child,<br />It was the time for these questions:<br />Why am I me, and why not you?<br />Why am I here, and why not there?<br />When did time begin, and where does space end?<br />Is life under the sun not just a dream?<br />Is what I see and hear and smell<br />not just an illusion of a world before the world?<br />Given the facts of evil and people.<br />does evil really exist?<br />How can it be that I, who I am,<br />didn’t exist before I came to be,<br />and that, someday, I, who I am,<br />will no longer be who I am?<br /><br />When the child was a child,<br />It choked on spinach, on peas, on rice pudding,<br />and on steamed cauliflower,<br />and eats all of those now, and not just because it has to.<br /><br />When the child was a child,<br />it awoke once in a strange bed,<br />and now does so again and again.<br />Many people, then, seemed beautiful,<br />and now only a few do, by sheer luck.<br /><br />It had visualized a clear image of Paradise,<br />and now can at most guess,<br />could not conceive of nothingness,<br />and shudders today at the thought.<br /><br />When the child was a child,<br />It played with enthusiasm,<br />and, now, has just as much excitement as then,<br />but only when it concerns its work.<br /><br />When the child was a child,<br />It was enough for it to eat an apple, … bread,<br />And so it is even now.<br /><br />When the child was a child,<br />Berries filled its hand as only berries do,<br />and do even now,<br />Fresh walnuts made its tongue raw,<br />and do even now,<br />it had, on every mountaintop,<br />the longing for a higher mountain yet,<br />and in every city,<br />the longing for an even greater city,<br />and that is still so,<br />It reached for cherries in topmost branches of trees<br />with an elation it still has today,<br />has a shyness in front of strangers,<br />and has that even now.<br />It awaited the first snow,<br />And waits that way even now.<br /><br />When the child was a child,<br />It threw a stick like a lance against a tree,<br />And it quivers there still today. <br />--Peter Handke, translated from the German<br /><br /><br />"Peach Farm"<br />I'm thinking it's time to go back<br />to the peach farm or rather<br />the peach farm seems to be wanting me back<br />even though the work of picking, sorting,<br />the sticky perils and sudden swarms are done.<br />Okay, full disclosure, I've never<br />been on a peach farm, just glimpsed<br />from a car squat trees I assumed<br />were peach and knew a couple in school<br />who went off one summer, so they said,<br />to work on a peach farm. She was pregnant,<br />he didn't have much intention, canvases<br />of crushed lightbulbs and screws in paste.<br />He'd gotten fired from the lunch counter<br />for putting too much meat<br />on the sandwiches of his friends<br />then ended up in Macy's in New York<br />selling caviar and she went home<br />I think to Scranton, two more versions<br />of never hearing from someone again.<br />I'd like to say the most important fruits<br />are within but that's the very sort of bullshit<br />one goes to the peach farm to avoid,<br />not just flight from quadratic equations,<br />waiting for the plumber,<br />finding out your insurance won't pay.<br />Everyone wants out of the spider's stomach.<br />Everyone wants to be part of some harvest<br />and stop coughing to death and cursing<br />at nothing and waking up nowhere near<br />an orchard. Look at these baskets,<br />bashed about, nearly ruined with good employ.<br />Often, after you've spent a day on a ladder,<br />you dream of angels, the one with the trumpet<br />and free subscriptions to the New Yorker<br />or the archer, the oink angel, angel<br />of ten dollar bills found in the dryer<br />or the one who welcomes you in work gloves<br />and says if you're caught eating a single peach,<br />even windfall, you'll be executed.<br />Then laughs. It's okay, kiddo,<br />long as you're here, you're one of us.<br />--Dean Young<br /><br /><br />"Your Invitation to a Modest Breakfast"<br />It's too cold to smoke outside, but if you come over,<br />I'll keep my hands to myself, or won't I.<br />I would like to tell you about the wall eaten up<br /><br />by the climbing plant--it was so beautiful.<br />Various things have been happening to me,<br />all of them sexual. The man on the bus<br /><br />took off his pants so I could see him better.<br />Another man said, "Ignore him darlin'.<br />Just sit on my lap." But I'm not one of those<br /><br />who's hungriest in the morning,<br />unlike the man at the bakery<br />who eats egg after egg after egg.<br /><br />Listen. Come over: the cold has already eaten<br />the summer. I need another pair of ears:<br />from the kitchen I can't tell if I'm hearing wind chimes<br /><br />or some gray woman with failing arms<br />dropping a pan full of onions and potatoes.<br />This morning I need four hands--<br /><br />two to wash the greens, one to lift a teakettle,<br />one to pour the milk. This morning, one little mouth<br />will not do. We could play a game<br /><br />where we crouch on the tiles, two yellow dogs<br />drinking coffee from bowls. We could play a game<br />where we let the breakfast burn.<br /><br />Outside there's a world where every love scene<br />begins with a man in a doorway;<br />he walks over to the woman and says, "Open your mouth."<br />--Hannah Gamble<br /><br /><br />"In science, my dear, there is no such thing as good or evil. The death instinct is part of our biology. You're familiar with chromatolysis--the natural process by which cells die? Every one of our cells brings about its own destruction at its allotted time. That's the death instinct in operation. Now if a cell fails to die, what happens? It keeps dividing, reproducing, endlessly, unnaturally. It becomes a cancer. That's what cancer is, after all--cells afflicted with the loss of their will to die. The death instinct is not evil, Miss Rousseau. In its proper place it's every bit as essential to our well-being as its opposite."<br />--Jed Rubenfeld, <i>The Death Instinct</i><br /><br /><br />"The Vanishings"<br />One day it will vanish,<br />how you felt when you were overwhelmed<br />by her, soaping each other in the shower,<br />or when you heard the news<br />of his death, there in the T-Bone diner<br />on Queens Boulevard amid the shouts<br />of short-order cooks, Armenian, oblivious.<br />One day one thing and then a dear other<br />will blur and though they won't be lost<br />they won't mean as much,<br />that motorcycle ride on the dirt road<br />to the deserted beach near Cadiz,<br />the Guardia mistaking you for a drug-runner,<br />his machine gun in your belly--<br />already history now, merely your history,<br />which means everything to you.<br />You strain to bring back<br />your mother's face and full body<br />before her illness, the arc and tenor<br />of family dinners, the mysteries<br />of radio, and Charlie Collins,<br />eight years old, inviting you<br />to his house to see the largest turd<br />that had ever come from him, unflushed.<br />One day there'll be almost nothing<br />except what you've written down,<br />then only what you've written down well,<br />then little of that.<br />The march on Washington in '68<br />where you hoped to change the world<br />and meet beautiful, sensitive women<br />is choreography now, cops on horses,<br />everyone backing off, stepping forward.<br />The exam you stole and put back unseen<br />has become one of your stories,<br />overtold, tainted with charm.<br />All of it, anyway, will go the way of icebergs<br />come summer, the small chunks floating<br />in the Adriatic until they're only water,<br />pure, and someone taking sad pride<br />that he can swim in it, numbly.<br />For you, though, loss, almost painless,<br />that Senior Prom at the Latin Quarter--<br />Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan, and you<br />just interested in your date's cleavage<br />and staying out all night at Jones Beach,<br />the small dune fires fueled by driftwood.<br />You can't remember a riff or a song,<br />and your date's a woman now, married,<br />has had sex as you have<br />some few thousand times, good sex<br />and forgettable sex, even boring sex,<br />oh you never could have imagined<br />back then with the waves crashing<br />what the body could erase.<br />It's vanishing as you speak, the soul-grit,<br />the story-fodder,<br />everything you retrieve is your past,<br />everything you let go<br />goes to memory's out-box, open on all sides,<br />in cahoots with thin air.<br />The jobs you didn't get vanish like scabs.<br />Her good-bye, causing the phone to slip<br />from your hand, doesn't hurt anymore,<br />too much doesn't hurt anymore,<br />not even that hint of your father, ghost-thumping<br />on your roof in Spain, hurts anymore.<br />You understand and therefore hate<br />because you hate the passivity of understanding<br />that your worst rage and finest<br />private gesture will flatten and collapse<br />into history, become invisible<br />like defeats inside houses. Then something happens<br />(it is happening) which won't vanish fast enough,<br />your voice fails, chokes to silence;<br />hurt (how could you have forgotten?) hurts.<br />Every other truth in the world, out of respect,<br />slides over, makes room for its superior.<br />--Stephen Dunn<br /><br /><br />"Musée des Beaux Arts"<br />About suffering they were never wrong,<br />The old Masters: how well they understood<br />Its human position: how it takes place<br />While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;<br />How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting<br />For the miraculous birth, there always must be<br />Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating<br />On a pond at the edge of the wood:<br />They never forgot<br />That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course<br />Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot<br />Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse<br />Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.<br /><br />In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away<br />Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may<br />Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,<br />But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone<br />As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green<br />Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen<br />Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,<br />Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. <br />--W. H. Auden<br /><br /><br />"Gerontion"<br /><i>Thou hast nor youth nor age<br />But as it were an after dinner sleep<br />Dreaming of both.</i><br /><br />Here I am, an old man in a dry month,<br />Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain.<br />I was neither at the hot gates<br />Nor fought in the warm rain<br />Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass,<br />Bitten by flies, fought.<br />My house is a decayed house,<br />And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner,<br />Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp,<br />Blistered in Brussels, patched and peeled in London.<br />The goat coughs at night in the field overhead;<br />Rocks, moss, stonecrop, iron, merds.<br />The woman keeps the kitchen, makes tea.<br />Sneezes at evening, poking the peevish gutter.<br />I an old man,<br />A dull head among windy spaces.<br /><br />Signs are taken for wonders. 'We would see a sign!'<br />The word within a word, unable to speak a word,<br />Swaddled with darkness. In the juvescence of the year<br />Came Christ the tiger<br /><br />In depraved May, dogwood and chestnut, flowering judas,<br />To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk<br />Among whispers; by Mr. Silvero<br />With caressing hands, at Limoges<br />Who walked all night in the next room;<br /><br />By Hakagawa, bowing among the Titians;<br />By Madame de Tornquist, in the dark room<br />Shifting the candles; Fräulein von Kulp<br />Who turned in the hall, one hand on the door. Vacant shuttles<br />Weave the wind. I have no ghosts,<br />An old man in a draughty house.<br />Under a windy knob.<br /><br />After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Think now<br />History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors<br />And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions,<br />Guides us by vanities. Think now<br />She gives when our attention is distracted<br />And what she gives, gives with such supple confusions<br />That the giving famishes the craving. Gives too late<br />What's not believed in, or if still believed,<br />In memory only, reconsidered passion. Gives too soon<br />Into weak hands, what's thought can be dispensed with<br />Till the refusal propagates a fear. Think<br />Neither fear nor courage saves us. Unnatural vices<br />Are fathered by our heroism. Virtues<br />Are forced upon us by our impudent crimes.<br />These tears are shaken from the wrath-bearing tree.<br /><br />The tiger springs in the new year. Us he devours. Think at last<br />We have not reached conclusion, when I<br />Stiffen in a rented house. Think at last<br />I have not made this show purposelessly <br />And it is not by any concitation<br />Of the backward devils.<br />I would meet you upon this honestly.<br />I that was near your heart was removed therefrom<br />To lose beauty in terror, terror in inquisition.<br />I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it<br />Since what is kept must be adulterated? <br />I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:<br />How should I use them for your closer contact?<br /><br />These with a thousand small deliberations<br />Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,<br />Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,<br />With pungent sauces, multiply variety<br />In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,<br />Suspend its operations, will the weevil<br />Delay? De Bailhache, Fresca, Mrs. Cammel, whirled<br />Beyond the circuit of the shuddering Bear<br />In fractured atoms. Gull against the wind, in the windy straits<br />Of Belle Isle, or running on the Horn.<br />White feathers in the snow, the Gulf claims,<br />And an old man driven by the Trades<br />To a sleepy corner.<br /><br />Tenants of the house,<br />Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season.<br />--T. S. Eliot<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=scrapofpaper&ditemid=148414" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-04:2841179:145229ext_52714i wanna grab you by the hair and hang you up from the heavens2012-12-29T02:26:00Z2012-12-29T02:26:00Z"Hang You from the Heavens," by the Dead Weatherscaredpublic0Posted by: <span lj:user='two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com' style='white-space: nowrap;' class='ljuser'><a href='https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?userid=54349&t=I'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png' alt='[identity profile] ' width='16' height='16' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='http://two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com/' rel='nofollow'><b>two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com</b></a></span><br /><br />"You Have to Be Careful"<br />You have to be careful telling things.<br />Some ears are tunnels.<br />Your words will go in and get lost in the dark.<br />Some ears are flat pans like the miners used<br />looking for gold.<br /><br />What you say will be washed out with the stones.<br />You look for a long time till you find the right ears.<br />Till then, there are birds and lamps to be spoken to,<br />a patient cloth rubbing shine in circles,<br />and the slow, gradually growing possibility<br />that when you find such ears<br />they already know.<br />--Naomi Shihab Nye<br /><br /><br />Sleep like the down elevator's<br />imitation of a memory lapse.<br /><br />Then early light.<br /><br />Why were you born, voyager?<br />One is not born for a reason,<br />although there is a skein of causes.<br />Out of yellowish froth,<br />cells began to divide, or so they say,<br />and feed on sunlight,<br />for no reason.<br />After that life wanted life.<br /><br />You are awake now?<br />I am awake now.<br /><br />*<br /><br />In front of me six African men, each of them tall<br />and handsome, all of them impeccably tailored;<br />all six ordered Coca-Cola at dinner (Muslim,<br />it seems, a trade delegation? diplomats?);<br />the young American girl next to me<br />is a veterinary assistant from DC;<br />I asked her if she kept records<br />or held animals. A little of both,<br />she says. She's on her way to Stockholm.<br />The young man in the window seat, also American,<br />black hair not combed any time<br />in recent memory, expensive Italian shirt,<br />gold crucifix fastened to his earlobe,<br />scarab tattooed in the soft skin<br />between thumb and forefinger of his left hand,<br />is reading a Portuguese phrasebook.<br />A lover perhaps in Lisbon or Faro.<br />There should be a phrase for this passenger tenderness,<br />the flickering perceptions like the whitecaps<br />later on the Neva, when the wind<br />off the Gulf of Finland, roughens the surface<br />of the river and spills the small petals<br />of white lilacs on the gray stone<br />of the embankment. Above it two black-faced gulls,<br />tilted in the air, cry out sharply, and sharply.<br /><br />*<br /><br />They are built like exclamation points, woodpeckers.<br /><br />*<br /><br />Are you there? It's summer. Are you smeared with the juice of cherries?<br /><br />The light this morning is touching everything,<br />the grasses by the pond,<br />and the wind-chivvied water,<br />and the aspens on the bank, and the one white fir on its sunward side,<br />and the blue house down the road<br />and its white banisters which are glowing on top<br />and shadowy on the underside,<br />which intensifies the luster of the surfaces that face the sun<br />as it does to the leaves of the aspen.<br /><br />Are you there? Maybe it would be best<br />to be the shadow side of a pine needle<br />on a midsummer morning<br />(to be in imagination and for a while<br />on a midsummer morning<br />the shadow side of a pine needle).<br /><br />The sun has concentrated to a glowing point<br />in the unlit bulb of the porchlight on the porch<br />of the blue house down the road.<br />It almost hurts to look at it.<br /><br />Are you there? Are you soaked in dreams still?<br /><br />The sky is inventing a Web site called newest azure.<br />There are four kinds of birdsong outside<br />and a methodical early morning saw.<br />No, not a saw. It's a boy on a scooter and the sun<br />on his black helmet is concentrated to a point of glowing light.<br />He isn't death come to get us<br />and he isn't truth arriving in a black T-shirt<br />chevroned up the arms in tongues of flame.<br /><br />Are you there? For some reason I'm imagining<br />the small hairs on your neck, even thought I know<br />you are dread and the muse<br />and my mortal fate and a secret.<br />It's a boy on a scooter on a summer morning.<br />Did I say the light was touching everything?<br />--Robert Hass, from "July Notebook: The Birds"<br /><br /><br /><span class="cut-wrapper"><span style="display: none;" id="span-cuttag___1" class="cuttag"></span><b class="cut-open">( </b><b class="cut-text"><a href="https://scrapofpaper.dreamwidth.org/145229.html#cutid1">trigger warning: mention of rape, torture, and murder</a></b><b class="cut-close"> )</b></span><div style="display: none;" id="div-cuttag___1" aria-live="assertive"></div><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=scrapofpaper&ditemid=145229" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-04:2841179:143549ext_52714so come out of your cave walking on your hands and see the world hanging upside down2012-11-16T19:40:00Z2012-11-16T19:40:00Z"The Cave," by Mumford & Sonsdrainedpublic4Posted by: <span lj:user='two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com' style='white-space: nowrap;' class='ljuser'><a href='https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?userid=54349&t=I'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png' alt='[identity profile] ' width='16' height='16' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='http://two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com/' rel='nofollow'><b>two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com</b></a></span><br /><br />"We need not stride resolutely into catastrophe, merely because those are the marching orders."<br />--Noam Chomsky<br /><br /><br />"A Home in Dark Grass"<br />In the deep fall, the body awakes,<br />And we find lions on the seashore--<br />Nothing to fear.<br />The wind rises, the water is born,<br />Spreading white tomb-clothes on a rocky shore,<br />Drawing us up<br />From the bed of the land.<br /><br />We did not come to remain whole.<br />We came to lose our leaves like the trees,<br />The trees that are broken<br />And start again, drawing up on great roots;<br />Like mad poets captured by the Moors,<br />Men who live out<br />A second life.<br /><br />That we should learn of poverty and rags,<br />That we should taste the weed of Dillinger,<br />And swim in the sea,<br />Not always walking on dry land,<br />And, dancing, find in the trees a saviour,<br />A home in the dark grass,<br />And nourishment in death.<br />--Robert Bly<br /><br /><br />"The best moments in reading are when you come across something--a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things--which you had thought special and particular to you. And now, here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out, and taken yours."<br />--Alan Bennett, <i>The History Boys</i><br /><br /><br />"Suicide Song"<br />But now I am afraid I know too much to kill myself<br />Though I would still like to jump off a high bridge<br /><br />At midnight, or paddle a kayak out to sea<br />Until I turn into a speck, or wear a necktie made of knotted rope<br /><br />But people would squirm, it would hurt them in some way,<br />And I am too knowledgeable now to hurt people imprecisely.<br /><br />No longer do I live by the law of me,<br />No longer having the excuse of youth or craziness,<br /><br />And dying you know shows a serious ingratitude<br />For sunsets and beehive hairdos and the precious green corrugated<br /><br />Pickles they place at the edge of your plate.<br />Killing yourself is wasteful, like spilling oil<br /><br />At sea or not recycling all the kisses you've been given,<br />And anyway, who has clothes nice enough to be caught dead in?<br /><br />Not me. You stay alive you stupid asshole<br />Because you haven't been excused,<br /><br />You haven't finished though it takes a mulish stubbornness<br />To chew this food.<br /><br />It is a stone, it is an inconvenience, it is an innocence,<br />And I turn against it like a record<br /><br />Turns against the needle<br />That makes it play.<br />--Tony Hoagland<br /><br /><br />III. Usk<br />Do not suddenly break the branch, or<br />Hope to find<br />The white hart over the white well.<br />Glance aside, not for lance, do not spell<br />Old enchantments. Let them sleep.<br />'Gently dip, but not too deep',<br />Lift your eyes<br />Where the roads dip and where the roads rise<br />Seek only there<br />Where the grey light meets the green air<br />The Hermit's chapel, the pilgrim's prayer.<br />--T. S. Eliot, from "Landscapes"<br /><br /><br />"The First Straw"<br />I used to think love was two people sucking<br />on the same straw to see whose thirst was stronger,<br /><br />but then I whiffed the crushed walnuts of your nape,<br />traced jackals in the snow-covered tombstones of your teeth.<br /><br />I used to think love was a non-stop saxophone solo<br />in the lungs, till I hung with you like a pair of sneakers<br /><br />from a phone line, and you promised to always smell<br />the rose in my kerosene. I used to think love was terminal<br /><br />pelvic ballet, till you let me jog beside while you pedaled<br />all over hell on the menstrual bicycle, your tongue<br /><br />ripping through my prairie like a tornado of paper cuts.<br />I used to think love was an old man smashing a mirror<br /><br />over his knee, till you helped me carry the barbell<br />of my spirit back up the stairs after my car pirouetted<br /><br />in the desert. You are my history book. I used to not believe<br />in fairy tales till I played the dunce in sheep's clothing<br /><br />and felt how perfectly your foot fit in the glass slipper<br /><br />of my ass. But then duty wrapped its phone cord<br /><br />around my ankle and yanked me across the continent.<br />And now there are three thousand miles between the u<br /><br />and the s in esophagus. And being without you is like standing<br />at a cement-filled well with a roll of Yugoslavian nickels<br /><br />and making a wish. Some days I miss you so much<br />I'd jump off the roof of your office building<br /><br />just to catch a glimpse of you on the way down. I wish<br />we could trade left eyeballs, so we could always see<br /><br />what the others see. But you're here, I'm there,<br />and we have only words, a nightly phone call--one chance<br /><br />to mix feelings into syllables and pour into the receiver,<br />hope they don’t disassemble in that calculus of wire.<br /><br />And lately--with this whole war thing--the language machine<br />supporting it--I feel betrayed by the alphabet, like they're<br /><br />injecting strychnine into my vowels, infecting my consonants,<br />naming attack helicopters after shattered Indian tribes:<br /><br />Apache, Blackhawk; and West Bank colonizers are settlers,<br />so Sharon is Davey Crockett, and Arafat: Geronimo,<br /><br />and it's the Wild West all over again. And I imagine Picasso<br />looking in a mirror, decorating his face in war paint,<br /><br />washing his brushes in venom, and I think of Jenin<br />in all that rubble, and I feel like a Cyclops with two eyes,<br /><br />like an anorexic with three mouths, like a scuba diver<br />in quicksand, like a shark with plastic vampire teeth,<br /><br />like I'm the executioner's fingernail trying to reason<br />with the hand. And I don't know how to speak love<br /><br />when the heart is a busted cup filling with spit and paste,<br />and the only sexual fantasy I have is busting<br /><br />into the Pentagon with a bazooka-sized pen and blowing<br />open the minds of generals. And I comfort myself<br /><br />with the thought that we'll name our first child Jenin,<br />and her middle name will be Terezin, and we'll teach her<br /><br />how to glow in the dark, and how to swallow firecrackers,<br />and to never neglect the first straw, because no one<br /><br />ever talks about the first straw, it's always the last straw<br />that gets all the attention, but by then it's way too late.<br />--Jeffery McDaniel<br /><br /><br />"After Love"<br />He is watching the music with his eyes closed.<br />Hearing the piano like a man moving<br />through the woods thinking by feeling.<br />The orchestra up in the trees, the heart below,<br />step by step. The music hurrying sometimes,<br />but always returning to quiet, like the man<br />remembering and hoping. It is a thing in us,<br />mostly unnoticed. There is somehow a pleasure<br />in the loss. In the yearning. The pain<br />going this way and that. Never again.<br />Never bodied again. Again the never.<br />Slowly. No undergrowth. Almost leaving.<br />A humming beauty in the silence.<br />The having been. Having had. And the man<br />knowing all of him would come to an end.<br />--Jack Gilbert<br /><br /><br />"The Dragon and the Undying"<br />All night the flares go up; the Dragon sings<br />And beats upon the dark with furious wings;<br />And, stung to rage by his own darting fires,<br />Reaches with grappling coils from town to town;<br />He lusts to break the loveliness of spires,<br />And hurls their martyred music toppling down.<br /><br />Yet, though the slain are homeless as the breeze,<br />Vocal are they, like storm-bewilder'd seas.<br />Their faces are the fair, unshrouded night,<br />And planets are their eyes, their ageless dreams.<br />Tenderly stooping earthward from their height,<br />They wander in the dusk with chanting streams,<br />And they are dawn-lit trees, with arms up-flung,<br />To hail the burning heavens they left unsung.<br />--Siegried Sassoon<br /><br /><br />In Europe you can see cathedrals<br />from far away. As you drive toward them<br />across the country they are visible--stony<br />and roosted on the land--even before the towns<br />that surround them. In New York you come<br />upon them with no warning, turn a corner<br />and there one is: on 5th Avenue St. Patrick's,<br />spiny and white as a shell in a gift shop; dark<br />St. Agnes lost near a canal and some housing<br />projects in Brooklyn; or St. John the Divine,<br />listed in every guidebook yet seeming always<br />like a momentary vision on Amsterdam<br />Avenue, with its ragged halo of trees, wide stone<br />steps ascending directly out of traffic.<br />--Anne Pierson Weise, from "Everything but God"<br /><br /><br />"Black Sea"<br />One clear night while the others slept, I climbed<br />the stairs to the roof of the house and under a sky<br />strewn with stars I gazed at the sea, at the spread of it,<br />the rolling crests of it raked by the wind, becoming<br />like bits of lace tossed in the air. I stood in the long,<br />whispering night, waiting for something, a sign, the approach<br />of a distant light, and I imagined you coming closer,<br />the dark waves of your hair mingling with the sea,<br />and the dark became desire, and desire the arriving light.<br />The nearness, the momentary warmth of you as I stood<br />on that lonely height watching the slow swells of the sea<br />break on the shore and turn briefly into glass and disappear...<br />Why did I believe you would come out of nowhere? Why with all<br />that the world offers would you come only because I was here? <br />--Mark Strand<br /><br /><br />"The City's Oldest Known Survivor of the Great War"<br />marches in uniform down the traffic stripe<br />at the center of the street, counts time<br />to the unseen web that has rearranged<br />the air around him, his left hand<br />stiff as a leather strap along his side,<br />the other saluting right through the decades<br />as if they weren't there, as if everyone under ninety<br />were pervasive fog the morning would dispel<br />in its own good time, as if the high school band<br />all flapping thighs and cuffs behind him<br />were as ghostly as the tumbleweed on every road<br />dead-ended in the present, all the ancient infantry<br />shoulder right, through a skein of bone, presenting arms<br />across the drift, nothing but empty graves now<br />to round off another century,<br />the sweet honey of the old cadence, the streets<br />going by at attention, the banners glistening with dew,<br />the wives and children blowing kisses.<br />--James Doyle<br /><br /><br />"I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.<br /><br />"It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.<br /><br />"Armistice Day has become Veterans' Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans' Day is not.<br /><br />"So I will throw Veterans' Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don't want to throw away any sacred things.<br /><br />"What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.<br /><br />"And all music is."<br />--Kurt Vonnegut, <i>Breakfast of Champions</i><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=scrapofpaper&ditemid=143549" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-04:2841179:132473ext_52714under the boardwalk, down by the sea, on a blanket with my baby's where i'll be2012-06-16T15:58:00Z2012-06-16T15:58:00Z"Under the Boardwalk," by Rickie Lee Jonesokaypublic0Posted by: <span lj:user='two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com' style='white-space: nowrap;' class='ljuser'><a href='https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?userid=54349&t=I'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png' alt='[identity profile] ' width='16' height='16' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='http://two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com/' rel='nofollow'><b>two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com</b></a></span><br /><br />"Playing around with symbols, even as a critic, can be a kind of kiddish parlor game. A little of it goes a long way. There are other things of greater value in any novel or story...humanity, character analysis, truth on other levels...Good symbolism should be as natural as breathing...and as unobtrusive."<br />--Ray Bradbury<br /><br /><br />"Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads--at least that's where I imagine it--there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks in this library. And to understand the workings of our own heart we have to keep on making new reference cards. We have to dust things off every once in awhile, let in fresh air, change the water in the flower vases. In other words, you'll live forever in your own private library."<br />--Haruki Murakami<br /><br /><br />"This person, this self, this me, finally, was made somewhere else. Everything had come from somewhere else, and it would all go somewhere else. I was nothing but a pathway for the person known as me."<br />--Haruki Murakami<br /><br /><br />"I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn."<br />--Anne Frank <br /><br /><br />"From this I reach what might be called a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we--I mean all human beings--are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself."<br />--Virginia Woolf<br /><br /><br />"That the Science of Cartography Is Limited"<br />--and not simply by the fact that this shading of<br />forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,<br />the gloom of cypresses<br />is what I wish to prove.<br /><br />When you and I were first in love we drove<br />to the borders of Connacht<br />and entered a wood there.<br /><br />Look down you said: this was once a famine road.<br /><br />I looked down at ivy and the scutch grass<br />rough-cast stone had<br />disappeared into as you told me<br />in the second winter of their ordeal, in<br /><br />1847, when the crop had failed twice,<br />Relief Committees gave<br />the starving Irish such roads to build.<br /><br />Where they died, there the road ended<br />and ends still and when I take down<br />the map of this island, it is never so<br />I can say here is<br />the masterful, the apt rendering of<br /><br />the spherical as flat, nor<br />an ingenious design which persuades a curve<br />into a plane,<br />but to tell myself again that<br /><br />the line which says woodland and cries hunger<br />and gives out among sweet pine and cypress,<br />and finds no horizon<br /><br />will not be there.<br />--Eavan Boland<br /><br /><br />"Don't Ask Me"<br />Lights coming on in windows; windows lit all night long suddenly<br />dark...How long have I been here, unable to read, head on the desk,<br />listening to rain, the rain striking the window; the far off and near-<br />unheard roar of a lone fighter, moonlit trail vanishing past the horizon,<br />a phrase I had long ago underlined. When? To those very words I've<br />been listening again. It's now the lovely lilac time. It lasts about forty-<br />five minutes here. I really ought to get out of the house, go for a walk,<br />drive around, find some home owner's lilac bush to sample if this can be<br />done without looking suspicious or overly pervy, plunging my face in its<br />great heart-shaped leaves, breathing that scent which is childhood to me,<br />I don't know why. All I know is that I have been sitting here all night<br />missing out on what may well be the last chance I am ever going to have.<br />Now the birds are starting. All those either distant or extremely quiet,<br />darkly feathered voices, one of night's elements, one of its chapters.<br />Though what this one's about, we don't know, and likely do not want<br />to. Where are they anyway? Two blocks away, or right outside the<br />window in those densely-leaved and vaguely signing branches? And<br />before they were where were they? Words, more words. What have I<br />done?<br />--Franz Wright<br /><br /><br />"Bavarian Gentians"<br />Not every man has gentians in his house<br />in soft September, at slow, sad Michaelmas.<br /><br />Bavarian gentians, big and dark, only dark<br />darkening the daytime, torch-like, with the smoking blueness of Pluto's<br />gloom,<br />ribbed and torch-like, with their blaze of darkness spread blue<br />down flattening into points, flattened under the sweep of white day<br />torch-flower of the blue-smoking darkness, Pluto's dark-blue daze,<br />black lamps from the halls of Dis, burning dark blue,<br />giving off darkness, blue darkness, as Demeter's pale lamps give off<br />light,<br />lead me then, lead the way.<br /><br />Reach me a gentian, give me a torch!<br />let me guide myself with the blue, forked torch of this flower<br />down the darker and darker stairs, where blue is darkened on blueness<br />even where Persephone goes, just now, from the frosted September<br />to the sightless realm where darkness is awake upon the dark<br />and Persephone herself is but a voice<br />or a darkness invisible enfolded in the deeper dark<br />of the arms Plutonic, and pierced with the passion of dense gloom,<br />among the splendor of torches of darkness, shedding darkness on<br />the lost bride and her groom.<br />--D.H. Lawrence <br /><br /><br />"Time Does Not Bring Relief"<br />Time does not bring relief; you all have lied<br />Who told me time would ease me of my pain!<br />I miss him in the weeping of the rain;<br />I want him at the shrinking of the tide;<br />The old snows melt from every mountain-side,<br />And last year's leaves are smoke in every lane;<br />But last year's bitter loving must remain<br />Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.<br />There are a hundred places where I fear<br />To go,--so with his memory they brim.<br />And entering with relief some quiet place<br />Where never fell his foot or shone his face<br />I say, "There is no memory of him here!"<br />And so stand stricken, so remembering him.<br />--Edna St. Vincent Millay<br /><br /><br />"The Shoe" <br />Each time I relived it, after the worst<br />was over, I'd say to myself, as if my fate<br />would solace me,<br />"at least I'll never have to do this again."<br />It is true that I'll never have to kiss his<br />dying hands, now dead. I'll never have<br />to find where he left his coffee mug, now mine.<br /><br />I'll never have to wash his hair or repair<br />his typewriter or stock the medicine stand.<br />I'll never even have to find places<br />that can use his clothes because<br />some friend--I don't remember who--<br />did that for me when I could not. I<br />distributed his portrait, I picked up his poems.<br /><br />I thanked friends and children for helping me<br />hold on. I made braids out of dead funeral<br />flowers to border the rooms where<br />once he breathed and took on the heavy<br />chores, gladly, of loving me. I sprinkled<br />one teaspoon of his ashes on our bereft bed<br />and slept with them. They scourged my body.<br /><br />But when that single shoe, the mate I thought<br />had got sent off with its partner, showed up<br />today, alone, crouching behind the couch, alive<br />with Effie's opulent Turkish angora fur, I knew<br />solace was something I could neither seek nor<br />find. Oh beloved! I know I am an old woman.<br />But I cannot live in your shoe.<br />--Kathryn Starbuck<br /><br /><br />"Starlings in Winter"<br />Chunky and noisy,<br />but with stars in their black feathers,<br />they spring from the telephone wire<br />and instantly<br />they are acrobats<br />in the freezing wind.<br />And now, in the theater of air,<br />they swing over buildings,<br />dipping and rising;<br />they float like one stippled star<br />that opens,<br />becomes for a moment fragmented,<br />then closes again;<br />and you watch<br />and you try<br />but you simply can't imagine<br />how they do it<br />with no articulated instruction, no pause,<br />only the silent confirmation<br />that they are this notable thing,<br />this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin<br />over and over again,<br />full of gorgeous life.<br />Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,<br />even in the leafless winter,<br />even in the ashy city.<br />I am thinking now<br />of grief, and of getting past it;<br />I feel my boots<br />trying to leave the ground,<br />I feel my heart<br />pumping hard. I want<br />to think again of dangerous and noble things.<br />I want to be light and frolicsome.<br />I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,<br />as though I had wings.<br />--Mary Oliver<br /><br /><br />"I Measure Every Grief"<br />I measure every grief I meet<br />With analytic eyes;<br />I wonder if it weighs like mine,<br />Or has an easier size.<br /><br />I wonder if they bore it long,<br />Or did it just begin?<br />I could not tell the date of mine,<br />It feels so old a pain.<br /><br />I wonder if it hurts to live,<br />And if they have to try,<br />And whether, could they choose between,<br />They would not rather die.<br /><br />I wonder if when years have piled--<br />Some thousands--on the cause<br />Of early hurt, if such a lapse<br />Could give them any pause;<br /><br />Or would they go on aching still<br />Through centuries above,<br />Enlightened to a larger pain<br />By contrast with the love.<br /><br />The grieved are many, I am told;<br />The reason deeper lies,--<br />Death is but one and comes but once<br />And only nails the eyes.<br /><br />There's grief of want, and grief of cold,--<br />A sort they call 'despair,'<br />There's banishment from native eyes,<br />In sight of native air.<br /><br />And though I may not guess the kind<br />Correctly yet to me<br />A piercing comfort it affords<br />In passing Calvary,<br /><br />To note the fashions of the cross<br />Of those that stand alone<br />Still fascinated to presume<br />That some are like my own.<br />--Emily Dickinson <br /><br /><br />"Distressed Haiku"<br />In a week or ten days<br />the snow and ice<br />will melt from Cemetery Road.<br /><br />I'm coming! Don't move!<br /><br />Once again it is April.<br />Today is the day<br />we would have been married<br />twenty-six years.<br /><br />I finished with April<br />halfway through March.<br /><br />You think that their<br />dying is the worst<br />thing that could happen.<br /><br />Then they stay dead.<br /><br />Will Hall ever write<br />lines that do anything<br />but whine and complain?<br /><br />In April the blue<br />mountain revises<br />from white to green.<br /><br />The Boston Red Sox win<br />a hundred straight games.<br />The mouse rips<br />the throat of the lion<br /><br />and the dead return<br />the whole sky.<br />--Donald Hall<br /><br /><br />"The Path"<br />Convinced, I am sure!<br />I wish a new journey no more.<br /><br />Please spare me, spare this old sailor, <br />True, I desire another journey no more.<br /><br />***<br /><br />Please, I implore!<br />Do not show me the stars,<br />drawing a map of the world in the skies.<br /><br />For it is now years,<br />the sky falls down, every night anew,<br />And I know, it will fall the same, wherever I go--<br />and unchanged, unchanged! The same as before!<br /><br />True, <br />I desire another journey no more.<br /><br />***<br /><br />And the trains crossing this small village–-<br />breaking the silence of my cottage–-<br />can no longer disparage–-<br />my piece of sky.<br /><br />My window, <br />stays wide open; and my sky infinite,<br />unchanged, unchanged!<br /><br />***<br /><br />And the path, <br />later than the bridge,<br />sends me no new invite. <br />For the only sailboat I knew–-<br />left for its maiden trip long ago.<br /><br />My door, <br />stays unlocked, and open to the same spheres, <br />unchanged, unchanged!<br /><br />***<br /><br />Asking me why?<br />For you cannot afford–-<br />to commission a new mission–-<br />but one!<br /><br />A journey to bring back<br />the need, the hunger, the thirst, <br />the fear, the fire, the silence and the cold,<br />the beasts and the faint torch, in the memories.<br /><br />A journey to recall, to remember all the routes crossed, <br />and the crossroads passed, departing from the roots.<br /><br />Save this one, <br />This old sailor, desire a journey for hire, no more.<br />--Ahmad Shamlou, translation by Maryam Dilmaghani<br /><br /><br />"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"<br /><i>S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse<br />A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,<br />Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.<br />Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo<br />Non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,<br />Senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.</i><br /><br />Let us go then, you and I,<br />When the evening is spread out against the sky<br />Like a patient etherized upon a table;<br />Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,<br />The muttering retreats<br />Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels<br />And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:<br />Streets that follow like a tedious argument<br />Of insidious intent<br />To lead you to an overwhelming question...<br />Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"<br />Let us go and make our visit.<br /><br />In the room the women come and go<br />Talking of Michelangelo.<br /><br />The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,<br />The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes<br />Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,<br />Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,<br />Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,<br />Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,<br />And seeing that it was a soft October night,<br />Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.<br /><br />And indeed there will be time<br />For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,<br />Rubbing its back upon the window panes;<br />There will be time, there will be time<br />To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;<br />There will be time to murder and create,<br />And time for all the works and days of hands<br />That lift and drop a question on your plate;<br />Time for you and time for me,<br />And time yet for a hundred indecisions,<br />And for a hundred visions and revisions,<br />Before the taking of a toast and tea.<br /><br />In the room the women come and go<br />Talking of Michelangelo.<br /><br />And indeed there will be time<br />To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"<br />Time to turn back and descend the stair,<br />With a bald spot in the middle of my hair--<br />(They will say: "How his hair is growing thin!")<br />My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,<br />My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin--<br />(They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!")<br />Do I dare<br />Disturb the universe?<br />In a minute there is time<br />For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.<br /><br />For I have known them all already, known them all:<br />Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,<br />I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;<br />I know the voices dying with a dying fall<br />Beneath the music from a farther room.<br />So how should I presume?<br /><br />And I have known the eyes already, known them all--<br />The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,<br />And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,<br />When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,<br />Then how should I begin<br />To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?<br />And how should I presume?<br /><br />And I have known the arms already, known them all--<br />Arms that are braceleted and white and bare<br />(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)<br />Is it perfume from a dress<br />That makes me so digress?<br />Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.<br />And should I then presume?<br />And how should I begin?<br /><br />Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets<br />And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes<br />Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?<br /><br />I should have been a pair of ragged claws<br />Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.<br /><br />And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!<br />Smoothed by long fingers,<br />Asleep...tired...or it malingers,<br />Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.<br />Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,<br />Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?<br />But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,<br />Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,<br />I am no prophet--and here's no great matter;<br />I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,<br />And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,<br />And in short, I was afraid.<br /><br />And would it have been worth it, after all,<br />After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,<br />Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,<br />Would it have been worth while,<br />To have bitten off the matter with a smile,<br />To have squeezed the universe into a ball<br />To roll it toward some overwhelming question,<br />To say: "I am Lazarus, come from the dead,<br />Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"--<br />If one, settling a pillow by her head,<br />Should say: "That is not what I meant at all;<br />That is not it, at all."<br /><br />And would it have been worth it, after all,<br />Would it have been worth while,<br />After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,<br />After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor--<br />And this, and so much more?--<br />It is impossible to say just what I mean!<br />But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:<br />Would it have been worth while<br />If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,<br />And turning toward the window, should say:<br />"That is not it at all,<br />That is not what I meant, at all."<br /><br />No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;<br />Am an attendant lord, one that will do<br />To swell a progress, start a scene or two,<br />Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,<br />Deferential, glad to be of use,<br />Politic, cautious, and meticulous;<br />Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;<br />At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--<br />Almost, at times, the Fool.<br /><br />I grow old...I grow old...<br />I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.<br /><br />Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?<br />I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.<br />I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.<br /><br />I do not think that they will sing to me.<br /><br />I have seen them riding seaward on the waves<br />Combing the white hair of the waves blown back<br />When the wind blows the water white and black.<br /><br />We have lingered in the chambers of the sea<br />By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown<br />Till human voices wake us, and we drown.<br />--T.S. Eliot<br /><br /><br />"Celestial Music"<br />I have a friend who still believes in heaven.<br />Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to God.<br />She thinks someone listens in heaven.<br />On earth she's unusually competent.<br />Brave too, able to face unpleasantness.<br /><br />We found a caterpillar dying in the dirt, greedy ants crawling over it.<br />I'm always moved by disaster, always eager to oppose vitality<br />But timid also, quick to shut my eyes.<br />Whereas my friend was able to watch, to let events play out<br />According to nature. For my sake she intervened<br />Brushing a few ants off the torn thing, and set it down<br />Across the road.<br /><br />My friend says I shut my eyes to God, that nothing else explains<br />My aversion to reality. She says I'm like the child who<br />Buries her head in the pillow<br />So as not to see, the child who tells herself<br />That light causes sadness--<br />My friend is like the mother. Patient, urging me<br />To wake up an adult like herself, a courageous person--<br /><br />In my dreams, my friend reproaches me. We're walking<br />On the same road, except it's winter now;<br />She's telling me that when you love the world you hear celestial music:<br />Look up, she says. When I look up, nothing.<br />Only clouds, snow, a white business in the trees<br />Like brides leaping to a great height--<br />Then I'm afraid for her; I see her<br />Caught in a net deliberately cast over the earth--<br /><br />In reality, we sit by the side of the road, watching the sun set;<br />From time to time, the silence pierced by a birdcall.<br />It's this moment we're trying to explain, the fact<br />That we're at ease with death, with solitude.<br />My friend draws a circle in the dirt; inside, the caterpillar doesn't move.<br />She's always trying to make something whole, something beautiful, an image<br />Capable of life apart from her.<br />We're very quiet. It's peaceful sitting here, not speaking, The composition<br />Fixed, the road turning suddenly dark, the air<br />Going cool, here and there the rocks shining and glittering--<br />It's this stillness we both love.<br />The love of form is a love of endings.<br />--Louise Glück<br /><br /><br />"In Tennessee I Found a Firefly"<br />Flashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clung <br /> to the dark of it: the legs of the spider <br />held the tucked wings close,<br /> held the abdomen still in the midst of calling <br />with thrusts of phosphorescent light--<br /><br />When I am tired of being human, I try to remember<br /> the two stuck together like burrs. I try to place them <br />central in my mind where everything else must<br /> surround them, must see the burr and the barb of them. <br />There is courtship, and there is hunger. I suppose<br /> there are grips from which even angels cannot fly. <br />Even imagined ones. Luciferin, luciferase.<br /> When I am tired of only touching,<br />I have my mouth to try to tell you<br /> what, in your arms, is not erased.<br />--Mary Szybist<br /><br /><br />"They Call It Attempted Suicide"<br />My brother's girlfriend was not prepared for how much blood<br />splashed out. He got home in time, but was angry<br />about the mess she had made of his room. I stood behind,<br />watching them turn into something manageable. Thinking<br />how frightening it must have been before things had names.<br />We say peony and make a flower out of that slow writhing.<br />Deal with the horror of recurrence by calling it<br />a million years. The death everywhere is no trouble<br />once you see it as nature, landscape, or botany.<br />--Jack Gilbert<br /><br /><br />"The Geology of Norway"<br /><i>But when his last night in Norway came, on 10 December, he greeted it with some relief, writing that it was perfectly possible that he would never return. --Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein</i><br /><br />I have wanted there to be<br />no story. I have wanted<br />only facts. At any given point in time<br />there cannot be a story: time,<br />except as now, does not exist.<br />A given point in space<br />is the compression of desire. The difference<br />between this point and some place else<br />is a matter of degree.<br />This is what compression is: a geologic epoch<br />rendered to a slice of rock you hold between<br />your finger and your thumb.<br />That is a fact.<br />Stories are merely theories. Theories<br />are dreams.<br />A dream<br />is a carving knife<br />and the scar it opens in the world<br />is history.<br />The process of compression gives off thought.<br />I have wanted<br />the geology of light.<br /><br />They tell me despair is a sin.<br />I believe them.<br /><br />The hand moving is the hand thinking,<br />and despair says the body does not exist.<br />Something to do with bellies and fingers<br />pressing gut to ebony,<br />thumbs on keys. Even the hand<br />writing is the hand thinking. I wanted<br />speech like diamond because I knew<br />that music meant too much.<br /><br />And the fact is, the earth is not a perfect sphere.<br />And the fact is, it is half-liquid.<br />And the fact is there are gravitational anomalies. The continents<br />congeal, and crack, and float like scum on cooling custard.<br />And the fact is,<br />the fact is,<br />and you might think the fact is<br />we will never get to the bottom of it,<br />but you would be wrong.<br />There is a solid inner core.<br />Fifteen hundred miles across, iron alloy,<br />the pressure on each square inch of its heart<br />is nearly thirty thousand tons.<br />That's what I wanted:<br />words made of that: language<br />that could bend light.<br /><br />Evil is not darkness,<br />it is noise. It crowds out possibility,<br />which is to say<br />it crowds out silence.<br />History is full of it, it says<br />that no one listens.<br /><br />The sound of wind in leaves,<br />that was what puzzled me, it took me years<br />to understand that it was music.<br />Into silence, a gesture.<br />A sentence: that it speaks.<br />This is the mystery: meaning.<br />Not that these folds of rock exist<br />but that their beauty, here,<br />now, nails us to the sky.<br /><br />The afternoon blue light in the fjord.<br />Did I tell you<br />I can understand the villagers?<br />Being, I have come to think,<br />is music; or perhaps<br />it's silence. I cannot say.<br />Love, I'm pretty sure,<br />is light.<br />You know, it isn't<br />what I came for, this bewilderment<br />by beauty. I came<br />to find a word, the perfect<br />syllable, to make it reach up,<br />grab meaning by the throat<br />and squeeze it till it spoke to me.<br />How else to anchor<br />memory? I wanted language<br />to hold me still, to be a rock,<br />I wanted to become a rock myself. I thought<br />if I could find, and say,<br />the perfect word, I'd nail<br />mind to the world, and find<br />release.<br />The hand moving is the hand thinking.<br />what I didn't know: even the continents<br />have no place by earth.<br /><br />These mountains: once higher<br />than the Himalayas. Formed in the pucker<br />of a supercontinental kiss, when Europe<br />floated south of the equator<br />and you could hike from Norway<br />down through Greenland to the peaks<br />of Appalachia. Before Iceland existed.<br />Before the Mediterranean<br />evaporated. Before it filled again.<br />Before the Rockies were dreamt of.<br />And before these mountains,<br />the rock raised in them<br />chewed by ice that snowed from water<br />in which no fish had swum. And before that ice,<br />the almost speechless stretch of the Precambrian:<br />two billion years, the planet<br />swathed in air that had no oxygen, the Baltic Shield<br />older, they think, than life.<br /><br />So I was wrong.<br />This doesn't mean<br />that meaning is a bluff.<br />History, that's what<br />confuses us. Time<br />is not linear, but it's real.<br />The rock beneath us drifts,<br />and will, until the slow cacophony of magma<br />cools and locks the continents in place.<br />Then weather, light,<br />and gravity<br />will be the only things that move.<br /><br />And will they understand?<br />Will they have a name for us?--Those<br />perfect changeless plains,<br />those deserts,<br />the beach that was this mountain,<br />and the tide that rolls for miles across<br />its vacant slope.<br />--Jan Zwicky <br /><br /><br />"You don't tell a story only to yourself. There's always someone else.<br /><br />"Even when there is no one.<br /><br />"A story is like a letter. Dear You, I'll say. Just you, without a name. Attaching a name attaches you to the world of fact, which is riskier, more hazardous: who knows what the chances are out there, of survival, yours? I will say you, you, like an old love song. You can mean more than one."<br />--Margaret Atwood, <i>The Handmaid's Tale</i><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=scrapofpaper&ditemid=132473" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-04:2841179:115358ext_52714and while you hurt with all that pain, the stars will kiss your pretty face2011-11-23T17:57:00Z2011-11-23T17:57:00Z"Nobody Has to Stay," by Mirahguttedpublic0Posted by: <span lj:user='two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com' style='white-space: nowrap;' class='ljuser'><a href='https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?userid=54349&t=I'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png' alt='[identity profile] ' width='16' height='16' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='http://two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com/' rel='nofollow'><b>two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com</b></a></span><br /><br />"The stories we sit up late to hear are love stories. It seems that we cannot know enough about this riddle of our lives. We go back and back to the same scenes, the same words, trying to scrape out the meaning. Nothing else could be more familiar than love. Nothing could elude us so completely."<br />--Jeanette Winterson<br /><br /><br />"far memory"<br />a poem in seven parts<br /><br />1<br /><i>convent</i><br /><br />my knees recall the pockets<br />worn into the stone floor,<br />my hands, tracing against<br />the wall their original name, remember<br />the cold brush of brick, and the smell<br />of the brick powdery and wet<br />and the light finding its way in<br />through the high bars.<br /><br />and also the sisters singing<br />at matins, their sweet music<br />the voice of the universe at peace<br />and the candles their light the light<br />at the beginning of creation<br />and the wonderful simplicity of prayer<br />smooth along the wooden beads<br />and certainly attended.<br /><br />2<br /><i>someone inside me remembers</i><br /><br />that my knees must be hidden away<br />that my hair must be shorn<br />so that vanity will not test me<br />that my fingers are places of prayer<br />and are holy that my body is promised<br />to something more certain<br />than myself<br /><br />3<br /><i>again</i><br /><br />born in the year of war<br />on the day of perpetual help.<br /><br />come from the house<br />of stillness<br />through the soft gate<br />of a silent mother.<br /><br />come to a betraying father.<br />come to a husband who would one day<br />rise and enter a holy house.<br /><br />come to wrestle with you again,<br />passion, old disobedient friend,<br />through the secular days and nights<br />of another life.<br /><br />4<br /><i>trying to understand this life</i><br /><br />who did i fail, who<br />did i cease to protect<br />that i should wake each morning<br />facing the cold north?<br /><br />perhaps there is a cart<br />somewhere in history<br />of children crying "sister<br />save us" as she walks away.<br /><br />the woman walks into my dreams<br />dragging her old habit.<br />i turn from her, shivering,<br />to begin another afternoon<br />of rescue, rescue.<br /><br />5<br /><i>sinnerman</i><br /><br />horizontal one evening<br />on the cold stone,<br />my cross burning into<br />my breast, did i dream<br />through my veil<br />of his fingers digging<br />and is this the dream<br />again, him, collarless<br />over me, calling me back<br />to the stones of this world<br />and my own whispered<br />hosanna?<br /><br />6<br /><i>karma</i><br /><br />the habit is heavy.<br />you feel its weight<br />pulling around your ankles<br />for a hundred years.<br /><br />the broken vows<br />hang against your breasts,<br />each bead a word<br />that beats you.<br /><br />even now<br />to hear the words<br />defend<br />protect<br />goodbye<br />lost or<br />alone<br />is to be washed in sorrow.<br /><br />and in this life<br />there is no retreat<br />no sanctuary<br />no whole abiding<br />sister.<br /><br />7<br /><i>gloria mundi</i><br /><br />so knowing,<br />what is known?<br />that we carry our baggage<br />in our cupped hands<br />when we burst through<br />the waters of our mother.<br />that some are born<br />and some are brought<br />to the glory of this world.<br />that it is more difficult<br />than faith<br />to serve only one calling<br />one commitment<br />one devotion<br />in one life.<br />--Lucille Clifton<br /><br /><br />"East Coker"<br />I<br /><br />In my beginning is my end. In succession<br />Houses rise and fall, crumble, are extended,<br />Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place<br />Is an open filed, or a factory, or a by-pass.<br />Old stone to new building, old timber to new fires,<br />Old fires to ashes, and ashes to the earth<br />Which is already flesh, fur and faeces,<br />Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.<br />Houses live and die: there is a time for building<br />And a time for living and for generation<br />And a time for the wind to break the loosened pane<br />And to shake the wainscot where the field-mouse trots<br />And to shake the tattered arras woven with a silent motto.<br /><br />In my beginning is my end. Now the light falls<br />Across the open field, leaving the deep lane<br />Shuttered with branches, dark in the afternoon,<br />Where you lean against a bank while a van passes,<br />And the deep lane insists on the direction<br />Into the village, in the electric heat<br />Hypnotised. In a warm haze the sultry light<br />Is absorbed, not refracted, by grey stone.<br />The dahlias sleep in the empty silence.<br />Wait for the early owl.<br />In that open field<br />If you do not come too close, if you do not come too close,<br />On a Summer midnight, you can hear the music<br />Of the weak pipe and the little drum<br />And see them dancing around the bonfire<br />The association of man and woman<br />In daunsinge, signifying matrimonie--<br />A dignified and commodious sacrament.<br />Two and two, necessarye coniunction,<br />Holding eche other by the hand or the arm<br />Whiche betokeneth concorde. Round and round the fire<br />Leaping through the flames, or joined in circles,<br />Rustically solemn or in rustic laughter<br />Lifting heavy feet in clumsy shoes,<br />Earth feet, loam feet, lifted in country mirth<br />Mirth of those long since under earth<br />Nourishing the corn. Keeping time,<br />Keeping the rhythm in their dancing<br />As in their living in the living seasons<br />The time of the seasons and the constellations<br />The time of milking and the time of harvest<br />The time of the coupling of man and woman<br />And that of beasts. Feet rising and falling.<br />Eating and drinking. Dung and death.<br /><br />Dawn points, and another day<br />Prepares for heat and silence. Out at sea the dawn wind<br />Wrinkles and slides. I am here<br />Or there, or elsewhere. In my beginning. <br /><br />II<br /><br />What is the late November doing<br />With the disturbance of the spring<br />And creatures of the summer heat,<br />And snowdrops writhing under feet<br />And hollyhocks that aim too high<br />Red into grey and tumble down<br />Late roses filled with early snow?<br />Thunder rolled by the rolling stars<br />Simulates triumphal cars<br />Deployed in constellated wars<br />Scorpion fights against the Sun<br />Until the Sun and Moon go down<br />Comets weep and Leonids fly<br />Hunt the heavens and the plains<br />Whirled in a vortex that shall bring<br />The world to that destructive fire<br />Which burns before the ice-cap reigns.<br /><br />That was a way of putting it--nor very satisfactory: <br />A periphrastic study in a worn-out poetical fashion,<br />Leaving one still with the intolerable wrestle<br />With words and meanings. The poetry does not matter.<br />It was not (to start again) what one had expected.<br />What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,<br />Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity<br />And the wisdom of age? Had they deceived us<br />Or deceived themselves, the quiet-voiced elders,<br />Bequeathing us merely a receipt for deceit?<br />The serenity only a deliberate hebetude,<br />The wisdom only the knowledge of dead secrets<br />Useless in the darkness into which they peered<br />Or from which they turned their eyes. There is, it seems to us,<br />At best, only a limited value<br />In the knowledge derived from experience.<br />The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,<br />For the pattern is new in every moment.<br />And every moment is a new and shocking<br />Valuation of all we have been. We are only undeceived<br />Of that which, deceiving, could no longer harm.<br />In the middle, not only in the middle of the way<br />But all the way, in a dark wood, in a bramble,<br />On the edge of a grimpen, where is no secure foothold,<br />And menaced by monsters, fancy lights,<br />Risking enchantment. Do not let me hear<br />Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,<br />Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,<br />Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.<br />The only wisdom we can hope to acquire<br />Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.<br /><br />The houses are all gone under the sea.<br /><br />The dancers are all gone under the hill.<br /><br />III<br /><br />O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,<br />The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,<br />The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,<br />The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,<br />Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,<br />Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,<br />And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha<br />And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,<br />And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.<br />And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,<br />Nobody's funeral, for there is no one to bury.<br />I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you<br />Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,<br />The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed<br />With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,<br />And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama<br />And the bold imposing façade are all being rolled away--<br />Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations<br />And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence<br />And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen<br />Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;<br />Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing--<br />I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope<br />For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love<br />For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith<br />But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.<br />Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:<br />So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.<br /><br />Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.<br />The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,<br />The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy<br />Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony<br />Of death and birth. <br />You say I am repeating<br />Something I have said before. I shall say it again.<br />Shall I say it again? In order to arrive there,<br />To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,<br />You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.<br />In order to arrive at what you do not know<br />You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.<br />In order to possess what you do not possess<br />You must go by the way of dispossession.<br />In order to arrive at what you are not<br />You must go through the way in which you are not.<br />And what you do not know is the only thing you know<br />And what you own is what you do not own<br />And where you are is where you are not.<br /><br />IV<br /><br />The wounded surgeon plies the steel<br />That questions the distempered part;<br />Beneath the bleeding hands we feel<br />The sharp compassion of the healer's art<br />Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.<br /><br />Our only health is the disease<br />If we obey the dying nurse<br />Whose constant care is not to please<br />But to remind of our, and Adam's curse,<br />And that, to be restored, our sickness must grow worse.<br /><br />The whole earth is our hospital<br />Endowed by the ruined millionaire,<br />Wherein, if we do well, we shall<br />Die of the absolute paternal care<br />That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.<br /><br />The chill ascends from feet to knees,<br />The fever sings in mental wires.<br />If to be warmed, then I must freeze<br />And quake in frigid purgatorial fires<br />Of which the flame is roses, and the smoke is briars.<br /><br />The dripping blood our only drink,<br />The bloody flesh our only food: <br />In spite of which we like to think<br />That we are sound, substantial flesh and blood--<br />Again, in spite of that, we call this Friday good.<br /><br />V<br /><br />So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years--<br />Twenty years largely wasted, the years of <i>l'entre deux guerres</i>--<br />Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt<br />Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure<br />Because one has only learnt to get the better of words<br />For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which<br />One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture<br />Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate<br />With shabby equipment always deteriorating<br />In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,<br />Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer<br />By strength and submission, has already been discovered<br />Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope<br />To emulate--but there is no competition--<br />There is only the fight to recover what has been lost<br />And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions<br />That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.<br />For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.<br /><br />Home is where one starts from. As we grow older<br />The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated<br />Of dead and living. Not the intense moment<br />Isolated, with no before and after,<br />But a lifetime burning in every moment<br />And not the lifetime of one man only<br />But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.<br />There is a time for the evening under starlight,<br />A time for the evening under the lamplight<br />(The evening with the photograph album).<br />Love is most nearly itself<br />When here and now cease to matter.<br />Old men ought to be explorers<br />Here and there does not matter<br />We must be still and still moving<br />Into another intensity <br />For a further union, a deeper communion<br />Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,<br />The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters<br />Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.<br />--T.S. Eliot<br /><br /><br />"The Dry Salvages"<br />I<br />I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river<br />Is a strong brown god--sullen, untamed and intractable,<br />Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier;<br />Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce;<br />Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges.<br />The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten<br />By the dwellers in cities--ever, however, implacable,<br />Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder<br />Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated<br />By worshipers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting.<br />His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom,<br />In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard,<br />In the smell of grapes on the autumn table,<br />And the evening circle in the winter gaslight.<br /><br />The river is within us, the sea is all about us;<br />The sea is the land's edge also, the granite<br />Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses<br />Its hints of earlier and other creation:<br />The starfish, the hermit crab, the whale's backbone;<br />The pools where it offers to our curiosity<br />The more delicate algae and the sea anemone. <br />It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,<br />The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar<br />And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices,<br />Many gods and many voices.<br />The salt is on the briar rose,<br />The fog is in the fir trees.<br />The sea howl<br />And the sea yelp, are different voices<br />Often together heard; the whine in the rigging,<br />The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water,<br />The distant rote in the granite teeth,<br />And the wailing warning from the approaching headland<br />Are all sea voices, and the heaving groaner<br />Rounded homewards, and the seagull:<br />And under the oppression of the silent fog<br />The tolling bell<br />Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried<br />Ground swell, a time<br />Older than the time of chronometers, older<br />Than time counted by anxious worried women<br />Lying awake, calculating the future,<br />Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel<br />And piece together the past and the future,<br />Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,<br />The future futureless, before the morning watch<br />When time stops and time is never ending;<br />And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning,<br />Clangs <br />The bell.<br /><br />II<br /><br />Where is there an end of it, the soundless wailing,<br />The silent withering of autumn flowers<br />Dropping their petals and remaining motionless;<br />Where is there an end to the drifting wreckage,<br />The prayer of the bone on the beach, the unprayable<br />Prayer at the calamitous annunciation? <br /><br />There is no end, but addition: the trailing<br />Consequence of further days and hours,<br />While emotion takes to itself the emotionless<br />Years of living among the breakage<br />Of what was believed in as the most reliable--<br />And therefore the fittest for renunciation.<br /><br />There is the final addition, the failing<br />Pride or resentment at failing powers,<br />The unattached devotion which might pass for devotionless,<br />In a drifting boat with a slow leakage,<br />The silent listening to the undeniable<br />Clamour of the bell of the last annunciation.<br /><br />Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing<br />Into the wind's tail, where the fog cowers?<br />We cannot think of a time that is oceanless<br />Or of an ocean not littered with wastage<br />Or of a future that is not liable<br />Like the past, to have no destination.<br /><br />We have to think of them as forever bailing,<br />Setting and hauling, while the North East lowers<br />Over shallow banks unchanging and erosionless<br />Or drawing their money, drying sails at dockage;<br />Not as making a trip that will be unpayable<br />For a haul that will not bear examination.<br /><br />There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,<br />No end to the withering of withered flowers,<br />To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,<br />To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,<br />The bone's prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable<br />Prayer of the one Annunciation.<br /><br />It seems, as one becomes older,<br />That the past has another pattern, and ceases to be a mere sequence--<br />Or even development: the latter a partial fallacy,<br />Encouraged by superficial notions of evolution,<br />Which becomes, in the popular mind, a means of disowning the past.<br />The moments of happiness--not the sense of well-being,<br />Fruition, fulfillment, security, or affection,<br />Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination--<br />We had the experience but missed the meaning,<br />And approach to the meaning restores the experience<br />In a different form, beyond any meaning<br />We can assign to happiness. I have said before<br />That the past experiences revived in the meaning<br />Is not the experience of one life only<br />But of many generations--not forgetting<br />Something that is probably quite ineffable:<br />The backward look behind the assurance<br />Of recorded history, the backward half-look<br />Over the shoulder, towards the primitive terror.<br />Now, we come to discover that the moments of agony<br />(Whether, or not, due to misunderstanding,<br />Having hoped for the wrong things or dreaded the wrong things,<br />Is not in question) are likewise permanent<br />With such permanence as time has. We appreciate this better<br />In the agony of others, nearly experienced,<br />Involving ourselves, than in our own.<br />For our own past is covered by the currents of action,<br />But the torment of others remains an experience<br />Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition. <br />People change, and smile: but the agony abides.<br />Time the destroyer is time the preserver,<br />Like the river with its cargo of dead Negroes, cows and chicken coops,<br />The bitter apple and the bite in the apple.<br />And the ragged rock in the restless waters,<br />Waves wash over it, fogs conceal it;<br />On a halcyon day it is merely a monument,<br />In navigable weather it is always a seamark<br />To lay a course by: but in the sombre season<br />Or the sudden fury, is what it always was.<br /><br />III<br /><br />I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant--<br />Among other things--or one way of putting the same thing:<br />That the future is a fated song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray<br />Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,<br />Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.<br />And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.<br />You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,<br />That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.<br />When the train starts, and the passengers are settled<br />To fruit, periodicals and business letters<br />(And those who saw them off have left the platform)<br />Their faces relax from grief into relief,<br />To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.<br />Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past<br />Into different lives, or into any future;<br />You are not the same people who left that station<br />Or who will arrive at any terminus,<br />While the narrowing rails slide together behind you,<br />You shall not think "the past is finished"<br />Or "the future is before us."<br />At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,<br />Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,<br />The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)<br />"Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging;<br />You are not those who saw the harbour<br />Receding, or those who will disembark.<br />Here between the hither and the farther shore<br />While time is withdrawn, consider the future<br />And the past with an equal mind.<br />At the moment which is not of action or inaction<br />You can receive this: 'on whatever sphere of being<br />The mind of a man may be intent<br />At the time of death'--that is the one action<br />(And the time of death is every moment)<br />Which shall fructify in the lives of others:<br />And do not think of the fruit of action.<br />Fare forward.<br /><br />O voyagers, O seamen,<br />You who come to port, and you whose bodies<br />Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,<br />Or whatever event, this is your real destination."<br />So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna<br />On the field of battle.<br />Not fare well,<br />But fare forward, voyagers.<br /><br />IV<br /><br />Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory,<br />Pray for all those who are in ships, those<br />Whose business has to do with fish, and<br />Those concerned with every lawful traffic<br />And those who conduct them.<br /><br />Repeat a prayer also on behalf of<br />Women who have seen their sons or husbands<br />Setting forth, and not returning:<br />Figlia del tuo figlio,<br />Queen of Heaven.<br /><br />Also pray for those who were in ships, and<br />Ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea's lips<br />Or in the dark throat which will not reject them<br />Or wherever cannot reach them the sound of the sea bell's<br />Perpetual angelus.<br /><br />V<br /><br />To communicate with Mars, converse with spirits,<br />To report the behaviour of the sea monster,<br />Describe the horoscope, haruspicate or scry,<br />Observe disease in signatures, evoke<br />Biography from the wrinkles of the palm<br />And tragedy from fingers; release omens<br />By sortilege, or tea leaves, riddle the inevitable<br />With playing cards, fiddle with pentagrams <br />Or barbituric acids, or dissect<br />The recurrent image into pre-conscious terrors--<br />To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual<br />Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:<br />And always will be, some of them especially<br />When there is distress of nations and perplexity<br />Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road.<br />Men's curiosity searches past and future<br />And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend<br />The point of intersection of the timeless<br />With time, is an occupation for the saint--<br />No occupation either, but something given<br />And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,<br />Ardour and selfishness and self-surrender.<br />For most of us, there is only the unattended<br />Moment, the moment in and out of time,<br />The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,<br />The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning<br />Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply<br />That it is not heard at all, but you are the music<br />While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,<br />Hints followed by guesses; and the rest<br />Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.<br />The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation.<br />Here the impossible union.<br />Of spheres of existence is actual,<br />Here the past and future<br />Are conquered, and reconciled,<br />Where action were otherwise movement<br />Of that which is only moved<br />And has in it no source of movement--<br />Driven by daemonic, chthonic <br />Powers. And right action is freedom<br />From past and future also.<br />For most of us, this is the aim<br />Never here to be realised;<br />Who are only undefeated<br />Because we have gone on trying;<br />We, content at the last<br />If our temporal reversion nourish<br />(Not too far from the yew-tree)<br />The life of significant soil.<br />--T.S. Eliot<br /><br /><br />"Little Gidding"<br />I<br /><br />Midwinter spring is its own season<br />Sempiternal though sodden towards sundown,<br />Suspended in time, between pole and tropic.<br />When the short day is brightest, with frost and fire,<br />The brief sun flames the ice, on pond and ditches,<br />In windless cold that is the heart's heat,<br />Reflecting in a watery mirror<br />A glare that is blindness in the early afternoon. <br />And glow more intense than blaze of branch, or brazier,<br />Stirs the dumb spirit: no wind, but pentecostal fire<br />In the dark time of the year. Between melting and freezing<br />The soul's sap quivers. There is no earth smell<br />Or smell of living thing. This is the spring time<br />But not in time's covenant. Now the hedgerow<br />Is blanched for an hour with transitory blossom<br />Of snow, a bloom more sudden<br />Than that of summer, neither budding nor fading,<br />Not in the scheme of generation.<br />Where is the summer, the unimaginable<br />Zero summer?<br /><br />If you came this way,<br />Taking the route you would be likely to take<br />From the place you would be likely to come from,<br />If you came this way in may time, you would find the hedges<br />White again, in May, with voluptuary sweetness.<br />It would be the same at the end of the journey,<br />If you came at night like a broken king,<br />If you came by day not knowing what you came for,<br />It would be the same, when you leave the rough road<br />And turn behind the pig-sty to the dull façade<br />And the tombstone. And what you thought you came for<br />Is only a shell, a husk of meaning<br />From which the purpose breaks only when it is fulfilled<br />If at all. Either you had no purpose<br />Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured<br />And is altered in fulfillment. There are other places<br />Which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws,<br />Or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city--<br />But this is the nearest, in place and time,<br />Now and in England.<br /><br />If you came this way,<br />Taking any route, starting from anywhere,<br />At any time or at any season,<br />It would always be the same: you would have to put off<br />Sense and notion. You are not here to verify,<br />Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity<br />Or carry report. You are here to kneel<br />Where prayer has been valid. And prayer is more<br />Than an order of words, the conscious occupation<br />Of the praying mind, or the sound of the voice praying.<br />And what the dead had no speech for, when living,<br />They can tell you, being dead: the communication<br />Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.<br />Here, the intersection of the timeless moment<br />Is England and nowhere. Never and always.<br /><br />II<br /><br />Ash on an old man's sleeve<br />Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.<br />Dust in the air suspended<br />Marks the place where a story ended.<br />Dust inbreathed was a house--<br />The wall, the wainscot and the mouse.<br />The death of hope and despair,<br />This is the death of air.<br /><br />There are flood and drouth<br />Over the eyes and in the mouth,<br />Dead water and dead sand<br />Contending for the upper hand.<br />The parched eviscerate soil<br />Gapes at the vanity of the toil,<br />Laughs without mirth.<br />This is the death of earth.<br /><br />Water and fire succeed<br />The town, the pasture and the weed.<br />Water and fire deride<br />The sacrifice that we denied.<br />Water and fire shall rot<br />The marred foundations we forgot,<br />Of sanctuary and choir.<br />This is the death of water and fire.<br /><br />In the uncertain hour before the morning<br />Near the ending of interminable night<br />At the recurrent end of the unending<br />After the dark dove with the flickering tongue<br />Had passed below the horizon of his homing<br />While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin<br />Over the asphalt where no other sound was<br />Between three districts whence the smoke arose<br />I met one walking, loitering and hurried<br />As if blown towards me like the metal leaves<br />Before the urban dawn wind unresisting. <br />And as I fixed upon the down-turned face<br />That pointed scrutiny with which we challenge<br />The first-met stranger in the waning dusk<br />I caught the sudden look of some dead master<br />Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled<br />Both one and many; in the brown baked features<br />The eyes of a familiar compound ghost<br />Both intimate and unidentifiable.<br /><br />So I assumed a double part, and cried<br />And heard another's voice cry: 'What! are <i>you</i> here?'<br />Although we were not. I was still the same,<br />Knowing myself yet being someone other--<br />And he a face still forming; yet the words sufficed<br />To compel the recognition they preceded.<br />And so, compliant to the common wind,<br />Too strange to each other for misunderstanding,<br />In concord at this intersection time<br />Of meeting nowhere, no before and after,<br />We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.<br />I said: 'The wonder that I feel is easy,<br />Yet ease is cause of wonder. Therefore speak:<br />I may not comprehend, may not remember.'<br />And he: 'I am not eager to rehearse<br />My thought and theory which you have forgotten.<br />These things have served their purpose: let them be.<br />So with your own, and pray they be forgiven<br />By others, as I pray you to forgive<br />Both bad and good. Last season's fruit is eaten<br />And the fullfed beast shall kick the empty pail.<br />For last year's words await another voice.<br />But, as the passage now presents no hindrance<br />To the spirit unappeased and peregrine<br />Between two worlds become much like each other,<br />So I find words I never thought to speak<br />In streets I never thought I should revisit<br />When I left my body on a distant shore.<br />Since our concern was speech, and speech impelled us<br />To purify the dialect of the tribe<br />And urge the mind to aftersight and foresight,<br />Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age<br />To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.<br />First, the cold friction of expiring sense<br />Without enchantment, offering no promise<br />But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit<br />As body and soul begin to fall asunder.<br />Second, the conscious impotence of rage<br />At human folly, and the laceration<br />Of laughter at what ceases to amuse.<br />And last, the rending pain of re-enactment<br />Of all that you have done, and been; the shame<br />Of motives late revealed, and the awareness<br />Of things ill done and done to others' harm<br />Which once you took for exercise of virtue.<br />Then fools' approval stings, and honour stains.<br />From wrong to wrong the exasperated spirit<br />Proceeds, unless restored by that refining fire<br />Where you must move in measure, like a dancer.'<br />The day was breaking. In the disfigured street<br />He left me, with a kind of valediction,<br />And faded on the blowing of the horn.<br /><br />III<br /><br />There are three conditions which often look alike<br />Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:<br />Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment<br />From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference<br />Which resembles the others as death resembles life,<br />Being between two lives--unflowering, between<br />The live and the dead nettle. This is the use of memory:<br />For liberation--not less of love but expanding<br />Of love beyond desire, and so liberation<br />From the future as well as the past. Thus, love of a country<br />Begins as attachment to our own field of action<br />And comes to find that action of little importance<br />Though never indifferent. History may be servitude,<br />History may be freedom. See, now they vanish,<br />The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them,<br />To become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.<br /><br />Sin is Behovely, but <br />All shall be well, and<br />All manner of thing shall be well.<br />If I think, again, of this place,<br />And of people, not wholly commendable,<br />Of no immediate kin or kindness,<br />But some of peculiar genius,<br />All touched by a common genius,<br />United in the strife which divided them;<br />If I think of a king at nightfall,<br />Of three men, and more, on the scaffold<br />And a few who died forgotten<br />In other places, here and abroad,<br />And of one who died blind and quiet,<br />Why should we celebrate<br />These dead men more than the dying?<br />It is not to ring the bell backward<br />Nor is it an incantation<br />To summon the spectre of a Rose.<br />We cannot revive old factions<br />We cannot restore old policies<br />Or follow an antique drum. <br />These men, and those who opposed them<br />And those whom they opposed<br />Accept the constitution of silence<br />And are folded in a single party.<br />Whatever we inherit from the fortunate<br />We have taken from the defeated<br />What they had to leave us--a symbol:<br />A symbol perfected in death.<br />And all shall be well and<br />All manner of thing shall be well<br />By the purification of the motive<br />In the ground of our beseeching.<br /><br />IV<br /><br />The dove descending breaks the air<br />With flame of incandescent terror<br />Of which the tongues declare<br />The one discharge from sin and error.<br />The only hope, or else despair<br />Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre--<br />To be redeemed from fire by fire.<br /><br />Who then devised the torment? Love.<br />Love is the unfamiliar Name<br />Behind the hands that wove<br />The intolerable shirt of flame<br />Which human power cannot remove.<br />We only live, only suspire <br />Consumed by either fire or fire.<br /><br />V<br /><br />What we call the beginning is often the end<br />And to make an end is to make a beginning.<br />The end is where we start from. And every phrase<br />And sentence that is right (where every word is at home,<br />Taking its place to support the others,<br />The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,<br />An easy commerce of the old and the new,<br />The common word exact without vulgarity,<br />The formal word precise but not pedantic,<br />The complete consort dancing together)<br />Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,<br />Every poem an epitaph. And any action<br />Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea's throat<br />Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.<br />We die with the dying:<br />See, they depart, and we go with them.<br />We are born with the dead:<br />See, they return, and bring us with them.<br />The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew-tree<br />Are of equal duration. A people without history<br />Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern<br />Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails<br />On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel<br />History is now and England.<br />With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling<br /><br />We shall not cease from exploration<br />And the end of all our exploring<br />Will be to arrive where we started<br />And know the place for the first time.<br />Through the unknown, remembered gate<br />When the last of earth left to discover <br />Is that which was the beginning:<br />At the source of the longest river<br />The voice of the hidden waterfall<br />And the children in the apple-tree<br />Not known, because not looked for<br />But heard, half-heard, in the stillness<br />Between two waves of the sea.<br />Quick now, here, now, always--<br />A condition of complete simplicity<br />(Costing not less than everything)<br />And all shall be well and<br />All manner of thing shall be well<br />When the tongues of flame are in-folded<br />Into the crowned knot of fire<br />And the fire and the rose are one.<br />--T.S. Eliot<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=scrapofpaper&ditemid=115358" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-04:2841179:115130ext_52714how come i can pick my friends but not my enemies?2011-11-23T00:58:00Z2011-11-23T00:58:00Z"Pick Yer Nose," by Ani DiFrancopeacefulpublic0Posted by: <span lj:user='two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com' style='white-space: nowrap;' class='ljuser'><a href='https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?userid=54349&t=I'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png' alt='[identity profile] ' width='16' height='16' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='http://two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com/' rel='nofollow'><b>two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com</b></a></span><br /><br />"1994: VII"<br />I would not have been a poet<br />except that I have been in love<br />alive in this mortal world,<br />or an essayist except that I<br />have been bewildered and afraid,<br />or a storyteller had I not heard<br />stories passing to me through the air,<br />or a writer at all except<br />I have been wakeful at night<br />and words have come to me<br />out of their deep caves<br />needing to be remembered.<br />But on the days I am lucky<br />or blessed, I am silent.<br />I go into the one body<br />that two make in making marriage<br />that for all our trying, all<br />our deaf-and-dumb of speech,<br />has no tongue. Or I give myself<br />to gravity, light, and air<br />and am carried back<br />to solitary work in fields<br />and woods, where my hands<br />rest upon a world unnamed,<br />complete, unanswerable, and final<br />as our daily bread and meat.<br />The way of love leads all ways<br />to life beyond words, silent<br />and secret. To serve that triumph<br />I have done all the rest.<br />--Wendell Berry<br /><br /><br />"Patience" <br />'Success is the worst possible thing that could happen<br />to a man like you,' she said,<br />'because the shiny shoes, and flattery<br />and the self-<br />lubricating slime of affluence would mean<br />you'd never have to face your failure as a human being.'<br /><br />There was a rude remark I could have made back to her right then<br />and I watched it go by like a bright blue sailboat<br />on a long gray river of silence,<br />watching it until it disappeared around the bend<br /><br />while I smiled and listened to her talk,<br />thinking it was good to let myself be stabbed by her little spears,<br />because I wanted to see what I was made of<br /><br />besides fear and the desire to be liked<br />by every person on the goddamn face of the earth--<br /><br />To tell the truth, I felt a certain satisfaction in taking it,<br /><br />letting her believe that I was just a little bird<br />opening my mouth and swallowing<br />the medicine she wanted to administer<br />--a mixture of good advice combined with slow-acting poison.<br /><br />Is it strange to say that there was something beautiful<br />in the sight of her running wild, cut loose in an<br />epileptic fit of telling the truth?<br /><br />And anyway, she was right about me,<br />that I am prone to certain misconceptions,<br /><br />that I should never get so big or fat that I<br />can't look down and see my own naked dirty feet,<br /><br />which is why I kept smiling and smiling as she talked--.<br /><br />It was a beautiful day. I felt like crying.<br /><br />I knew that if I could succeed at being demolished,<br />I could succeed at anything.<br />--Tony Hoagland<br /><br /><br /><br />"Box Seats, Bob Dylan, 1998"<br />While we maneuver the chairs<br />so we sit as close as possible,<br />the couple behind us laughs,<br />then introduces themselves; Nancy<br />and Tom -- They met, he tells us,<br />at a show almost thirty years ago.<br /><i>But I couldn't see<br />past her. I couldn't even say<br />whether Dylan was actually<br />on stage that day.</i> And Nancy looks at me<br />so tenderly, the way women look<br />at photographs of their younger selves.<br /><br />Sitting through <i>Absolutely Sweet Marie</i>,<br />I know they see our shy leaning<br />into each other, before you clasp your arms<br />around me and rest your chin<br />on my shoulder, and I can feel the pulse<br />at your temple blink<br />against the pulse at my temple.<br />I can close my eyes and brush you with lashes.<br />And I don't realize how frantically tangled<br />we look, until after you leave<br />to make your way closer to the stage,<br />and Nancy passes me her binoculars,<br />asking <i>Is it the crowd that makes you so<br />nervous? Or is it sitting up here, in the balcony?</i><br /><br />What do I tell her? It's not the heights<br />that frighten me. It's the darkness<br />some heights hang at the edge of.<br />But I can't tell Nancy how little we have left<br />to fear. How we've already lived<br />through our locked wards, our visiting hours,<br />how we've each lived through the other<br />not wanting to live. Suddenly, this<br />is crucial to me -- that Nancy never knows<br />any truth other than the two of us<br />huddled in the balcony.<br /><br />Tomorrow, we'll let each other go<br />like people used to letting each other go.<br />I'll turn away without watching you<br />drive off. But when Tom tells this<br />story, we'll always be the young lovers<br />who couldn't keep their hands off<br />each other. I'm the girl who's borrowed<br />their binoculars to track you through the crowd.<br />And you're the boy heading for the stage,<br />not even needing to look back<br />to know I have one hand pressed<br />to my face, holding the place<br />where your cheek was.<br />--Eireann Corrigan<br /><br /><br />"Draft #2006"<br />viii<br /><br />They asked me, is this time worse than another.<br /><br />I said, for whom?<br /><br />Wanted to show them something. While I wrote on the<br />chalkboard they drifted out. I turned back to an empty room.<br /><br />Maybe I couldn't write fast enough. Maybe it was too soon.<br />--Adrienne Rich<br /><br /><br />"Echoing Light"<br />When I was beginning to read I imagined<br />that bridges had something to do with birds<br />and with what seemed to be cages but I knew<br />that they were not cages it must have been autumn<br />with the dusty light flashing from the streetcar wires<br />and those orange places on fire in the pictures<br />and now indeed it is autumn the clear<br />days not far from the sea with a small wind nosing<br />over dry grass that yesterday was green<br />the empty corn standing trembling and a down<br />of ghost flowers veiling the ignored fields<br />and everywhere the colors I cannot take<br />my eyes from all of them red even the wide streams<br />red it is the season of migrants<br />flying at night feeling the turning earth<br />beneath them and I woke in the city hearing<br />the call notes of the plover then again and<br />again before I slept and here far downriver<br />flocking together echoing close to the shore<br />the longest bridges have opened their slender wings<br />--W.S. Merwin<br /><br /><br />"The New Experience"<br />I was ready for a new experience.<br />All the old ones had burned out.<br /><br />They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside<br />And blew in drifts across the fairgrounds and fields.<br /><br />From a distance some appeared to be smouldering<br />But when I approached with my hat in my hands<br /><br />They let out small puffs of smoke and expired.<br />Through the windows of houses I saw lives lit up<br /><br />With the otherworldly glow of TV<br />And these were smoking a little bit too.<br /><br />I flew to Rome. I flew to Greece.<br />I sat on a rock in the shade of the Acropolis<br /><br />And conjured dusky columns in the clouds.<br />I watched waves lap the crumbling coast.<br /><br />I heard wind strip the woods.<br />I saw the last living snow leopard<br /><br />Pacing in the dirt. Experience taught me<br />That nothing worth doing is worth doing<br /><br />For the sake of experience alone.<br />I bit into an apple that tasted sweetly of time.<br /><br />The sun came out. It was the old sun<br />With only a few billion years left to shine.<br />--Suzanne Buffam<br /><br /><br />"Burnt Norton"<br />"Although logos is common to all, most people live<br />as if they had a wisdom of their own."<br /> 1. p.77. Fr.2<br /><br />"The way upward and the way downward are the same."<br /> 1. p.89. Fr.60<br /><br />Diels: Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Herakleitos)<br /><br />I<br /><br />Time present and time past<br />Are both perhaps present in time future.<br />And time future contained in time past.<br />If all time is eternally present<br />All time is unredeemable.<br />What might have been is an abstraction<br />Remaining a perpetual possibility<br />Only in a world of speculation.<br />What might have been and what has been<br />Point to one end, which is always present.<br />Footfalls echo in the memory<br />Down the passage which we did not take<br />Towards the door we never opened<br />Into the rose-garden. My words echo<br />Thus, in your mind.<br />But to what purpose<br />Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves<br />I do not know.<br />Other echoes<br />Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?<br />Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,<br />Round the corner. Through the first gate,<br />Into our first world, shall we follow<br />The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.<br />There they were, dignified, invisible,<br />Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,<br />In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,<br />And the bird called, in response to<br />The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,<br />And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses<br />Had the look of flowers that are looked at,<br />There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.<br />So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,<br />Along the empty alley, into the box circle,<br />To look down into the drained pool.<br />Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,<br />And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,<br />And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,<br />The surface glittered out of heart of light,<br />And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.<br />Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.<br />Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,<br />Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.<br />Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind<br />Cannot bear very much reality.<br />Time past and time future<br />What might have been and what has been<br />Point to one end, which is always present.<br /><br />II<br /><br />Garlic and sapphires in the mud<br />Clot the bedded axle-tree.<br />The trilling wire in the blood<br />Sings below inveterate scars<br />And reconciles forgotten wars.<br />The dance along the artery<br />The circulation of the lymph<br />Are figured in the drift of stars<br />Ascend to summer in the tree<br />We move above the moving tree<br />In light upon the figured leaf<br />And hear upon the sodden floor<br />Below, the boarhound and the boar<br />Pursue their pattern as before<br />But reconciled among the stars.<br /><br />At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;<br />Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,<br />But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,<br />Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,<br />Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,<br />There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.<br />I can only say, <i>there</i> we have been: but I cannot say where.<br />And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.<br /><br />The inner freedom from the practical desire,<br />The release from action and suffering, release from the inner<br />And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded<br />By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,<br /><i>Erhebung</i> without motion, concentration<br />Without elimination, both a new world<br />And the old made explicit, understood<br />In the completion of its partial ecstasy,<br />The resolution of its partial horror.<br />Yet the enchainment of past and future<br />Woven in the weakness of the changing body,<br />Protects mankind from heaven and damnation<br />Which flesh cannot endure.<br />Time past and time future<br />Allow but a little consciousness.<br />To be conscious is not to be in time<br />But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,<br />The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,<br />The moment in the draughty church at smokefall<br />Be remembered; involved with past and future.<br />Only through time time is conquered.<br /><br />III<br /><br />Here is a place of disaffection<br />Time before and time after<br />In a dim light: neither daylight<br />Investing form with lucid stillness<br />Turning shadow into transient beauty<br />With slow rotation suggesting permanence<br />Nor darkness to purify the soul<br />Emptying the sensual with deprivation<br />Cleansing affection from the temporal.<br />Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker<br />Over the strained time-ridden faces<br />Distracted from distraction by distraction<br />Filled with fancies and empty of meaning<br />Tumid apathy with no concentration<br />Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind<br />That blows before and after time,<br />Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs<br />Time before and time after.<br />Eructation of unhealthy souls<br />Into the faded air, the torpid<br />Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,<br />Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,<br />Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here<br />Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.<br /><br />Descend lower, descend only<br />Into the world of perpetual solitude,<br />World not world, but that which is not world.<br />Internal darkness, deprivation<br />And destitution of the world of sense,<br />Evacuation of the world of fancy,<br />Inoperancy of the world of spirit; <br />This is the one way, and the other<br />Is the same, not in movement <br />But abstention from movement; while the world moves<br />In appetency, on its metalled ways<br />Of time past and time future.<br /><br />IV<br /><br />Time and the bell have buried the day,<br />The black cloud carries the sun away.<br />Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis<br />Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray<br />Clutch and cling?<br />Chill<br />Fingers of yew be curled<br />Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing<br />Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still<br />At the still point of the turning world.<br /><br />V<br /><br />Words move, music moves<br />Only in time; but that which is only living<br />Can only die. Words, after speech, reach<br />Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,<br />Can words or music reach<br />The stillness, as a Chinese jar still<br />Moves perpetually in its stillness.<br />Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,<br />Not that only, but the co-existence,<br />Or say that the end precedes the beginning,<br />And the end and the beginning were always there<br />Before the beginning and after the end.<br />And all is always now. Words strain,<br />Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,<br />Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,<br />Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,<br />Will not stay still. Shrieking voices<br />Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,<br />Always assail them. The Word in the desert <br />Is most attacked by voices of temptation,<br />The crying shadow in the funeral dance,<br />The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera. <br /><br />The detail of the pattern is movement,<br />As in the figure of the ten stairs.<br />Desire itself is movement<br />Not in itself desirable;<br />Love is itself unmoving,<br />Only the cause and end of movement,<br />Timeless, and undesiring<br />Except in the aspect of time<br />Caught in the form of limitation <br />Between un-being and being.<br />Sudden in a shaft of sunlight<br />Even while the dust moves<br />There rises the hidden laughter<br />Of children in the foliage<br />Quick now, here, now, always--<br />Ridiculous the waste sad time<br />Stretching before and after.<br />--T.S. Eliot<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=scrapofpaper&ditemid=115130" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-04:2841179:112658ext_52714were you born an asshole, or did you work at it your whole life?2011-08-20T17:13:00Z2011-08-20T17:13:00Z"I-95 (Asshole Song)," by Jimmy Buffettweirdpublic1Posted by: <span lj:user='two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com' style='white-space: nowrap;' class='ljuser'><a href='https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?userid=54349&t=I'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png' alt='[identity profile] ' width='16' height='16' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='http://two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com/' rel='nofollow'><b>two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com</b></a></span><br /><br />"The General paid no attention to the masterful reply, because he was shaken by the overwhelming revelation that the headlong race between his misfortunes and his dreams was at that moment reaching the finish line. The rest was darkness.<br /><br />" 'Damn it,' he sighed. 'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!'<br /><br />"He examined the room with the clairvoyance of his last days, and for the first time he saw the truth: the final borrowed bed, the pitiful dressing table whose clouded, patient mirror would not reflect his image again, the chipped porcelain washbasin with the water and towel and soap meant for other hands, the heartless speed of the octagonal clock racing toward the ineluctable appointment at seven minutes past one on his final afternoon of December 17. Then he crossed his arms over his chest and began to listen to the radiant voices of the slaves singing the six o'clock <i>Salve</i> in the mills, and through the window he saw the diamond of Venus in the sky that was dying forever, the eternal snows, the new vine whose yellow bellflowers he would not see bloom on the following Saturday in the house closed in mourning, the final brilliance of life that would never, through all eternity, be repeated again."<br />--Gabriel García Márquez, <i>The General in His Labyrinth</i> <br /><br /><br />"Books"<br />You're standing on the high school steps,<br />the double doors swung closed behind you<br />for the last time, not the last time you'll ever<br /><br />be damned or praised by your peers, spoken of <br />in whispers, but the last time you'll lock your locker,<br />zip up your gym bag, put on your out-of-style jacket,<br /><br />your too-tight shoes. You're about to be<br />done with it: the gum, the gossip, the worship<br />of a boy in the back row, histories of wheat and war,<br /><br />cheat sheets, tardies, the science of water,<br />negative numbers and compound fractions. <br />You don't know it yet but what you'll miss<br /><br />is the books, heavy and fragrant and frayed,<br />the pages greasy, almost transparent, thinned<br />at the edges by hundreds of licked thumbs.<br /><br />What you'll remember is the dumb joy<br />of stumbling across a passage so perfect<br />it drums in your head, drowns out<br /><br />the teacher and the lunch bell's ring. You've stolen<br /><i>A Tree Grows in Brooklyn</i> from the library.<br />Lingering on the steps, you dig into your bag<br /><br />to touch its heat: stolen goods, willfully taken,<br />in full knowledge of right and wrong.<br />You call yourself a thief. There are worse things,<br /><br />you think, fingering the cover, tracing <br />the embossed letters like someone blind.<br />This is all you need as you take your first step<br /><br />toward the street, joining characters whose lives<br />might unfold at your touch. You follow them into<br />the blur of the world. Into whoever you're going to be.<br />--Dorianne Laux<br /><br /><br />"The Cool Web"<br />Children are dumb to say how hot the day is,<br />How hot the scent is of the summer rose,<br />How dreadful the black wastes of evening sky,<br />How dreadful the tall soldiers drumming by,<br /><br />But we have speech, to chill the angry day,<br />And speech, to dull the roses' cruel scent,<br />We spell away the overhanging night,<br />We spell away the soldiers and the fright.<br /><br />There's a cool web of language winds us in,<br />Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:<br />We grow sea-green at last and coldly die<br />In brininess and volubility.<br /><br />But if we let our tongues lose self-possession,<br />Throwing off language and its watery clasp<br />Before our death, instead of when death comes,<br />Facing the wide glare of the children's day,<br />Facing the rose, the dark sky and the drums,<br />We shall go mad, no doubt, and die that way.<br />--Robert Graves<br /><br /><br />"My Father's Gun"<br />My mother never guessed I was her witness<br />the afternoon she emptied out his closet,<br />saw her unclasp the case, as if embossed<br /><br />with gold, watched her touch it, heft it in hand,<br />then place it back, her wedding stone refracting.<br />Waking at night to find my door outlined<br /><br />by light, I made a wish: to grow as tall<br />as my mother, to reach the shelf, to leave<br />behind a curl of smoke, a thin suggestion,<br /><br />a jinn escaped from its underground bottle<br />like those collected after their late dinners,<br />spiraling out to slither through the crack<br /><br />of their bedroom door, twisting up into<br />the refuge of my father's closet, shielded<br />by rows of reassuring shoes, clean soldiers<br /><br />called to attention, shoe-trees snug inside.<br />Invisible in smoke, I'd take the gun<br />and hurl it out into the quiet lake,<br /><br />that place where children play their games<br />safe as houses and, sinking, it would leave<br />a wake of rings within rings within rings.<br />--Elise Patchen<br /><br /><br />"Preludes"<br />I.<br /><br />The winter evening settles down<br />With smell of steaks in passageways.<br />Six o'clock.<br />The burnt-out ends of smoky days.<br />And now a gusty shower wraps<br />The grimy scraps<br />Of withered leaves about your feet<br />And newspapers from vacant lots;<br />The showers beat<br />On broken blinds and chimney-pots,<br />And at the corner of the street<br />A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.<br />And then the lighting of the lamps.<br /><br /><br />II.<br /><br />The morning comes to consciousness<br />Of faint stale smells of beer<br />From the sawdust-trampled street<br />With all its muddy feet that press<br />To early coffee-stands.<br />With the other masquerades<br />That time resumes,<br />One thinks of all the hands<br />That are raising dingy shades<br />In a thousand furnished rooms.<br /><br /><br />III.<br /><br />You tossed a blanket from the bed,<br />You lay upon your back, and waited;<br />You dozed, and watched the night revealing<br />The thousand sordid images<br />Of which your soul was constituted;<br />They flickered against the ceiling.<br />And when all the world came back<br />And the light crept up between the shutters,<br />And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,<br />You had such a vision of the street<br />As the street hardly understands;<br />Sitting along the bed's edge, where<br />You curled the papers from your hair,<br />Or clasped the yellow soles of feet<br />In the palms of both soiled hands.<br /><br /><br />IV.<br /><br />His soul stretched tight across the skies<br />That fade behind a city block,<br />Or trampled by insistent feet<br />At four and five and six o'clock<br />And short square fingers stuffing pipes,<br />And evening newspapers, and eyes<br />Assured of certain certainties,<br />The conscience of a blackened street<br />Impatient to assume the world.<br />I am moved by fancies that are curled<br />Around these images, and cling:<br />The notion of some infinitely gentle<br />Infinitely suffering thing.<br />Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;<br />The worlds revolve like ancient women<br />Gathering fuel in vacant lots.<br />--T.S. Eliot<br /><br /><br />"Wait"<br />Wait, for now.<br />Distrust everything, if you have to.<br />But trust the hours. Haven't they<br />carried you everywhere, up to now?<br />Personal events will become interesting again.<br />Hair will become interesting.<br />Pain will become interesting.<br />Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.<br />Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,<br />their memories are what give them<br />the need for other hands. And the desolation<br />of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness<br />carved out of such tiny beings as we are<br />asks to be filled; the need<br />for the new love is faithfulness to the old.<br /><br />Wait.<br />Don't go too early.<br />You're tired. But everyone's tired.<br />But no one is tired enough.<br />Only wait a while and listen.<br />Music of hair,<br />Music of pain,<br />music of looms weaving all our loves again.<br />Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,<br />most of all to hear,<br />the flute of your whole existence,<br />rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.<br />--Galway Kinnell<br /><br /><br /><br />"People Like Us"<br />There are more like us. All over the world<br />There are confused people, who can't remember<br />The name of their dog when they wake up, and <br />people<br />Who love God but can't remember where<br /><br />He was when they went to sleep. It's<br />All right. The world cleanses itself this way.<br />A wrong number occurs to you in the middle<br />Of the night, you dial it, it rings just in time<br /><br />To save the house. And the second-story man<br />Gets the wrong address, where the insomniac lives,<br />And he's lonely, and they talk, and the thief<br />Goes back to college. Even in graduate school,<br /><br />You can wander into the wrong classroom,<br />And hear great poems lovingly spoken<br />By the wrong professor. And you find your soul<br />And greatness has a defender, and even in death<br />you're safe.<br />--Robert Bly<br /><br /><br />"Prospective Immigrants Please Note"<br />Either you will<br />go through this door<br />or you will not go through.<br /><br />If you go through<br />there is always the risk<br />of remembering your name.<br /><br />Things look at you doubly<br />and you must look back<br />and let them happen.<br /><br />If you do not go through<br />it is possible<br />to live worthily<br /><br />to maintain your attitudes<br />to hold your position<br />to die bravely<br /><br />but much will blind you,<br />much will evade you,<br />at what cost who knows?<br /><br />The door itself<br />makes no promises.<br />It is only a door.<br />--Adrienne Rich<br /><br /><br />"My Papa's Waltz"<br />The whiskey on your breath<br />Could make a small boy dizzy;<br />But I hung on like death:<br />Such waltzing was not easy.<br /><br />We romped until the pans<br />Slid from the kitchen shelf;<br />My mother's countenance<br />Could not unfrown itself.<br /><br />The hand that held my wrist<br />Was battered on one knuckle;<br />At every step you missed<br />My right ear scraped a buckle.<br /><br />You beat time on my head<br />With a palm caked hard by dirt,<br />Then waltzed me off to bed<br />Still clinging to your shirt.<br />--Theodore Roethke<br /><br /><br />"Temporary Tattoo"<br />Beside the cash register in my favorite used bookstore<br />I see a glass bowl of what seem to be postage stamps<br />until I look closer: temporary tattoos of red and green,<br /><br />with ornate black lettering <i>Bruised Apple Books</i>.<br />Take one, says Andrew, Take two, as if he directs a film<br />about the struggle of an independent bookseller<br /><br />and his aging clientele, some of them tattooed<br />in the Summer of Love, some of them tattooed<br />by surgery, or time. I take one<br /><br />although I know a temporary tattoo<br />is oxymoronic, maybe just plain moronic,<br />something else the world does not need,<br /><br />as no one needs the leather-bound collected Thackeray<br />or the first-edition <i>Joy of Sex</i>, inscribed <i>Love,<br />from Guess Who?</i> A tattoo should be permanent,<br /><br />a commitment, a cross-hatched cobra coiled<br />around the biceps, inks of deep blue and green<br />like the veins that pop from the carney's arm<br /><br />when he makes a fist. A tattoo should not<br />smear, dissolve with baby-oil-on-tissue,<br />should be bold as a snake swallowing a mouse<br /><br />and the mouse-shape traveling the length of it<br />like a bad idea shaping a life, distorting a life.<br />The apple is pink-red, like the tip of a cigarette,<br /><br />its single leaf the green of the 1964 Chevy convertible<br />on cinder blocks behind the bookstore,<br />a car that will never run<br /><br />despite the young man who works<br />under the hood every night until dark.<br />Someone should go to him and tell him<br /><br />the sum is not always greater than its parts.<br />Sometimes the parts are what is valuable,<br />what can be parlayed into a life.<br /><br />Tell him sell the tires, sell the wheels.<br />Tell him there is not enough light in all of his days<br />to spend evenings with his back to the stars,<br /><br />staining his hands with grease and oil.<br />Someone should give him the tattoo<br />of the bruised apple, which will last<br /><br />a week, at best. Tell him the Chevy's time<br />has come and gone, that nothing lasts forever<br />except our desire for things to last forever.<br /><br />But he is too young to know this,<br />and nothing can convince him this is true.<br />Nothing written in any of these books<br /><br />can show him what his strong hands<br />seem to show as they fold the oily rag<br />and drop the hood on another day<br /><br />and in the gravel lot behind the bookstore<br />the last of the sun shines<br />pink, and everywhere, and always.<br />--Suzanne Cleary<br /><br /><br />"6:59"<br />I've been told<br />that people in the army<br />do more by 7:00 am<br />than I do<br />in an entire day<br /><br />but if I wake<br />at 6:59 am<br />and turn to you<br />to trace the outline of your lips<br />with mine<br />I will have done enough<br />and killed no one<br />in the process.<br />--Shane Koyczan<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=scrapofpaper&ditemid=112658" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-04:2841179:24694ext_52714at last the skies above are blue, my heart was wrapped up in clover the night I looked at you2007-08-31T13:11:00Z2007-08-31T13:11:00Z"At Last" - Etta Jameshungrypublic0Posted by: <span lj:user='two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com' style='white-space: nowrap;' class='ljuser'><a href='https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?userid=54349&t=I'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png' alt='[identity profile] ' width='16' height='16' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='http://two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com/' rel='nofollow'><b>two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com</b></a></span><br /><br />"Better is the enemy of good."<br />--Voltaire<br /><br /><br />"Black spring! Pick up your pen, and weeping,<br />Of February, in sobs and ink,<br />Write poems, while the slush in thunder<br />Is burning in the black of spring.<br /><br />Through clanking wheels, through church bells ringing<br />A hired cab will take you where<br />The town has ended, where the showers<br />Are louder still than ink and tears.<br /><br />Where rooks, like charmed pears, from the branches<br />In thousands break away, and sweep<br />Into the melting snow, instilling<br />Dry sadness into eyes that weep.<br /><br />Beneath--the earth is black in puddles,<br />The wind with croaking screeches throbs,<br />And--the more randomly, the surer<br />Poems are forming out of sobs."<br />--Boris Pasternak<br /><br /><br />"I can be changed by what happens to me. But I refuse to be reduced by it."<br />--Maya Angelou<br /><br /><br />"Most of you have been where I am tonight. The crash site of unrequited love. You ask yourself, How did I get here? What was it about? Was it her smile? Was it the way she crossed her legs, the turn of her ankle, the poignant vulnerability of her slender wrists? What are these elusive and ephemeral things that ignite passion in the human heart? That's an age-old question. It's perfect food for thought on a bright midsummer's night."<br />--Martin Sage and Sybil Adelman, <i>Northern Exposure, The Bumpy Road to Love</i><br /><br /><br />"Forget not that the earth delights to feel your bare feet and the winds long to play with your hair."<br />--Kahlil Gibran<br /><br /><br />"Absence extinguishes small passions and increases great ones, as the wind blows out a candle, and blows in a fire."<br />--De La Rochefoucauld<br /><br /><br />"In the end, our society will be defined not only by what we create but by what we refuse to destroy."<br />--John C. Sawhill<br /><br /><br />"To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood."<br />--George Santayana<br /><br /><br />"But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself."<br />--Albert Camus<br /><br /><br />"The poet judges not as a judge judges but as the sun falling around a helpless thing."<br />--Walt Whitman<br /><br /><br />"There is nothing worse than aggressive stupidity."<br />--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe<br /><br /><br />"Now I know that our world is no more permanent than a wave rising on the ocean."<br />--Arthur Golden<br /><br /><br />"That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?"<br />--T.S. Eliot<br /><br /><br />"Anyone who can appease a man's conscience can take his freedom away from him."<br />--<i>The X-Files</i><br /><br /><br />"The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them--words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out...And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst--the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear."<br />--Stephen King<br /><br /><br />"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."<br />--F. Scott Fitzgerald, <i>The Crack-up</i><br /><br /><br />"No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear."<br />--C.S. Lewis<br /><br /><br />"What if this weren't a hypothetical question?"<br />--unknown<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=scrapofpaper&ditemid=24694" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2017-04-04:2841179:22387ext_52714oh, where is my will, why this strange desire?2007-08-13T00:51:00Z2007-08-13T00:51:00Z"You're My Thrill" - Joni Mitchellpleasedpublic0Posted by: <span lj:user='two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com' style='white-space: nowrap;' class='ljuser'><a href='https://www.dreamwidth.org/profile?userid=54349&t=I'><img src='https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png' alt='[identity profile] ' width='16' height='16' style='vertical-align: text-bottom; border: 0; padding-right: 1px;' /></a><a href='http://two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com/' rel='nofollow'><b>two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com</b></a></span><br /><br />"There is too much to hate in this world and much to love."<br />--Gregory Maguire, <i>Wicked</i><br /><br />"Since no one is perfect, it follows that all great deeds have been accomplished out of imperfection. Yet they were accomplished, somehow, all the same."<br />--Lois McMaster Bujold<br /><br />"When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical may be madness. To surrender dreams, this may be madness. To seek treasures where there is only trash...Too much sanity may be madness, and maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be."<br />--Miguel De Cervantes<br /><br />"The last temptation is the greatest treason: to do the right deed for the wrong reason."<br />--T.S. Eliot<br /><br />"You are the call and I am the answer You are the wish, and I am the fulfillment You are the night, and I am the day. What else? It is perfect enough. It is perfectly complete, You and I, What more--? Strange, how we suffer in spite of this!"<br />--D.H. Lawrence<br /><br />"You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you."<br />--Eric Hoffer<br /><br />"Yet such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere."<br />--J.R.R. Tolkien<br /><br />"You were a stranger to sorrow: therefore Fate has cursed you."<br />--Euripides<br /><br />"If you're frightened of dyin' and you're holdin' on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. But if you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels, freeing you from the earth."<br />--<i>Jacob's Ladder</i><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=scrapofpaper&ditemid=22387" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments