Security Psychosis - or - Misplaced Fear

It is always possible
to bind together
a considerable number of people
in love,

so long as
there are other people
left over
to receive the manifestations of
their aggressiveness.

-- Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
(quoted in an insightful article found in The Boston Globe)

One great thing

And I think over again
My small adventures
When from a shore wind I drifted out
In my kayak
And I thought I was in danger.

My fears,
Those small ones
That I thought so big,
For all the vital things
I had to get and to reach.

And yet, there is only
One great thing,
The only thing.
To live and see in huts and on journeys
The great day that dawns,
And the light that fills the world.

-- Song from the Kitlinuharmiut (Copper Inuit), 
attributed to The Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-1924 
(other versions here).

One Morning

Looking for distinctive stones, I found the dead otter
rotting by the tideline, and carried all day the scent of this savage
valediction. That headlong high sound the oystercatcher makes
came echoing through the rocky cove
where a cormorant was feeding and submarining in the bay
and a heron rose off a boulder where he'd been invisible,
drifted a little, stood again -- a hieroglyph
or just longevity reflecting on itself
between the sky clouding over and the lightly ruffled water.

This was the morning after your dream of dying, of being held
and told it didn't matter. A butterfly went jinking over
the wave-silky stones, and where I turned
to go up the road again, a couple in a blue camper sat
smoking their cigarettes over their breakfast coffee (blue
scent of smoke, the thick dark smell of fresh coffee)
and talking in quiet voices, first one then the other answering,
their radio telling the daily news behind them. It was warm.
All seemed at peace. I could feel the sun coming off the water.

—Eamon Grennan

Love Poem With Toast

Some of what we do, we do
to make things happen,
the alarm to wake us up, the coffee to perc,
the car to start.

The rest of what we do, we do
trying to keep something from doing something,
the skin from aging, the hoe from rusting,
the truth from getting out.

With yes and no like the poles of a battery
powering our passage through the days,
we move, as we call it, forward,
wanting to be wanted,
wanting not to lose the rain forest,
wanting the water to boil,
wanting not to have cancer,
wanting to be home by dark,
wanting not to run out of gas,

as each of us wants the other
watching at the end,
as both want not to leave the other alone,
as wanting to love beyond this meat and bone,
we gaze across breakfast and pretend.

—Miller Williams

Kindness

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

-- Naomi Shihab Nye

Live Like the Yukon

By the time I reached the sea, 

I knew I could do far worse than 

to live life like the Yukon: 

keep moving but find places to slow down. 

Don't go straight at the expense of meandering. 

Nurture others; accommodate 

both change and attrition.

Savor the element of 

surprise. Be gracious, 

accepting, resilient.

 - Jill Fredston, Rowing to Latitude

(arranged quote)

Lucky to Live

Perhaps, after seeing our beautiful photos
of this life unplugged,
on the road,
with our children -

perhaps, you think we are selfish
and lucky
and only indulging in this wanderlust for
ourselves.

Quite the contrary.

We live this life
with a small urn on our dashboard,
taking our son with us
in our hearts
every mile we drive
showing Aaro,
and his two sisters,
the wonders of the world.

We had hoped to share this majesty with him
in the flesh, but now we may do so
only in spirit.

We work hard to lead the life we do,
for our children,
to feel them, see them, smell them, hear them;
to guide them, learn from them,
to tuck them in as often as we can,
to experience as many slow mornings snuggled in together as possible.

This is not about holding tightly, but rather
savoring and experiencing these moments;
glorying in life, celebrating it, tasting it, embracing it.

We choose to live our lives to honor our son,
we choose to disengage from the whispering factory of fear,
we choose to listen to the deep truth inside, that yells -
LIVE! Damnit, GO and LIVE!

We are honoring what is our only guaranteed turn around the sun
this short and tender chance to flourish in the radiance,
this radiance, this spark called life.

If you are lucky - that spark may catch and grow.

So, yes, we are lucky,
lucky to see what is possible
in the darkest corners of loss,
lucky to see what can be made
when this spark of life is embraced,
when that light is allowed to shine.

-- Emily Harteau, who travels the world with her husband, Adam, and their two young girls, Colette and Sierra, posting their adventures on http://ouropenroad.com/
(arranged and edited quote, sourced from http://ouropenroad.com/torres-del-paine/)

Another Step Into the Deep

There is a wind,

You may feel it blowing now

A bright, curling thing

Resting so lightly

Upon your fevered brow.

You and I,

We are one

Are all of us

Made from the selfsame dust

Oh lord,

Sweet sad humans

If not us

Then who can we trust?

Come and go,

Be at peace

Rest your eyes

Stretch your legs a piece

Run out your hearts dreams

Until panting in exhaustion

You find at last

Something in which

To believe.

--T.R.

Sleeping in the forest

I thought the earth remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

-- Mary Oliver

A love that lights the whole sky

Even after all this time,
the Sun never says
to the earth, ‘You owe me.'

Look what happens
with a love like that.
It lights the whole sky.

- Hafiz

Perspective (A man saw a ball of gold in the sky)

A man saw a ball of gold in the sky;
He climbed for it,
And eventually he achieved it -
It was clay.

Now this is the strange part:
When the man went to the earth
And looked again,
Lo, there was the ball of gold.
Now this is the strange part:
It was a ball of gold.
Aye, by the heavens, it was a ball of gold.

-- Stephen Crane

Purpose

Life will break you.

Nobody can protect you from that, and
living alone won’t either, for solitude
will also break you with its yearning.

You have to love.

You have to feel.

It is the reason
you
are here on earth.

You are here to risk your heart.

You are here to be swallowed up.

And when it happens that you are
broken, or
betrayed, or
left, or
hurt, or
death brushes near,

let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you
in heaps, wasting their sweetness.

Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

The poor folks

"Wonder what the poor folks are doing today?"

He let out a sigh
and settled back on his overturned bucket,
as relaxed and satisfied
as if he were reclining in an easy chair
and putting up his feet.

"Who?" I asked, the first time I heard him say this.

"Those poor folks
who have so much
they don't know what to do with it," he said,

gesturing expansively around the small room.
Here was all he required in life, almost within arm's reach:
food, warmth, tobacco, good company.
What need had he of anything more?

-- T. Louise Freeman-Toole, writing about her friend Dave, an old-timer from Eagle, Alaska

What we want

It isn't normal
to know what we
want.

It is a rare
and difficult
psychological achievement.

-- Abraham Maslow

Corporeal Mist

The partition separating
life from death is
so tenuous.

The unbelievable fragility
of our organism suggests
a vision on a screen:

a kind of mist condenses itself
into
a human shape,

lasts a moment, and
scatters.

- Czeslaw Milosz
(found in The Sun, Sunbeam, August 2015 | Issue 476)

Loss

The thing I've been thinking about the most
is loss.

The losses experienced in life,
yes,
but really
the meaning
we all make of our losses.

Deaths of loved ones,
the phases of lives hurtling by,
jobs and relationships we never imagined
would end.

All of it.

Among other things,
our lives are compendiums of
loss and change
and what we make of it.

-- Joel Lovell
( edited quote, from article about Stephen Colbert )

The Journey

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting 
their bad advice–

though the whole house
 began to tremble

and you felt the old tug
 at your ankles.


“Mend my life!”
 each voice cried.


But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried
 with its stiff fingers 
at the very foundations,

though their melancholy
 was terrible.


It was already late
 enough,
and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen
 branches and stones.


But little by little,
 as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn
 through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly
 recognized as your own,

that kept you company
 as you strode deeper and deeper
 into the world,

determined to do
 the only thing you could do–

determined to save
 the only life you could save.

-- Mary Oliver

On Softness

God, I am tired of writing about you.
Downbeat. Upbeat. A pretty metaphor about geese
and Indian Summer.

I am so sad but I am still shaving my legs.
No one is touching my shins but I still
rub coconut oil into my ankles after
I shower. I spray rosewater onto my cheeks until
I glow. I am so soft and I run my fingertips over my
stomach when I miss you, palms whisper soft like kissing
a stranger, a hundred peach fuzz hairs, duckling
new and I love every one (everyone).
I am soft as the sweet, wet bruise on an overripe plum.
Soft as grayblack winter slush. Soft as the flame
that licks your passing palm.

Once, I slept beside you so often that when I smelled
perfume on your pillow it was my own.

Once, I burned myself boiling water in your kitchen and you
cupped your hands around my fingers like you’d captured a moth,
your face like my hand was something fragile and winged.

Once, we were arguing and you said “God, we are married,”
but I don’t think you meant me to remember that.

When I think of you, I think of sunrise, the way we always
fought it to keep talking even when I was sleeping with
my phone in my hand.

When I think of you, I think of heavy blankets,
hot coffee, a valley of pillows.

I told you I am good at math but I do not know how to add up a year.
Still, next week I may miss you less.

For now, I do my laundry, kiss my cousin’s
baby girl on both cheeks, put on lipgloss just to
play piano in my robe.

I still write you into all my lists, try to stitch
you into the bindings of my books. Once, in a poem,
I called you a church but you are not an image
about the fragility of stone. Missing you is not a tornado.
We are neither the wolf nor the lamb in its teeth.
We are not epic, not myth, not legend. We are not simile.
There is nothing we are like or as.

Here is the truth:
Once, we were two people.
Once, we curled toward each other like a pair of parentheses
around something secret.

Here is the truth:
I am still softening my edges.
I am still wearing the same perfume.
I am still hoping that I smell like home
even when home is not with you.

Tomorrow I will miss you less.
God, I am tired of writing about you.

- J.S.

You deserve to discover the joys of life

When you
find yourself drowning in
self-hate,

remind yourself - you
weren’t born feeling this way;

remind yourself - somewhere
in your journey
some person or experience
sent you the message
that there was something wrong with
who you are,

and you then internalized
those messages and
took them on
as your truth.

But that hate isn’t yours to carry, and
those judgments aren’t about you.

And in the same way that you
learned
to think badly of yourself, you can
learn
to think new, self-loving and accepting thoughts.

You can learn to challenge
those beliefs, take away
their power, and reclaim
your own.

It won’t be easy, and
it won’t happen over night.

But it is possible.

And it starts when
you decide
that there has to be more
to life than this pain you feel.

It starts
when you decide
that
you deserve to discover it.

-- Danielle Keopke
(arranged, edited quote)

Young Man

I seemed always standing
before a door
to which I had no key,
although I knew it hid behind it
a gift for me.

Until one day I closed
my eyes a moment, stretched
then looked once more.
And not surprised, I did not mind it
when the hinges creaked
and, smiling, Death
held out his hands to me.

-- John Haines --

The only struggle that really counts

when you realise you've gone
a few weeks
and haven't felt that awful struggle
of your childish self—struggling
to lift itself out of its
inadequacy and incompetence—
you'll know you've gone
some weeks
without meeting new challenge, and
without growing, and
that you've gone
some weeks
towards losing touch with yourself.

The only calibration that counts
is how much heart people invest,
how much they ignore their fears
of being hurt or caught out or humiliated.

And the only thing people regret
is that they didn't live boldly enough,
that they didn't invest enough heart,
didn't love enough.

Nothing else really counts at all.

It was a saying about noble figures
in old Irish poems
—he would give his hawk
to any man that asked for it,
yet he loved his hawk better
than men nowadays
love their bride of tomorrow.
He would mourn a dog
with more grief than men nowadays
mourn their fathers.

-- Ted Hughes
(letter to his son, Nicholas, 1986)
(contained in Letters of Ted Hughes)
(arranged quote)

Fulfillment

Fulfillment is a function of time.

The search for pleasure is
circular, repetitive, atemporal.

The variety seeking of
the spectator,
the thrill hunter,
the promiscuous,
always ends in the same place.

It comes to the end
and has to start over.

It is not a journey and return,
but a closed cycle,
a locked room,
a cell.

It is not until an act occurs
within the landscape
of the past and the future
that it is a human act.

Loyalty, which asserts the
continuity of past and future,
binding time in a whole,
is the foot of mans strength;

there is no good to be done without it.

-- Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
(arranged quote)

My hero bares his nerves

My hero bares his nerves along my wrist
That rules from wrist to shoulder,
Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,
Leans on my mortal rule,
The proud spine spurning turn and twist.

And these poor nerves so wires to the skull
Ache on lovelorn paper
I hug to love with my unruly scrawl
That utters all love hunger
And tells the page the empty ill.

My hero bares my side and sees his heart
Tread, like a naked Venus,
The beach of flesh, and wind her bloodred plait;
Stripping my loin of promise,
He promises a secret heat.

He holds the wire from this box of nerves
Praising the mortal error
Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves,
And the hunger's emperor;
He pulls the chain, the cistern moves.

-- dylan thomas

This Dark Water

Reading in another man's book,
of voyages in a tropic sea
and strange thoughts
under the green silence
of an equatorial forest,
I found this passage:

"You, in the hard and bitter
north, on the exposed summit
of the world where Polaris
glitters in the forehead of a
frozen god . . ."

And it spoke to me of ourselves
here in the vast, lonely
twilight of Alaska
with the rumors of war steadily
pulsing against the hillside.

The friends we have
are few and distant,
their words reach us through
the onrushing season
like the hurried sentences
of those about to depart.

Appalling shadows grope
among the trees outside.
A nameless animal
crawls through the grass
to stand on hairy legs
and stare unblinking
through the window.

We have drawn in the flesh
against our bones
and gripped to our hearts
the warmth of our
troubled companionship.

It is as if we had been
sitting here for years, in a house
like a vessel bound outward
on the yellow tide of dusk,
with the helmsman asleep
and the sightless crew
staring ahead into nothing --
this dark water
that closes over our heads.

-- John Haines --

The World's End for those that Remain

Robert Frost wrote
that the world may end
in fire or ice.

From what I've seen,
heard and imagined,
all I can conclude
is that the world could end
in any number of ways, and
there's nothing anyone can do about it.

The only choice any of us has
is what to do
if we're still here after it happens.

Do we die a little death
every day ourselves, or
do we reach for someone's hand
and dance again?

-- Heather Linde, in 2015 Alaska Sampler
(arranged, edited quote)

Horns

I went to the edge of the wood
in the color of evening,
and rubbed with a piece of horn
against a tree,
believing the great, dark moose
would come, his eyes
on fire with the moon.
.
I fell asleep in an old white tent.
The October moon rose,
and down a wide, frozen stream
the moose came roaring,
hoarse with rage and desire.
.
I awoke and stood in the cold
as  he slowly circled the camp.
His horns exploded in the brush
with dry trees cracking
and falling; his nostrils flared
as, swollen-necked, smelling
of challenge, he stalked by me.
.
I called him back, and he came
and stood in the shadow
not far away, and gently rubbed
his horns against the icy willows.
I heard him breathing softly.
Then with a faint sigh of warning
Soundlessly he walked away.
.
I stood there in the moonlight,
and the darkness and silence
surged back, flowing around me,
full of wild enchantment,
as though a god had spoken.

-- John Haines --

Excerpts: The Book of Monastic Life, Rainier Maria Rilke's The Book of Hour

The hour is striking so close above me,

so clear and sharp,

that all my senses ring with it.

I feel it now: there's a power in me

to grasp and give shape to my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real

without my beholding it.

All becoming has needed me.

My looking ripens things

and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

I live my life in widening circles

that reach out across the world.

I may not complete this last one

but I give myself to it.

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.

I've been circling for thousands of years

and I still don't know: am I a falcon,

a storm, or a great song?

I love the dark hours of my being.

My mind deepens into them.

There I can find, as in old letters,

the days of my life, already lived,

and held like a legend, and understood.

The the knowing comes. I can open

to another life that's wide and timeless.

So I am sometimes like a tree

rustling over a gravesite

and making real the dream

of the one its living roots embrace:

a dream once lost

among sorrows and songs.

You, darkness, of whom I am born --

I love you more than the flame

that limits the world

to the circle it illumines

and excludes all the rest.

But the dark embraces everything

shapes and shadows, creatures and me,

people, nations -- just as they are.

It lets me imagine

a great presence stirring beside me.

I believe in the night.

-Rainier Marie Rilke, The Book of Monastic Life 1.1, 1.2, 1.5, 1.11

Rising From The Well

Once in Arkansas I pried the boards
from an old-time well
and lowered myself down,
bracing my back against the stones
till the circle of light above me
became a kind of moon.
The coolness of air boarded up
in the earth crept under my shirt,
and the stones grew slippery
with seepage and moss
the farther I went down.
Ten feet? Twenty? I couldn't tell how far
before I became afraid
of the looseness of the stones,
the fact that I was miles
from the note I left that morning.
There, balled up in a well
that no one had drunk from,
maybe for decades, I dropped
lit matches and heard their hiss
as they hit the water
I couldn't see. But what
I remember most about that day
was the climbing back toward light
and how it was difficult,
the heat of late July
and the gradually expanding sky
that opened upon on goldenrod
as I crested the rim of the well.

- charles rafferty

anyone lived in a pretty how town

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sand his didn't he danced his did.

Women and men (both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn't they reaped their same
sun moon stairs rain

children guessed (but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone's any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then) they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

- e.e. cummings

As For the Poets

As for poets
The Earth Poets
Who write small poems;
Need help from no man.

The Air Poets
Play out the swiftest gales
And sometimes loll in the eddies.
Poem after poem,
Curling back on the same thrust.

At fifty below
Fuel oil won't flow
And propane stays in the tank.
Fire Poets
Burn at absolute zero
Fossil love pumped back up.

The first
Water Poet
Stayed down six years.
He was covered with seaweed.
The life in his poem
Left millions of tints
Different tracks
Criss-crossing through the mud.

With the Sun and Moon
In his belly,
The Space Poet
Sleeps.
No end to the sky--
But his poems,
Like wild geese,
Fly off the edge.

A Mind Poet
Stays in the house.
The house is empty
And it has no walls.
The poem
Is seen from all sides,
Everywhere,
At once.

-- Gary Snyder

Where once the twilight locks

Where once the twilight locks no longer
Locked in the long worm of my finger
Nor dammed the sea that sped about my fist,
The mouth of time sucked, like a sponge,
The milky acid on each hinge,
And swallowed dry the waters of the breast.

When the galactic sea was sucked
And all the dry seabed unlocked,
I sent my creature scouting on the globe,
That globe itself of hair and bone
That, sewn to me by nerve and brain,
Had stringed my flask of matter to his rib.

My fuses timed to charge his heart,
He blew like powder to the light
And held a little sabbath with the sun,
But when the stars, assuming shape,
Drew in his eyes the straws of sleep,
He drowned his father's magics in a dream.

All issue armoured, of the grace,
The redhaired cancer still alive,
The cataracted eyes that filmed their cloth;
Some dead undid their bushy jaws,
And bags of blood let out their flies;
He had by heart the Christ-cross-row of death.

Sleep navigates the tides of time;
The dry Sargasso of the tomb
Gives up its dead to such a working sea;
And sleep rolls mute above the beds
Where fishes' food is fed the shades
Who periscope through flowers to the sky.

The hanged who lever from the limes
Ghostly propellers for their limbs,
The cypress lads who wither with the cock,
These, and the others in sleep's acres.
Of dreaming men make moony suckers,
And snipe the fools of vision in the back.

When once the twilight screws were turned,
And mother milk was stiff as sand,
I sent my own ambassador to light;
By trick or chance he fell asleep
And conjured up a carcase shape
To robe me of my fluids in his heart.

Awake, my sleeper, to the sun,
A worker in the morning town,
And leave the poppied pickthank where he lies;
The fences of the light are down,
All but the briskest riders thrown,
And worlds hang on the trees.

-- dylan thomas

Bedrock

for Masa

Snowmelt pond     warm granite
we make camp,
no thought of finding more.
and nap
and leave our minds to the wind.

on the bedrock, gently tilting,
sky and stone,

teach me to be tender.

the touch that nearly missed--
brush of glances--
tiny steps--
that finally cover worlds
                of hard terrain.
cloud wisps and mists
gathered into slate blue
bolts of summer rain.

tea together in the purple starry eve;
new moon soon to set,
why does it take so
long to learn to
love,
       we laugh
                      and grieve.


-- gary snyder

End of April

Under a cherry tree
I found a robin’s egg,
broken, but not shattered.

I had been thinking of you,
and was kneeling in the grass
among fallen blossoms

when I saw it: a blue scrap,
a delicate toy, as light
as confetti

It didn’t seem real,
but nature will do such things
from time to time.

I looked inside:
it was glistening, hollow,
a perfect shell

except for the missing crown,
which made it possible
to look inside.

What had been there
is gone now
and lives in my heart

where, periodically,
it opens up its wings,
tearing me apart.

--Phillis Levin

Your Story

If you don’t
turn your life into
a story,

you just
become a part
of someone else’s
story.

– Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents
(arranged quote)

Ebb

I know what my heart is like
      Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
      Left there by the tide,
      A little tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge.

-- Edna St. Vincent Millay

Poverty's Shod Slave-ships

There is something about poverty
that smells like death.

Dead dreams dripping off the heart
like leaves in a dry season and
rotting around the feet;

impulses smothered too long in the
fetid air of underground caves.

The soul lives in a sickly air.

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

-- Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Dirt Road,
(arranged)

When Like A Running Grave

When, like a running grave, time tracks you down,
Your calm and cuddled is a scythe of hairs,
Love in her gear is slowly through the house,
Up naked stairs, a turtle in a hearse,
Hauled to the dome,

Comes, like a scissors stalking, tailor age,
Deliver me who timid in my tribe,
Of love am barer than Cadaver's trap
Robbed of the foxy tongue, his footed tape
Of the bone inch

Deliver me, my masters, head and heart,
Heart of Cadaver's candle waxes thin,
When blood, spade-handed, and the logic time
Drive children up like bruises to the thumb,
From maid and head,

For, sunday faced, with dusters in my glove,
Chaste and the chaser, man with the cockshut eye,
I, that time's jacket or the coat of ice
May fail to fasten with a virgin o
In the straight grave,

Stride through Cadaver's country in my force,
My pickbrain masters morsing on the stone
Despair of blood faith in the maiden's slime,
Halt among eunuchs, and the nitric stain
On fork and face.

Time is a foolish fancy, time and fool.
No, no, you lover skull, descending hammer
Descends, my masters, on the entered honour.
You hero skull, Cadaver in the hangar
Tells the stick, 'fail.'

Joy is no knocking nation, sir and madam,
The cancer's fashion, or the summer feather
Lit on the cuddled tree, the cross of fever,
Not city tar and subway bored to foster
Man through macadam.

I dump the waxlights in your tower dome.
Joy is the knock of dust, Cadaver's shoot
Of bud of Adam through his boxy shift,
Love's twilit nation and the skull of state,
Sir, is your doom.

Everything ends, the tower ending and,
(Have with the house of wind), the leaning scene,
Ball of the foot depending from the sun,
(Give, summer, over), the cemented skin,
The actions' end.

All, men my madmen, the unwholesome wind
With whistler's cough contages, time on track
Shapes in a cinder death; love for his trick,
Happy Cadaver's hunger as you take
The kissproof world.

-- Dylan Thomas

To question answers

It is not the writer's task to answer questions
but to question answers. To be impertinent,
insolent, and if necessary, subversive.

- Edward Abbey

Kyrie

At times my life suddenly opens its eyes in the dark.
A feeling of masses of people pushing blindly
through the streets, excitedly, toward some miracle,
while I remain here and no one sees me.

It is like the child who falls asleep in terror
listening to the heavy thumps of his heart.
For a long, long time till morning puts his light in the locks
and the doors of darkness open.

-- Tomas Tranströmer

Life is work

"Goddamn it," he said,
cursing again, though he knew
she hated it,

"we have to go on, don't you see that?"

His eyes were huge, apoplectic,
his face flushed.

"Life goes on, and what does life mean?
Life means work, Marantha, work.
And work is what I intend to do."

-- T.C. Boyle, San Miguel
(arranged quote)

Out upon the earth

She was out of doors,
only that,
and it came to her
that it was the first time
she'd been out
in days.

The house loomed at her back,
but she never turned her head.

She was watching her feet, concentrating
on keeping her balance
in the roiling sepia
mud that clung to the
toes of her boots and
sucked at her heels.

The rain drummed
at the parasol.

Everything smelled
of fresh-turned earth.

-- T.C. Boyle, San Miguel
(arranged quote)

Reel

Time
is but the stream
I go a-fishing in.

Its thin current
slides away, but
eternity remains.

– Henry David Thoreau
(arranged quote)

Different Stripes

The consciousness of difference
in a child
may be very painful;

for, having done nothing
yet, and
being incapable
of doing anything,

the young person
cannot justify
that difference.

-- Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
(arranged quote)

Success

Success
is the ability to go
from one failure to another

with no loss of enthusiasm.

--Anonymous
(arranged quote)
(often misattributed to Winston Churchill or Abraham Lincoln)
(http://quoteinvestigator.com/2014/06/28/success/)

Know your Enemy

The greatest enemy
of knowledge
is not ignorance,

it is the illusion
of knowledge.

—Daniel J. Boorstin (The Discoverers: A History of Man's Search to Know His World and Himself)
(arranged quote)
(often misattributed to Stephen Hawking)

Learning is the only thing for you

You may
grow old and trembling
in your anatomies,

you may
lie awake at night listening
to the disorder of your veins,

you may
miss your only love,

you may
see the world about you devastated
by evil lunatics,

or know
your honour trampled
in the sewers of baser minds.

There is
only one thing for it then
 — to learn.

Learn why
the world wags and
what wags it.

That is
the only thing
which the mind
can never exhaust,

never alienate,
never be tortured by,
never fear or distrust, and
never dream of regretting.

Learning is
the only thing for you.

Look
what a lot of things there are
to learn.

--T.H. White
(arranged quote)

What you need

Nothing's wrong with pleasure,
or wanting it.

Only,
if it is not
what you need,

and you take it,
take what it is you don't need,

you will never
get to what it is
you do need.

-- Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed
(arranged quote)

The Rider

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,

the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.

What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.

A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

-- Naomi Shihab Nye

The Kungle Jing

"Oh I am the Jing of the Kungle,"
Runny roared to one and all
When he wore his cion's lostume
To the walloheen bostume call.
But there he meat a leal rion
Who said, "You'd best cake tare,
And do not start believin'
You're the costume that you wear."

-- shel silverstein, from Runny Babbit

Hummingbird

We leave while your chest is still rising, to watch
for signs in the canyon of the journey you are taking alone,
without us, beyond our touch at your bedside, beyond the
windows of your flowered room.

The river carves its course through desert rock,
the kind that you, from green country, found haunting.
But it was here that we last came with you,
and here you may be waiting.

High above us, water falls in pounding roars,
each ripple, each wave, appearing only to disappear,
churning mists that soothe our burning eyes and
haze the pain of memory.

You once said “time marches on” to comfort us,
but in this place of endless time we see only the
blur of moving water, the mystery of quiet stone.
Until the moist air flickers:

A glimmer, green and golden, follows the river’s edge
and hovers close, a tiny whisper echos up the walls, and we
hear the requiem we have come for: your last breath,
in the wings of a hummingbird.

--Barbara Hood
Winner of 2014 ADN/UAA Writing Contest
Public Poetry Category

Existence

I want movement, 

not a calm course of existence. 

I want excitement 

and danger and the chance to sacrifice 

myself for my love. 

I feel in myself a superabundance 

of energy which finds no outlet

in our quiet life.

― Leo Tolstoy
(arranged quote)

Walking to Oak-Head Pond, and Thinking of the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks

What is so utterly invisible
as tomorrow?
Not love,
not the wind,

not the inside of stone.
Not anything.
And yet, how often I'm fooled-
I'm wading along

in the sunlight-
and I'm sure I can see the fields and the ponds shining
days ahead-
I can see the light spilling

like a shower of meteors
into next week's trees,
and I plan to be there soon-
and, so far, I am

just that lucky,
my legs splashing
over the edge of darkness,
my heart on fire.

I don't know where
such certainty comes from-
the brave flesh
or the theater of the mind-

but if I had to guess
I would say that only
what the soul is supposed to be
could send us forth

with such cheer
as even the leaf must wear
as it unfurls
its fragrant body, and shines

against the hard possibility of stoppage-
which, day after day,
before such brisk, corpuscular belief,
shudders, and gives way.

- Mary Oliver

Best to remember

The only time
most people feel
alive
is when they're
suffering,

when something
overwhelms their ordinary,
careful armour,
and the naked child
is flung out
onto the world.

That's why
the things that are
worst to undergo
are best to remember.

-- Ted Hughes
(letter to his son, Nicholas, 1986)
(contained in Letters of Ted Hughes)
(arranged quote)

Hold On

There are times
in life
when people must know
when
not to let go.

Balloons
are designed
to teach
small children
this.

– Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight
(arranged quote)

Rain Light

All day the stars watch from long ago

my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know

look at the old house in the dawn rain
all the flowers are forms of water

the sun reminds them through a white cloud
touches the patchwork spread on the hill
the washed colors of the afterlife

that lived there long before you were born
see how they wake without a question

even though the whole world is burning

--W.S. Merwin

Truth Seekers

The presence

of those seeking the truth is

infinitely to be preferred to

the presence

of those who think they've found it.


– Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment

Flux

You shall not go down twice
to the same river, nor can you
go home again.

What is most changeable
is shown to be 
   fullest of eternity,
and your relationship to the river,
and the river's relationship to you 
   and to itself,
turns out to be at once more complex 
   and more reassuring 
than a mere lack of identity.

You can go home again,
so long as you understand
that home is a place
where you have never been.

-- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
(who was paraphrasing Heraclitus)
(edited, arranged quote)

Enter Within

The clearest way
into
the Universe
is
through a
forest wilderness.

-- John Muir,
John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir
(1938) | page 313
(arranged quote)

Excerpts: The Book of Poverty and Death, Rainier Maria Rilke's The Book of Hours

The big cities are not true; they betray
the day, the night, animals and children.
They lie with silence, they lie with noise
and with all that lets itself be used.

None of the vast events that move around you
happens there. In streets and alleys
your winds falter and churn,
and in frenzied traffic grow confused.

You who know, and whose vast knowing
is born of poverty, abundance of poverty--

make it so the poor are no longer
despised and thrown away.

Look at them standing about--
like wildflowers, which have nowhere else to grow.

-- Rainier Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours,
excerpts from Book III, The Book of Poverty and Death, pp. 13, 19

Tangled

When we try

to 

pick 

out 

anything 

by itself,

we find it
hitched to everything else in the Universe.

-- John Muir,
My First Summer in the Sierra
1911 | page 110

(arranged quote)

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

-- W.S. Merwin

This honor and privilege

It is an honor
and a privilege to
be alive,

however briefly,
on this marvelous planet
we call Earth.

- Edward Abbey
(arranged quote)

Pretty Chaotic

When we contemplate the whole globe as

one great dewdrop, striped and 

dotted with continents and islands, flying 

through space with other stars 

all singing and shining together as one, the 

whole universe appears as 

an infinite storm of beauty.

-- John Muir
Travels in Alaska
1915 | chapter 1 | page 5

(arranged quote)

Paradise Now

Bless and sit down.
Forgive and forget.

Practice kindness all day to everybody
and you will realize you're already
in heaven now.

-Jack Kerouac

(taken from letter to Edie Kerouac Parker, January 1957)

Nature's Peace

Climb the mountains and get their good tidings.

Nature's peace will flow into you 

as sunshine flows into trees. 

The winds will blow their own freshness into you, 

and the storms their energy, while 

cares will drop off like 

autumn leaves.

-- John Muir, Our National Parks, 1901, page 56

(arranged quote)

(and happy belated birthday, Mr. Muir, April 21)

Callow Resistance

Can it be that we do not love to be reminded
that we are very young
and callow
in a world that was old when
we came into it?

And could there be a strong resistance
to the certainty
that a living world will
continue its stately way when
we no longer inhabit it?

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
(arranged quote)

The way you get in the wilderness

I watched,
not bored
not fascinated

simple-minded,

the way you get sometimes
in the wilderness, or
on the water.

-Kenneth Brower, 
(on sitting in a canoe 
with George Dyson, 
in the Inner Passage)
(arranged quote)

The Very Edge

Here I came to the very edge
where nothing at all needs saying,
everything is absorbed through weather and the sea,
and the moon swam back,
its rays all silvered,
and time and again the darkness would be broken
by the crash of a wave,
and every day on the balcony of the sea,
wings open, fire is born,
and everything is blue again like morning.

-- Pablo Neruda

Enlightened

History must yield to
a more fully developed understanding

of the invidious quality of
discrimination.

-- Chief Justice Marshall, Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusets
(Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, 798 N.E.2d 941, 958 (Mass. 2003)).
(arranged quote)

Procession

We spend most of our adulthoods
trying to grasp the meanings
of our parents’ lives. How we shape

and answer those questions largely
turns us into who we are.

-Phillip Lopate
(arranged quote)

Reality Check

The first task

of reason

is to recognise its

own limitations.


-Peter Stone, paraphrasing Immanuel Kant
(arranged quote)

Words

Then it occurred to me
that the delicate shades
of feeling, of reaction,
are the result of communication,

and without such communication
they tend to disappear.

A man with nothing to say has no words.

Can its reverse be true—a man
who has no one to say anything to
has no words
as he has no need
for words?

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America

No Illusions

And perhaps it’s this
that defines the atheist:

the intuition that,
were we to believe in God,
no amount of religious code,
no matter how muscular,
could ever prevent us
from falling headlong into him.

Because we know ourselves.
We have no illusions.
We recognize perfectly
our own insignificance, and with it
how feeble our claim on sanity really is.

We cling to the earth with our toenails.

-- Oliver Broudy, The Convert
(arranged quote)

Survival

And the desert,
the dry and sun-lashed
desert, is a good school in which
to observe the cleverness and
the infinite variety of techniques of
survival
under pitiless opposition.

Life could not change the sun
or water the desert, so
it changed itself.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America

Enriched

Life is enriched 

by aspiration and effort, 

rather than 

by acquisition and accumulation.

- Helen and Scott Nearing, Living The Good Life
(arranged quote)

Sufficient

It is not the greatness

of a man’s means

that makes him independent, so much as

the smallness of his wants


– William Cobbett
(arranged quote)

Home

In three hundred years
the American soul
has not found
a home.

-- Norman Cousins

Sailor Man

He was the one who followed
Dreams and stars and ships,
They say the wind had fastened
Strange words upon his lips.

There was something secret
In the way he smiled
As if he could remember
The laughter of a child.

Wayward as a seagull,
Lonely as a hawk
Yet he believed in fairies
And heard the mermaids talk.

Nothing ever held him
Longer than a day,
They speak of him as careless,
And whimsical and gay.

But I think he swaggered
So he could pretend
The other side of Nowhere
Led somewhere in the end.

- H. Sewall Bailey

The Wilderness Provides the Ultimate Delight

To countless people 

the wilderness provides 

the ultimate delight 

because it combines 

the thrills of 

jeopardy and beauty. 

It is the last stand for 

that glorious adventure 

into the physically unknown.

-- Bob Marshall

The Meaning

What does life mean?
A silly question, really;
the grammatical equivalent
of an Escher staircase.

Why should life mean anything?
And who should have reason to care,
except on those long nights
when the void looms so far and dark

that by sheer force of nothingness
the question is sucked into being,
implying the existence of an answer
larger than any you have at hand?

-- Oliver Broudy, The Convert

(arranged quote)

Intermeshed

I discovered
long ago
in collecting and classifying marine animals

that what I found was
closely intermeshed with
how I felt at the moment.

External reality has a way of being
not so external
after all.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
(arranged quote)

Elegy for the Southern Drawl - Selection

It is all dying out now in a voice asking,
"Where you from? How ya'll folks doin'?"
On the blank verse of the forklift man,
From way off down there and yonder,
Is draining, thou and thine, from prayers
Of spinsters in the Nazarene Church --
Is dying of knowledge of the world,
But still going, barely, in a grunted "hidey"
In the line at the cash register at Shoney's,
A father telling how he came north
To visit his son, impatience starting up
Its coughs behind him, his yes'ms and no'ms
An impediment here, Confederate money.
Kid's in my office, slow-talking. I ask,
"Where you from" He doesn't seem to want
To say, thinks again, then does. "All over."

 -- Rodney Jones, Elegy for the Southern Drawl
(selection)

Once below a time

I

Once below a time,
When my pinned-around-the spirit
Cut-to-measure flesh bit,
Suit for a serial sum
On the first of each hardship,
My paid-for slaved-for own too late
In love torn breeches and blistered jacket
On the snapping rims of the ashpit,
In grottoes I worked with birds,
Spiked with a mastiff collar,
Tasselled in cellar and snipping shop
Or decked on a cloud swallower,

Then swift from a bursting sea with bottlecork boats
And out-of-perspective sailors,
In common clay clothes disguised as scales
As a he-god's paddling water skirts,
I astounded the sitting tailors,
I set back the clock faced tailors,

Then, bushily swanked in bear wig and tails,
Hopping hot leaved and feathered
From the kangaroo foot of the earth
From the chill, silent centre,
Trailing the frost bitten cloth,
Up through the lubber curst of Wales
I rocketed to astonish
The flashing needle rock of squatters,
The criers of Shabby and shorten,
The famous stitch droppers.

II

My silly suit, hardly yet suffered for,
Around some coffin carrying
Birdman or told ghost I hung.
And the owl hood, the heel hider,
Claw fold and hole for the rotten
Head, deceived, I believed, my maker,

The cloud perched tailors' master with nerves for cotton.
On the old seas from stories, thrashing my wings,
Combing with antlers, Columbus on fire,
I was pierced by the idol tailor's eyes,
Glared through shark mask and navigating head,
Cold Nansen's beak on boat full of gongs,

To the boy of common thread,
The bright pretender, the ridiculous sea dandy
With dry flesh and earth for adorning and bed.
It was sweet to drown in the readymade handy water

With my cherry capped dangler green as seaweed
Summoning a child's voice from a webfoot stone,
Never never oh never to regret the bugle I wore
On my cleaving arm as I blasted in a wave.

Now shown and mostly bared I would lie down,
Lie down, lie down and live
As quiet as a bone.

-- dylan thomas

Encroachment

Pelorat said, “It seems to me,
Golan,
that the advance of civilization
is nothing
but an exercise in
the limiting of privacy.”

-- Isaac Asimov, Foundation's Edge
(arranged quote)

The Mountain

Any road followed
precisely to its end
leads precisely nowhere.

Climb the mountain
just a little bit to test that
it's a mountain.

From the top of the mountain,
you cannot see the mountain.

― Frank Herbert, Dune

I know I am but summer to your heart

I know I am but summer to your heart,
And not the full four seasons of the year;
And you must welcome from another part
Such noble moods as are not mine, my dear.
No gracious weight of golden fruits to sell
Have I, nor any wise and wintry thing;
And I have loved you all too long and well
To carry still the high sweet breast of Spring.
Wherefore I say: O love, as summer goes,
I must be gone, steal forth with silent drums,
That you may hail anew the bird and rose
When I come back to you, as summer comes.
Else will you seek, at some not distant time,
Even your summer in another clime.

- Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Truth

To know when
a truth will do is
admirable,

since no nontruth
can be presented with
the same sincerity.

Palver once said, “The closer to the truth,
the better the lie,
and the truth itself,
when it can be used,
is the best lie.”

-- Isaac Asimov, Foundation's Edge

(arranged quote)

Standby until March 23

Programming Note

For those who partake of this blog (specifically, Rick Grisel, and the ether), the maintenance man is departing his rock in the pacific for warmer climates. Fear not, for your fearless poster shall return and commence collecting and sharing favorite works of poetic words on or about March 23. Until then, and of course after then - be well.

Shared Presence

Having a companion fixes you
in time and that of the present, but
when the quality of alone-ness settles down,
past, present, and future
all flow together.

A memory,
a present event, and a forecast
all equally present.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
(arranged quote)

Susceptibility

In effect, revelation is
an act of violence perpetrated
on a system of knowledge.

Anyone possessing a system
of knowledge, therefore,
is susceptible to revelation.

-- Oliver Broudy, The Convert
(arranged quote)

Luck

"Luck, good or bad,"
said Rumfoord
up in his treetop,
"is not the hand of God."

"Luck," said Rumfoord
up in his treetop, "is the way
the wind swirls
and the dust settles
eons after God has passed by."

-- Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

Mothballed

When I went away
I had died, and so became
fixed and unchangeable.

My return caused only
confusion
and uneasiness.

Although they could not say it,
my old friends wanted me gone
so that I could take my proper place
in the pattern of remembrance—and

I wanted to go for the same reason.

Tom Wolfe was right.
You can’t go home again
because home has ceased to exist except in
the mothballs of memory.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America

Those who pulled their homes from beyond the horizon

Traveling in
these giant cedar canoes,
the Haida
would regularly paddle their home
into, and
out of,
existence.

With each collective paddle stroke
they would have seen
their islands sinking
steadily
into the sea, while
distant snow-covered peaks
scrolled up before them
like a new planet.

Few people alive today
have any notion of how it might feel
to pull worlds up from
beyond the horizon
by faith and muscle alone.

--John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce (quote,
arranged)

A Deceptive Loss

And there are
true secrets in the desert.

In the war of sun
and dryness against living things,

life has its secrets of survival. Life,
no matter on what level,
must be moist or it will
disappear.

I find most interesting the conspiracy
of life in the desert
to circumvent the death rays of the all-conquering sun.

The beaten earth appears defeated
and dead, but it only appears so.

A vast and inventive organization of living matter
survives by
seeming to have lost.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America

Alternatives

one drawback
of an active mind
is that one can
always conceive
alternative
explanations

-- Arthur Conan Doyle, The Complete Sherlock Holmes
(arranged quote)

The Tale is the Map which is the Territory

One describes a tale best by telling the tale.
You see? The way one describes a story,
to oneself or to the world,
is by telling the story.

It is a balancing act and it is a dream.

The more accurate the map,
the more it resembles the territory.

The most accurate map possible
would be the territory, and thus would be
perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.

The tale is the map which is the territory.

-- Neil Gaiman, American Gods

(arranged quote)

Mirrored Images

Pelorat sighed. “I will never
understand people.”

“There’s nothing to it.
All you have to do is
take a close look at
yourself

and you will understand
everyone else.

We’re in no way different ourselves.”

-- Isaac Asimov, Foundation's Edge
(arranged quote)

The Journey's End

My own journey started
long before I left, and was over
before I returned.

I know exactly where
and when it was over.

Near Abingdon, in
the dog-leg of Virginia, at
four o’clock of a windy afternoon,

without warning or good-by
or kiss my foot, my journey went away and
left me stranded far from home.

I tried to call it back, to catch it up—
a foolish and hopeless matter,
because it was definitely
and permanently over and finished.

-- John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley in Search of America
(arranged quote)

Time

Habituation is a falling asleep or
fatiguing of the sense of time;
which explains why young years
pass slowly, while later life flings
itself faster and faster upon its course.

 -- Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
(arranged quote)

Of the natural rights of all

A free people [claim] their rights
as derived from the laws
of nature, and not as
the gift
of their chief magistrate.

What is true of
every member of
the society, individually,
is true of them all
collectively;

since the rights of the whole
can be no more
than the sum of the rights
of the
individuals.

--Thomas Jefferson (arranged quote)

Every River is a World of Its Own

Swift or smooth, 

broad as the Hudson or 

narrow enough to 

scrape your gunwales, 

every river is 

a world of its own, 

unique in pattern and personality. 

Each mile on a river 

will take you 

further from home 

than a hundred miles on a road.

-- Bob Marshall
(arranged quote)

I Will Persist

I will persist until I succeed.
I was not delivered into this world in defeat,
nor does failure course in my veins.
I am not a sheep
waiting to be prodded by my shepherd.
I am a lion and I
refuse to talk, to walk, to sleep with the sheep.

The slaughterhouse of failure is not my destiny.
I will persist until I succeed.

-- Og Mandino, The Greatest Salesman In The World
(arranged quote)

Caper Gratefulness

I now inhabit a life
I don’t deserve,

but we all walk this earth
feeling we are frauds.

The trick is to
be grateful

and hope the caper doesn't
end any time soon.”

-- David Carr, The Night of the Gun
(arranged quote)
[New Yorker Postscript: David Carr, 1956-2015]

I Fellowed Sleep

I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain,
Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper's eye,
Shifting to light, turned on me like a moon.
So, planning-heeled, I flew along my man
And dropped on dreaming and the upward sky.

I fled the earth and, naked, climbed the weather,
Reaching a second ground far from the stars;
And there we wept I and a ghostly other,
My mothers-eyed, upon the tops of trees;
I fled that ground as lightly as a feather.

'My fathers' globe knocks on its nave and sings.'
'This that we tread was, too, your father's land.'
'But this we tread bears the angelic gangs
Sweet are their fathered faces in their wings.'
'These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.'

Faded my elbow ghost, the mothers-eyed,
As, blowing on the angels, I was lost
On that cloud coast to each grave-grabbing shade;
I blew the dreaming fellows to their bed
Where still they sleep unknowing of their ghost.

Then all the matter of the living air
Raised up a voice, and, climbing on the words,
I spelt my vision with a hand and hair,
How light the sleeping on this soily star,
How deep the waking in the worlded clouds.

There grows the hours' ladder to the sun,
Each rung a love or losing to the last,
The inches monkeyed by the blood of man.
And old, mad man still climbing in his ghost,
My fathers' ghost is climbing in the rain.

-- Dylan Thomas

Occasionally saved

Literature usually
gives us a story
and sometimes gives us
a moral, but
life mostly gives us the
opposite;

not a plot but a lot
of set pieces;

not happily ever after, but
happy, occasionally,
in the middle.

If there is no overarching narrative,
if life has ups and downs but no
denouement, an ending
but no conclusion, then
all we get from it
is whatever we love enough
to save.

-- Kathryn Schulz
(arranged quote)

The Great Innovation

When the great innovation
appears, it will
almost certainly be in a muddled,
incompleteandconfusing form.

To the discoverer himself
it,
will be a mystery.

For any speculation
which does not
at    first    glance
   look   crazy,
there is no hope.

-- Freeman Dyson (arranged quote
from The Starship and The Canoe)

Bankruptcy before the thunders silence

The
years thunder
by.

The dreams
of youth grow
dim, where they lie caked
in dust on the
shelves of patience.

Before we
know it, the tomb
is sealed.

Where then
lies the answer?

In choice. Which
shall it be:

bankruptcy
of purse or
bankruptcy of life?

--Sterling Hayden, Wanderer
(arranged quote)

the important act is dreaming

the important act is dreaming

so let dreams flood over you endlessly

along with the intense desire to make some of them come true

and let's love what should be loved

and forget what should be forgotten

let's wish for passions

as well as silences

and bird song upon awakening

and the laughter of children.

let us resist being swallowed up

and resist indifference

resist the negative virtues of our age.

above all, let us all just be, and be ourselves.

or try to - for as long as we can, as hard as we can.

--Jacques Brel, quote

from A Sea Vagabond's World by Bernard Moitessier,

arranged by Jen Buttery of Hey Sailor

The future's fit

The plan,
a memory of


the future,
tries on reality


to see if it fits.

-- Laurence Gonzalez
(arranged quote)

Messy Room

Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
His underwear is hanging on the lamp.
His raincoat is there in the overstuffed chair,
And the chair is becoming quite mucky and damp.
His workbook is wedged in the window,
His sweater's been thrown on the floor.
His scarf and one ski are beneath the TV,
And his pants have been carelessly hung on the door.
His books are all jammed in the closet,
His vest has been left in the hall.
A lizard named Ed is asleep in his bed,
And his smelly old sock has been stuck to the wall.
Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
Donald or Robert or Willie or --
Huh? You say it's mine? Oh dear,
I knew it looked familiar!

-- Shel Silverstein

The trick of living

The world is
as sharp as
the edge of a knife.

If you live
on the edge of a circle,
that is the present moment.

What's inside
is knowledge, experience:
the past.

What's outside has
yet to be
experienced.

The knife's edge is so fine
that you can live
either in the past, or
in the future.

The real trick,
is to live on the edge.

--Robert Davidson, Haida artist (quoted
by John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce,
arranged)

Holy Ground

One place comes back from my early ranging ground:
A shelf of limestone alive with cedar and cactus,
A sampler of Palestine in North Alabama.
The glinting sewage of blue and brown glass

Made me know that the widow who'd lived below
Had made this unplantable tract a dumping ground.
The rock was pocked and puddled with rainwater
And felt blood-soaked and haunted with prophecy.

What I liked best were the prickles
Of the cactus that bound me to constant
Watchfulness and the whorled grain
Of the cedar branches scattered by the storm.

Stripping the bark, I'd find the balance
Of a handhold, then the stock and bolt.
Others may have seen sticks. I saw guns
To shape and stock carefully among the limbs

Of leafless treees. These would stem invasions,
And if the bomb fell, the one like a club,
Dark red and rich with pith, was the torch
That would lead me to shelter in the cave.

-- Rodney Jones, Holy Ground

I Went Into The Maverick Bar

I went into the Maverick Bar
In Farmington, New Mexico,
And drank double shots of bourbon
                                  backed with beer.
My long hair was tucked up under a cap
I'd left the earring in the car.

Two cowboys did horseplay
                                   by the pool tables,
A waitress asked us
                                   where are you from?
a country-and-western band began to play
"We don't smoke Marijuana in Muskokie"
And with the next song,
                                   a couple began to dance.

They held each other like in High School dances
                                    in the fifties;
I recalled when I worked in the woods
                                    and the bars of Madras, Oregon.
That short-haired joy and roughness--
                                   America--your stupidity.
I could almost love you again.

We left--onto the freeway shoulders--
                                    under the tough old stars--
In the shadow of bluffs
                                     I came back to myself,
To the real work, to
                                      "What is to be done."

~Gary Snyder

And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead man naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon; 
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot; 
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; 
Though lovers be lost love shall not; 
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily; 
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break; 
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through; 
Split all ends up they shan't crack; 
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores; 
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain; 
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies; 
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion. 

- Dylan Thomas

Alone [He] Stare[s] Into the Frost's White Face

Alone [he] stare[s] into the frost’s white face.   
It’s going nowhere, and [he]—from nowhere.   
Everything ironed flat, pleated without a wrinkle:   
Miraculous, the breathing plain.   

Meanwhile the sun squints at this starched poverty—
The squint itself consoled, at ease . . .   
The ten-fold forest almost the same . . .   
And snow crunches in the eyes, innocent, like clean bread.  

Osip Mandelstam
January 16, 1937

For an Absence

When I cannot be with you
I will send my love (so much
is allowed to human lovers)
to watch over you in the dark --
a winged small presence
who never sleeps, however long
the night. Perhaps it cannot
protect or help, I do not know,
but it watches always, and so
you will sleep within my love
within the room within the dark.
And when, restless, you wake
and see the room palely lit
by that watching, you will think,
"It is only dawn," and go
quiet to sleep again.

- Wendell Berry