Liquid Assets, Compounded

[Image: “Butterfly Splash,” by Alex Koloskov. For more information, including an “e-videobook” tutorial on creating this sort of effect, see the photographer’s site, which is where I found it.]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

Poem Holding Its Heart In One Fist

Each pebble in this world keeps
its own counsel.

Certain words — these, for instance —
may be keeping a pronoun hidden.
Perhaps the lover’s you
or the solipsist’s I.
Perhaps the philosopher’s willowy it.

The concealment plainly delights.

Even a desk will gather
its clutch of secret, half-crumpled papers,
eased slowly, over years,
behind the backs of drawers.

Olives adrift in the altering brine-bath
etch onto their innermost pits
a few furrowed salts that will never be found by the tongue.

Yet even with so much withheld,
so much unspoken,
potatoes are cooked with butter and parsley,
and buttons affixed to their sweater.
Invited guests arrive, then dutifully leave.

And this poem, afterward, washes its breasts
with soap and trembling hands, disguising nothing.

(Jane Hirshfield)

…and:

I had a discussion with a great master in Japan, and we were talking about the various people who are working to translate the Zen books into English, and he said, “That’s a waste of time. If you really understand Zen, you can use any book. You could use the Bible. You could use Alice in Wonderland. You could use the dictionary, because the sound of the rain needs no translation.”

(Alan Watts)

…and:

In the end, writing is like a prison, an island from which you will never be released but which is a kind of paradise: the solitude, the thoughts, the incredible joy of putting into words the essence of what you for the moment understand and with your whole heart want to believe.

(James Salter)

Not from whiskey river:

The other day I found myself chairless, in one of the rooms, and I am sometimes all but bootless and shoeless, before I can stir up the local shoemaker. We are not quite tailorless and so not obliged to go trouserless, like the thoughtless & careless, if not quite shameless inhabitants of the treeless, cultureless, gasless, daily-paperless & once schoolless regions of the north. The subject is endless & exhaustless, boundless & bottomless but the raising of it is not purposeless I assure you. Then must I not, if a place is carpenterless, at times wield the hammer carpenter-wise myself — or if my floor is carpetless spread it carpetwise with something… A great deal of this applies equally to -ful, -ly, -ism, -ize, etc. Think of this when sleeplessly tossing on your bed, or carriagelessly scuttling home in the rain. Yours truly, if breathlessly, JAHM.

(James A.H. Murray, editor of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, on the difficulty of deciding which compound words to include [source])

…and:

River

At the turn of the river the language changes,
a different babble, even a different name
for the same river. Water crosses the border,
translates itself, but words stumble, fall back,
and there, nailed to a tree, is proof. A sign

in new language brash on a tree. A bird,
not seen before, singing on a branch. A woman
on the path by the river, repeating a strange sound
to clue the bird’s song and ask for its name, after.
She kneels for a red flower, picks it, later
will press it carefully between the pages of a book.

What would it mean to you if you could be
with her there, dangling your own hands in the water
where blue and silver fish dart away over stone,
stoon, stein, like the meanings of things, vanish?
She feels she is somewhere else, intensely, simply because
of words; she sings loudly in nonsense, smiling, smiling.

If you were really there what would you write on a postcard,
or on the sand, near where the river runs into the sea?

(Carol Ann Duffy)

…and:

Gin

I like a green olive
stuffed with a pimento
after it has been submerged
for some time in a martini.
I like to go downtown with my husband,
sit in a booth at the Grand
and let the drink rub the edge
off the inane fight we had
about the furniture salesman
and whether he treated us fairly,
my view, or whether he tried
to put one over on us,
my husband’s view.
In some moods we’ll fight about anything
just to make the other
carry the weight of anger
we lug all day through our lives.
But that moment
when we climb into bed
on a winter’s night,
letting our bodies lie down,
letting the day be over,
its not unlike the way gin
loosens the rope, lets float
the raft into its stillest waters.
Happy hour, when the landscape
loses its daylight meaning
as it slips into the silk of dusk
before night pours down its jazzy notes
in a cathedral of crushed velvet.
We are sitting side by side in the booth,
watching the flurry of holiday shoppers
come in from the cold.
By now the salesman is a jerk,
or he’s a helluva guy,
either way is fine.
We are talking about anything,
having drifted out into the calm
plainness of intimacy. Nothing
profound, just a place to rest
at the end of the day,
the cord between us swinging gently
after the bells have stopped their ringing.

(Jacqueline Berger)

Finally: Muddy Waters (now there’s a liquid asset for you) mixes tears with the Mississippi, and serves up a powerful sip of blues:

[Below, click Play button to begin My Home Is in the Delta. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:59 long.]

[Lyrics]

Love that little Look out he injects just before the guitar break — as if to say, Better be sittin’ down for this next part.