Unquiet Large, Quiet Small

From whiskey river:

In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

(Dag Hammarskjöld, from Markings [source])

…and:

The world — whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we’ve just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don’t know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we’ve got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world — it is astonishing.

(Wislawa Szymborska, from her Nobel lecture The Poet and the World [source])

…and:

The Sciences Sing a Lullabye

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you’re tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.

Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep.

Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.

(Albert Goldbarth [source])

People look down on stuff like geography and meteorology, and not only because they’re standing on one and being soaked by the other. They don’t look quite like real science.† But geography is only physics slowed down and with a few trees stuck on it, and meteorology is full of excitingly fashionable chaos and complexity. And summer isn’t a time. It’s a place as well. Summer is a moving creature and likes to go south for the winter.

________________

† That is to say, the sort you can use to give something three extra legs and then blow it up.

(Terry Pratchett [source])

…and:

Last Night We Saw South Pacific

I wake to see a cardinal in our white
crape myrtle. My eye aches. Bees celebrate
morning come with their dynamo-hum
around a froth of bloom.

Though presently it’s paradise for the bees,
noon will reach ninety-nine degrees.
Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’ hui [*] will stultify hope in ennui.

I watched Raging Planet on TV.
Earth’s orbit around the sun appears
to alter every hundred thousand years.
Each thirty million years,

mass extinctions attend Earth’s
traverse of the galactic plane.
The asteroid rain that cratered the moon
returns, brings species’ deaths.

In the Hudson Bay region of Quebec,
the Laurentide ice sheet
only a geological eye-blink
ago lay two miles thick.

Disasters preceded us, like violent parents.
Pangaea’s fragmenting land mass
drowned origins like lost Atlantis:
an enigma for consciousness.

These continents will re-collide
in their rock-bending tectonic dance,
as once before Tyrannosaurus died.
So change continues by chance,

as if meaningless — granite to sand,
sand to sandstone, sandstone to sand.
In five billion years, the sun will expand,
to Venus and Mars, then end

planet Earth. The hydrangea blooms
its dry blue, burns a brown lavender.
Earth whirls in space and August comes —
this slanted light my calendar.

As I water the pink phlox, I wonder
what use there is for a world of matter —
why the universe exploding into being invents
night and star-incandesence?

We are the part of it that feels it,
thinks it, seeing this time in its slant
on bloom with our physical brains that
change it as they sense it.

We become. We hum a story as tune,
in sonata form that runes this sphinx-
riddle sequence as notes that the pharynx
fluctuates, to mean.

So “This Nearly Was Mine” assuages,
braced against old loss and war.
Emile de Becque sounds rich with knowledge
of children and love, before.

(James Applewhite [source])

…and:

Rest.

It’s so late I could cut my lights
and drive the next fifty miles
of empty interstate
by starlight,
flying along in a dream,
countryside alive with shapes and shadows,
but exit ramps lined
with eighteen wheelers
and truckers sleeping in their cabs
make me consider pulling into a rest stop
and closing my eyes. I’ve done it before,
parking next to a family sleeping in a Chevy,
mom and dad up front, three kids in the back,
the windows slightly misted by the sleepers’ breath.
But instead of resting, I’d smoke a cigarette,
play the radio low, and keep watch over
the wayfarers in the car next to me,
a strange paternal concern
and compassion for their well being
rising up inside me.
This was before
I had children of my own,
and had felt the sharp edge of love
and anxiety whenever I tiptoed
into darkened rooms of sleep
to study the small, peaceful faces
of my beloved darlings. Now,
the fatherly feelings are so strong
the snoring truckers are lucky
I’m not standing on the running board,
tapping on the window,
asking, Is everything okay?
But it is. Everything’s fine.
The trucks are all together, sleeping
on the gravel shoulders of exit ramps,
and the crowded rest stop I’m driving by
is a perfect oasis in the moonlight.
The way I see it, I’ve got a second wind
and on the radio an all-night country station.
Nothing for me to do on this road
but drive and give thanks:
I’ll be home by dawn.

(Richard Jones [source])

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* This line, penned by French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé, is widely quoted and variously translated. The number of discussions of the correct translation, however, may actually exceed the number of translations — possibly even the number of quotations. Some translations apparently aren’t quite, well, Symbolist enough for whoever’s doing the discussing. Some fail to capture the nuanced sonic properties of the French raw materials from which the translations are crafted. Some disappoint on both counts. (And Mallarmé didn’t help matters, by declining to endorse one translation over the others. Ha.)

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