It’s a Matter of Leaning the Right Way

[I have no idea where this sculpture is located, or who created it. Anyone know???]

From whiskey river:

Thirst

Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart. Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

On Living: I
(excerpt)

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example–
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people–
even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees–
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

(Nâzim Hikmet [source])

Not from whiskey river:

The Garbo Cloth

For Marybelle

Her daughter wrote back to say my friend had died
(my friend to whom I wrote a letter maybe twice a year).
From time to time I’d pictured her amid strange foliage
(and in a Mongol yurt, for she was fond of travel).
Why not a flock of something darkening the sky, so we would know
(ah, so-and-so is gone!)?
For a woman from the city, this might perhaps be pigeons
(blacking out the sun).
Or else a human messenger, as once when she was fabric shopping
(bolt of green silk furled across her body)
Garbo passed, and nodded. At Macy’s years ago
(when I was not a creature in her world).
Of course she bought the cloth, but never sewed the dress
(“a massive stroke, and I take comfort in the fact
she felt no pain.”)
Logic says we should make omens of our Garbos and our birds
(but which one bears the message? which one just the mess?)
From the kayak, I’ve seen pigeons nesting underneath the pier
(a dim ammoniated stink)
where one flew into my face. I read this as a sign
(that rancid smash of feathers)
but couldn’t fathom what it meant, trapped in the lag-time
(of an oracle’s translation).
Foolish mind, wanting to obliterate the lag and why—
(let memory wait to catch up to its sorrow).

(Lucia Perillo [source])

…and:

Science

Then it was the future, though what’s arrived
isn’t what we had in mind, all chrome and
cybernetics, when we set up exhibits
in the cafeteria for the judges
to review what we’d made of our hypotheses.

The class skeptic (he later refused to sign
anyone’s yearbook, calling it a sentimental
degradation of language) chloroformed mice,
weighing the bodies before and after
to catch the weight of the soul,

wanting to prove the invisible
real as a bagful of nails. A girl
who knew it all made cookies from euglena,
a one-celled compromise between animal and plant,
she had cultured in a flask.

We’re smart enough, she concluded,
to survive our mistakes, showing photos of farmland,
poisoned, gouged, eroded. No one believed
he really had built it when a kid no one knew
showed up with an atom smasher, confirming that

the tiniest particles could be changed
into something even harder to break.
And one whose mother had cancer (hard to admit now,
it was me) distilled the tar of cigarettes
to paint it on the backs of shaven mice.

She wanted to know what it took,
a little vial of sure malignancy,
to prove a daily intake smaller
than a single aspirin could finish
something as large as a life. I thought of this

because, today, the dusky seaside sparrow
became extinct. It may never be as famous
as the pterodactyl or the dodo,
but the last one died today, a resident
of Walt Disney World where now its tissue samples

lie frozen, in case someday we learn to clone
one from a few cells. Like those instant dinosaurs
that come in a gelatin capsule—just add water
and they inflate. One other thing this
brings to mind. The euglena girl won first prize

both for science and, I think, in retrospect, for hope.

(Alison Deming [source])

…and:

The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly colored, and it’s very loud, and it’s fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, “Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?” And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, “Hey, don’t worry; don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.” And we… kill those people. “Shut him up! I’ve got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up! Look at my furrows of worry, look at my big bank account, and my family. This has to be real.” It’s just a ride. But we always kill the good guys who try and tell us that, you ever notice that? And let the demons run amok… But it doesn’t matter, because it’s just a ride.

(Bill Hicks [source])

The Missus and I will be down at Florida’s southern end for a couple of day, while The Pooch keeps The Stepson company at our place. (Hence, no Music Break this week.) Hope you have a lovely weekend yourselves!