A Direction in Which to Look

[Video: Linda Ronstadt sings “Blue Bayou,” in a performance filmed in September, 1977.
(Lyrics here.)]

From whiskey river:

Imagine yourself streaming through time shedding gloves, umbrellas, wrenches, books, friends, homes, names. This is what the view looks like if you take a rear-facing seat on the train. Looking forward you constantly acquire moments of arrival, moments of realization, moments of discovery. The wind blows your hair back and you are greeted by what you have never seen before. The material falls away in onrushing experience. It peels off like skin from a molting snake. Of course to forget the past is to lose the sense of loss that is also memory of an absent richness and a set of clues to navigate the present by; the art is not one of forgetting but letting go. And when everything else is gone, you can be rich in loss.

(Rebecca Solnit [source])

…and (italicized portion):

New Year’s Day

The rain this morning falls
on the last of the snow

and will wash it away. I can smell
the grass again, and the torn leaves

being eased down into the mud.
The few loves I’ve been allowed

to keep are still sleeping
on the West Coast. Here in Virginia

I walk across the fields with only
a few young cows for company.

Big-boned and shy,
they are like girls I remember

from junior high, who never
spoke, who kept their heads

lowered and their arms crossed against
their new breasts. Those girls

are nearly forty now. Like me,
they must sometimes stand

at a window late at night, looking out
on a silent backyard, at one

rusting lawn chair and the sheer walls
of other people’s houses.

They must lie down some afternoons
and cry hard for whoever used

to make them happiest,
and wonder how their lives

have carried them
this far without ever once

explaining anything. I don’t know
why I’m walking out here

with my coat darkening
and my boots sinking in, coming up

with a mild sucking sound
I like to hear. I don’t care

where those girls are now.
Whatever they’ve made of it

they can have. Today I want   
to resolve nothing.

I only want to walk
a little longer in the cold

blessing of the rain,   
and lift my face to it.

(Kim Addonizio [source])

Not from whiskey river:

What most distinguishes the Maya conception of time from the Western view, however, is not the counting system but the imagined nature of time itself. For us, time is inanimate: We feel that it “flows” by at a constant rate, with no heed paid to human or machine. We can neither give it a boost nor slow it down. For the Maya, however, time is organic — it can be stretched, shrunk, or even stopped by human activity; people are seen to be intimately involved in time’s passage… As divinely ordained ruler, [the king] was seen as the embodiment of time, and it was his duty to maintain the social, political, and cosmological order.

The burden of that temporal responsibility comes to life in one of the most striking exhibits at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum — a cast of a stone monument from the Maya city of Copán, in Honduras, known as Altar Q. The square stele is carved with the figures of sixteen kings — four to a side — spanning nearly four hundred years of history. Time wraps around this monument, so that the sixteenth monarch is face to face with the first. The old king is passing what looks like a torch to the new king.

(Dan Falk [source])

…and:

The End of the Holidays

We drop you at O’Hare with your young husband,
two slim figures under paradoxical signs:
United and Departures. The season’s perfect oxymoron.
Dawn is a rumor, the wind bites, but there are things
fathers still can do for daughters.
Off you go looking tired and New Wave
under the airport’s aquarium lights,
with your Coleman cooler and new, long coat,
something to wear to the office and to parties
where down jackets are not de rigeur.
Last week winter bared its teeth.
I think of summer and how the veins in a leaf
come together and divide
come together and divide.
That’s how it is with us now
as you fly west toward your thirties
I set my new cap at a nautical angle, shift
baggage I know I’ll carry with me always
to a nether hatch where it can do only small harm,
haul up fresh sail and point my craft
toward the punctual sunrise.

(Mark Perlberg [source])