[Photo: “This Disembodiment,” by Dee Ashley (user dionnehartnett) on Flickr. Used under a Creative Commons license.]
From whiskey river:
Am I Not Among the Early Risers
(excerpt)Here is an amazement — once I was twenty years old and in
every motion of my body there was a delicious ease,
and in every motion of the green earth there was
a hint of paradise,
and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.
(Mary Oliver [source])
…and:
Monday
The birds are in their trees,
the toast is in the toaster,
and the poets are at their windows.They are at their windows
in every section of the tangerine of earth—
the Chinese poets looking up at the moon,
the American poets gazing out
at the pink and blue ribbons of sunrise.The clerks are at their desks,
the miners are down in their mines,
and the poets are looking out their windows
maybe with a cigarette, a cup of tea,
and maybe a flannel shirt or bathrobe is involved.The proofreaders are playing the ping-pong
game of proofreading,
glancing back and forth from page to page,
the chefs are dicing celery and potatoes,
and the poets are at their windows
because it is their job for which
they are paid nothing every Friday afternoon.Which window it hardly seems to matter
though many have a favorite,
for there is always something to see—
a bird grasping a thin branch,
the headlights of a taxi rounding a corner,
those two boys in wool caps angling across the street.The fishermen bob in their boats,
the linemen climb their round poles,
the barbers wait by their mirrors and chairs,
and the poets continue to stare
at the cracked birdbath or a limb knocked down by the wind.By now, it should go without saying
that what the oven is to the baker
and the berry-stained blouse to the dry cleaner,
so the window is to the poet.Just think—
before the invention of the window,
the poets would have had to put on a jacket
and a winter hat to go outside
or remain indoors with only a wall to stare at.And when I say a wall,
I do not mean a wall with striped wallpaper
and a sketch of a cow in a frame.I mean a cold wall of fieldstones,
the wall of the medieval sonnet,
the original woman’s heart of stone,
the stone caught in the throat of her poet-lover.
(Billy Collins [source])
Not from whiskey river:
What I Know
(excerpt)7. I know that I live not in the world, but in the shadow of the world. I know that I go through the world the way an insect goes through its entire life in the shadow of a bank.
8. I know that nothing is simple. Or more, that what’s simple is never truly, never completely, so. I know that everything adds up and that every element of this total depends on the whole.
9. I know that everything around me is nothing but a mass of contingency. I know that every word props itself up on an immense architecture of contingency.
20. I know that, seen from the border between language and the world, the universe is in increasing entropy. But I no longer know what it is if I climb to the top of a tree (one of these trees on the border between language and the world), from where you can see far into language and far into the world at the same time.
21. Because I have scaled a tree, I know that beyond language is a huge plain, with dark flowers and little mazy footpaths.
(Patrick Dubost (translation by Fiona Sampson) [source])
…and:
Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold, lost as it is in the depths, small, isolated, a pin-point, brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.
(Victor Hugo [source])
…and:
Things
A man stood in the laurel tree
Adjusting his hands and feet to the boughs.
He said, “Today I was breaking stones
On a mountain road in Asia,When suddenly I had a vision
Of mankind, like grass and flowers,
The same over all the earth.
We forgave each other; we gave ourselves
Wholly over to words.
And straightway I was released
And sprang through an open gate.”I said, “Into a meadow?”
He said, “I am impervious to irony.
I thank you for the word…
I am standing in a sunlit meadow.
Know that everything your senses reject
Springs up in the spiritual world.”I said, “Our scientists have another opinion.
They say, you are merely phenomena.”He said, “Over here they will be angels
Singing, Holy holy be His Name!
And also, it works in reverse.
Things which to us in the pure state are mysterious,
Are your simplest articles of household use—
A chair, a dish, and meaner even than these,
The very latest inventions.
Machines are the animals of the Americans—
Tell me about machines.”I said, “I have suspected
The Mixmaster knows more than I do,
The air conditioner is the better poet.
My right front tire is as bald as Odysseus—
How much it must have suffered!
Then, as things have a third substance
Which is obscure to both our senses,
Let there be a perpetual coming and going
Between your house and mine.”
(Louis Simpson [source])
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