[Image: “A true photograph need not be explained, nor can it be contained in words,” by sk.fotography. Found it on Flickr; used here under a Creative Commons license.]
From whiskey river (italicized lines):
Dancing
It was my father taught my mother
how to dance.
I never knew that.
I thought it was the other way.
Ballroom was their style,
a graceful twirling,
curved arms and fancy footwork,
a green-eyed radio.There is always more than you know.
There are always boxes
put away in the cellar,
worn shoes and cherished pictures,
notes you find later,
sheet music you can’t play.A woman came on Wednesdays
with tapes of waltzes.
She tried to make him shuffle
around the floor with her.
She said it would be good for him.
He didn’t want to.
(Margaret Atwood [source])
…and (italicized passage):
It is, of course, we who house poems as much as their words, and we ourselves must be the locus of poetry’s depth of newness. Still, the permeability seems to travel both ways: a changed self will find new meanings in a good poem, but a good poem also changes the shape of the self. Having read it, we are not who we were the moment before… Art lives in what it awakens in us… It is a triteness to say that the only thing to be counted upon is that what you count on will not be what comes. Utilitarian truths evaporate: we die. Poems allow us not only to bear the tally and toll of our transience, but to perceive, within their continually surprising abundance, a path through the grief of that insult into joy.
(Jane Hirshfield [source])
…and:
Joy
Don’t cry, its only music,
someone’s voice is saying.
No one you love is dying.It’s only music. And it was only spring,
the world’s unreasoning body
run amok, like a saint’s, with glory,
that overwhelmed a young girl
into unreasoning sadness.
Crazy, she told herself,
I should be dancing with happiness.But it happened again. It happens
when we make bottomless love—
there follows a bottomless sadness
which is not despair
but its nameless opposite.
It has nothing to do with the passing of time.
It’s not about loss. It’s about
two seemingly parallel lines
suddenly coming together
inside us, in some place
that is still wilderness.Joy, joy, the sopranos sing,
reaching for the shimmering notes
while our eyes fill with tears.
(Lisel Mueller [source])
Not from whiskey river:
I dream of my old English teacher [Miss Groby] occasionally. It seems that we are always in Sherwood Forest and that from far away I can hear Robin Hood winding his silver horn.
“Drat that man for making such a racket on his cornet!” cries Miss Groby. “He scared away a perfectly darling Container for the Thing Contained, a great, big, beautiful one. It leaped right back into its context when that man blew that cornet. It was the most wonderful Container for the Thing Contained I ever saw here in the Forest of Arden.”
“This is Sherwood Forest,” I say to her.
“That doesn’t make any difference at all that I can see,” she says to me.
Then I wake up, tossing and moaning.
(James Thurber [source])
…and:
[asking]
there is ghazal swimming inside of her, wanting to be born. on the matter of foretelling, of small miracles, cactus flowers in bloom on this city fire escape, where inside your tongue touches every inch of her skin, where you lay your hand on her belly and sleep. here, she fingers the ornate remains of ancient mosques. here, some mythic angel will rise from the dust of ancestors’ bones. this is where you shall worship, at the intersections of distilled deities and memory’s sharp edges. the country is quite a poetic place; water and rock contain verse and metaphor, even wild grasses reply in rhyme. you are not broken. she knows this having captured a moment of lucidity; summer lightning bugs, sun’s rays in a jelly jar.
this is not a love poem, but a cove to escape the flux, however momentary. she is still a child, confabulating the fantastic; please do not erode her wonder for the liquid that is your language. there is thunderstorm in her chest, wanting to burst through her skin. this is neither love poem nor plea. this is not river, nor stone.
(Barbara Jane Reyes [source])
…and:
Night Drive
Roadlight licks the night ahead, licks
the white line on night’s new hide, licks
the undulating blacktop flat, sticks its end-
less forking tongue out onward, flicks
itself at culvert, tree, passing truck, a sign
insisting heartbeats equal conscious life
(it may be) of someone’s (maybe my)
forever unborn child. I let the knife
of wind inside and sing A Whiter Shade of Pale,
no earthly reason why, and think of what
won’t be and who, and whether it be
speed, wind, song, or my mind’s roar
that drowns for once time’s slangy whine,
here comes hope to climb clear of before;
stillborn hope with desperate, Moro-reflex,
undead grip climbs right back up my neck,
raising each pointless, residual nape hair
in ancestral salute to an absence, to the air
that won’t question itself, won’t ever check
the moral rearview. I accelerate gamely,
wondering what makes me want to leave
each person, place and thing I learn to love.
What shoves me off again, racing insanely,
as if to the place that will always save
a place for me, a room that will contain
the kind of people who’d embrace the things
I’m still afraid I’m still afraid to face.
(J. Allyn Rosser [source])
…and:
Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object; it means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Our thought should be in relation to all p articular and already formulated thoughts, as a man on a mountain who, as he looks forward, sees also below him, without actually looking at them, a great many forests and plains. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.
(Simone Weil [source])
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