[Image: “LA River and Washington Boulevard Looking East, Santa Fe Railroad,” by Michael Light. (Larger, higher-resolution version here.) See the quotation from Rebecca Solnit, below.]
From whiskey river:
We pass the word around; we ponder how the case is put by different people, we read the poetry; we meditate over the literature; we play the music; we change our minds; we reach an understanding. Society evolves this way. Not by shouting each other down, but by the unique capacity of unique, individual human beings to comprehend each other.
(Lewis Thomas [source])
…and:
The sense of unhappiness is so much easier to convey than that of happiness. In misery we seem aware of our own existence, even though it may be in the form of a monstrous egotism: this pain of mine is individual, this nerve that winces belongs to me and to no other. But happiness annihilates us: we lose our identity.
(Graham Greene [source])
…and:
Mother Talking in the Porch Swing
Inside the river is there a river?—
it could follow slow water the way
the real current follows a stiller
shore. And in your life the life that
hurries could pass, and pass its
open neighbor the earth, and its shore
the sky. To be here, and always to find
places in the current, the dreams
the river has—surely we bubbles
ought to tell about it?Listen: One of the rooms the river has
after its bridge and its bend in the mountains
is a place waiting for the sun every
afternoon, when the sun dwells
at a slant under a log and finds
that little yellow room and a waterbug
trying to learn circles but never making
one its shadow approves. Miles later
the river tries to recall that dream,
turning with all of its twisting self
that found gravel and found it good.Just before the ocean that river
turns on its back and side and slowly
invites the world and the air and the sky,
trying to give away everything, everything.
(William Stafford [source])
Not from whiskey river:
That is the example that snails offer us: saints who make masterpieces of their lives, works of art of their own perfection. They secrete form. Nothing outside themselves, their necessity, or their needs is their work. Nothing is out of proportion with their physical being. Nothing that is unnecessary or obligatory.
And so they delineate the duties of humanity: great thoughts come from the heart. Live a better life and make better verses. Morality and rhetoric combine in the ambition and desire of the wise.
How are they saints? Precisely by obedience to their nature. So: know yourself. And accept yourself for what you are. In agreement with your vices. In proportion with your measure.
(Francis Ponge [source])
…and:
A poem for record players
The scene changes
Five hours later and
I come into a room
where a clock ticks.
I find a pillow to
muffle the sounds I make.
I am engaged in taking away
from God his sound.
The pigeons somewhere
above me, the cough
a man makes down the hall,
the flap of wings
below me, the squeak
of sparrows in the alley.
The scratches I itch
on my scalp, the landing
of birds under the bay
window out my window.
All dull details
I can only describe to you,
but which are here and
I hear and shall never
give up again, shall carry
with me over the streets
of this seacoast city,
forever; oh clack your
metal wings, god, you are
mine now in the morning.
I have you by the ears
in the exhaust pipes of
a thousand cars gunning
their motors turning over
all over town.6.15.58
(John Wieners [source])
…and:
I still think the revolution is to make the world safe for poetry, meandering, for the frail and vulnerable, the rare and obscure, the impractical and local and small, and I feel that we’ve lost if we don’t practice and celebrate them now…
We need to look not at ugly places—the only ugly places are man made anyway, and even the airports and oil refineries and parking lots are pretty interesting in, for example, Michael Light’s brilliant aerial work. One of the things that I love about his aerials of southern Los Angeles is that you can see the docks, the refineries, the freeways, the suburban residential layouts with little cul-de-sacs and curving streets and the huge amount given over to cars in motion or parked—on that scale you really see systemically what the petroleum landscape is. It’s not exactly ugly—it’s too fascinating—but it doesn’t make you feel comfortable, it makes you feel alert and engaged.
(Rebecca Solnit [source])
…and:
Night Singing
Long after Ovid’s story of Philomela
has gone out of fashion and after the testimonials
of Hafiz and Keats have been smothered in comment
and droned dead in schools and after Eliot has gone home
from the Sacred Heart and Ransom has spat and consigned
to human youth what he reduced to fairy numbers
after the name has become slightly embarrassing
and dried skins have yielded their details and tapes have been
slowed and analyzed and there is nothing at all
for me to say one nightingale is singing
nearby in the oaks where I can see nothing but darkness
and can only listen and ride out on the long note’s
invisible beam that wells up and bursts from its
unknown star on on on never returning
never the same never caught while through the small leaves
of May the starlight glitters from its own journeys
once in the ancestry of this song my mother visited here
lightning struck the locomotive in the mountains
it had never happened before and there were so many
things to tell that she had just seen and would never
have imagined now a field away I hear another
voice beginning and on the slope there is a third
not echoing but varying after the lives
after the goodbyes after the faces and the light
after the recognitions and the touching and tears
those voices go on rising if I knew I would hear
in the last dark that singing I know how I would listen
(W. S. Merwin [source])
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