[Image: “New York Public Library #5,” by Tom Waterhouse. (Found it on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) Interestingly, this is the second image I’ve used here; the first one also accompanied a whiskey river Fridays post, in May of 2017. I have no idea if I’ve used any other photographer’s work more than once — and no idea how to find out, if I have. The shortcomings of technology (especially in the hands of the lazy, ha)!]
From whiskey river:
Mostly the animals understand their roles, but man, by comparison, seems troubled by a message that, it is often said, he cannot quite remember, or has gotten wrong. Implied in this is our feeling that life demands an answer from us, that an essential part of man is his struggle to remember the meaning of the message with which he has been entrusted, that we are, in fact, message carriers. We are not what we seem. We have had a further instruction.”
(Loren Eiseley [source])
…and:
Nocturne II
August arrives in the dark
we are not even asleep and it is here
with a gust of rain rustling before it
how can it be so late all at once
somewhere the Perseids are falling
toward us already at a speed that would
burn us alive if we could believe it
but in the stillness after the rain ends
nothing is to be heard but the drops falling
one at a time from the tips of the leaves
into the night and I lie in the dark
listening to what I remember
while the night flies on with us into itself
(W. S. Merwin [source])
…and:
The Nightingale in Badelunda
In the green midnight at the nightingale’s northern limit. Heavy leaves hang in trance, the deaf cars race towards the neon-line. The nightingale’s voice rises without wavering to the side, it is as penetrating as a cock-crow, but beautiful and free of vanity. I was in prison and it visited me. I was sick and it visited me. I didn’t notice it then, but I do now. Time streams down from the sun and the moon and into all the tick-tock-thankful clocks. But right here there is no time. Only the nightingale’s voice, the raw resonant notes that whet the night sky’s gleaming scythe.
(Tomas Tranströmer [source])
Not from whiskey river:
August Morning
It’s ripe, the melon
by our sink. Yellow,
bee-bitten, soft, it perfumes
the house too sweetly.
At five I wake, the air
mournful in its quiet.
My wife’s eyes swim calmly
under their lids, her mouth and jaw
relaxed, different.
What is happening in the silence
of this house? Curtains
hang heavily from their rods.
Ficus leaves tremble
at my footsteps. Yet
the colors outside are perfect—
orange geranium, blue lobelia.
I wander from room to room
like a man in a museum:
wife, children, books, flowers,
melon. Such still air. Soon
the mid-morning breeze will float in
like tepid water, then hot.
How do I start this day,
I who am unsure
of how my life has happened
or how to proceed
amid this warm and steady sweetness?
(Albert Garcia [source])
…and:
The Dogs at Live Oak Beach, Santa Cruz
As if there could be a world
Of absolute innocence
In which we forget ourselvesThe owners throw sticks
And half-bald tennis balls
Toward the surf
And the happy dogs leap after them
As if catapulted—Black dogs, tan dogs,
Tubes of glorious muscle—Pursuing pleasure
More than obedience
They race, skid to a halt in the wet sand,
Sometimes they’ll plunge straight into
The foaming breakersLike diving birds, letting the green turbulence
Toss them, until they snap and sinkTeeth into floating wood
Then bound back to their owners
Shining wet, with passionate speed
For nothing,
For absolutely nothing but joy.
(Alicia Ostriker [source])
…and:
If I were prone to conspiracy theories, I would espouse one in which the shortening of the average attention span has been a conspiracy to weaken our ability to follow a long-term news story, to commit to a long-term goal, to even perceive the expansive but hardly geologic scale on which social and political change unfold. The people I meet who believe in an unchanging status quo have chopped their own trajectory into incoherence, since anyone over thirty has lived through astounding changes produced through activism.
In my elementary school we used to watch nature movies in which the growth of a plant, the blooming of a flower, was sped up to transpire in less than a minute. They were helpful for understanding botanical life, but they turned flora into fauna, landscape into action movie, feeding our impatience. What we really needed was training in seeing how suburbia was spreading, one development at a time, how non-native species were proliferating, how wildlife species in our coastal region — pelicans, peregrines, coyotes, abalones — were coming back. What we really needed was practice in paying attention over long periods of time. That’s what would have given us the power to see that we can prevail, and that, thanks to the more stubborn and patient among us, we have, from time to time, and we will.
(Rebecca Solnit [source])
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