[Image: “Unused House Numbers,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]
From whiskey river:
We do our twenty minutes of meditation a day in the hope that, properly stilled, our minds will stop just reflecting back to us the confusion and multiplicity of our world but will turn to a silvery mist like Alice’s looking glass that we can step through into a world where the beauty that sleeps in us will come awake at last. We send scientific expeditions to Loch Ness because if the dark and monstrous side of fairy tales can be proved to exist, who can be sure that the blessed side doesn’t exist, too? I suspect that the whole obsession of our time with the monstrous in general—with the occult and the demonic, with exorcism and black magic and the great white shark—is at its heart only the shadow side of our longing for the beatific, and we are like the knight in Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal, who tells the young witch about to be burned at the stake that he wants to meet the devil her master, and when she asks him why, he says, “I want to ask him about God. He, if anyone, must know.
(Frederick Buechner [source])
…and:
Photosynthesis
Morning falls out of its orbit
and swims up through the blue.
Last night, when I heard the news,
I forgot my human hunger.Now I am making calculations
with a row of ivy and old hibiscus.
I am silent as a shadow in the ferns,
I am frond green and curled.It may be necessary to drink through
the roots; I could eat sunlight and air,
start a green factory in each finger;
I could make each arm a branch.Let me begin as stem and leaf.
I’ll make something you can breathe.
(Joyce Sutphen [source])
…and:
As The Poems Go
as the poems go into the thousands you
realize that you’ve created very
little.
it comes down to the rain, the sunlight,
the traffic, the nights and the days of the
years, the faces.
leaving this will be easier than living
it, typing one more line now as
a man plays a piano through the radio,
the best writers have said very
little
and the worst,
far too much.
(Charles Bukowski [source: various, none canonical — apparently from an out-of-print literary magazine, On the Bus])
…and:
In one recorded dialogue with a student, Basho instructed, “The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective.” “Don’t you mean too subjective or too objective?” his student asked. Basho answered, simply, “No.”
(Jane Hirshfield [source])
