[Image: “Prison for a Day”; found it on Flickr (used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!), posted by user “amberandclint.” This is a portion of the interior of an airport (Bangkok International? not sure; the caption’s wording is ambiguous), where the photographer once spent eleven hours while waiting for his wife’s flight to board.]
From whiskey river:
Promise of Blue Horses
A blue horse turns into a streak of lightning,
then the sun—
relating the difference between sadness
and the need to praise
that which makes us joyful, I can’t calculate
how the earth tips hungrily
toward the sun—then soaks up rain—or the density
of this unbearable need
to be next to you. It’s a palpable thing—this earth philosophy
and familiar in the dark
like your skin under my hand. We are a small earth. It’s no
simple thing. Eventually
we will be dust together; can be used to make a house, to stop
a flood or grow food
for those who will never remember who we were, or know
that we loved fiercely.
Laughter and sadness eventually become the same song turning us
toward the nearest star—
a star constructed of eternity and elements of dust barely visible
in the twilight as you travel
east. I run with the blue horses of electricity who surround
the heart
and imagine a promise made when no promise was possible.
(Joy Harjo [source])
…and:
Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.
(Cormac McCarthy [source])
