![\"Ellis](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/images\/ellislarkins_sm.jpg?ssl=1\")
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[Image: Jazz pianist Ellis Larkins. (I haven’t been able to track down the artist who created this drawing\/painting\/etching\/whatever, but this seems based on the cover of Larkins’s album, <\/em>A Smooth One. For one of his signature recordings, use the little audio-player thing just below this caption.]<\/em><\/p>\n\n From whiskey river<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n For us there are always shackles, cages, constrictions. We are not pure beings, not whole selves; not animals, not gods. For all the purity of our aspirations, we live, as Kafka did, in the middle of things, in a room between other rooms, a self among other selves, in what literary types call a “liminal space.” Trapped between two realms, the earthly and the heavenly, we’re unable to fully inhabit, or escape, either one, but can only gesture longingly in both directions, flailing our useless limbs, like an upended beetle trying to get out of bed.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Robert Cohen)<\/p>\n …and<\/a>:<\/p>\n Elegy<\/strong><\/p>\n What to do with this knowledge <\/em> Perhaps one day you touch the young branch All above us Listen to me. I am telling you (Aracelis Girmay [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n …and<\/a>:<\/p>\n That’s the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they’re suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armor, and the naked child is flung out into the world. That’s why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember. But when that child gets buried away under their adaptive and protective shells — he becomes one of the walking dead, a monster. So when you realize you’ve gone a few weeks and haven’t felt that awful struggle of your childish self — struggling to lift itself out of its inadequacy and incompetence — you’ll know you’ve gone some weeks without meeting new challenges, and without growing, and that you’ve gone some weeks towards losing touch with yourself. The only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated. And the only thing people regret is that they didn’t live boldly enough, that they didn’t invest enough heart, didn’t love enough. Nothing else really counts at all.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Ted Hughes)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Not from whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n The Ferry<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019m jotting down these lines, I\u2019ll eat it cold. Soon I too Slightly seasick, I keep on writing fish through clouds. Others drink iced tea, I miss them now: cousins in linen dresses, (Katia Kapovich [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n …and:<\/p>\n The dead will always outnumber the living.<\/p>\n Dead Americans, however, if all proceeds, will not outnumber living Americans until the year 2030, because the nation is young. Many of us will be among the dead then. Will we know or care, we who once owned the still bones under the quick ones, we who spin inside the planet with our heels in the air? The living might well seem foolishly self-important to us, and overexcited.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Annie Dillard [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n …and:<\/p>\n Innocence<\/strong><\/p>\n There is nothing more innocent I cover it again, keep laboring, This same growing must be myself,
\nthat our living is not guaranteed?<\/em><\/p>\n
\nof something beautiful. & it grows & grows
\ndespite your birthdays & the death certificate,
\n& it one day shades the heads of something beautiful
\nor makes itself useful to the nest. Walk out
\nof your house, then, believing in this.
\nNothing else matters.<\/p>\n
\nis the kingdom of touching
\nof strangers & parrots,
\nsome of them human,
\nsome of them not human.<\/p>\n
\na true thing. This is the only kingdom.
\nThe kingdom of touching
\nthe touches of the disappearing, things.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nhaving borrowed a pen from a waitress
\nin this roadside restaurant. Three rusty pines
\nprop up the sky in the windows.
\nMy soup gets cold, which implies<\/p>\n
\nwill leave a tip on the table, merge
\ninto the beehive of travelers
\nand board one of the ferries,
\nwhere there\u2019s always a line to the loo
\nand no one knows where the captain is.<\/p>\n
\nof the wind-rose and lobster traps,
\nseagulls, if any—and there always are.
\nCheck the air and you\u2019ll see them
\nabove straw hats and caps.
\nThe sun at noon glides like a monstrous star-<\/p>\n
\ntraining binoculars on a tugboat.
\nWhen I finish this letter, I\u2019ll take a gulp
\nfrom the flask you gave me for the road
\nin days when I was too young to care about
\nthose on the pier who waved goodbye.<\/p>\n
\nmy mother, you, boys in light summer shirts.
\nLife is too long. The compass needle dances.
\nEverything passes by. The ferry passes
\nby ragged yellow shores.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\nthan the still-unformed creature I find beneath soil,
\nneither of us knowing what it will become
\nin the abundance of the planet.
\nIt makes a living only by remaining still
\nin its niche.
\nOne day it may struggle out of its tender
\npearl of blind skin
\nwith a wing or with vision
\nleaving behind the transparent.<\/p>\n
\nhands in earth, myself a singular body.
\nWatching things grow,
\nwondering how
\na cut blade of grass knows
\nhow to turn sharp again at the end.<\/p>\n
\nnot aware yet of what I will become
\nin my own fullness
\ninside this simple flesh.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n