But the sea
which no one tends
is also a garden
Asphodel, That Greeny Flower by William Carlos Williams
–
First, The fish needs to say, “Something ain’t right about this Camel ride – And I’m Feeling so damn Thirsty.”
Hafiz
–
And we all say: OH!
Well I never!
Was there ever
A Cat so clever
As Magical Mr. Mistoffelees!
–
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
From: The Four Quartets by TS Eliot
–
In the summer
I stretch out on the shore
And think of you
Had I told the sea
What I felt for you,
It would have left its shores,
Its shells,
Its fish,
And followed me.
Nizar Qabbani
–
But after a time allowed for it to swim,
Instead of proving human when it neared
And someone else additional to him,
As a great buck it powerfully appeared,
Pushing the crumpled water up ahead,
And landed pouring like a waterfall,
And stumbled through the rocks with horny tread,
And forced the underbrush–and that was all.
The Most of It by Robert Frost
–
We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.
Diving into the wreck by Adrienne Rich
–
I prove a theorem and the house expands:
the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,
the ceiling floats away with a sigh.
As the walls clear themselves of everything
but transparency, the scent of carnations
leaves with them. I am out in the open
And above the windows have hinged into butterflies,
sunlight glinting where they’ve intersected.
They are going to some point true and unproven.
–
An airborne instrument I sit,
Predestined nightly to fulfill
Columbia-Giesen-Management’s
Unfathomable will,
By whose election justified,
I bring my gospel of the Muse
To fundamentalists, to nuns,
to Gentiles and to Jews,
And daily, seven days a week,
Before a local sense has jelled,
From talking-site to talking-site
Am jet-or-prop-propelled.
–
ECHO: For sure the Rebel is going to Die. Oh, there will be no flags, not even black ones, no gun salutes, no ceremony. It will be very simple, something which in appearance will not change anything, but which will cause coral in the depths of the sea, birds in the depths of the sky, stars in the depths of women’s eyes to crackle for the instant of a tear or the bat of an eyelash.
Aimé Césaire, And the Dogs Were Silent
–
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird by WALLACE STEVENS
–
The child is father of the man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
(Wordsworth, “My Heart Leaps Up”)
Ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
–
A Winter Night
Tomas Transtromer
The storm puts its mouth to the house
and blows to get a tone.
I toss and turn, my closed eyes
reading the storm’s text.
The child’s eyes grow wide in the dark
and the storm howls for him.
Both love the swinging lamps;
both are halfway towards speech.
The storm has the hands and wings of a child.
Far away, travellers run for cover.
The house feels its own constellation of nails
holding the walls together.
The night is calm in our rooms,
where the echoes of all footsteps rest
like sunken leaves in a pond,
but the night outside is wild.
A darker storm stands over the world.
It puts its mouth to our soul
and blows to get a tone. We are afraid
the storm will blow us empty.
https://www.npr.org/2012/01/09/144904447/a-winter-night
Sometimes Writing
-Pat Schneider-
“Sometimes writing sits in you
like a wild animal. Maybe
you see its eyes.
Maybe you don’t see it at all,
but the hair on the back of your neck
knows it is there
where the deepest shadows lie.
Often the shadows lie
about what’s hiding in them.
The panther that has stalked you
since you were a child
is old now. No longer wild,
and tired of guarding the treasure
you yourself left behind–
blind and deaf, she will give it all to you
if you just let her go.
But how are you to know
whether the fox on the hill
in the cemetery carries your mother’s name
or is the same fox you saw
crossing your back yard in the snow
unless you put your pen to paper
and use it to release the animal
that hides in the shadow of your hand.”