A Long Drive to Nowhere

The truth is I may never know what I wanted from you. I only knew what I didn't want. I didn't want what you gave me; even if I needed it. Which sounds completely ungrateful. I'm sorry. I can't think of two more terrible words to use. I want to say, "thank you." But I can't. I'm sorry. I know you are too. I'm not sure how we ended up here. It's not what either of us wanted. And yet, here we are. We both drove us to this point.

This destination was never on my map. Maybe that's part of the problem. I wasn't looking at maps. I was too busy reading the signs. None of the signs I read pointed here. Maybe I misread. There were other signs. Portents. I left a book on the counter and fled because the pages burned my fingers. It felt accusatory, especially the section titled "LOVE TIPS." A stranger had marked the places where things fell apart. Outlined the detours and wrong turns we'd taken to end up here.

It's so easy to misunderstand. I ignore the obvious in favor of the subtext. So much between us was subtextual. We were beneath the surface before we'd even defined the outlines. I was drowning. Maybe you were too.

Today, I wanted to say I was sorry. But what difference would that make? You already know. The apologies lie between us like broken teacups we've forgotten to sweep up. We've cut ourselves open on the shards and these tiny pieces remain embedded in our skin. You'd be surprised how long a piece of splintered porcelain can remain under your skin. I had a fragment of Noritake in my palm for five years. It was too far below the surface to remove. I could feel it under the skin, but had to wait until it worked itself out. Maybe it will be like that for us too.

Goethe Knew What's Up

“We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.”

“The way you see people is the way you treat them, and the way you treat them is what they become.”

“If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.” 

 “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it!”

“I have possessed that heart, that noble soul, in whose presence I seemed to be more than I really was, because I was all that I could be.”

“If you've never eaten while crying you don't know what life tastes like.” 

“As soon as you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: First Part 

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.” 

“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and, if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
~ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

Nothing Cuts Like Love

Love
by Radmila Lazić

I sharpened knives
All night.
To welcome you
In the brilliance of their blades,
And among them,
My love sparkles
For your eyes only.

Radmila Lazic, born in 1949, is one of the best living Serbian poets. She is the author of six collections of poetry, for which she received several literary prizes. She has published numerous essays on literature and is the editor of an anthology of women's poetry and another of anti-war letters, and the founder and editor of the journal Profemina. Wake for the Living is the first translation of her poetry into English.
 

The Nails 
by W.S. Merwin

I gave you sorrow to hang on your wall

Like a calendar in one color.

I wear a torn place on my sleeve.

It isn't as simple as that.

 

Between no place of mine and no place of yours

You'd have thought I'd know the way by now

Just from thinking it over.

Oh I know

I've no excuse to be stuck here turning

Like a mirror on a string,

Except it's hardly credible how

It all keeps changing.

Loss has a wider choice of directions

Than the other thing.

 

As if I had a system

I shuffle among the lies

Turning them over, if only

I could be sure what I'd lost.

I uncover my footprints, I

Poke them till the eyes open.

They don't recall what it looked like.

When was I using it last?

Was it like a ring or a light

Or the autumn pond

Which chokes and glitters but

Grows colder?

It could be all in the mind.  Anyway

Nothing seems to bring it back to me.

 

And I've been to see

Your hands as trees borne away on a flood,

The same film over and over,

And an old one at that, shattering its account

To the last of the digits, and nothing

And the blank end.

 

The lightning has shown me the scars of the future.

 

I've had a long look at someone

Alone like a key in a lock

Without what it takes to turn.

 

It isn't as simple as that.

 

Winter will think back to your lit harvest

For which there is no help, and the seed

Of eloquence will open its wings

When you are gone.

But at this moment

When the nails are kissing the fingers good-bye

And my only

Chance is bleeding from me,

When my one chance is bleeding,

For speaking either truth or comfort

I have no more tongue than a wound.

 

 

W. S. Merwin, The Second Four Books of Poems: The Moving Target The Lice The Carriers of Ladders Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment (Copper Canyon Press, 1993)

The Struggle for Human Decency

Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell: In 1936 George Orwell traveled to Spain as a volunteer to fight Fascism in the Spanish Civil War. For a little over a year he did just this, on and off, before he was shot in the throat and returned to England, where he wrote an account of his experiences. The book investigates the roots and effects of fascist regimes, the people and landscape of northern Spain, the daily tedium of military life, and his own inspirations and disillusion with what he called the "struggle for human decency."

Like You

Roque Dalton's "Like You"

Like You

Like you I
love love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky-
blue landscape of January days.


And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.
I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.


And that my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.

translated by Jack Hirschman

Como Tú

Yo, como tú,
amo el amor, la vida, el dulce encanto
de las cosas, el paisaje
celeste de los días de enero.

También mi sangre bulle
y río por los ojos
que han conocido el brote de las lágrimas.

Creo que el mundo es bello,
que la poesía es como el pan, de todos.

Y que mis venas no terminan en mí
sino en la sangre unánime
de los que luchan por la vida,
el amor,
las cosas,
el paisaje y el pan,
la poesía de todos.
 

Compassion

He asked me about compassion. This was all I could think to say:

“A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” 

~ Albert Einstein

“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” 

~ Mother Teresa

“for there is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.” 

~ Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being  

It is the most beautiful word in the English language.

The Timid, the Weak, and Timorous Need Not Apply

“You only need one man to love you. But him to love you free like a wildfire, crazy like the moon, always like tomorrow, sudden like an inhale and overcoming like the tides. Only one man and all of this.” ~ C. JoyBell C.
 

The girl is a wildfire. She'll set your mind on fire and rain thunder in your dreams. She'll dance across fields in your heart like she's chasing a hurricane. And she'll run. She'll run like the tides chasing the moon. She'll slip through your fingers like quicksilver. But maybe, just maybe, if you softly sing your siren song, she'll swim to your distant shore. And moor with you, in the sea.

Word of the Day

anthos, n.

Etymology:  Greek ἄνθος flower.

Obs.

 

  Formerly applied to Rosemary as ‘the flower’ par excellence.

1585   H. Llwyd tr. Pope John XXI Treasury of Health (new ed.) I iiij,   Basyll, Anthos, and suche whych comforteth the herte.

1728   E. Chambers Cycl.   Anthos..signifies Flower; but by way of Excellency is appropriated to Rosemary.

These Fragile Threads

"How people treat other people is a direct reflection of how they feel about themselves."
~ Paulo Coelho

Epiphanic

I'd wasted days trying to reconcile the seeming contradiction. Endlessly sifting through the hours to separate the false from the true. Then today, a ridiculously quotidian moment, combing my hair after a shower, I caught a glimpse of my reversed image in the steam-fogged mirror, a strange, sad face staring back at me through my eyes. I realized the seeming contradiction was my own invention. Both things were simultaneously true. I'd misunderstood. It’s easy to imagine you’ve misheard. I'd wanted to believe. You knew that. I'd wanted to believe that one statement was true and the other a lie. That would make it easier: if one statement is true then I can hate you. Truly hate you. Never think of you again. Obliterate all trace of you from my mind. If the other is true, then you will return to me. If both are true. None of these things will happen.

Destruction Without Remorse

“I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”
  ~ William Blake, Jerusalem

THE POISON TREE

I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe;
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I water'd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears;
And I sunned it with my smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.

And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright;
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine,

And into my garden stole
When the night had veil'd the pole:
In the morning glad I see
My foe outstretch'd beneath the tree.
~ William Blake

"Men are admitted into heaven not because they have curbed and governed their passions or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings. The treasures of heaven are not negations of passion, but realities of intellect, from which all the passions emanate uncurbed in their eternal glory."
~ William Blake

The Smile

There is a smile of love,
And there is a smile of deceit,
And there is a smile of smiles
In which these two smiles meet.

And there is a frown of hate,
And there is a frown of disdain,
And there is a frown of frowns
Which you strive to forget in vain,

For it sticks in the heart's deep core
And it sticks in the deep backbone--
And no smile that ever was smil'd,
But only one smile alone,

That betwixt the cradle and grave
It only once smil'd can be;
And, when it once is smil'd,
There's an end to all misery.
~ William Blake

"Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained; and the restrainer or reason usurps its place & governs the unwilling.
And being restrain'd it by degrees becomes passive till it is only the shadow of desire."
~ William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

The Genius of the Crowd

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect

like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock

their finest art

~ Uncle Buk

Fire and Ice

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say in ice.

From what I’ve tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.

But if it had to perish twice,

I think I know enough of hate

To say that for destruction ice

Is also great

And would suffice.

~ Robert Frost

Moby Dick Truly Does Contain the Truth to Everything

Epilogue

"And I only am escaped alone to tell thee." -- Job

        "The drama's done," says our narrator, called Ishmael, the sole survivor of this fictional sinking of a whaleship by a Sperm Whale. One true and documented case, known to Melville, was the sinking of the Whaleship Essex of Nantucket, Captain George Pollard, Jr., by a Sperm Whale in the Pacific in 1820.
        Ishmael, whose identity has been subordinated for many chapters, now must explain to his listeners how it was that he survived. It seems that he was assigned to Ahab's boat after Fedallah was lost. He was dumped out of the boat on the third day, but did not climb back in -- so he watched the sinking of the Pequod from a safe distance. He was able to describe how the very last sight of her was of Tashtego still nailing a red flag, together with the wing of an unlucky sea hawk, to the top of her mast as he and the ship sank beneath the water. This, of course, is a hard-to-swallow but symbolic statement of the diabolic nature of Ahab's voyage of revenge. But in the end it was Moby Dick, the archetype that inhabits the collective unconscious symbolized by the sea, who tasted revenge.
        Parenthetically, It is remarkable that Melville would have Tashtego, the American Indian, be the human agent to drag the free-flying bird of prey down with the ship named for an American Indian tribe.
        Although on the edge of the vortex caused by the sinking ship, nevertheless Ishmael found himself drawn in, spinning round and round: "Like another Ixion did I revolve" (Melville here shares his knowledge of obscure myth: Ixion was condemned by Zeus to ride an eternally revolving wheel in Hades). And what was Ishmael's life-preserver? Why Queequeg's coffin life-buoy, of course!

        "And now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirge-like main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew nearer, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan." 

FINIS  

*Taken with extreme liberty from Melville.org

"The pure products of America go crazy"

To Elsie

By William Carlos Williams

 

The pure products of America

go crazy—

mountain folk from Kentucky

or the ribbed north end of

Jersey

with its isolate lakes and

valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves

old names

and promiscuity between

devil-may-care men who have taken

to railroading

out of sheer lust of adventure—

and young slatterns, bathed

in filth

from Monday to Saturday

to be tricked out that night

with gauds

from imaginations which have no

peasant traditions to give them

character

but flutter and flaunt

sheer rags—succumbing without

emotion

save numbed terror

under some hedge of choke-cherry

or viburnum—

which they cannot express—

Unless it be that marriage

perhaps

with a dash of Indian blood

will throw up a girl so desolate

so hemmed round

with disease or murder

that she'll be rescued by an

agent—

reared by the state and

sent out at fifteen to work in

some hard-pressed

house in the suburbs—

some doctor's family, some Elsie—

voluptuous water

expressing with broken

brain the truth about us—

her great

ungainly hips and flopping breasts

addressed to cheap

jewelry

and rich young men with fine eyes

as if the earth under our feet

were

an excrement of some sky

and we degraded prisoners

destined

to hunger until we eat filth

while the imagination strains

after deer

going by fields of goldenrod in

the stifling heat of September

Somehow

it seems to destroy us

It is only in isolate flecks that

something

is given off

No one

to witness

and adjust, no one to drive the car

 

 

William Carlos Williams, “To Elsie” from The Collected Poems of William Carlos Williams, Volume I, 1909-1939, edited by Christopher MacGowan. Copyright 1938, 1944, 1945 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

Source: The Collected Poems: Volume I 1909-1939 (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1945)