Silence.

Like the little stream

Making its way

Through the mossy crevices

I, too, quietly

Turn clear and transparent.

Ryokan (1758-1831)

Working Late

A light is on in my father's study.
"Still up?" he says, and we are silent,
looking at the harbor lights,
listening to the surf
and the creak of coconut boughs.

He is working late on cases.
No impassioned speech! He argues from evidence,
actually pacing out and measuring,
while the fans revolving on the ceiling
winnow the true from the false.

Once he passed a brass curtain rod
through a head made out of plaster
and showed the jury the angle of fire--
where the murderer must have stood.
For years, all through my childhood,
if I opened a closet . . . bang!
There would be the dead man's head
with a black hole in the forehead.

All the arguing in the world
will not stay the moon.
She has come all the way from Russia
to gaze for a while in a mango tree
and light the wall of a veranda,
before resuming her interrupted journey
beyond the harbor and the lighthouse
at Port Royal, turning away
from land to the open sea.

Yet, nothing in nature changes, from that day to this,
she is still the mother of us all.
I can see the drifting offshore lights,
black posts where the pelicans brood.

And the light that used to shine
at night in my father's study
now shines as late in mine.

Louis Simpson

Setting my teeth in the silver of the moon.

i will wade out
till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers

i will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness

in the sleeping curves of my body
shall enter fingers of smooth mastery
with chasteness of sea-girls
will i complete the mystery
of my flesh

i will rise
after a thousand years
lipping
flowers

and set my teeth in the silver of the moon

E.E. Cummings, 1894 – 1962

More Whitman

WHEN lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,

And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.


O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;

Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,

And thought of him I love.

Walt Whitman

When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, part I (1865)

(Composed after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln)

A martini, a banquette table, and Miss Dorothy

Inventory

Four be the things I am wiser to know:
Idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.

Four be the things I'd been better without:
Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.

Three be the things I shall never attain:
Envy, content, and sufficient champagne.

Three be the things I shall have till I die:
Laughter and hope and a sock in the eye.

- Dorothy Parker

Being yourself.

Considering whom to please.

The Redwoods

Mountains are moving, rivers
are hurrying. But we
are still.

We have the thoughts of giants--
clouds, and at night the stars.

And we have names-- guttural, grotesque--
Hamet, Og-- names with no syllables.

And perish, one by one, our roots
gnawed by the mice. And fall.

And are too slow for death, and change
to stone. Or else too quick,

like candles in a fire. Giants
are lonely. We have waited long

for someone. By our waiting, surely
there must be someone at whose touch

our boughs would bend; and hands
to gather us; a spirit

to whom we are light as the hawthorn tree.
O if there is a poet

let him come now! We stand at the Pacific
like great unmarried girls,

turning in our heads the stars and clouds,
considering whom to please.

-- Louis Simpson

Circuit Party

My friend Jeremy Glazier wrote this poem, currently published with a bit more of his work here.

Circuit Party

Beautiful boys with glistening skin,
their eyes aglaze with ecstasy,
wait for the night to come full circuit,
bare—chested and thrusting to a rhythm.

If their eyes are aglaze with ecstasy,
their hearts and minds are ablaze with love,
bare-chested and thrusting to a rhythm
they won't remember in the morning.

Their hearts and minds indeed blaze with love,
or what they think of as love.
But they won't remember in the morning
the things they whisper to one another.

What they think of as love
is the pulse they feel beneath the music.
The things they whisper to one another
on the dance floor shimmer just out of reach.

What is that pulse they feel beneath the music?
Something primitive, that keeps them moving.
On the dance floor, shimmering just out of reach,
they somehow understand what is to come.

Something primitive keeps us moving,
like beautiful boys with glistening skin.
Somehow we too understand what is. Come.
Wait for the night to come full circuit.

What was that splash? Oh, never mind.

This poem seems to speak to the disconnected bewilderment that Americans so often demonstrate when faced with torture, famine, disaster, and injustices in far-flung parts of the world. Frankly, too many of us show this kind of reaction when confronted with similar atrocities in our own backyards.

I wonder if this kind of fragmented, disjointed approach to the suffering of others is something that's inherent in all people, or is it just peculiar to Americans? It seems to take such an enormous event to get Americans to take political or social action in numbers large enough to facilitate immediate and lasting change. Perhaps that's why people are getting so excited about Barack Obama and his somewhat nebulous plans for the presidency. People are hoping to feel like they're connected to each other again through their shared citizenship and common goals.

Unfortunately, I think it's a crock. When it comes down to it, people will usually act only when their own self-interest dictates it. I hate to admit it, but it seems to be true.

Musée des Beaux Arts
by W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

How when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting

For the miraculous birth, there always must be

Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating

On a pond at the edge of the wood:

They never forgot

That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot

Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse

Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away

Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may

Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone

As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green

Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,

Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.