The bird (Octavio Paz)

This one really gets me going.  La luz! La luz!

The Bird

In transparent silence

day was resting:

the transparency of space

was silence’s transparency.

Motionless light of the sky was soothing

the growth of the grass.

Small things of earth, among the stones,

under identical light, were stones

Time sated itself in the minute.

And in an absorbed stillness

noonday consumed itself.

And a bird sang, slender arrow.

The sky shivered a wounded silver breast,

the leaves moved,

and grass awoke.

And I knew that death was an arrow

let fly from an unknown hand

and in the flicker of an eye we die.


from Bajo Tu Clara Sombra/"Under Your Clear Shadow"
1935-1944

Thoughts on the uprising in Egypt

Daniel Levine to Eliot Cardinaux  

That's cool. The situation in egypt is really interesting and I've only had time to follow it superficially. Maybe I can catch up on it this weekend. From what I understand this could be a really positive thing, but there are a lot of people interseted in exploiting the situation and it's too soon to say how things will unfold.. (?)  I saw footage of protestors in egypt and in washignton. It was really moving. These people feel like this is their moment and it's like an affirmation of humanity that everyone is protesting. I saw some footage of a clash in Egypt too, where people were throwing stones. I couldn't tell-- it seemed like they were all just throwing stones at a big fence in front of a big highway. It seemed really absurd and senseless. It looked like some people were trying to mediate things and talk to others in the crowd. It was so chaotic, and yet, it totally reminded me of new york, when something interesting happens, as it does from time to time.
Maybe this is just the beginning of a wave of peaceful revolutions in the mideast. And once the people there start running democracies on their own, well, we really wont have any moral justification to keep fucking with them. Maybe this could de-escalate the whole thing.

And eliot’s reply

Hard to say how it will turn out, I was struck by what it meant - what this wave of protests toward democracy in the middle east might lead to here - have you read Helen in Egypt?  its a poem by H.D. that's based on the idea that Helen was not in fact in Troy at all, and that the men were fighting over an illusion.  I think these protests are inherently a good thing, and I'm sad to see violence "at its core" (as the news has shown – , our government is falteringly trying to employ old rhetoric, and I do feel strongly the impact of the protests) here, its moving, and at the same time, saddening.  If looked at from a point of view of our government, I don't know how to handle it for long. 
 

    Feb. 4^th, 2011

The Answer - Robert Creeley

  The Answer

Will we speak to each other
making the grass bend as if
a wind were before us, will our

way be as graceful, as
substantial as the movement
of something moving so gently.

We break things in pieces like
walls we break ourselves into
hearing them fall just to hear it.

from Words

Haikai

Here is a sort of silly link to the rules of Haikai, an ancient form of collaborative poetry

http://www.wikihow.com/Play-Haikai-%28Collaborative-Poetry-Game%29

Bei Dao - Toxin

I don’t consider myself a once expatriate, but I admire this guy.


  Toxin

tobacco's breath catches short

an exile's window aims at
deep-sea wings released into flight
music of a winter's day sailing closer
like a flag shedding its colors

it's yesterday's wind, its love

remorse deep as the fall of heavy snow
when a stone reveals the end result
I take this moment to weep for the rest of my life

give me another name

I've made a disguise of misfortune
shelter from the mother tongue's solar blaze


Bei Dao, written somewhere between 1991 and 1994

Years of Indescretion (a John Ashbery poem)

Years of Indescretion

Whatever your eye alights on this morning is yours:
Dotted rhythms of colors as they fade to the color,
A grey agate, translucent and firm, with nothing
Beyond its putrifying reach. It's all there.
These are things offered to your participation.

These pebbles in a row are the seasons.
This is a house in which you may wish to live.
There are more than any of us to choose from
But each must live its own time.

And with the urging of the year each hastens onward separately
In strange sensations of emptiness, anguish, romantic
Outbursts, visions and wraiths. One meeting
Cancels another.  "The seven-league boot
Gliding hither and tither of its own accord"
Salutes these forms for what they now are:

Fables that time invents
To explain its passing. They entertain
The very young and the very old, and not
One's standing up in them to shoulder
Task and vision, vision in the form of a task
So that the present seems like yesterday
And yesterday the place where we left off a little while ago.


John Ashbery, from
 The Double Dream of Spring

Some Kafka

‎"There is within everyone a devil which gnaws the nights to destruction, and that is neither good nor bad, rather, it is life: if you did not have it, you could not live. So what you curse in yourself is your life. This devil is the material (and a fundamentally wonderful one) which you have been given and which you must now make use of..... On the Charles Bridge in Prague, there is a relief under the statue of a saint, which tells your story. The saint is ploughing a field there and has harnessed a devil to the plough. Of course, the devil is still furious (hence the transitional stage; as long as the devil is not satisfied the victory is not complete), he bares his teeth, looks back at his master with a crooked, nasty expression and convusively retracts his tail; nevertheless, he is submitted to the yoke..."

 

Franz Kafka

(from a letter to a friend)