March 2010
27 posts
from St. Francis and the Sow. Galway Kinnell
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing; though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing
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Woman in Love. Rilke
Yes I long for you. I glide,
losing myself, out of my own hand,
without hope of conquering
what comes of me, as if out of your side,
grave and stark and undeterred.
…back then: O how complete I was,
nothing calling, nothing that divulged me;
my stillness was like a stone’s
over which the brook makes its murmuring.
But now in these spring weeks
something has slowly broken...
O Living Always, Always Dying. Walt Whitman
O living always, always dying!
O the burials of me past and present,
O me while I stride ahead, material, visible, imperious as ever;
O me, what I was for years, now dead, (I lament not, I am content;)
O to disengage myself from those corpses of me, which I turn and look at where I cast them,
To pass on, (O living! always living!) and leave the corpses behind.
“All presence has authority, a force and radiance, unreserved and yet...”
– On Presence. Ralph Harper
on presence. ralph harper
Nothing restores the sense of being alive less ambiguously than the birth of the unexpected, the finding of a person who one did not know one loved so much.
A Love Song. John Berger
The mountains are pitiless
the rain is melting the snow
it will freeze again.
In the cafe two strangers
play the accordian
and a roomful of men are singing.
Tunes are filling
the sacks of the heart
the troughs of the eyes.
Words are filling
the stalls
which bellow between the ears.
Music shaves the jowls
loosens the joints,
the only cure for rheumatism.
Music cleans the nails
...
“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do...”
– Mark Twain (via yoursummerheart)
“To exist is an art. The subjective thinker is aesthetic enough for his life to...”
– Kierkegaard.
Inquietude. Rilke
…
This round bird-call
rests in the instant that engenders it
huge as the sky above the withered forest
docilely things take their place in this call
in it the entire landscape seems to rest.
Twentieth Century Storm. John Berger
Lightning the scythe
is cutting down the rain.
Swathes of water
fall like the clothes
—o the great coats for parting
the great great coats
that never returned!
fall like the clothes
of the far away
on the sky’s empty field.
And in the grass of this rain
flowers
which grew with the strength of rivers
—o the pockets of the ferryman
packed with the letters
silences...
