Trust [countdown: 1... 0...]

A last flying visit... I'm leaving today, one day earlier than planned, for my one-year-stay in Greece -- out of the already-known into the unknown -- a journey I've longed for from time immemorial.

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Creative action plays with the unknown.
But as the child fears the dark,
full of big dogs and mental monsters
formed from fantasies,

the adult child will be fearful too,
faced with the dark world of the unknown mind,
with vast concepts looking enormous
just beyond the front yard.

Peering out, he sees no parents
in the darkness of that land
where he has never been.

The unknown is uncontrolled,
no strategies exist that will enclose
the endless territory of the new.

Only trust in yourself and in this world
can carry you past the watchdogs of your fears
and out of the iron gates of the already-known.

~ Arthur Deikman ~

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What am I, after all, but a child, pleas'd with the sound of my own
name? repeating it over and over;
I stand apart to hear -- it never tires me.

To you, your name also;
Did you think there was nothing but two or three pronunciations in
the sound of your name?

~ Walt Whitman ~

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Strength [countdown: 2]

Strength, strength is what I want. Strength not to endure, I have that -- and it has made me weak -- but strength to act.

~ Susan Sontag ~

One Art [countdown: 4... 3...]

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

~ Elizabeth Bishop ~

The Ghazal of What Hurt [countdown: 5]

(from the archives, taken in January 2006)


Pain froze you, for years — and fear — leaving scars.
But now, as though miraculously, it seems, here you are

walking easily across the ground, and into town
as though you were floating on air, which in part you are,

or riding a wave of what feels like the world's good will —
though helped along by something foreign and older than you are

and yet much younger too, inside you, and so palpable
an X-ray, you're sure, would show it, within the body you are,

not all that far beneath the skin, and even in
some bones. Making you wonder: Are you what you are —

with all that isn't actually you having flowed
through and settled in you, and made you what you are?

The pain was never replaced, nor was it quite erased.
It's memory now — so you know just how lucky you are.

You didn't always. Were you then? And where's the fear?
Inside your words, like an engine? The car you are?!

Face it, friend, you most exist when you're driven
away, or on — by forms and forces greater than you are.

~ Peter Cole ~

The Next Door [countdown: 6]

(from the archives, taken in May 2009)


Delivered out of raw continual pain,
smell of darkness, groans of those others
to whom she was chained --

unchained, and led
past the sleepers,
door after door silently opening --
out!
And along a long street's
majestic emptiness under the moon:

one hand on the angel's shoulder, one
feeling the air before her,
eyes open but fixed...

And not till she saw the angel had left her,
alone and free to resume
the ecstatic, dangerous, wearisome roads of
what she had still to do,
not till then did she recognize
this was no dream. More frightening
than arrest, than being chained to her warders:
she could hear her own footsteps suddenly.
Had the angel's feet
made any sound? She could not recall.
No one had missed her, no one was in pursuit.
She herself must be
the key, now, to the next door,
the next terrors of freedom and joy.

~ Denise Levertov ~

I'm Alive, I Believe In Everything [countdown: 7]

I'm Alive, I Believe In Everything

Self. Brotherhood. God. Zeus. Communism.
Capitalism. Buddha. Vinyl records.
Baseball. Ink. Trees. Cures for disease.
Saltwater. Literature. Walking. Waking.
Arguments. Decisions. Ambiguity. Absolutes.
Presence. Absence. Positive and Negative.
Empathy. Apathy. Sympathy and entropy.
Verbs are necessary. So are nouns.
Empty skies. Dark vacuums of night.
Visions. Revisions. Innocence.
I've seen All the empty spaces yet to be filled.
I've heard All of the sounds that will collect
at the end of the world.
And the silence that follows.

I'm alive, I believe in everything
I'm alive, I believe in it all.

Waves lapping on the shore.
Skies on fire at sunset.
Old men dancing on the streets.
Paradox and possibility.
Sense and sensibility.
Cold logic and half truth.
Final steps and first impressions.
Fools and fine intelligence.
Chaos and clean horizons.
Vague notions and concrete certainty.
Optimism in the face of adversity.

I'm alive, I believe in everything
I'm alive, I believe in it all.

~ Lesley Choyce ~

A Thing of Beauty [countdown: 8]

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its lovliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkn'd ways
Made for our searching: yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep; and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in; and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season; the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms:
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

~ John Keats ~

Sing To Me [countdown: 9]

Sing to me! Something of sunlight and bloom,
I am so compassed with sorrow and gloom,
I am so sick with the world’s noise and strife, --
Sing of the beauty and brightness of life --
Sing to me, sing to me!

Sing to me! Something that’s jubilant, glad!
I am so weary, my soul so sad.
All my earth riches are covered with rust,
All my bright dreams are but ashes and dust.
Sing to me, sing to me!

Sing of the blossoms that open in spring,
How the sweet flowers blow, and the long lichens cling,
Say, though the winter is round about me,
There are bright summers and springs yet to be.
Sing to me, sing to me!

Sing me a song full of hope and of truth,
Brimming with all the sweet fancies of youth!
Say, though my sorrow I may not forget,
I have not quite done with happiness yet.
Sing to me, sing to me!

Lay your soft fingers just here, on my cheek;
Turn the light lower -- there -- no, do not speak,
But sing! My heart thrills at your beautiful voice;
Sing till I turn from my grief and rejoice.
Sing to me, sing to me!

~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox ~

Moving Forward [countdown: 10]

Und wieder rauscht mein tiefes Leben lauter,
als ob es jetzt in breitern Ufern ginge.
Immer verwandter werden mir die Dinge
und alle Bilder immer angeschauter.
Dem Namenlosen fühl ich mich vertrauter:
Mit meinen Sinnen, wie mit Vögeln, reiche
ich in die windigen Himmel aus der Eiche,
und in den abgebrochnen Tag der Teiche
sinkt, wie auf Fischen stehend, mein Gefühl.

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The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
That I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can't reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
in the ponds broken off from the sky
my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~


(translated by Robert Bly)

For we are only hull and leaf... [countdown: 11]

Denn wir sind nur die Schale und das Blatt.
Der große Tod, den jeder in sich hat,
das ist die Frucht, um die sich alles dreht.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

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"For we are only hull and leaf..."

We all carry the seed of death, the potential "fruit", within us and much of our frenzied efforts and activity is prompted by the inevitability of this fruit's ripening. Girls and boys, mothers, artists, and architects all long and spin and turn and shape because death looms in the background. In fact, much of our emotional and intellectual activity is a product of our being aware of this fruit, which is so painfully slow in maturing.

~ Annemarie S. Kidder ~

Flourishing True [countdown: 12]

We are alive our very breath singing.
We live beyond certainty, constantly stretching.

We are the lucky who live beyond,
in a swirl of questioning,
broadening. Reach...
We stretch in our borderless
matrix of gestures,
our instruments urge us,
our melodies carry us...
towards where you sit,
in that daring front row.
You await our flowering intonations,
the hint of the glorious flourishing new.

Paintbrush, melodies, give us their clues,
In hours of practise, its you were befriending.
Authentic, blended and lifted, we woo
the small beauty of a perfect ending.

With golden fingers our harmonies fuse,
the secrets of the gardens weve tended
the streggle for the pure, authentic,
were dancing on strings,
towards a God amused,
a cosmos applauding.
What we've tried to accomplish,
at such great odds,
is beauty, melding audience with artist.
Humanity flourishing true.

We are the workers who bring you the true
and the new and the old again, remade for you,
we are alive, our breath has a view,
Weve striven and surfaced, and now were all new.

~ Judith Pordon ~

nothing more [countdown: 13]

Wake up. Day calls you
to your life: your duty.
And to live, nothing more.
Root it out of the glum
night and the darkness
that covered your body
for which light waited
on tiptoe in the dawn.
Stand up, affirm the straight
simple will to be
a pure slender virgin.
Test your bodys metal.
Cold, heat? Your blood
will tell against the snow,
or behind the window.
The colour
in your cheeks will tell.
And look at people. Rest
doing no more than adding
your perfection to another
day. Your task
is to carry your life high,
and play with it, hurl it
like a voice to the clouds
so it may retrieve the light
already gone from us.
That is your fate: to live.
Do nothing.
Your work is you, nothing more.

~ Pedro Salinas ~

child [little K. & Ruth]

Taken about 42 years ago... one of the very few childhood photos I own.

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Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new

Whose name you meditate --
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little

Stalk without wrinkle,
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical

Not this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.

~ Sylvia Plath ~

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You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.

Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.

~ Margaret Atwood ~

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free flight

This is thy hour, O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou lovest best,
Night, sleep, death, and the stars.

~ Walt Whitman ~

Be Not Weary [self-reflexion]

Sometimes, when I am toil-worn and aweary,
And tired out with working long and well,
And earth is dark, and skies above are dreary,
And heart and soul are all too sick to tell,
These words have come to me like angel fingers
Pressing the spirit's eyelids down in sleep,
'Oh let us not be weary in well doing,
For in due season we shall surely reap.'

Oh, blessed promise! When I seem to hear it,
Whispered by angel voices on the air,
It breathes new life and courage to my spirit,
And gives me strength to suffer and forbear.
And I can wait most patiently for harvest,
And cast my seeds, nor ever faint, nor weep,
If I know surely that my work availeth,
And in God's season, I at last shall reap.

When mind and body were borne down completely,
And I have thought my efforts were all in vain,
These words have come to me so softly, sweetly,
And whispered hope, and urged me on again.
And though my labour seems all unavailing,
And all my striving fruitless, yet the Lord
Doth treasure up each little seed I scatter,
And sometime, sometime, I shall reap the reward.

~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox ~

The Untrustworthy Speaker [self-reflexion]

Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken.
I don’t see anything objectively.

I know myself; I’ve learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
That’s when I’m least to be trusted.

It’s very sad, really: all my life I’ve been praised
For my intelligence, my posers of language, of insight –
In the end they’re wasted –

I never see myself,
Standing on the front steps. Holding my sisters hand.
That’s why I can’t account
For the bruises on her arm where the sleeve ends…

In my own mind, I’m invisible: that’s why I’m dangerous.
People like me, who seem selfless.
We’re the cripples, the liars:
We’re the ones who should be factored out
In the interest of truth.

When I’m quiet, that’s when the truth emerges.
A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers,
Underneath, a little gray house. The azaleas
Read and bright pink.

If you want the truth, you have to close yourself
To the older sister, block her out:
When a living thing is hurt like that
In its deepest workings,
All function is altered.

That’s why I’m not to be trusted.
Because a wound to the heart
Is also a wound to the mind.

~ Louise Gluck ~

Mad Girl's Love Song [self-reflexion]

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

~ Sylvia Plath ~

In Plaster [self-reflexion]

I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now:
This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one,
And the white person is certainly the superior one.
She doesn't need food, she is one of the real saints.
At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality --
She lay in bed with me like a dead body
And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was

Only much whiter and unbreakable and with no complaints.
I couldn't sleep for a week, she was so cold.
I blamed her for everything, but she didn't answer.
I couldn't understand her stupid behavior!
When I hit her she held still, like a true pacifist.
Then I realized what she wanted was for me to love her:
She began to warm up, and I saw her advantages.

Without me, she wouldn't exist, so of course she was grateful.
I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose
Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain,
And it was I who attracted everybody's attention,
Not her whiteness and beauty, as I had at first supposed.
I patronized her a little, and she lapped it up --
You could tell almost at once she had a slave mentality.

I didn't mind her waiting on me, and she adored it.
In the morning she woke me early, reflecting the sun
From her amazingly white torso, and I couldn't help but notice
Her tidiness and her calmness and her patience:
She humored my weakness like the best of nurses,
Holding my bones in place so they would mend properly.
In time our relationship grew more intense.

She stopped fitting me so closely and seemed offish.
I felt her criticizing me in spite of herself,
As if my habits offended her in some way.
She let in the drafts and became more and more absent-minded.
And my skin itched and flaked away in soft pieces
Simply because she looked after me so badly.
Then I saw what the trouble was: she thought she was immortal.

She wanted to leave me, she thought she was superior,
And I'd been keeping her in the dark, and she was resentful --
Wasting her days waiting on a half-corpse!
And secretly she began to hope I'd die.
Then she could cover my mouth and eyes, cover me entirely,
And wear my painted face the way a mummy-case
Wears the face of a pharaoh, though it's made of mud and water.

I wasn't in any position to get rid of her.
She'd supported me for so long I was quite limp --
I had forgotten how to walk or sit,
So I was careful not to upset her in any way
Or brag ahead of time how I'd avenge myself.
Living with her was like living with my own coffin:
Yet I still depended on her, though I did it regretfully.

I used to think we might make a go of it together --
After all, it was a kind of marriage, being so close.
Now I see it must be one or the other of us.
She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy,
But she'll soon find out that that doesn't matter a bit.
I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her,
And she'll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me.

~ Sylvia Plath ~

Dismembered Angel [self-portrait]

Dismembered angel
In whose heart the earth is still on fire,
The moon still has not been split-off;
Here is the message
Your long night announces:

Everything my eye encompasses this instant:
This fire, the cupped-hand, this window
With trees and miles of snow beyond it,
Even this thought, this poem,
Will be compressed
Into a lump of your sleep
For some other awakening.

~ Charles Simic ~

The First Dream [self-portrait]

Key sentence: Imagining something is better than remembering something. (John Irwing, The World According To Garp)

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The Wind is ghosting around the house tonight
and as I lean against the door of sleep
I begin to think about the first person to dream,
how quiet he must have seemed the next morning

as the others stood around the fire
draped in the skins of animals
talking to each other only in vowels,
for this was long before the invention of consonants.

He might have gone off by himself to sit
on a rock and look into the mist of a lake
as he tried to tell himself what had happened,
how he had gone somewhere without going,

how he had put his arms around the neck
of a beast that the others could touch
only after they had killed it with stones,
how he felt its breath on his bare neck.

Then again, the first dream could have come
to a woman, though she would behave,
I suppose, much the same way,
moving off by herself to be alone near water,

except that the curve of her young shoulders
and the tilt of her downcast head
would make her appear to be terribly alone,
and if you were there to notice this,

you might have gone down as the first person
to ever fall in love with the sadness of another.

~ Billy Collins ~

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framework [self-reflexion]

No, I will go alone.
I will come back when it's over.
Yes, of course I love you.
No, it will not be long.
Why may you not come with me? —
You are too much my lover.
You would put yourself
Between me and song.

[...]

You and I have nothing to do with music.
We may not make of music a filigree frame,
Within which you and I,
Tenderly glad we came,
Sit smiling, hand in hand.

Come now, be content.
I will come back to you, I swear I will;
And you will know me still.
I shall be only a little taller
Than when I went.

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay ~