everything loose

2009-04-20T17:52:00.000-07:00

the angels here
have pigeons' wings
blue collars
washed in sweat
the common salt
in tears
tongues swirl
in a stew of cultures
singing asphalt songs
in the midst of seagulls
bebop atop
the San Andreas
a humble plate
of beings

- Kamau Daáood, "Los Angeles"

2009-03-11T21:56:00.000-07:00

Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us. - Hebrews 12:1

2009-01-26T08:00:00.000-08:00

This blog is two years old today! I've been horribly neglectful, however. A summer in New York is death to an LA photo blog, but with the new year, I am newly resigned to document the city. More soon!

2008-06-06T09:32:00.001-07:00

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

- William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

2008-06-01T18:33:00.000-07:00

And the talk slid north, and the talk slid south
With the sliding puffs from the hookah-mouth;
Four things greater than all things are
Women and Horses and Power and War

- Rudyard Kipling, "Ballad of the King's Jest"

2008-05-26T11:23:00.000-07:00

Unknown faces in the street
And winter coming on. I
Stand in the last moments of
The city, no more a child,
Only a man, -- one who has
Looked upon his own nakedness
Without shame, and in defeat
Has seen nothing to bless.
Touched once, like a plum, I turned
Rotten in the meat, or like
The plum blossom I never
Saw, hard at the edges, burned
At the first entrance of life,
And so endured, unreckoned,
Untaken, with nothing to give.
The first Jew was God; the second
Denied him; I am alive.

- Philip Levine, "The Turning"

2008-05-25T14:58:00.000-07:00

I like an escalator because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. There would never be an escalator temporarily out of order sign, only an escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience. - Mitch Hedberg

2008-05-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

Like streetlights
still lit
past dawn,
the dead
stare at us
from the framed
photographs.
You may say otherwise,
but there they are,
still here
traveling
continuously
backwards
without a sound
further and further
into the past.
- Malena Mörling, "Traveling"

2008-05-18T16:48:00.000-07:00

You have to forget about what other people say; when you're supposed to die, when you're supposed to be lovin'. You have to forget about all these things. You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven. - Jimi Hendrix

2008-05-05T07:56:00.000-07:00

The people Jesus loved were shopping at The Star Market yesterday.
An old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout
breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps.

Even after his bags were packed he still stood, breathing hard and
hawking into his hand. The feeble, the lame, I could hardly look at them:
shuffling through the aisles, they smelled of decay, as if The Star Market

had declared a day off for the able-bodied, and I had wandered in
with the rest of them: sour milk, bad meat:
looking for cereal and spring water.

Jesus must have been a saint, I said to myself, looking for my lost car
in the parking lot later, stumbling among the people who would have
been lowered into rooms by ropes, who would have crept

out of caves or crawled from the corners of public baths on their hands
and knees begging for mercy.

If I touch only the hem of his garment, one woman thought, I will be healed.
Could I bear the look on his face when he wheels around?

- Marie Howe, "The Star Market"

2008-05-01T10:04:00.000-07:00

The higher the buildings, the lower the morals. - Noel Coward

2008-03-06T07:10:00.001-08:00

"It is folly to punish your neighbor by fire
when you live next door." - Pubilius Syrus

2008-02-24T08:40:00.001-08:00

And there was a beautiful view
But nobody could see.
Cause everybody on the island
Was saying: Look at me! Look at me!

Laurie Anderson, "Language Is a Virus"

2008-02-23T10:36:00.000-08:00

I loathe people who keep dogs. They are cowards who haven't got the guts to bite people themselves. - August Strindberg

2008-02-17T14:42:00.000-08:00

The clouds sank down
down to the pavement
between five and seven tonight
taillight soup, headlight soup
we were swimming in fog light soup
down the highway in a daze
watching for the dim light
down the road, in the distance

- Raymond A. Foss, "Taillight Soup"

2008-01-26T10:47:00.001-08:00

One year ago today,
the first loose piece of Los Angeles tipped in to this site.

2008-01-12T12:19:00.001-08:00

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of a man at twice its natural size. - Virginia Woolf

2008-01-08T09:22:00.000-08:00

A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age. - Robert Frost

2008-01-05T09:31:00.001-08:00

Love looks through a telescope; envy, through a microscope.
- Josh Billings

2008-01-04T09:55:00.001-08:00

To want to write, but to lack words.
More accurately, to lack some
thing to feel.

This unpainted
desk, cars outside
proving themselves on the hill,
smoke from burning fields
slipping unnoticed under the sun
until someone drowns
in his own breath.
To listen for some wind.

To feel responsible for listening
and to be unmoved, an air sock
limp as an unfilled dunce's cap
waiting some change in the weather,
something full as the river
you fished last weekend
without luck

and then swimming saw
the whitefish
grazing on stones

the flickering trout steady
as mobiles suspended
on more levels
than you thought water
could contain.

- Ingrid Wendt, "Feeling Dry"

2007-12-30T11:16:00.001-08:00

Marilyn Monroe wasn’t Jean Harlow.
Jayne Mansfield wasn’t Marilyn Monroe.
Anna Nicole Smith wasn’t Jayne Mansfield.
Thankfully, there is only one Britney Spears.

But know, whoever you are,
whatever your gender, hair color, physique,
within you there does reside an unhappy blonde
archetype with enormous breasts.

It is her you need to contact.

- Elaine Equi, "#4 The Girl Can’t Help It (Jayne Mansfield unbuttons her blouse)" via Silliman's Blog

2007-12-23T16:38:00.000-08:00

My living will, waiting to be signed,
sits next to an old New Yorker
it's my ritual to read with breakfast
each morning, to finish
one issue before going to the next,
and this way I skip
the news merely timely—October 2004
with a fundraiser bringing Kerry
within blocks of President Bush
proves painful in December '05
but fast turning to find Graham Greene
his authorized biography reviewed,
I'm relieved, though perplexed, by
Because of an ambiguous comma
in a document Greene signed on his deathbed
other scholars were forbidden to quote . . .
and I wonder as I slowly eat
my oatmeal with raisins and cranberries
and four summer blueberries
I pick from their bag in my freezer,
gathering what pleases me, a woman of 73
with a will nearby, if I might not like
lingering in an ambiguous comma
someday, not rushing
to an afterlife I don't believe in,
drifting dreamily, held
for a day or two in its pause.

- Myra Shapiro, "Because of the Ambiguity"

2007-12-21T09:10:00.001-08:00

Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists.
- Donal Henahan

2007-12-19T11:19:00.001-08:00

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

2007-11-30T10:13:00.001-08:00

If you don't know where you are going,
any road will take you there. - Lewis Carroll

2007-11-19T07:21:00.001-08:00

Buy the ticket, take the ride. - Hunter S. Thompson

2007-11-16T07:26:00.001-08:00

I am your pilgrim, who wanders
to stay home; your monk,
who keeps silent when you demand
confessions and theology.

You are too difficult to love
directly; you have no roof
or floor, and I am too pious
for your rain and mud.

So I keep your shrine, the best of you,
the clean, the smiling rest of you.
I am a stubborn priest, who knows himself
only in the dwindling oil of you,
the weeping and rebellious flame
about to die.
- Val Vinokur, "Your Worship"

2007-11-11T09:30:00.000-08:00

Give my regards to Broadway
Remember me to Herald Square
Tell all the gang at Forty-second Street
That I will soon be there.
- George M. Cohan

2007-11-03T15:54:00.000-07:00

Much that is terrible we do not know. Much that is beautiful we shall still discover. Let's sail till we come to the edge.
- Thomas M. Disch

2007-10-31T12:44:00.001-07:00

It can be a fascinating game, noticing how any person with vitality and vigor will have a little splash of red in a costume, in a room, or in a garden. - Edgar Cayce

2007-10-28T11:51:00.000-07:00

The only sure thing about luck is that it will change. - Bret Harte

2007-10-22T08:05:00.000-07:00

Work hard all your young days
and they’ll find you too, some morning
staring up under
your chiffonier at its warped
bass-wood bottom and your soul —
out!
— among the little sparrows
behind the shutter.

- William Carlos Williams,
"January Morning: Suite 13"

2007-10-18T07:13:00.001-07:00

Time does go on—
I tell it gay to those who suffer now—
They shall survive—
There is a sun—
They don’t believe it now—

- Emily Dickinson

2007-10-16T07:21:00.001-07:00

Because life's too short to blush,
I keep my blood tucked in.
I won't be mortified
by what I drive or the flaccid
vivacity of my last dinner party.
I take my cue from statues posing only
in their shoulder pads of snow: all January
you can see them working on their granite tans.

That I woke at an ungainly hour,
stripped of the merchandise that clothed me,
distilled to pure suchness,
means not enough to anyone for me
to confess. I do not suffer
from the excess of taste
that spells embarrassment:
mothers who find their kids unseemly
in their condom earrings,
girls cringing to think
they could be frumpish as their mothers.
Though the late nonerotic Elvis
in his studded gut of jumpsuit
made everybody squeamish, I admit.
Rule one: the King must not elicit pity.

Was the audience afraid of being tainted
--this might rub off on me--
or were they--surrendering--
what a femme word--feeling
solicitous--glimpsing their fragility
in his reversible purples
and unwholesome goldish chains?

At least embarrassment is not an imitation.
It's intimacy for beginners,
the orgasm no one cares to fake.
I almost admire it. I almost wrote despise.

- Alice Fulton, "About Face"

2007-10-15T08:20:00.001-07:00

The camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own. - Susan Sontag

2007-09-05T08:59:00.001-07:00

We love our cat
for her self
regard is assiduous
and bland,

for she sits in the small
patch of sun on our rug
and licks her claws
from all angles

and it is far
superior
to "balanced reporting"

though, of course,
it is also
the very same thing.

- Rae Armantrout, "Thing"

2007-09-04T10:03:00.001-07:00

It would be absurd if we did not understand both angels and devils, since we invented them. - John Steinbeck

2007-08-30T07:33:00.001-07:00

If I have learnt anything, it is that life forms no logical patterns.

It is haphazard and full of beauties which I try to catch as they fly by, for who knows whether any of them will ever return?
- Margot Fonteyn

2007-08-26T11:56:00.000-07:00

You can learn as much - or more - from one glance at a private space as you can from hours of exposure to a public face. - Malcolm Gladwell

2007-08-18T07:59:00.000-07:00

Hollywood is a place where people from Iowa mistake each other for stars. - Fred Allen

2007-08-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

Either be hot or cold. If you are lukewarm, the Lord will spew you forth from His mouth. - Jerry Lee Lewis

2007-07-31T08:04:00.000-07:00

Let us touch each other
while we still have hands,
palms, forearms, elbows . . .
Let us love each other for misery,
torture each other, torment,
disfigure, maim,
to remember better,
to part with less pain.

- Vera Pavlova

2007-07-30T12:08:00.000-07:00

Come to the edge
He said. They said: We are afraid.
Come to the edge
He said. They came.
He pushed them, and
they flew...

- Guillaume Apollinaire

2007-07-29T08:02:00.000-07:00

Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.

His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call his feeling for the words
That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?

- William Meredith, "The Illiterate"

2007-07-27T08:08:00.000-07:00

To knock a thing down, especially if it is cocked at an arrogant angle, is a deep delight of the blood. - George Santayana

2007-07-26T11:08:00.000-07:00

When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.
- Oscar Wilde

2007-07-25T12:05:00.000-07:00

My forefathers gave me
My spirit’s shaken flame,
The shape of hands, the beat of heart,
The letters of my name.

But it was my lovers,
And not my sleeping sires,
Who gave the flame its changeful
And iridescent fires;

As the driftwood burning
Learned its jewelled blaze
From the sea’s blue splendor
Of colored nights and days.

- Sarah Teasdale, "Driftwood"

2007-07-24T08:07:00.000-07:00

If you are out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor. - Albert Einstein

2007-07-19T09:03:00.000-07:00

When the young man on State Street
approached as if to ask directions,
saying, "Can you help me out a little here?"
and I, though I already knew, said,
"Help you out how, exactly?"
"A dollar or two if you can,"
he said, and I took a deep breath,
holding in what I might've held out,
hearing When someone asks, you
give what you can, from my bank
of training in the ways of compassion,
and though I didn't want to,
opened my wallet, and
with the munificence of a toad,
pulled out a five and bought him off.

- Dan Gerber, "Bodhisattva"

2007-07-18T07:57:00.000-07:00

A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease. - Joan Didion

2007-07-17T07:53:00.000-07:00

The entire sum of existence is the magic of being needed by just one other person. - Vi Putnam

2007-07-16T19:54:00.000-07:00

It is better for civilization to be going down the drain than to be coming up it. - Henry Allen

2007-07-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

You live and learn. At any rate, you live. - Douglas Adams

2007-07-14T10:58:00.000-07:00

Cruising these residential Sunday
streets in dry August sunlight:
what offends us is
the sanities:
the houses in pedantic rows, the planted
sanitary trees, assert
levelness of surface like a rebuke
to the dent in our car door.
No shouting here, or
shatter of glass; nothing more abrupt
than the rational whine of a power mower
cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.

But though the driveways neatly
sidestep hysteria
by being even, the roofs all display
the same slant of avoidance to the hot sky,
certain things:
the smell of spilled oil a faint
sickness lingering in the garages,
a splash of paint on brick surprising as a bruise,
a plastic hose poised in a vicious
coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide windows

give momentary access to
the landscape behind or under
the future cracks in the plaster

when the houses, capsized, will slide
obliquely into the clay seas, gradual as glaciers
that right now nobody notices.

That is where the City Planners
with the insane faces of political conspirators
are scattered over unsurveyed
territories, concealed from each other,
each in his own private blizzard;

guessing directions, they sketch
transitory lines rigid as wooden borders
on a wall in the white vanishing air

tracing the panic of suburb
order in a bland madness of snows

- Margaret Atwood, "The City Planners"

2007-07-12T08:05:00.000-07:00

Keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching for the stars. - Casey Kasem

2007-07-10T12:19:00.000-07:00

Everything has been taken that anyone
thought worth taking. The stairs are tilted,
scattered with sycamore leaves curled
like ammonites in inland rock.
Wood shows through the paint on the frame
and the door is open--an empty room,
sunlight on the floor. All that is left
on the porch is the hollow cylinder
of an Albert's Quick Oats cardboard box
and a sewing machine. Its extraterrestrial
head is bowed, its scrolled neck
glistens. I was born, that day, near there,
in wartime, of ignorant people.

- Sharon Olds, "Japanese-American Farmhouse, California, 1942"

2007-07-09T07:55:00.000-07:00

I laugh sometimes when I think about
say
Céline at a typewriter
or Dostoevsky...
or Hamsun...
ordinary men with feet, ears, eyes,
ordinary men with hair on their heads
sitting there typing words
while having difficulties with life
while being puzzled almost to madness.

Dostoevsky gets up
he leaves the machine to piss,
comes back
drinks a glass of milk and thinks about
the casino and
the roulette wheel.

Céline stops, gets up, walks to the
window, looks out, thinks, my last patient
died today, I won't have to make any more
visits there.
when I saw him last
he paid his doctor bill;
it's those who don't pay their bills,
they live on and on.
Céline walks back, sits down at the
machine
is still for a good two minutes
then begins to type.

Hamsun stands over his machine thinking,
I wonder if they are going to believe
all these things I write?
he sits down, begins to type.
he doesn't know what a writer's block
is:
he's a prolific son-of-a-bitch
damn near as magnificent as
the sun.
he types away.

and I laugh
not out loud
but all up and down these walls, these
dirty yellow and blue walls
my white cat asleep on the
table
hiding his eyes from the
light.

he's not alone tonight
and neither am
I.

- Charles Bukowski, "one thirty-six a.m."

2007-07-05T08:32:00.001-07:00

Drugs have taught an entire generation of Americans the metric system. - P.J. O'Rourke

2007-07-03T08:28:00.001-07:00

He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever. - Chinese proverb

2007-07-01T12:01:00.000-07:00

Dear Magnitude, I leave the how much
to you. Bereft of equation,

I'd rather logarithms lodged elsewhere—
there is no sensitivity in numbers,

only in effects. In the calm, let us speak
in effects: a ball drops

dragon's mouth-to-frog's mouth,
a pendulum swings on its knife-edge

pivot. I'd say the measurable
captivates more than the measurement

in any accident, but I am merely a mass
suspended. Set my pen

to drum, set my drum recording—
I am the instrument of your intensity

and you my more. If there
be foundation, I have found it

to be oscillating. If there be water,
it is something falling.

Be peak to my trough, be hand
fastened to my throat. Shake me

something fierce and I will be the figure
of what you did.

- Cecily Parks, "Self-Portrait as a Seismograph"

2007-06-24T12:04:00.000-07:00

It's so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.
- Anna Quindlen

2007-06-21T12:01:00.000-07:00

The Devil finds work for idle hands. - Proverb, 1721

2007-06-20T12:10:00.000-07:00

Finally, it was the city that held us, the city they said had no center, that all of us had come to from all over America because this was the place to find dreams and pleasure and love. I noticed – looking at headlines – that some cities emptied and some didn’t. Ours didn’t, not completely. They said we were crazy to stay. But then someone had always said we were crazy to be here in the first place. And someone had always said Noah was crazy to build a boat in his desert, and Lot had been crazy to pack up, on an impulse, and head west. - Carolyn See, Golden Days

2007-06-19T09:55:00.000-07:00

If you refuse to be made straight when you are green, you will not be made straight when you are dry. - African Proverb

2007-06-18T12:18:00.000-07:00

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh. - W.H. Auden

2007-06-16T12:07:00.000-07:00

Something was about to go laughably wrong,
whether directly at home or here,
on this random shoal pleading with its eyes
till it too breaks loose, caught in a hail of references.
I’ll add one more scoop
to the pile of retail.

Hey, you’re doing it, like I didn’t tell you
to, my sinking laundry boat, point of departure,
my white pomegranate, my swizzle stick.
We’re leaving again of our own volition
for bogus patterned plains streaked by canals,
maybe. Amorous ghosts will pursue us
for a time, but sometimes they get, you know, confused and
forget to stop when we do, as they continue to populate this
fertile land with their own bizarre self-imaginings.
Here’s hoping the referral goes tidily, O brother.
Chime authoritatively with the pop-ups and extras.
Keep your units pliable and folded,
the recourse a mere specter, like you have it coming to you,
awash with the new day and its abominable antithesis,
OK? Don’t be able to make that distinction.

- John Ashbery, "Mottled Tuesday"

2007-06-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

I don't believe in intuition. When you get sudden flashes of perception, it is just the brain working faster than usual. But you've been getting ready to know it for a long time, and when it comes, you feel you've known it always. - Katherine Anne Porter

2007-06-13T10:05:00.000-07:00

Above the fire a man floats in a boat.

Above the fire a woman is devoured by a snake,
unseen.

The leaves are yellow alongside & in the wake

the trunks & branches
mirror one another, black, rain-soaked.

And now he's old. He trails a hand until it snares
a leaf--saw-toothed.

Clouds break above the buildings
where there had been none.

The snake is old, its jaw completely
unhinged for the swallowing.

What now?

There was a continent.

Below, the last gods bum along with their last
offerings--

no smoke, no film, no evidence.

The gold-shagged blizzard of the willow

spills again.

Climb down. Prevent.

He leans back & the oar drips like no other memory.

- Peter Sacks, "Above the Fire"

2007-06-10T10:02:00.000-07:00

Solitude: sweet absence of faces. - Milan Kundera

2007-06-01T10:03:00.000-07:00

only you
i choose
among the entire world

is it fair
of you
letting me be unhappy

my heart
is a pen
in your hand

it is all
up to you
to write me happy or sad

i see only
what you reveal
and live as you say

all my feelings
have the color
you desire to paint

from the beginning
to the end
no one but you

please make
my future
better than the past

when you hide
i change
to a Godless person

and when you
appear
i find my faith

don't expect
to find any more in me
than what you give

don't search for
hidden pockets because
i've shown you that
all i have
is all you gave.

- Rumi, "Only You"

2007-05-31T09:53:00.000-07:00

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
'Stay where you are until our backs are turned!'
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
'Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.' I could say 'Elves' to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, 'Good fences make good neighbors.'

- Robert Frost, "Mending Wall"

2007-05-30T09:57:00.000-07:00

The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it. - Flannery O'Connor

2007-05-27T09:58:00.000-07:00

I wind my way across a black donut hole
and space that clunks.
Once I saw on a stage,
as if at the bottom of a mineshaft,
the precise footwork
of some mechanical ballet.
It was like looking into the brain
of a cuckoo clock and it carried
some part of me away forever.
No one knows when they first see a thing,
how long its after image will last.
Proust could stare at the symptom of a face
for years, while Frank O'Hara, like anyone with a job,
was always looking at his watch.
My favorite way of remembering is to forget.
Please start the record of the sea over again.
Call up a shadow below the pendulum of a gull's wing.
In a city of eight million sundials, nobody has any idea
how long a minute really is.

- Elaine Equi, "Bent Orbit"

2007-05-25T09:59:00.000-07:00

Make the best use of what is in your power, and take the rest as it happens. - Epictetus

2007-05-22T10:05:00.000-07:00

...she could eat but no longer speak, not without playing herself. And she was a great player, roaming the invisible world that runs the world, avoiding the other freak flesh instruments; avoiding those who wanted to touch. Blowing for those who never have to choose, who never have to Become, but Are.

- Akua Lezli Hope, "The Becoming"

2007-05-21T09:55:00.000-07:00

At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; At 45 they are caves in which we hide. - F. Scott Fitzgerald

2007-05-18T09:54:00.000-07:00

I am not asking to suffer less.
I hope to be nearly crucified.
To live because I don't want to.

That hope, that sweet agent —
My best work is its work.
The horse I ride into Hell is my best horse
And bears its name.
So, friends, drink your cocktails and wear your hats.
Thank you for leaving me this whole world to go mad in.

I am not asking for mercy. I am asking for more.
I don't mind when no mercy comes
Or when it comes in the form of my mad self
Running at me. I am not asking for mercy.

- Sarah Manguso, "Asking for More"

2007-05-12T09:53:00.000-07:00

Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others. - Albert Camus

2007-05-11T10:05:00.002-07:00

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake. - Jeannette Rankin

2007-05-08T09:40:00.000-07:00

after Marina Wilson

Consider the hands
that write this letter.
The left palm pressed flat against the paper,
as it has done before, over my heart,
in peace or reverence
to the sea or some beautiful thing
I saw once, felt once: snow falling
like rice flung from the giants' wedding,
or the strangest birds. & consider, then,
the right hand, & how it is a fist,
within which a sharpened utensil,
similar to the way I've held a spade,
match to the wick, the horse's reins,
loping, the very fists
I've seen from the roads to Limay & Estelí.
For years, I have come to sit this way:
one hand open, one hand closed,
like a farmer who puts down seeds & gathers up
the food that comes from that farming.
Or, yes, it is like the way I've danced
with my left hand opened around a shoulder
& my right hand closed inside
of another hand. & how
I pray, I pray for this
to be my way: sweet
work alluded to in the body's position
to its paper:
left hand, right hand
like an open eye, an eye closed:
one hand flat against the trapdoor,
the other hand knocking, knocking.

- Aracelis Girmay, "Consider the Hands that Write This Letter"

2007-05-07T08:34:00.000-07:00

A Weight with Needles on the pounds—
To push, and pierce, besides—
That if the Flesh resist the Heft—
The puncture—coolly tries—

That not a pore be overlooked
Of all this Compound Frame—
As manifold for Anguish—
As Species—be—for name—

- Emily Dickinson

2007-05-03T08:42:00.000-07:00

Our patience will achieve more than our force. - Edmund Burke

2007-04-30T23:31:00.000-07:00

A final poem for April...


The world does not need words. It articulates itself 
in sunlight, leaves, and shadows. The stones on the path 
are no less real for lying uncatalogued and uncounted.
The fluent leaves speak only the dialect of pure being. 
The kiss is still fully itself though no words were spoken.

And one word transforms it into something less or other--
illicit, chaste, perfunctory, conjugal, covert.
Even calling it a kiss betrays the fluster of hands 
glancing the skin or gripping a shoulder, the slow 
arching of neck or knee, the silent touching of tongues.

Yet the stones remain less real to those who cannot 
name them, or read the mute syllables graven in silica. 
To see a red stone is less than seeing it as jasper--
metamorphic quartz, cousin to the flint the Kiowa 
carved as arrowheads. To name is to know and remember.

The sunlight needs no praise piercing the rainclouds, 
painting the rocks and leaves with light, then dissolving 
each lucent droplet back into the clouds that engendered it. 
The daylight needs no praise, and so we praise it always-- 
greater than ourselves and all the airy words we summon.

- Dana Gioia, "Words"

2007-04-26T08:30:00.000-07:00

Driving a cardboard automobile without a license
at the turn of the century
my father ran into my mother
on a fun-ride at Coney Island
having spied each other eating
in a French boardinghouse nearby
And having decided right there and then
that she was right for him entirely
he followed her into
the playland of that evening
where the headlong meeting
of their ephemeral flesh on wheels
hurtled them forever together

And I now in the back seat
of their eternity
reaching out to embrace them

- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

2007-04-24T08:29:00.000-07:00

Fleas interest me so much
that I let them bite me for hours.
They are perfect, ancient, Sanskrit,
machines that admit of no appeal.
They do not bite to eat,
they bite only to jump;
they are the dancers of the celestial sphere,
delicate acrobats
in the softest and most profound circus;
let them gallop on my skin,
divulge their emotions,
amuse themselves with my blood,
but someone should introduce them to me.
I want to know them closely,
I want to know what to rely on.

- Pablo Neruda

2007-04-23T08:35:00.000-07:00

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, "The First Dream"

2007-04-20T08:38:00.000-07:00

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what's underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty's and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I'm the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I'll pull that garment
from its hanger like I'm choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I'll wear it like bones, like skin,
it'll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.

- Kim Addonizio, "What Do Women Want?"

2007-04-19T08:37:00.000-07:00

Here are two pupils
whose moons of black
transform to cripples
all who look:

each lovely lady
who peers inside
take on the body
of a toad.

Within these mirrors
the world inverts:
the fond admirer's
burning darts

turn back to injure
the thrusting hand
and inflame to danger
the scarlet wound.

I sought my image
in the scorching glass,
for what fire could damage
a witch's face?

So I stared in that furnace
where beauties char
but found radiant Venus
reflected there.

- Sylvia Plath, "On Looking into the Eyes of a Demon Lover"

2007-04-18T08:33:00.000-07:00

This poem isn't an intricate theory years in the making.
This poem can speak only for this poem.
This poem will tell you it's not what you think.
This poem is nothing more than a series of coincidences.
This poem can't help but attract the occaisional crackpot.
This poem is offered in full compliance with the Freedom of Information Act.
This poem is not anything like the Official Version.
This poem is holding something back.
This poem is covering up.
This poem may be afraid of worldwide panic.
This poem is no secret prototype the government is testing.

This poem has a lot of powerful friends behind it.
This poem is something you'd be happier not knowing.
This poem is murder on reliable witnesses.
This poem is counting on your complete cooperation.
This poem can put you at the scene of untold crimes or
this poem is your iron-clad-alibi, depending.
This poem doesn't want anything to happen to you.
This poem hopes you get the message, although
this poem has no explicit message of its own.
This poem can't promise it will bail you out.
This poem won't ever remember you.
This poem is well aware of the statute of limitations.

This poem means what it says.
This poem means anything you need it to.
This poem has seen things hard to believe.
This poem is all you have to believe.
This poem has implications.
This poem couldn't possibly be.
This poem is so good it ought to be illegal.
This poem is the only hard evidence recovered.
This poem has your prints all over it.
This poem has recently been discharged.

This poem is not a disgruntled loner acting spontaneously.
This poem has been seen consorting with other known poems.
This poem has confederates in top-floor windows all over the city.
This poem never goes by the same name twice.
This poem has no highly trained Russian look-alike.
This poem never received specific instructions.
This poem has nothing better to do.
This poem can hit you where you live.
This poem seldom misses at this distance.

This poem has its story down cold.
This poem doesn't want to have to say it more than once.
This poem has never seen its share of the money.
This poem is just the patsy.
This poem laughs at the Witness Protection Program.
This poem wants immunity before it starts naming names.
This poem isn't taking the fall for anyone.
This poem has you exactly where it wants you.

This poem you think you're getting to the bottom of right now,
this poem that's taken you into its confidence,
this poem that's made you an accomplice-after-whatever-the-fact,
this poem suggesting in so many words that it's always been on your side:

this poem doesn't make those kinds of mistakes.
This poem will give you up every time.

- David Clewell, "The Accomplice" (via Counterbalance)

2007-04-17T08:27:00.000-07:00

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse      
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo
Questa fiamma staria senza più scosse.
Ma perciocchè giammai di questo fondo
Non tornò vivo alcun, s’i'odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, ‘What is it?’
Let us go and make our visit.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,
Rubbing its back upon the window panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, ‘Do I dare?’ and, ‘Do I dare?’
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: ‘How his hair is growing thin!’)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
(They will say: ‘But how his arms and legs are thin!’)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
 So how should I presume?

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?
 And how should I presume?

And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)
Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
 And should I then presume?
 And how should I begin?

    . . . . .

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

    . . . . .

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep … tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in
    upon a platter,
I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.

And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all’—
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
 Should say: ‘That is not what I meant at all;
 That is not it, at all.’

And would it have been worth it, after all,
Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail
    along the floor—
And this, and so much more?—
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
 ‘That is not it at all,
 That is not what I meant, at all.’

    . . . . .

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—
Almost, at times, the Fool.

I grow old … I grow old …
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

2007-04-16T08:32:00.000-07:00

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An Adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

Each Sentence says one thing - for example, "Although it was a dark rainy day when the Adjective walked by, I shall remember the pure and sweet expression on her face until the day I perish from the green, effective earth."
Or, "Will you please close the window, Andrew?"
Or, for example, "Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on the window sill has changed color recently to a light yellow, due to the heat from the boiler factory which exists nearby."

In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, "And! But!"
But the Adjective did not emerge.

As the adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat -
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.

- Kenneth Koch, "Permanently"

2007-04-15T08:28:00.000-07:00

Cool black night thru the redwoods
cars parked outside in shade
behind the gate, stars dim above
the ravine, a fire burning by the side
porch and a few tired souls hunched over
in black leather jackets. In the huge
wooden house, a yellow chandelier
at 3 A.M. the blast of loudspeakers
hi-fi Rolling Stones Ray Charles Beatles
Jumping Joe Jackson and twenty youths
dancing to the vibration thru the floor,
a little weed in the bathroom, girls in scarlet
tights, one muscular smooth skinned man
sweating dancing for hours, beer cans
bent littering the yard, a hanged man
sculpture dangling from a high creek branch,
children sleeping softly in their bedroom bunks.
And 4 police cars parked outside the painted
gate, red lights revolving in the leaves.

- Allen Ginsberg, "First Party at Ken Kesey's with Hell's Angels"

2007-04-14T08:24:00.000-07:00

Contemplating Hell, as I once heard it,
My brother Shelley found it to be a place
Much like the city of London. I,
Who do not live in London, but in Los Angeles,
Find, contemplating Hell, that it
Must be even more like Los Angeles.

Also in Hell,
I do not doubt it, there exist these opulent gardens
With flowers as large as trees, wilting, of course,
Very quickly, if they are not watered with very
expensive water. And fruit markets
With great leaps of fruit, which nonetheless

Possess neither scent nor taste. And endless trains of autos,
Lighter than their own shadows, swifter than
Foolish thoughts, shimmering vehicles, in which
Rosy people, coming from nowhere, go nowhere.
And houses, designed for happiness, standing empty,
Even when inhabited.

Even the houses in Hell are not all ugly.
But concern about being thrown into the street
Consumes the inhabitants of the villas no less
Than the inhabitants of the barracks.

- Bertolt Brecht, "Contemplating Hell"

2007-04-13T10:27:00.000-07:00

I believe there is something else

entirely going on but no single
person can ever know it,
so we fall in love.

It could also be true that what we use
everyday to open cans was something
much nobler, that we'll never recognize.

I believe the woman sleeping beside me
doesn't care about what's going on
outside, and her body is warm
with trust
which is a great beginning.

- Matthew Rohrer, "Credo"

2007-04-12T08:20:00.000-07:00

A sighing we do,
in its lingering

rising and dying
of caught breath, a slow,

tongueless vibrato
not yet reaching song,

still a beginning,
a sulk burning through,

languored, lamenting
not yet to pursue,

its ruffling wing
enchanting sorrow:

longing and longing,
subdue and subdue.

- Hailey Leithauser, "Coo"

2007-04-11T08:25:00.000-07:00

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal.
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

- Wallace Stevens, "The Emperor of Ice Cream"

2007-04-10T08:19:00.000-07:00

They fuck you up, your mum and dad
They do not mean to, but they do
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you
But they were fucked up in their time
By folks in old style hats and coats
Who half the time were soppy stern
And half at each other's throats
Man hands on misery to man
It builds up like the coastal shelf
Get out as early as you can
And don't have any kids yourself

- Philip Larkin, "They Fuck You Up"

2007-04-09T08:16:00.000-07:00

there are worse things than
being alone
but it often takes decades
to realize this
and most often
when you do
it's too late
and there's nothing worse
than
too late.

- Charles Bukowski, "Oh Yes"

2007-04-07T08:15:00.000-07:00

(Giovanni di Paolo, ca. 1440)

Particularity evidently survives in paradise.
Your own uniform, the modesty of it, still fits.
Your bruises and cuts still glimmer.
The goldapple trees still stand up like the very first numbers you ever learned,
and love’s sentence—I am so glad you’re here—is still what you say.

- Jean Gallagher, "Detail of Paradise"

2007-04-06T08:23:00.000-07:00

I

You are clear
O rose, cut in rock,
hard as the descent of hail.

I could scrape the colour
from the petals
like spilt dye from a rock.

If I could break you
I could break a tree.

If I could stir
I could break a tree—
I could break you.

II

O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air—
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat—
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.

- H.D., "Garden"