PHILIP LEVINE ~

Philip Levine

(January 10, 1928 – February 14, 2015)

COMING HOMEWARD FROM TOLEDO




We stopped at a beer garden,

drank, and watched the usual farmers

watching us, and gave a dull

country laborer a lift

in the wrong direction. He

giggled by the roadside where

we left him, pissing in snow

and waving, forty frozen

miles from home.



                            When the engine

failed, we stood in a circle

of our breathing listening for

the sounds of snow.



                             Later

just before the dawn of the

second day of a new year

already old, we found her

under white heaps, another

city in another time,

and fell asleep, and wakened

alone and disappointed

in a glass house under a

bare wood roof.    



                               I called out for

you, my brothers and friends, and

someone's children came, someone's

wife — puzzled helpful faces —

saying "father" and "husband."

You never answered, never

heard, under the frozen stars

of that old year where the snow

creaked in great mounds and the air

bronzed from the slag heaps twenty

miles south of Ecorse, for you were

happy, tired, and never going home.



 _____________________

Philip Levine
Not This Pig
Wesleyan University Press 1968

PALS ~

Andy Warhol and Parker Tyler
Photograph by Gerard Malanga
New York City, 1969
The Bellevue Press

DOC POMUS ~

https://rockhall.com/inductees/doc-pomus/bio/

WILLIAM EGGLESTON ~

Steidl, 2014

http://erickimphotography.com/blog/2013/04/01/10-lessons-william-eggleston-has-taught-me-about-street-photography/

DAVID CARR'S LAST VENUE ~

David Carr

September 8, 1956 – February 12, 2015

http://new.livestream.com/nytimes/events/3800646/videos/76929642

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/business/media/david-carr-media-equation-columnist-for-the-times-is-dead-at-58.html

TRIGGER ~

Roy Rogers' famous horse "Trigger"
A permanent resident of the Roy Rogers
and Dale Evans Museum

One can play "Happy Trails"
recording on the postcard
on any nonautomatic return
phonograph player at 33-1/3 rpm

MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ ~

A long time ago, way back, there were beings

Who formed a circle to keep the wolves

At bay and stay warm; they were bound to vanish

They were a lot like us.

We're here, our last words are fading,

The sea has gone

For one last time lovers are embracing,

The land is naked.

Above our bodies sound waves rise

And fall and move

Around the world,

Our hearts are nearly cold

Death must surely come, deep and gentle;

Soon, human beings will run off from this world.

The dominion of machines will then be complete

And pure information will triumph and fill

The empty carcass of the absent divine;

And this noise will rule until the end of time.






The Long Road To Clifden 



West of Clifden, headland, 

Where the sky changes to water

Where water changes to memory

At the edge of a new world



Along the hills of Clifden

The green hills of Clifden,

I shall lay down my pain.



For us to live with death

Death must change to light

Light change to water

And water change to memory.



To the west, all of humanity

Gathers on the road to Clifden

On the long road to Clifden

Humans lay down their pain

Between the waves and the light.

___________________________________

MICHEL HOUELLEBECQ 

The Art of Struggle

translated by Delphine Grass & Timothy Mathews

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6040/the-art-of-fiction-no-206-michel-houellebecq

SILVINA OCAMPO ~

Fragrance

I who live close by

bear witness that at certain hours

of the night or day

it floods the areas of the square where it lives

and enters the windows of neighboring houses;

it's more important than the corporeal

beauty of the trees because even the blind can see it

through the illusion of perfume,

as through music.

Often, at any hour,

I tried like a sleuth to find where that heavenly

fragrance came from and I reached the conclusion

that it's simply like the soul

lodging nowhere and all about.

~





Love



I would like to be your favorite pillow

where you rest your ears at night

to be your secret and the fence

around your sleep; asleep or awake



to be your door, your light when you go away,

someone who does not try to be loved.

To escape the anxiety in my complaints,

and manage at times to be what I am; nothing,



never to be afraid of losing you

through fickleness and unfaithfulness,

nor pointlessly grant to you



the tedious, vulgar faithfulness

of those abandoned who prefer

to die instead of suffer, and do not die.

__________________________

Silvina Ocampo

translated from the Spanish by Jason Weiss

New York Review Books, 2015

http://www.nybooks.com/books/authors/silvina-ocampo/

SIT DOWN ~

B E C K

_____________________________________________________________________________

The born loud and now rich Kanye West picked on Beck last night at The Grammys, grumbling about how Beck, of all people, isn't worthy of the album of the year award. He may as well have picked on George Martin of The Beatles. This is what I mean by loud. His mother or father never got across "think" then "speak."

______________________________________________________________________________

STEVE ~

Steve Sanfield & Doc Dachtler

I just learned of an old friend's passing. This is what I get for living so tucked away in the snow. 

News comes from a snail mail letter from another old friend in Colorado telling me about Steve's passing in the Sierra of California. And I'm not sure how long my letter sat in the post office box but I opened it tonight sitting by the wood stove on a small bench in barely any light and when I came to that part of the letter about Steve I moved into the light and read the paragraph again to make sure I was hearing things right.  That's right, hearing things right.

Above is a photograph of two long-time Longhouse poets I always liked to publish and be in touch with. You can see they were pals.

 Steve Sanfield was one of the founders of the American Storytelling Renaissance, becoming the first storyteller-in-residence in the United States in 1977. He is also the founder of the Sierra Storytelling Festival. Steve had over thirty published books under his belt — poetry and prose, but really it was all poetry.

We both lived as long as we lived in our respective spots on earth — 45 years in our spots — which I believe was part of why we contacted one another in the first place. Brotherly Place. Steve's spot on earth was the San Juan Ridge at his home on Montezuma Hill.

_____________________

BOB DYLAN WOODSTOCK ~

Bob Dylan
photograph by Elliott Landy

DEEP WINTER TUNES ~

music compiled

by bob arnold

feb 2015

WARRIOR ~ EDDY VAN WESSEL ~

http://www.edgeofcivilization.com/

 

THE EDGE OF CIVILIZATION

Eddy Van Wessel

edgeofcivilization.com

SHAPING THE LOTUS SUTRA ~

Shaping the Lotus Sutra

Eugene Y. Wang

University of Washington Press 2005

Buddhist visual culture in

Medieval China

http://www.bokus.com/bok/9780295986852/shaping-the-lotus-sutra/

ONE MORE LEO KOTTKE STORY ~

WHEN LEO KOTTKE MET BOB DYLAN ~

EDWIN DICKINSON ~

SHACK, PEAKED HILL BARS, 1955

E d w i n   D i c k i n s o n

 

EDWIN   DICKINSON   IN   PROVINCETOWN,   MA 






http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-edwin-w-dickinson-11644


http://www.driscollbabcock.com/artists/slideshow/edwin-dickinson/4#

HUGE LATER PAUL CELAN ~

 P A U L   C E L A N

Farrar, Straus 2014
 

P I E R R E   J O R I S

"Just read and keep reading!

Understanding will come by itself."

PAUL CELAN

GEOFF MULDAUR MUSIC BOX~

Geoff Muldaur

photograph by

Catherine Sebastian

music box

compiled 1 March 2015

by bob arnold

HAPPY BIRTHDAY THOMAS MERTON! ~

How to Enter a Big City 
Thomas James Merton
(1915-1968)
 
I

Swing by starwhite bones and
Lights tick in the middle.
Blue and white steel
Black and white
People hurrying along the wall.  
”Here you are, bury my dead bones.“

Curve behind the sun again  
Towers full of ice. Rich  
Glass houses, “Here,
Have a little of my blood,”  
Rich people!”

Wheat in towers. Meat on ice.
Cattlecars. Miles of wide-open walls.  
Baseball between these sudden tracks.  
Yell past the red street—
Have you any water to drink, City?  
Rich glass buildings, give us milk!  
Give us coffee! Give us rum!

There are huge clouds all over the sky.
River smells of gasoline.
Cars after cars after cars, and then
A little yellow street goes by without a murmur.

There came a man
(”Those are radios, that were his eyes“)  
Who offered to sell us his bones.

Swing by starwhite buildings and  
Lights come to life with a sound  
Of bugs under the dead rib.

Miles of it. Still the same city.  


II

Do you know where you are going?  
Do you know whom you must meet?

Fortune, perhaps, or good news  
Or the doctor, or the ladies  
In the long bookstore,
The angry man in the milkbar  
The drunkard under the clock.  
Fortune, perhaps, or wonder  
Or, perhaps, death.

In any case, our tracks
Are aimed at a working horizon.
The buildings, turning twice about the sun,  
Settle in their respective positions.
Centered in its own incurable discontent, the City  
Consents to be recognized.


III

Then people come out into the light of afternoon,  
Covered all over with black powder,
And begin to attack one another with statements  
Or to ignore one another with horror.
Customs have not changed.
Young men full of coffee and
Old women with medicine under their skin
Are all approaching death at twenty miles an hour.

Everywhere there is optimism without love
And pessimism without understanding,
They who have new clothes, and smell of haircuts  
Cannot agree to be at peace
With their own images, shadowing them in windows  
From store to store.


IV

Until the lights come on with a swagger of frauds  
And savage ferns,
The brown-eyed daughters of ravens,
Sing in the lucky doors
While night comes down the street like the millennium  
Wrapping the houses in dark feathers
Soothing the town with a sign
Healing the strong wings of sunstroke.
Then the wind of an easy river wipes the flies
Off my Kentucky collarbone.

The claws of the treacherous stars  
Renegade drums of wood
Endure the heavenward protest.  
Their music heaves and hides.  
Rain and foam and oil
Make sabbaths for our wounds.  
(Come, come, let all come home!)
The summer sighs, and runs.
My broken bird is under the whole town,  
My cross is for the gypsies I am leaving  
And there are real fountains under the floor.


V

Branches baptize our faces with silver
Where the sweet silent avenue escapes into the hills.  
Winds at last possess our empty country
There, there under the moon  
In parabolas of milk and iron  
The ghosts of historical men  
(Figures of sorrow and dust)
Weep along the hills like turpentine.  
And seas of flowering tobacco
Surround the drowning sons of Daniel Boone.



_________________________________

The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton
(New Directions)

http://merton.org/chrono.aspx