we both always carry sam cooke. . .
and ~
Sunday, August 28, 2016
ANNIVERSARY ~
Seasons
All my life
Lived under the stars,
Walked with them night after
Night, and I’m still
Learning how they move
Through the seasons.
And you help — point your
Gloved hand this winter
Evening almost over our heads
To Cassiopeia and then arc
To the North Star in the
Little of the dippers. It’s
Easy once you know, once you
Are shown, once you have
Someone to see with.
for Susan forever
_______________________
Bob Arnold
WHERE RIVERS MEET
(Mad River Press)
Saturday, August 27, 2016
Friday, August 26, 2016
PASCAL QUIGNARD ~
Some electric fish can give off up to 500 volts. The
electrical fiend that silently surrounds them is the
ancestor of eyesight.
Speaking forcefully diminishes one's force. If you
shout, "I love you," you have already lost your sexual
potency. You have to speak with your eyes. Between
hunters, the intense, decisive exchange is a silent
exchange of glances.
We are still living in the interglacial period of the
Pleistocene which we sometimes call present time.
Which brings us to Mallarme's remark of February
1895: "There is no present.
He who thinks himself his own contemporary is
misinformed."
CHAPTER 35
There are streams that meander about long before the
human beings who follow them, the birds that fly
above them, the flowers that border them. Secret
traditions don't go back to historical periods. They
re-emerge from the secrecy of the unmediated dispel
station itself, beyond history, in the fons tempers.
CHAPTER 36
Mercury is a hard metal, dense and elusive.
Only the real is harder and has more holes in it; is
more truncated, more sexed, cutting, dying.
Writing is closer to the real than speaking.
Writing is a denser material than mercury. I call up
a face which each secret I divulge pushes further and
further from me into the shadows, so true is it that all
attempts to call out to people actually abandons them.
Hadewijch says that above scripture, above all that is
created, the short-circuit of the mind-that-loses-track-
of-meaning recovers the lost element at the root of its
loss.
Vision, the reading, then dazzlement,
Vision become reading.
Reading become dazzlement.
Vision, reading, then dazzlement recapture the
irradiating intimacy of the wandering planets, letter for
letter, atom for atom; they communicate at full speed;
without mediation, sonder middel,
they stream at once.
CHAPTER 46
There are men who follow the banks of rivers with the
aim of getting back to their source. They climb mount-
tains. They come up against solitary wild beasts. They
discover wondrous women. They think of themselves
as the companions of the great silent birds of prey
flying at great heights — on top of the world — sweeping
up the moon and sun in their talons, and swooping
down suddenly amid the steep rocks and fearsome
flowers to crush their prey and drench them in their
blood. They keep watch over some harrowing spots.
They live for a time in caves inaccessible to ibex and
bears. They fear neither sky nor night.
Most let the breezes carry them along and dive into
the sea before suddenly turning around as the sun does
twice a year.
Some men go against the flow.
There are centrifugal men, men who go against the
flow, just as there are rivers that flow into others. From
the beginnings of time, there are anti-focal, anti-festive,
anti-social men. Mountain men. Stag men. Fountain-
head men.
Marcus Aurelius wrote: "The sunlight spreads
everywhere but never runs out."
CHAPTER 57
The Fear of Forebears
Fear of mice is the fear of forebears. There are 4,5000
species of mammal.
The ancestral form of mammals is a kind of shrew
that lived in the Eocene.
All creatures with breasts derive from a sort of
tiny insectivorous rat that makes us scream the way we
might at a witch jumping out or a ghost appearing.
We are screaming at the sight of our ancestors.
Animal husbandry on horseback, which was
extremely unusual in human history, beginning in
2,800 BCE and ending in 1789. On the hillsides of
Afghanistan in 2001, men on horseback were still to
be seen fighting against aircraft.
The European twenty-first century is a thing of mean-
choly, knowing, as it does, for the first time, that
humanity isn't special, that meaning is constructed,
that truth is unknowable and nudity unrevealable.
An age of intense wonder where the excavation of
the most distant things is concerned. The modern
world is wrong to complain of the Unanswerability
that has accompanied it — this is its extraordinary, ever-
ally unpredictable good fortune.
Its sudden silence.
I went hunting for antiques.
Loosening the ties a little.
______________________
Pascal Quignard
A B Y S S E S
Seagull Books 2015
translated by Chris Turner
Thursday, August 25, 2016
Wednesday, August 24, 2016
Tuesday, August 23, 2016
MORE ROBBIE BASHO ~
|
Monday, August 22, 2016
PACIFIC ~
Sand Dollar
We’ve waited all year
And traveled all morning
Just to arrive like this —
In the very same place
We were a year ago today.
And you are just as beautiful,
Your long skirt blowing in sand,
And we walk for miles along
The edge of the leaving tide
Picking up seashells and stone
That we’ll select more carefully
The longer we are here —
Which is no place with a name,
Except someplace in our heart.
Where that day, unlike any other,
You found excitedly a sand dollar
Washed in during the night,
Left in a tidal pool, and
Kneeling while taking it up,
Placed it home in my hand.
Doe
Standing mid river
Sunlight already
In the waves, long
Before any sound or
Movement beyond her
Own or my own —
Out of my clothes into
The water, looking up
I see her then, eyes
Meeting in the current
No sound I say, even as
She lifts her muzzle and
Rears her spotted hide
The stare lasts for years
Pacific
Lovelier —
When the
Bandana from
My pocket is
Worn around
Her neck
__________________
Bob Arnold
WHERE RIVERS MEET
Sunday, August 21, 2016
I WAS THERE (TICKETS $3) ~
CONCERT VAULT TANGLEWOOD 1970
I was never a huge Who fan — I was there that night for the Airplane —
and the Bill Graham Fillmore aura which was present in its
ever living glory. However, The Who did
rock the house (shed).
I was never a huge Who fan — I was there that night for the Airplane —
and the Bill Graham Fillmore aura which was present in its
ever living glory. However, The Who did
rock the house (shed).
DOES HENRY KISSINGER HAVE A CONSCIENCE? ~
"And one has an awareness that Kissinger, the longest-lasting and most iconic pariah figure in modern American history, is but one of a line of men held in fear and contempt for the immorality of their services rendered and yet protected by the political establishment in recognition of those same services."
______
The New Yorker
Saturday, August 20, 2016
FLOAT ~
John Levy's new book of poems and meditations
in response to the drawings of Donald Cole
Afterword (shown below) by Alan Chong Lau
_______________________
Dovadola Press, Tucson and ArtXchange Gallery, Seattle
2016
John Levy poet and Don Cole artist presenting their book Float among what sails & spirals from rick skillman on Vimeo.
Friday, August 19, 2016
HOA NGUYEN ~
Mekong I
River as sift
and sorter
Raw fruits and sell the wares
"Floating market"
Stone pebble sand
The silt and new islands
There were 9 months
9 dragons but they change
as the letter is a triangle
She could be seen as
swan or generalized white
bird Goddess that ate the earth
How to strand become
mangroves stranded
and braid your oiled hair
Vivid swoops that coil
a mouth and canal steered
Row from here to there
Birthday Poem
Illuminated behind a skin
a grey the sky with fat
fast slants of snow
First Horse poet This is a birthday
poem squeaky underfoot
the snow and Jeannine's cookies
I drive husbands and fathers
to early deaths Push the knife
into the cake to cut it
Me the supposed bringer of ruin
(money) Covered in fondant and
violet flowers
It's my birthday My eyes are older
Leave
Mouth A pictured lip
in a kiss What it leaves
out
Cloaking your mouth
with your hands to say
no more breathing you in
Gather the firm clever thing
from the moment looking away
and the weather quiet
with the turning book
Bark of the trees
you love then leave
Redbud
Live Oak
Hackberry
_____________________
H O A N G U Y E N
Violent Energy Ingots
Wave Books 2016
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