this amazing day:

February 2, 2010

No Platonic Love

Tell me no more of minds embracing minds,
And hearts exchang'd for hearts;
That spirits spirits meet, as winds do winds,
And mix their subt'lest parts;
That two unbodied essences may kiss,
And then like Angels, twist and feel one Bliss.

I was that silly thing that once was wrought
To practise this thin love;
I climb'd from sex to soul, from soul to thought;
But thinking there to move,
Headlong I rolled from thought to soul, and then
From soul I lighted at the sex again.

As some strict down-looked men pretend to fast,
Who yet in closets eat;
So lovers who profess they spririts taste,
Feed yet on grosser meat;
I know they boast they souls to souls convey,
Howe'r they meet, the body is the way.

Come, I will undeceive thee, they that tread
Those vain aerial ways
Are like young heirs and alchemists misled
To waste their wealth and days,
For searching thus to be for ever rich,
They only find a med'cine for the itch.

—William Cartwright

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February 1, 2010

Great Sleeps I Have Known

Once in a cradle in Norway folded
like Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir
as a ship in full sail transported the dead to Valhalla

Once on a mountain in Taos after making love
in my thirties the decade of turquoise and silver

After your brother walked into the Atlantic
to scatter your mothers ashes his khakis soaked
to the knees his shirtsleeves blowing

At the top of the cottage in a thunderstorm
once or twice each summer covetous of my solitude

Immediately following lunch
against circadian rhythms, once
in a bunk bed in a dormitory in the White Mountains

Once in a hollow tree in Wyoming
A snow squall blew in the guide said tie up your horses

The last night in the Katmandu guest house
where I saw a bird fly from a monk's mouth
a consolidated sleep of East and West

Once on a horsehair mattress two feet thick
I woke up singing
as in the apocryphal story of my birth
at Temple University Hospital

On the mesa with the burrowing owls
on the mesa with the prairie dogs

Willing to be lucky
I ran the perimeter road in my sleep
entrained to the cycles of light and dark
Sometimes my dead sister visited my dreams

Once on the beach in New Jersey
after the turtles deposited their eggs
before my parents grew old, nocturnal

—Robin Becker

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January 31, 2010

As one put drunk into the packet-boat

I tried each thing, only some were immortal and free.

Elsewhere we are as sitting in a place where sunlight

Filters down, a little at a time,

Waiting for someone to come. Harsh words are spoken,

As the Sun yellows the green of the maple tree…

So this was ah, but obscurely

I felt the stirrings of new breath in the pages

Which all winter long had smelled like an old catalogue.

New sentences were starting up. But the summer

Was well along, not yet past the mid-point

But full and dark with the promise of that fullness,

That time when one can no longer wander away

And even the least attentive fall silent

To watch the thing that is prepared to happen.

A look of glass stops you

And you walk on shaken: was I the perceived?

Did they notice me, this time, as I am,

Or is it postponed again? The children

Still at their games, clouds that arise with a swift

Impatience in the afternoon sky, then dissipate

As limpid, dense twilight comes.

Only is that tooting of a horn

Down there, for a moment, I thought

The great, formal affair was beginning, orchestrated,

Its colors concentrated in a glance, a ballade

That takes in the whole world, now, but lightly,

Still lightly, but with wide authority and tact.

The prevalence of those gray flakes failing?

They are sun motes. You have slept in the Sun

Longer than the sphinx, and are none the wiser for it.

Come in. And I thought a shadow fell across the door

But it was only her come to ask once more

If I was coming in, and not to hurry in case I wasn’t.

The night sheen takes over. A moon of cistercian pallor

Has climbed to the center of heaven, installed,

Finally involved with the business of darkness.

And a sigh heaves from ah the small things on earth,

The books, the papers, the old garters and union-suit buttons

Kept in a white cardboard box somewhere, and all the lower

Versions of cities flattened under the equalizing night.

The summer demands and takes away too much,

But night, the reserved, the reticent, gives more than it takes.

—John Ashbery

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January 31, 2010

Friends Meeting House

Click here to download:

Friends_Meeting_House.zip (18027 KB)

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January 28, 2010

Field of Rye

J.D. Salinger 1919–2010

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January 23, 2010

834

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January 20, 2010

RIP Kate McGarrigle

Anna [L] and Kate McGarrigle, 1990. photo: Jack Vartoogian

NYTimes obit

Complainte Pour Ste Catherine

Moi j' me promène sous Ste-Catherine
J' profite de la chaleur du métro
Je n' me regarde pas dans les vitrines
Quand il fait trente en-dessous d' zéro

Y'a longtemps qu'on fait d' la politique
Vingt ans de guerre contre les moustiques

Je ne me sens pas intrépide
Quand il fait fret j' fais pas du ski
J'ai pas d' motel aux Laurentides
Le samedi c'est l' soir du hockey

Y'a longtemps qu'on fait d' la politique
Vingt ans de guerre contre les moustiques

Faut pas croire que j' suis une imbécile
Parce que j' chauffe pas une convertible
La gloire c'est pas mal inutile
Au prix du gaz c'est trop pénible

Y'a longtemps qu'on fait d' la politique
Vingt ans de guerre contre les moustiques

On est tous frères pis ça s'adonne
Qu'on a toujours eu du bon temps
Parce qu'on reste sur la terre des hommes
Même les femmes et les enfants

Y'a longtemps qu'on fait d' la politique
Vingt ans de guerre contre les moustiques

Croyez pas qu'on est pas chrétiens
Le dimanche on promène son chien

---

Me, I walk along Ste Catherine
Getting the warmth from the Métro
I don't look through shop windows
When it's thirty below zero

We've been in politics for a long time
Twenty years of war against mosquitos

I don't feel intrepid
When it snows I don't go skiing
I don't have a motel in the Laurentians
Sunday night is hockey night

We've been in politics for a long time
Twenty years of war against mosquitos

Don't think that I'm an fool
Because I don't drive a convertible
The glory is fairly useless
At the price of gas (petrol) it's too distressing

We've been in politics for a long time
Twenty years of war against mosquitos

We're all brothers and it so happens
That we've always had a good time
Because we're on the earth of men
And women and children

We've been in politics for a long time
Twenty years of war against mosquitos

Don't believe that we're not Christians
On Sundays we walk our dogs

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January 20, 2010

Early Bird Specials

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January 16, 2010

Bobo

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January 12, 2010

Until She Spoke

Until she spoke, no Christian nation had abolished Negro slavery.

Until she spoke, no Christian nation had given to the world an organized effort to abolish slavery.

Until she spoke, the slave ship, followed by hungry sharks, greedy to devour the dead and dying slaves flung overboard to feed them, ploughed in peace the South Atlantic, painting the sea with the Negro’s blood.

Until she spoke, the slave trade was sanctioned by all the Christian nations of the world, and our land of liberty and light included.

Men made fortunes by this infernal traffic, and were esteemed as good Christians, and the standing types and representations of the Savior of the World.

Until Haiti spoke, the church was silent, and the pulpit was dumb.
Slave-traders lived and slave-traders died.
Funeral sermons were preached over them, and of them it was said that they died in the triumphs of the Christian faith and went to heaven among the just.

—Frederick Douglass

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