Saturday, May 22, 2010
"It is easy to go down into Hell; night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide; but to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air - there's the rub, the task." (from Aeneid)
Read more...Road Trip
Friday, May 21, 2010
Acid in mood and focused
on the yellow center stripe
I fly down the road.
Pedestrian thoughts,
immured in deadlines and responsibility.
In half an eye, and as many a second,
a tuft of yellow causes pause;
like some surreal river
yellow plunges, rolls, cascades
in waterfall, crests and waves
unnatural in its golden splendor
just one petal short of madness.
Disarming distraction,
Rapunzel like it tumbles
down in yarn like desperation
offering me a transpontine intention
and beckons me
a moments hesitation
to climb upon
in lost direction
and once upon a time.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are people better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friends?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God.
-Alfred Lord Tennyson
Read more...
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
H/T Inscapes for the poem and a new book (or two) for the library.Hopkins in Ireland
for the Jesuit community at Boston College
Above the bluebleak priest the brightblue fisher hovers.
The priest notes the book upon the table, the lamp beside the book.
A towering Babel of papers still to grade, and that faraway look
as once more the mind begins to wander. Ah, to creep beneath the covers
of the belled bed beckoning across the room. He stops, recovers,
takes another sip of bitter tea, then winces as he takes another look
at the questions he has posed his students and the twists they took
to cover up their benighted sense of Latin. The fisher hovers
like a lit match closer to him. The windows have all been shut against
the damp black Dublin night. After all these years, his collar chokes
him still, in spite of which he wears it like some outmoded mark
of honor, remembering how his dear Ignatius must have sensed
the same landlocked frustrations. Again he lifts his pen. His strokes
lash out against the dragon din of error. The fisher incandesces in the dark.
-Paul Mariani
A Thunderstorm
Monday, May 17, 2010
The wind begun to rock the grass
With threatening tunes and low, -
He flung a menace at the earth,
A menace at the sky.
The leaves unhooked themselves from trees
And started all abroad;
The dust did scoop itself like hands
And throw away the road.
The wagons quickened on the streets,
The thunder hurried slow;
The lightning showed a yellow beak,
And then a livid claw.
The birds put up the bars to nests,
The cattle fled to barns;
There came one drop of giant rain,
And then, as if the hands
That held the dams had parted hold,
The waters wrecked the sky,
But overlooked my father's house,
Just quartering a tree.
-by Emily Dickinson
Read more...
Saturday, May 15, 2010
...The season bears upon its wing
The swallows and the songs of spring,
And days that were, and days that flit;
The loved lost hours are far away;
And hope and fame are scattered spray
For me, that gave you love a day
For you that not remember it.
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