pilot lights

we write letters to the universe.  thoughts into the flesh of words.  no matter the words, too, no longer assume a physical mold the way they used to do when books and their pages were tangible.  still, we write the words and flung them out into space, into the vast expanse of the Net like a wide lake, like an ocean, often folded, keeping in its bosom both the shipwrecked and the sails.  we look up the stars, who live longer than our lives, and who have been pilot lights to the many more others before us.

in the long run, the world, the nations, the people, the person

Organ Tuning




Someone was tuning the organ in an empty church.
In a Gothic hall a waterfall boomed.
The voices of the tortured and schoolchildren's laughter
mixed with my vertical breath.

In an empty church someone tuned the organ
and tinkered with the pipes' wild anarchy,
demolished houses, flung thunderbolts, then built
a city, airport, highway, stadium.

If only I could see the organist!
Catch sight of his face, his eyes!
If I could trace the movements of his hands,
I might understand where he's taking us,
us and those for whom we care,
children, animals, shadows.












by Adam Zagawjewski

translated by Clare Cavanagh 

at seven in the morning

the curtains are not drawn and dark and so monsoon light comes in.  grey, as it always is in June.  by standards, it is already late and W* is licking my hand with the patient look of a toilet-trained dog.  i will be leaving again in less than 24 hours.  arrangements have been made.  all that is needed, to pack by number:  two places, two different temperatures.  after the ISSI and the R*, i will have to remember the tickets for the musical play.

greeting

three angles removed

we all have space here, under this wide awning.  possibly also a berth, for where we all temporarily anchor.  if it is alright, we could take a walk or meet at a refreshment place, not a bar, two blocks down not too far from the dock.  you can tell me all about God, and all about patience, and all about moving and keeping apace while keeping still.  you might not notice, i am a bit resigned.  and take things almost a day at a time.  and the little good things, i like to save.  even the colored paperclip we happened along the way.  such things we dream, often are fiction, i suppose.  they do not really stay, the way they are, the moment they become real. 

                                                                                                                                                                                           photo by Alvin Pang

what occurs between

she smiles, and for the briefest of instance, the world is aright.



between days and between years.
between this moment now and the moment thereafter the turn of a new leaf.
when nothing stays the same, what stays?
a list of memories, no matter malleable
a bag of bones
a bucket list, no matter vague an outline
a prayer, maybe
that whatever occurs between
let the cosmos say all that is good stay

not talking about politics

the politics in this country has come to such we decide not to talk about it.  a conversation best left unsaid.  we both know the condition of the roads and there is no one and everyone to blame.  now the elections are over, the tellies are beginning to show other things of interest; though a nationwide comedian still banters and makes satire in his primetime show.  you like this, of course.  and basketball, too.  in this country of basketball seasons and soap opera series.  a lost child always seeking to reunite with the lost parent, or the other way around.  in the meantime, the drama.  a masochist nation's form of entertainment.  little wonder the state of the nation.  these, among others, we agree not to disagree.  

nights, i walk with the dogs and watch the halved melon moon.   you call from the doorstep.  we share the couch in the dimmed living room.  i play jazz.  and in bed you tell me i am a stranger without roots.

on staying under the sun

roger has written and published another non-fiction piece.  a memoir.  and it is beautiful and tender, the kind that makes you be on a boat watching the glowing dusk and white waves.  he mentions reading as a child The Little Prince, the "old" grownups always needing explanations; and how now he himself is on his way to needing those.  i sent roger a post telling how beautiful his new published work and how i wish i have his bravery to step into the light, under the sun, for the world to see.

roger says he walks around naked.  sunburnt.  
i say that is why i write poetry.

writing for children

photo taken of a neighbor's wall a few months ago:  bright day at sea with a school of fish, a pink shark, and happy mermaid.

how do we tell our children about the world?

about its being a Neither place.  about the world-at-large only as good as our-world-within can get: the starry heaven above, the moral law within.

pink sharks do not and do exist. 
so do mermaids.  the happy ones.  those who do not  keep on singing about lost loves.

how do we tell our children about the world?
that it is only as beautiful as we will it to be so.

atlas shrugged

"The man who said he would stop the motor of the world and did."  The line I remember of Ayn Rand's book.  Made me pick it up and wade through the yellowed and water-stained volume.

Somehow:  it made sense why an assembly-line worker for cars cannot have a car; why the Man with the Idea can have it all.  

Because the Idea ripples, and blooms.  The Idea is the seed, from which grows the tree, from where many can reap.  So that is why capitalism appears to be utopia.

But we are on capitalism now.  And on the fringes, there, the impoverished; in the hidden fringes, there, the sweat shops.

Where is John Galt now?

old man with an umbrella

two nights ago i woke to the sound of the old man next door knocking at his own door.  the dogs, who were let indoors in anticipation of rain, barking at the sound.  it was well past midnight and i knew his family next door had left for out of town.  
 
didn't he know?  i wondered.  although it took no genius to guess he probably didn't.  certainly one didn't have to be nosy to see the scrawny man must have fallen off from his family:  his wife makes no pretense of calling him well; his grown son does not talk to him.  it is not unheard of in this country how some men, while in their prime, leave their families for someone else; how these same men come back to the lives of their wives and children when they have grown old and sick and abandoned by their other women.  how their wives and children, morally obliged, take them in.  in the same way one takes in a very unwelcomed stranger.

the next door neighbors could be a classic.  although i'll never know from the few neighborly exchanges.  the wife had remarked twice or so about the frontyard plants, the fruit tree i was growing.  her grandchild's fondness for dogs.  the son and i had exchanged briefly about the weather, the water supply, the tiles, the routes, the breaking-in two doors away.

the old man attempts to make conversation; but is strange.  

the sound of his knocking made the dogs bark.  i called the dogs.  it had started to rain and i began to worry for the man.  how it must be:  to keep on knocking on one's own door late into the night, exhausted and never knowing it'll never be opened.  there's no one in.  

it pelted harder.  and i wondered about having him in.  he couldn't stay on the couch, the dogs wouldn't let him and would keep awake the entire neighborhood.  there was no extra room; upstairs being a large studio space and a bed i was sharing.  she was half awakened by the heavy rain, and the dull, exhausted and frustrated sound.  the old man knocking next door, i said. 

she went back to sleep.  i kept awake at the sound of heavy rain.  and the knocking that had stopped.  i got up from bed and looked through the window.  the old man was leaving, holding on to an umbrella, and dragging his one limp limb out into the open rain.


























 

    

a kind of be-ing

shouldn't we try, at least, every day, to keep a pace apart from the clocks of the world?  

see the things must to do, all the people to meet, the things due.  how they never run out
how they always manage to outrun.  everyone. 

it is a kind of be-ing.  to keep still.  to watch:  the world running around, chasing
its own mad tail.




























 

rain for our many kinds of loss

the season of rain is coming.  already it beats cold on rooftops, rough on pavements, and soft on grass, on mists, in the middle of nights or in the break of mornings.  a number of people are growing colds (myself included) and a number of plants bloom in this odd time of in between seasons.  some didn't make it past the scorch of summer.  some still trying to survive, holding on to this last stretch of distance between dry now and tomorrow's rain.  

for what ever it lets us, the rain, how it is both gift and loss.  also, an embrace and a promise of gentler things to come.  see, the softer earth, ripe for planting; see the buds beginning to hesitate, growing drowsy with the weight of its dreams of coming summers; birds migrating in numbers.  it's a loss, and a flight from it, towards gentler things to come.

Blake on graying streets

Blake




I watch William Blake, who spotted angels
every day in treetops
and met God on the staircase
of his little house and found light in grimy alleys--

Blake, who died
singing gleefully
in a London thronged
with streetwalkers, admirals, and miracles,

William Blake, engraver, who labored
and lived in poverty, but not despair,
who received burning signs
from the sea and from the starry sky,

who never lost hope, since hope
was always born anew like breath,
I see those who walked like him on graying streets,
headed toward the dawn's rosy orchid.










by Adam Zagajewski

translated by Clare Cavanagh 

when the lovers are dead

it may be worth to think about why two dead lovers are the best lovers.  one, their love is as eternal as their youth, their passion as steady as in the Grecian Urn.  then: no hunger will tear them apart, no sickness, no need for health.  why then wish to be alive?  perhaps it why too many wanted to love and be loved in Twilight.
but, 
what about boredom?  the ebbs and tides that make for joy and laughter?
and unpredictability that make for those rarest, temporal moments we have when the world and the universe, and life itself, despite everything else, is simply beautiful...

a list of thoughts today

1.  how truth is burdened with need for proof.
2.  stephen hawking.
3.  physics: how no information disappears.  but see: where does the "you" go after ALS.
4.  random acts of kindness at 
     http://www.boredpanda.com/random-acts-of-kindness/
5.  balmy summer afternoon calling for a hammock.
6.  semester papers, a cup of coffee, a glass of water.


























 

companionable silence

companionable silence is perhaps one of the most beautiful, warm things.  when the moment has rested itself; and there is no need to fill anything with words.  (you are just there across) i, here on the couch, under the reading light.  the dogs napping just beside.

it is not with everyone we can have companionable silence with.  more often is that sense of need to find comfort in words, holding on to them like life buoys for safety, like security blankets we wrap ourselves with.  like scaffolds we use to support moments.  

perhaps it is the fear of silence.  or the fear of thoughts--the other's or our own.
perhaps it is the fear of distance from the other.  or the fear of alienation, that dawning so often ignored how the beloved other is really, in essence, a stranger.

companionable silence feels to me as this comfort without such fears, even as this comfort knows, harboring no illusions, that the other will always remain other.

it is almost like faith.


 tonight is one of those nights of companionable silence.  it is after dinner.  i have already walked with the dogs.  you are at the table, working on the laptop; i am on the reading couch, finishing the book, "The Portland Vase," stopping briefly at times to read you the most interesting parts.  not too long ago, it was "The Root of Wild Madder", something about the natural red dye and the handmade Persian carpets.  i do not tell you how i miss being so voracious a reader as when i was younger; you already know this.  i do not tell you how at times i think there is so much to read but so little time.  we both know how it is to be adults.

already it is late night, past midnight.  i have a chapter and an epilogue left.  there are a couple of papers to review for tomorrow; maybe i'll stay up awhile longer.  

beside the bed, a few more books that i do not read cover to cover.  only when i feel like it--a page or two or so--before turning off the lamplight, or after waking up and not wanting to get up just yet.  roland barthes' "A Lover's Discourse", in spite of its seemingly romantic and/or casual title, is not, after all, a light reading.  it being the rumination of nuance.  nuance being the Intractable.  i particularly like the book because, as koestenbaum so aptly describes it in the introduction, it "is an attempt to get rid of 'love'--its roles, its attitudes--in order to find the luster that
remains when the stereotypes  have been sent packing."

Of course, expectedly a kind of reading that would need one to mull over thoughts after reading a fragment-chapter.  much like milan kundera's
"The Curtain", which, for some time, i tried to read at the airport and aboard the plane.

there is, too, wislawa's book, from where some poems i read for you on mornings. 

to get covered in leaves, mislay your keys in the grass

A Note




Life is the only way
to get covered in leaves,
catch your breath on the sand,
rise on wings;

to be a dog,
or stroke its warm fur;

to tell pain
from everything it's not;

to squeeze inside events,
dawdle in views,
to seek the least of all possible mistakes.

An extraordinary chance
to remember for a moment
a conversation held
with the lamp switched off;

and if only once
to stumble upon a stone,
end up soaked in one downpour or another;

mislay your keys in the grass;
and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes;
and to keep on not knowing
something important.



 


by Wislawa Szymborska

(from Monologue of a Dog, translated by S. Baranczak and C. Cavanagh)

secret rain

i realize just now it might have been the first May rain.  some minutes ago.  it woke me up, it being so unexpected.  it was so warm and humid last night, starry too.  no trace of red clouds, or wind when i walked the dog.  when the rain came, the first thought was finally a break of coolness, some draft through the windows left open.  then of the clothes left hanging on the clothesline in the yard.  i got up from bed and walked to the other end of the room, parted the curtains. partly thought of maybe dashing to save what can be saved of the what-ever still partly-dry clothes.  then decided against it.  W* who now sleeps under the newly made bed just looked at me and didn't even bother to move.

went downstairs to have a glass of water and of course couldn't get back to sleep.  wrote some while the rain pelted.  checked emails and a call for submission.  thought of the graduate papers that still need evaluating.  opened the file but didn't read it; noting it instead as a box of to-do tomorrow. listened to the rain slowly easing itself.  calming down.  into no more than drops.  

now listening closely, there are actually sounds of crickets. a motor at a distance.  and my eyes, having adjusted to the lack-light, find it is not really so dark after all this time of the night.  lamp post light seeps partly through the curtains.  and the white light from the laptop i've put on the bed.  it occurs to me now: maybe it was not really the first rain this long summer.  maybe it has rained secretly, nights, leaving only the telltale moist on the grass i mistake as mist by early morning.


















  

you are rain

waking up midnight at the sound of summer rain...



you are rain.  secret in the middle of the night, in the middle of summer.  like an apology in the dark, in the night, like passion without words, after days long of summer heat.  months dry white torrid scorching.  you are.  rain, at last.  draft through the windows left open, fluttering the curtains.  unexpected, relief.  a welcome, a handful familiar of contours on the palms of my waking.  here, the sound of rain, hard and gradually.  coming to gentleness.  to becoming sound.  of drops, random, spent, and cool, like kisses, finally, easing themselves, sliding, from the bush leaves, to the soft blankets of night grass.