Not to go gentle into the night

It cannot be trust, if it is not trust
Isn't it?
Not love, if not love

Things that can only be absolute are
Too large
For lives with threaded seams

Do weeds in a landscaped yard know
Their fate, just the same
They soak up sun and rain

Of course we know sweetness cannot 
Be had for long
But what is life for, if not for it?

drowning with woman

Counterculture communes in the 60s and 70s
attempted to distill love
through music, herbs, and freedom in forest
idyllic edens or as thought to be.

My own short experience told me 
youth has a way of imagining 
as does any spring beginnings.
To have a time of easy belief in hope

has its own good, if only to make the later years
bearable with dream-like memories. 

There is always something beautiful
about the long ago we have lived or survived.
Thus, that smile when we are
alone one morning with second cup of coffee

and remembering. Times, there, of love
also of beauty we had not recognised
while it looked us on the face. Gentle gust.
Perched on our palms like easy wind.  

How time flies. 

The hours we wasted arguing and hating
each other as much as ourselves for 
nonetheless loving both self and other. 
No counterculture communes truly survived.

There is no way to distill love.

world moving

1
When we lie down seeing the sky, 
we may as well be standing 
from another angle; the sky is sea foam.
Such ways the world can be

seen, different eyes: punto de vista.

2
The call, sooner than expected, arrived
yesterday; half the request granted.
What it meant we knew from the beginning.
In the beginning, we knew 

different and the same: punto de vista.

what happened to icarus

ICARUS


Only the feathers floating around the hat
Showed that anything more spectacular had occurred
Than the usual drowning. The police preferred to ignore
The confusing aspects of the case,
And the witnesses ran off to a gang war.
So the report filed and forgotten in the archives read simply
“Drowned,” but it was wrong: Icarus
Had swum away, coming at last to the city
Where he rented a house and tended the garden.

“That nice Mr. Hicks” the neighbors called,
Never dreaming that the gray, respectable suit
Concealed arms that had controlled huge wings
Nor that those sad, defeated eyes had once
Compelled the sun. And had he told them
They would have answered with a shocked,
uncomprehending stare.
No, he could not disturb their neat front yards;
Yet all his books insisted that this was a horrible mistake:
What was he doing aging in a suburb?
Can the genius of the hero fall
To the middling stature of the merely talented?

And nightly Icarus probes his wound
And daily in his workshop, curtains carefully drawn,
Constructs small wings and tries to fly
To the lighting fixture on the ceiling:
Fails every time and hates himself for trying.
He had thought himself a hero, had acted heroically,
And dreamt of his fall, the tragic fall of the hero;
But now rides commuter trains,

Serves on various committees,
And wishes he had drowned.




~ Edward Field

temperatures

1.  Monday morning; writing desk by window.  Gray white sky morning; clear breeze.  Sent instructions to secretary; most likely to stay home for a week (i hope not).

2.  Still woke up at 4 this morning, even if cannot run; how the body keeps its own clock; took med instead, talked to the dogs, made coffee, toast bread.

3.  News says what may be the coldest place in this tropical country made 6 degrees; it'll have to live with 9 degrees for the next few days; in this normally humid province, a mountain place along the transnational highway is having 16 degrees; word has reached the city already three elderly died from the cold; that farm animals are dying is old news.

4.  Was it a few days ago I saw a boy that must be no more than twelve pass the M* bridge, shirtless and barefoot, on the way to a junkshop by the obvious weight of his burden, rusty metal junk balanced on his head.

5.  Three things gnaw me since I moved about two years ago in this little island, supposedly to be close to sea:  poverty as clear as broad daylight, a resigned people to an apathetic government, a cruelty to dogs... Last week, I was asked to give a talk to young writers about the importance of poetry, a part of me is unconvinced.  This coming weekend (i hope i will be well by then) I will fly to N* invited to talk again about writing...do I really believe it can change the world to a better place?  Maybe.  But never in a writer's lifetime.

there have been many poems about mermaids

I heard mermaids are found this way.

She who is not always near the shore

or in between abandoned mastless ships

sails torn or anchors lost.  She who is

said to be sometimes found in cities

taking the beautiful in pictures, as if

wanting to find and place the missing. 
  
                                                 C. Carreon, Through a camera lucida





Already there are many poems about mermaids, even though these are by far less than the stories about them already told.  Told by way of caution, disbelief, or awe.

If one stares at open sea long enough, they are easy to believe: creatures that resemble like you and me, though freer, under the sea; 

but only maybe 

because it could be a tail or fin of any:

sealion, snake, whale, shark.


 

a complex relation

so many things have been said about the boston marathon bombing.  but possibly what stayed most in mind, long after the news were over, was how the suspects were identified through cameras.  hundreds of them, thousands even.  from CCTVs to handhelds.  lenses that look and watch nearly our every move.  like multiple eyes of the behemoth that is the System.  the State.  how these eyes are the eyes of the panopticon that is Michel Foucault's metaphor for the disciplinary power.

and when the armed forces moved to make their presence tangible, demonstrating the State's authoritative power directly over people's lives, stopping literally the movement of a town, of a city, we are reminded again of how complex is the relation between the individual and the State.  like separate beings.  even though at times the two may be indistinguishable from each other.

like separate beings wresting for power.
how the State flexes its muscles, showing its strength, saying:  I will hunt you down.  I will bring you down.  you must not be allowed--as no one else is allowed--to question the Order.
how the resistance boldly makes its mark.  taunting:  Oh Power!  see just how much it takes you to take down a 19-year-old boy!