Angels

In the Library

There's a book called
"A Dictionary of Angels."
No one has opened it in fifty years,
I know, because when I did,
The covers creaked, the pages
Crumbled. There I discovered

The angels were once as plentiful
As species of flies.
The sky at dusk
Used to be thick with them.
You had to wave both arms
Just to keep them away.

Now the sun is shining
Through the tall windows.
The library is a quiet place.
Angels and gods huddled
In dark unopened books.
The great secret lies
On some shelf Miss Jones
Passes every day on her rounds.

She's very tall, so she keeps
Her head tipped as if listening.
The books are whispering.
I hear nothing, but she does.

Charles Simic, 'In the Library (for Octavio)'

Night Picnic

There was the sky, starless and vast—
Home of every one of our dark thoughts—
Its door open to more darkness.
And you, like a late door-to-door salesman,
With only your own beating heart
In the palm of your outstretched hand.

All things are imbued with God’s being—
She said in hushed tones
As if his ghost might overhear us—
The dark woods around us,
Our faces which we cannot see,
Even this bread we are eating.

You were mulling over the particulars
Of your cosmic insignificance
Between slow sips of red wine.
In the ensuing quiet, you could hear
Her small, sharp teeth chewing the crust—
And then finally, she moistened her lips. 

Charles Simic

Walking

I never run into anyone from the old days.
It's summer and I'm alone in the city.
I enter stores, apartment houses, offices
And find nothing remotely familiar.

The trees in the park - were they always so big?
And the birds so hidden, so quiet?
Where is the bus that passed this way?
Where are the greengrocers and hairdressers,

And that schoolhouse with the red fence?
Miss Harding is probably still at her desk,
Sighing as she grades papers late into the night.
The bummer is, I can't find the street.

All I can do is make another tour of the neighbourhood,
Hoping I'll meet someone to show me the way
And a place to sleep, since I've no return ticket
To wherever it is I came from earlier this evening.

From 'That Little Something', Poems by Charles Simic

Poetry

"A young man in a small town in Patagonia or in Kansas reads an ancient Chinese poet in a book he borrowed from the library and falls in love with a poem, which he reads to himself over and over again as the summer night is falling. With each reading he brings the voice of the dead poet to life. For one unforgettable moment, he steps out of his own cramped self and enters the lives of unknown men and women, seeing the world through their eyes, feeling what they once felt and thinking what they once thought.

If poetry is not the most utopian project ever devised by human beings, I don’t know what is."

Poetry and Utopia, Charles Simic

Yet within, it must be cool and quiet

Stone
Charles Simic

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger's tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill--
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.

In other words, hold my hand...

"Jazz is about happiness. Old happiness made into new happiness." Charles Simic

Nat King Cole, In Other Words: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp0Pe0fFMXk

Poets often use many words
To say a simple thing.
It takes thought and time amd rhyme
To make a poem sing.

With music and words I've been playing
For you I have written a song.
To be sure that you'll know what I'm saying,
I'll translate as I go along...

Fly me to the moon,
And let me play among the stars.
Let me see what spring is like
On jupiter and mars.

In other words,
Hold my hand.
In other words,
Darling, kiss me......

* Photo from Google Images

Momentary deities

I keep going back to this, as if to a holy book. On any random page, I come across answers, revelations, and wonder.

.................................................................................. 

"Momentary deities" is, I believe, how the Greeks thought of words.

Cold, windy autumn night. A homeless woman on the corner talking to God, and he, as usual, having nothing to say.

 

The identification of what remains untouched by change has been the philosopher's task. Art and literature, on the contrary, have been delighted with the ephemeral - the smell of bread, for instance.

I heard of a mind reader who could read what a lit match feared as it entered a dark house.

'The Monster loves his Labyrinth: Notebooks', Charles Simic  

Poetry

"To lovers, even their first names are poetry."

'The Monster loves his Labyrinth: Notebooks', Charles Simic


Ultimo Tango a Parigi video: http://www.myspace.com/tiagobenzinho (scroll down)

That commonplace miracle

"A New Hampshire high school student reading an ancient Chinese poem and being moved - a theory of literature that cannot account for that commonplace miracle is worthless."

"Being is not an idea in philosophy, but a wordless experience we have from time to time."

"I still think Camus was right. Heroic lucidity in the face of the absurd is about all we really have."

"One writes because one has been touched by the yearning for and the despair of ever touching the Other."

 'The Monster loves his Labyrinth: Notebooks', Charles Simic 

Chance, a lyric force

Excerpt from 'The Monster Loves His Labyrinth: Notebooks', by Charles Simic

"I admire Claude Levi Strauss's observation that all art is essentially reduction and Gertrude Stein's saying that poetry is vocabulary.

Chance as a tool with which to break up one's habitual associations. Once they're broken, use one of the pieces to launch yourself into the unknown.

We name one thing and then another. That's how time enters poetry. Space, on the other hand, comes into being through the attention we pay to each word. The more intense our attention, the more space, and there's a lot of space inside words.

Connotations have their non-Euclidean geometries.