The Secret Sits

We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

Robert Frost

Return

“Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you’re allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It’s like killing yourself, and then you’re reborn. I guess I’ve lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.”

Charles Bukowski, An interview with London Magazine,
Dec 1974 – Jan 1975

My Father Comes to the City

Tonight his airplane comes in from the West,
and he rises from his seat, a suitcoat slung
over his arm. The flight attendant smiles
and says, "Have a nice visit," and he nods
as if he has done this all before,
as if his entire life hasn't been 170 acres
of corn and oats, as if a plow isn't dragging
behind him through the sand and clay,
as if his head isn't nestling in the warm
flank of a Holstein cow.

Only his hands tell the truth:
fingers thick as ropes, nails flat
and broken in the trough of endless chores.
He steps into the city warily, breathing
metal and exhaust, bewildered by the
stampede of humanity circling around him.
I want to ask him something familiar,
something about tractors and wagons,
but he is taken by the neon night,
crossing carefully against the light.

Joyce Sutphen

Suddenly, sun

What the Day Gives

Suddenly, sun. Over my shoulder
in the middle of gray November
what I hoped to do comes back,
asking.

Across the street the fiery trees
hold onto their leaves,
red and gold in the final months
of this unfinished year,
they offer blazing riddles..

In the frozen fields of my life
there are no shortcuts to spring,
but stories of great birds in migration
carrying small ones on their backs,
predators flying next to warblers
they would, in a different season, eat.

Stunned by the astonishing mix in this uneasy world
that plunges in a single day from despair
to hope and back again, I commend my life
to Ruskin's difficult duty of delight,
and to that most beautiful form of courage,
to be happy.

Jeanne Lohmann, 'The Light of Invisible Bodies'

Some say you're lucky

Some say you're lucky
If nothing shatters it.
But then you wouldn't
Understand poems or songs.
You'd never know
Beauty comes from loss.

It's deep inside every person:
A tear tinier
Than a pearl or thorn.
It's one of the places
Where the beloved is born.

Gregory Orr

Fiction

Going south, we watched spring
unroll like a proper novel:
forsythia, dogwood, rose;
bare trees, green lace, full shade.
By the time we arrived in Georgia
the complications were deep.

When we drove back, we read
from back to front. Maroon went wild,
went scarlet, burned once more
and then withdrew into pink,
tentative, still in bud.
I thought if only we could go on
and meet again, shy as strangers.

"Fiction" by Lisel Mueller, from Alive Together

Sweetness

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear  
one more friend  
waking with a tumor, one more maniac  

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness  
has come  
and changed nothing in the world  

except the way I stumbled through it,  
for a while lost  
in the ignorance of loving  

someone or something, the world shrunk  
to mouth-size,  
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness  
that doesn’t leave a stain,  
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet ...
  
Tonight a friend called to say his lover  
was killed in a car  
he was driving. His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed  
to repeat, and I repeated  
the one or two words we have for such grief  

until we were speaking only in tones.  
Often a sweetness comes  
as if on loan, stays just long enough  

to make sense of what it means to be alive,  
then returns to its dark  
source. As for me, I don’t care  

where it’s been, or what bitter road  
it’s traveled  
to come so far, to taste so good.

Stephen Dunn

Begin

Begin again to the summoning birds
to the sight of light at the window,
begin to the roar of morning traffic
all along Pembroke Road.

Every beginning is a promise
born in light and dying in dark
determination and exaltation of springtime
flowering the way to work.
Begin to the pageant of queuing girls
the arrogant loneliness of swans in the canal
bridges linking the past and future
old friends passing though with us still.

Begin to the loneliness that cannot end
since it perhaps is what makes us begin,
begin to wonder at unknown faces
at crying birds in the sudden rain
at branches stark in the willing sunlight
at seagulls foraging for bread
at couples sharing a sunny secret
alone together while making good.

Though we live in a world that dreams of ending
that always seems about to give in
something that will not acknowledge conclusion
insists that we forever begin.

Brendan Kennelly, 'Do Not Go Gentle'

And wished to drown

I suppose like others
I have come through fire and sword,
love gone wrong,
head-on crashes, drunk at sea,
and I have listened to the simple sound of water running
in tubs
and wished to drown.

Charles Bukowski, The People Look Like Flowers at Last

Consummation Of Grief

I even hear the mountains
the way they laugh
up and down their blue sides
and down in the water
the fish cry
and the water
is their tears.

I listen to the water
on nights I drink away
and the sadness becomes so great
I hear it in my clock
it becomes knobs upon my dresser
it becomes paper on the floor
it becomes a shoehorn
a laundry ticket
it becomes
cigarette smoke
climbing a chapel of dark vines. . .

it matters little
very little love is not so bad
or very little life
what counts
is waiting on walls
I was born for this
I was born to hustle roses down the avenues of the dead.

Charles Bukowski

It came too, all of it

"When no one was left she would have to confront herself. Leaving home left nothing behind. It came too, all of it, and waited in the dark. She realized that the only war worth fighting was the one that raged within; the rest were all diversions. In this small space, her hunting miles, she was going to bring herself home. Home was not a place for the faint-hearted; only the very brave could live with themselves."

Orion, from The World and Other Places: Stories, by Jeanette Winterson

Epiphany

"Epiphany is an unveiling of reality. What in Greek was called epiphaneia meant the appearance, the arrival, of a divinity among mortals or its recognition under a familiar shape of man or woman. Epiphany thus interrupts the everyday flow of time and enters as one privileged moment when we intuitively grasp a deeper, more essential reality hidden in things or persons. A poem-epiphany tells about one moment-event and this imposes a certain form."

'A Book of Luminous Things, An International Anthology of Poetry', Introduced by Czeslaw Milosz

Wave after Wave

Every evening, at sunset-time, hundreds of bats fly out of Cubbon Park to dot the sky in a silent drama that never fails to fascinate you. To be there, under the bare rain-trees, and see them fly out silently against the darkening blue sky, in wave after wave.

Today watched them gather at the fruiting silk cotton tree.

Don't have a camera great enough to capture that movement, so just go see it yourself. In this season, 6.30 PM, the gate next to UB City.

Go. And tell me about it.

I know, I know, I know that this is changing me

The latest OCD song, on repeat, like some 1500 times. I think I should watch this on really bad days.
And to think the video has a squirrel in it - you know?

R.E.M. - ÜBerlin (Official)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZITh-XIikgI

I know, I know, I know that this is changing
We walk the streets to feel the ground
I'm chasing through Berlin

I am flying on a star into a meteor tonight
I am flying on a star, a star, a star
I will make it through the day
And then the day becomes the night
I will make it through the night

Uttaraayan

"The trees are coming into leaf,
like something almost being said..."*

A time of transition, in our city. The bare trees reveal the intricate patterns of their arms, the new buds "relax and spread", the flowers bloom all over - the annual yellow tabubeia flowers kept their February promise. 

You go to Lal Bagh Botanical gardens every weekend, in the heart of the city, to watch the young squirrels scamper all over 200-year-old trees. Soon they will be covered in leaves, all set for the summer sun.

Photos, on Picasa: https://picasaweb.google.com/106491954401233999557/Uttaraayan

Photos, on Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/106491954401233999557/albums/5833123102125674161
* Philip Larkin