The only sins

"Graham (Greene) loved to write and talk of brothels, paid companions, and it was one of the habits that put off many an otherwise sympathetic reader, or convinced friends that they were dealing with an adolescent. But underneath the wished-for bravado there always seemed to lie something quieter and more sincere than simply a wish to shock. He really did appear to hold that kindness is more important than conventional morality and the things you do more telling than merely the things we claim to believe.

In one play he barely acknowledged - it was never published in his lifetime - he portrays the girls in a whorehouse as earthly angels of a kind, listening to men's confessions and offering a form of absolution, as elsewhere priests might do.

The only crime in such a place, he suggests - the play is called A House of Reputation - is to feel shame about one's presence there (as a dentist does) or to complicate the exchange  with the talk of love (as one "sentimental ignorant fool" does, falling for a hardheaded girl as if he's confusing the woman with her office). When the boy in love gets the brothel closed down, in a fit of too-simple righteousness, he strips the girl he loves of her home and her living and deprives the world of a much-needed hospital of the heart. The only sins in the Greene universe are hypocrisy and putting a theory - even a religion - before a human being."

Page 33, 'The Man Within My Head', Pico Iyer

Remember Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday? Is kindness the common denominator of all great writers?

The Almanac of Last Things

In this season of falling seeds, a parrot shook a whole podful of snowflake-like seeds in my path this morning.

The Almanac of Last Things

From the almanac of last things
I choose the spider lily
for the grace of its brief
blossom, though I myself
fear brevity,

but I choose The Song of Songs
because the flesh
of those pomegranates
has survived
all the frost of dogma.

I choose January with its chill
lessons of patience and despair--and
August, too sun-struck for lessons.
I choose a thimbleful of red wine
to make my heart race,

then another to help me
sleep. From the almanac
of last things I choose you,
as I have done before.
And I choose evening

because the light clinging
to the window
is at its most reflective
just as it is ready
to go out.

Linda Pastan

Help me decide

I somehow love the idea of living on an island and someone coming to meet me, and me waiting at the dock for the boat. Surely a memory from Henning Menkell, or one of the Scandinavian writers.


To Happiness
by Carl Dennis

If you're not approaching, I hope at least
You're off to comfort someone who needs you more,
Not lost wandering aimlessly
Or drawn to the shelter of well-lit rooms
Where people assume you've arrived already.

If you're coming this way, send me the details—
The name of the ship, the port it leaves from—
So I can be down on the dock to help you
Unload your valises, your trunks and boxes
And stow them in the big van I'll have rented.

I'd like this to be no weekend stay
Where a single change of clothes is sufficient.
Bring clothes for all seasons, enough to fill a closet;
And instead of a single book for the bedside table
Bring boxes of all your favorites.

I'll be eager to clear half my shelves to make room,
Eager to read any titles you recommend.
If we've many in common, feel free to suggest
They prove my disposition isn't to blame
For your long absence, just some problems of attitude,

A few bad habits you'll help me set to one side.
We can start at dinner, which you're welcome
To cook for us while I sweep and straighten
And set the table. Then light the candles
You've brought from afar for the occasion.

Light them and fill the room I supposed I knew
With a glow that shows me I was mistaken.
Then help me decide if I'm still the person I was
Or someone else, someone who always believed in you
And imagined no good reasons for your delay.

Alive

Sweet Darkness

...Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognise its own.
There you can be sure
... you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.

David Whyte

Provisional

Contentment
by Michael Ryan

Fragile, provisional, it comes unbidden
as evening: the children on the block
called in to dinner that for tonight
is plentiful, as if it had cost nothing
either in money or worry about money.

Then evening deepens and the street
turns silent. There may be disasters
idling in driveways, and countless distresses
sharpening, but all that matters
most that must be done is done.

"Contentment" by Michael Ryan, from 'This Morning'

Pause

Now and then
it's good to pause
in our pursuit of happiness
and just be happy.

Guillaume Apollinaire

The art of losing

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

And wave after wave

"This sky like an infinite tenderness, I have caught
glimpses of that, often, so often, and never yet have
I described it, I can’t, somehow, I never will.

How is it that I didn’t spend my whole life being happy, loving
other human beings’ faces.

And wave after wave, the ocean smells like lilacs in
late August."

'Walking to Martha’s Vineyard', by Franz Wright

From http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/242682

What you must forget

"We talk about survivor’s guilt, but not about observer’s guilt. For journalists this is particularly acute, as we are paid to watch suffering and paid more during war. For poets, it’s even worse. It’s Adorno for the twenty-first century. The incomparable horror of Auschwitz has given way to Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.

    It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.
    It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.
    It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
    It is not your memories which haunt you.
    It is not what you have written down.
    It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.
    What you must go on forgetting all your life.
    And with any luck oblivion should discover a ritual.

                      From “A German Requiem,” by James Fenton"

 Everyone is an Immigrant, Poetry and Reportage in Lampedusa, Eliza Griswold:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/243226

As branches reach

A Neruda-feel.

"You come to me quiet as rain not yet fallen.

...You come to me
Quiet as bulbs not yet broken
Out into sunlight.

...The fear I see in your now lining face
Changes to puzzlement when my hands reach
For you as branches reach..."

Brian Patten

I lived for those connections

Don't Use My Blood
Tim McBride

The Confidential Self-Exclusion Sticker lets the donor indicate anonymously that his/her blood should not be used for transfusion if he/she is donating under peer pressure or other strained circumstances.—The American Red Cross

Don't trust my smile
no matter how I gush
at you from the tilted chair
letting blood
run into your plastic bag.
My heart is sick. My pint is venomous.

Don't trust my words.
I lied to every question on your form.
I have "taken/given money in exchange for sex"
with men and women,
not "even once," but many times.
I've been "unprotected" in love
in despair, in loneliness—
in New York and Miami,
in Java and in Niamey, Niger.
I lived for those connections.
That's why I come to you.

Don't trust my eyes.
Though I look away from the quick stab
into the swabbed and swollen mainline
of my tied-off radial vein,
I'm not afraid. I share ungodly needles
all the time. Like yours
they make me feel giddy and generous,
light-headed and brave.
Unpunctured night
turns rank and malarial.
Rats have bitten me.
Such things leave their mark.

Don't use my blood.
I offer it for nothing,
a sacrament unfit for you to touch.
Tape that red cross
in the hinge of my arm.
Take the scarlet button,
pin it to my chest.
Change Be nice,
I gave blood today.
Write Love me,
I have drained my heart.

Context

"I think we judge people we know personally in the context of their entire lives. Nothing else would make sense or seem fair. But we judge strangers and public figures by statements taken out of context. Removing context is what turns a non-story into a story. And it allows the news media to put a face on evil, which is a good way to attract eyeballs and sell advertising."

Scott Adams. http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/insults_and_context/

Darkness

I used to love the rainbow
And I used to love the view
Another early morning
I pretend that it was new
But I caught the darkness, baby
And I got it worse than you.

Leonard Cohen, Darkness: http://soundcloud.com/leonardcohen/leonard-cohen-darkness

Telling its story, against the vanishing

The Enigma We Answer by Living

Einstein didn't speak as a child
waiting till a sentence formed and
emerged full-blown from his head.

I do the thing, he later wrote, which
nature drives me to do. Does a fish
know the water in which he swims?

This came up in conversation
with a man I met by chance,
friend of a friend of a friend,

who passed through town carrying
three specimen boxes of insects
he'd collected in the Grand Canyon-

one for mosquitoes, one for honeybees,
one for butterflies and skippers,
each lined up in a row, pinned and labeled,

tiny morphologic differences
revealing how adaptation
happened over time. The deeper down

he hiked, the older the rock
and the younger
the strategy for living in that place.

And in my dining room the universe
found its way into this man
bent on cataloguing each innovation,

though he knows it will all disappear-
the labels, the skippers, the canyon.
We agreed then, the old friends and the new,

that it's wrong to think people are a thing apart
from the whole, as if we'd sprung
from an idea out in space, rather than emerging

from the sequenced larval mess of creation
that binds us with the others,
all playing the endgame of a beautiful planet

that's made us want to name
each thing and try to tell
its story against the vanishing.

Alison Hawthorne Deming

What lasts

Hummingbird
For Tess

Suppose I say summer,
write the word for "hummingbird",
put it in an envelope,
take it down the hill
to the box. When you open
my letter you will recall
those days and how much,
just how much, I love you.


Five O'Clock in the Morning

As he passed his father's room, he glanced in at the door,
Yevgraf Ivanovitch, who had not taken off his clothes or gone
to bed, was standing by the window, drumming on the panes.

"Goodbye, I am going." said the son.
"Goodbye...the money is on the round table," his father
answered without turning around.

A cold, hateful rain was falling as the laborer drove him
to the station...The grass seemed darker than ever.

Anton Chekov, "Difficult People"


"What lasts is what you start with."

Charles Wight, from "A Journal of Southern Rivers'

From 'All of Us', Collected Poems, Raymond Carver