excoriated: crooked heart by aepocrypha on Flickr.
My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far beyond the road I have begun,
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has an inner light, even from a distance—
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
(Rilke; Trans. Robert Bly)
Shouldn’t the distance between impossible
and improbable be widened? Might miracle
deserve its own appendix: the ease with which night
becomes winter? There must be a word for it,
a term unique and apropos to star-pocked sky
and village roads blanketed by snow,
a good-natured—but stone drunk—schoolteacher
leaving a warm bar. It is improbable she will drive.
She does.
(Luke Johnson)
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
(Pablo Neruda)
When I point
out to you that
the flat face of the lake’s water in
stillness is made suddenly
more striking for how a wind
just now, coming, spoils it,
I have in mind
only how even a least
disturbance, strangely
heightening a thing’s
beauty, can at last
define it.
(Carl Phillips)
To hold an avalanche off.
and i. what dreams had i suspended
above our short order lives
when death covered you with bells.
call her back for me
bells. call back this memory
still fresh with cactus pain.
(Sonia Sanchez)
my best, though human cruelty made no sense
to me, though love was inexplicable, more
phantom than reality.”
-Eric Gamalinda, from “Labyrinth
each dull morning the mirror imagines me a future: older misshapen
forest: stinging adder and sprawling spider
the way to haven seems interminable. I creak and shuffle
listen, you wilderness: make plain and let me pass
(D.A. Powell)
We are a meadow where the bees hum,
mind and body are almost one
as the fire snaps in the stove
and out eyes close,
and mouth to mouth, the covers
pulled over our shoulders,
we drowse as the horses drowse afield,
in accord; though the fall cold
surrounds our warm bed, and though
by day we are singular and often lonely.
(Denise Levertov)
I thought I had hold of something elegant, a luminescent glow
on the lake, a flicker’s flash of headdress high on the tree.
I thought I heard a conversation from over water, someone saying
laissez faire, or Toulouse Lautrec, but it was only guys fishing,
a mishearing that came to me like a ray of light through stained glass,
a shimmer like a fine line of Milton’s, or a landscape by Monet,
applied in layers.
What I wanted was something privately
apprehended, something slowly and privately understood:
elite, yes, I admit it.
(Fleda Brown)
I read in the papers the other day that what America needs at this time is somehow to bring back the extended family. And I saw in my mind’s eye future African Peace Corps Volunteers coming to help you set up the system.
-Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa”
