Twelve o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Disolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said,
“Regard that woman
Who hesitates toward you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin.”

The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.
Half-past two,
The street-lamp said,
“Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter.”
So the hand of the child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along
the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.
Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The lamp hummed:
“Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smooths the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets
And female smells in shuttered rooms
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.”
The lamp said,
“Four o’clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”
The last twist of the knife.

T.S. Eliot

Poor summer, it doesn’t know it’s dying.
A few days are all it has. Still, the lake
is with me, its strokes of blue-violet
and the fiery sun replacing loneliness.
I feel like an animal that has found a place.
This is my burrow, my nest, my attempt
to say, I exist. A rose can’t shut itself
and be a bud again. It’s a malady,
wanting it. On the shore, the moon sprinkles
light over everything, like a campfire,
and in the green-black night, the tall pines
hold their arms out as God held His arms
out to say that He was lonely and that
He was making Himself a man.

Henri Cole

Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine — they are the life, the soul of reading.
Tristram Shandy

I remember all the different kinds of years.
Angry, or brokenhearted, or afraid.
I remember feeling like that
walking up the mountain along the dirt path
to my broken house on the island.
And long years of waiting in Massachusetts.
The winter walking and hot summer walking.
I finally fell in love with all of it:
dirt, night, rock and far views.
It’s strange that my heart is as full
now as my desire was then.

Linda Gregg

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Hiding ignorance is to be preferred; but it is difficult to do so while relaxing and over wine.

Heraclitus

A book is made by the reader.

Marcel Proust

Jun17 – 24

Geraint Lewis

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Yuri Kozyrev

What I am I must not show,
What I am thou couldst not know.
Something betwixt heaven and hell,
Something that neither stood nor fell,
Something that through thy wit or will
May work thee good, may work thee ill.
Neither substance quite, nor shadow,
Haunting lonely moor and meadow,
Dancing by the haunted spring,
Riding on the whirlwind’s wing;
Aping in fantastic fashion
Every change of human passion,
While o’er our frozen minds they pass
Like shadows from the mirror’d glass.”

Sir Walter Scott
[Works XVII, 138: chap. 17]

Above the Gorges, one thread of sky:
Cascades in the gorges twine a thousand cords.
High up the slant of splintered sunlight, moonlight:
Beneath, curbs to the wild heave of the waves.
The shock of a gleam, and then another,
In depths of shadow, frozen for centuries:
The rays between the gorges do not halt at noon;
Where the straits are perilous, more hungry spittle.
Trees lock their roots in rotted coffins
And the twisted skeletons hang tilted upright:
Branches weep as the frost perches
Mournful cadences, remote and clear.
        A spurned exile’s shrivelled guts
Scald and seethe in the water and fire he walks through.
A lifetime like a fine-spun thread,
The road goes up by the rope at the edge.
When he pours his libation of tears to the ghosts in the
    stream
The ghosts gather, a shimmer on the waves.

Meng Chiao

(trans. A.C. Graham)

Will be in the old country 4/27 – 5/13

Henk Pander

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Jens Nieth

Like an empty vessel in space (the knower of Truth) is empty both within and without, while at the same time he is full within and without like a vessel immersed in the ocean.
Sage Vasistha

Tara Donovan Untitled

I was often unable to think of external things as having external existence, and I communed with all that I saw as something not apart from, but inherent in, my own immaterial nature. Many times while going to school have I grasped at a wall or a tree to recall myself from this abyss of idealism to the reality.

William Wordsworth

In spring it is the dawn that is most beautiful.
As the light creeps over the hills, their outlines
are dyed a faint red and wisps of purplish cloud
trail over them.

In summer the nights. Not only when the moon
shines, but on dark nights too, as the fireflies
flit to and fro, and even when it rains, how
beautiful it is!

In autumn the evenings, when the glittering sun
sinks close to the edge of the hills and the crows
fly back to their nests in threes and fours and
twos; more charming still is a file of wild geese,
like specks in the distant sky. When the sun has
set, one’s heart is moved by the sound of the wind
and the hum of the insects.

In winter the early mornings. It is beautiful
indeed when snow has fallen during the night, but
splendid too when the ground is white with frost;
or even when there is no snow or frost, but it is
simply very cold and the attendants hurry from room
to room stirring up the fires and bringing
charcoal, how well this fits the season’s mood!
But as noon approaches and the cold wears off, no
one bothers to keep the braziers alight, and soon
nothing remains but piles of white ashes.

Sei Shonagon