note to the president

This country will not be a permanently good place for any of us to live in unless we make it a reasonably good place for all of us to live in.

Theodore Roosevelt

Sam

Why, Sir, most schemes of political improvement are very laughable things.

Samuel Johnson

history

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.

Abba Eban

Twain

When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.

Mark Twain

After the Flood, We

We must be the only ones
left, in the mist that has risen
everywhere as well
as in these woods

I walk across the bridge
towards the safety of high ground
(the tops of the trees are like islands)

gathering the sunken
bones of the drowned mothers
(hard and round in my hands)
while the white mist washes
around my legs like water;

fish must be swimming
down in the forest beneath us,
like birds, from tree to tree
and a mile away
the city, wide and silent,
is lying lost, far undersea.

You saunter beside me, talking
of the beauty of the morning,
not even knowing
that there has been a flood,

tossing small pebbles
at random over your shoulder
into the deep thick air,

not hearing the first stumbling
footsteps of the almost-born
coming (slowly) behind us,
not seeing
the almost-human
brutal faces forming
(slowly)
out of stone.





-Margaret Atwood

The Woodpecker Pecks, But the Hole Does Not Appear

It's hard to imagine how unremembered we all become,
How quickly all that welve done
Is unremembered and unforgiven,
how quickly
Bog lilies and yellow clover flashlight our footfalls,
How quickly and finally the landscape subsumes us,
And everything that we are becomes what we are not.

This is not new, the orange finch
And the yellow-and-dun finch
picking the dry clay politely,
The grasses asleep in their green slips
Before the noon can roust them,
The sweet oblivion of the everyday
like a warm waistcoat
Over the cold and endless body of memory.

Cloud-scarce Montana morning.
July, with its blue cheeks puffed out like a putto on an ancient map,
Huffing the wind down from the northwest corner of things,
Tweets on the evergreen stumps,
swallows treading the air,
The ravens hawking from tree to tree, not you, not you,
Is all that the world allows, and all one could wish for.




Charles Wright

Horace

He who postpones the hour of living is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses.

Horace

The Fragility of Heavy Machinery

They don't love
what live things do, not the blue drain
of veins, not the swell of lungs, certainly not

the slide of balls
in sockets, that slick
organic superiority. All this time,

they've been eyeing our particular kind
of flexibility as they go on drilling
and driving piles, wondering

at our lack of sensitivity. Look at the belly
of a jet sometime and see how thin,
how far, the skin's

been stretched, look at a crane's
bent arm, hold in your hand the cripple
of a stripped screw. None of these things

know what to do. No matter what they say, banging
their anger, sighing with that high whine, shrieking
fatigue, all we hear

is noise, all we see is something
serving. The occasional accident we put down
to human error, while all the while

they stare back smiling
from the wreckage, knowing
what we made them for.


— Caroline Fraser

Gull Skeleton

In the first verse I find his skeleton
nested in shore grass, late one autumn day.
The loss of life and the life which is decay
have been so gentle, so clasped one-to-one

that what they left is perfect; and here in
the second verse I kneel to pick it up:
bones like the fine white china of a cup,
chambered for lightness, dangerously thin,

their one clear purpose forcing them toward flight
even now, from the warm solace of my hand.
In the third verse I bend to that demand
and -- quickly, against the deepening of night,

because I can in poems -- remake his wild eye,
his claws, and the tense heat his muscles keep,
his wings' knit feathers, then free him to his steep
climb, in the last verse, up the streaming sky.


-Jonathan Revere

or any year, really

1999

It was a year in which sadness fulfilled the Socialist ideal
and was given to everyone. Of little there is never shortage.
The news featured our neighbors, as if agony lacked

a local representative, and friends came over
in all their casualty with pictures of sadness
in billfolds beside their babes.

Meanwhile our mothers tried sorrow on for size, like a casket,
and I who might have had your new year's child, gave birth
to blood. A hoard of emotion opened, gradual as shrapnel,

the wall grieved down my thighs and still
born in the drench -- after such sadness
what resolution? -- the beginning.


Christina Davis

Constantly Risking Absurdity

Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and slight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence






-Lawrence Ferlinghetti

hope

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.


Martin Luther King, Jr.

Baldwin

People pay for what they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it simply: by the lives they lead.

James Baldwin

shaw

My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.

-George Bernard Shaw

Intermission

They're feeding each other, two small birds
swiveling on a sea-stone, open beaks
kissing and closing—creatures seeing to each
other's needs without question, drawing
the big world into their brief circle
of wing-quiver, heart-shiver, quick cries
as if the nerves themselves gave tongue,
the path between desire and satisfaction
shorter than thought, the ground dividing
being from being—one flesh-protected
spark of life from another—covered
in no time, so even time, for the moment,
is a matter of no moment, smoke that
vanishes into air, into thin air, to leave
but a flaring thing behind—candescent,
burning its one good instant till all is ash,
redemptive breath recovering itself,
eyes seeking in eyes an answer
to what's happened. The fire at the heart
of things is what these two birds ignite
in their give and take, saying we live
in the one world—where some law of
loving exchange is what tends the blaze
and can startle us into a kind of intermission
of peace between two clamorous cliff-
crumbling waves that rear break roar and
rip to shreds a coast of stone, unsettling
the air we stand in with a surf-storm of
salt-light that bites our eyes, blinding them.




Eamon Grennan

Writing

The cursive crawl, the squared-off characters,
these by themselves delight, even without
a meaning, in a foreign language, in
Chinese, for instance, or when skaters curve
all day across the lake, scoring their white
records in ice. Being intelligible,
these winding ways with their audacities
and delicate hesitations, they become
miraculous, so intimately, out there
at the pen's point or brush's tip, do world
and spirit wed. The small bones of the wrist
balance against great skeletons of stars
exactly; the blind bat surveys his way
by echo alone. Still, the point of style
is character. The universe induces
a different tremor in every hand, from the
check-forger's to that of the Emperor
Hui Tsung, who called his own calligraphy
the 'Slender Gold.' A nervous man
writes nervously of a nervous world, and so on.

Miraculous. It is as though the world
were a great writing. Having said so much,
let us allow there is more to the world
than writing; continental faults are not
bare convoluted fissures in the brain.
Not only must the skaters soon go home;
also the hard inscription of their skates
is scored across the open water, which long
remembers nothing, neither wind nor wake.


-Howard Nemerov

After

After

Where I am going now
I don't yet know:
I have, it appears, no destination, no plan.
In fact no particular longing to go
on anymore, at the moment, the cold
weightless fingers encircling my neck
to make me recite, one more time,
the great reasons for being alive.


Permanent address: unknown.
In the first place, we are not convinced
I exist at all. And if I have
a job


it is to be that hour
when the birds who sing all night long wake
and cease one by one,
and the last stars blaze and go out.


It is to be the beam of morning in the room,


the traveler at your front door;
or, if you wake in the night,
the one who is not
at the door.


The one who can see, from far off,
what you hiddenly go through.


The hammer's shadow in the shadow of a hand.


No one,
and the father of no one.


Franz Wright

The Lowest Trees Have Topps

The lowest trees have topps, the ante her gall,
The flie her spleene, the little sparke his heat:
The slender hears cast shadows, though but small,
And bees have stinges, although they be not great;
Seas have their sourse, and soe have shallow springes:
And Love is Love, in beggars and in Kinges.

Wher waters smothest ronne, ther deepest are the foords,
The diall stirrs, yet none perceives it move;
The firmest fayth is found in fewest woordes,
The turtles doe not singe, and yet they love;
True heartes have ears and eyes, no tongues to speake:
They heare and see, and sigh, and then they breake.


Sir Edward Dyer

friendship

It is painful to consider . . . that there is no human possession of which the duration is less certain.

Samuel Johnson


I detest the man who hides one thing in the depths of his heart and speaks forth another.

Homer

Quod in te est, prome.

Ulysses

Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.


Tennyson

Because I have traveled, I can see other universes in the eyes of strangers. Because I have traveled, I know what parts of me I cannot deny and what parts of me are simply the choices I make. I know the blessings of my own table and the warmth of my own bed. I know how much of life is pure chance, and how great a gift I have been given simply to be who I am. ...

If we don't offer ourselves to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don't lift to the horizon; our ears don't hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in a routine that is both comfortable and limiting.

Kent Nerburn, Letters to my Son

Look to this day!
For it is life,
the very life of life.
For yesterday is already
a dream, and tomorrow
is only a vision:
But today, well lived,
makes every yesterday
a dream of happiness,
and every tomorrow
a vision of hope.

The future is not a choice between alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created --- created first in mind and will, created next in activity. The future is not someplace we are going to but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them changes both the maker and the destination.

marathons

A lot of people run a race to see who's fastest. I run to see who has the most guts.

Steve Prefontaine


If you want to experience a different life, run a marathon.

Emil Zatopek

I always loved running...it was something you could do by yourself, and under your own power. You could go in any direction, fast or slow as you wanted, fighting the wind if you felt like it, seeking out new sights just on the strength of your feet and the courage of your lungs.

Jesse Owens


The marathon's about . . . the last 10K. That's when it's about what you have in your core. You have run all the strength, all the superficial fitness out of yourself, and it really comes down to what's left inside you. To be able to draw deep and pull something out of yourself is one of the most tremendous things about the marathon.

Rob de Castella

Emmonsails Heath in Winter

I love to see the old heath's withered brake
Mingle its crimpled leaves with furze and ling
While the old heron from the lonely lake
Starts slow and flaps his melancholy wing
And oddling crow in idle motions swing
On the half-rotten ash tree's topmost twig
Beside whose trunk the gypsy makes his bed -
Up flies the bouncing woodcock from the brig
Where a black quagmire quakes beneath the tread;
The fieldfare chatters in the whistling thorn
And for the 'awe round fields and closen rove,
And coy bumbarrels twenty in a drove
Flit down the hedgerows in the frozen plain
And hang on little twigs and start again.




John Clare

Frost

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one
And the work is play for mortal sakes
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.


-Robert Frost

Circular

Daylight illuminated, but only for those
who had some knowing in their seeing,
and night fell for everyone, but harder
for some. A belief in happiness bred
despair, though despair could be assuaged
by belief, which required faith,
which made those who had it
one-eyed amid the beautiful contraries.
Love at noon that was still love at dusk
meant doubt had been subjugated
for exactly that long, and best to have music
to sweeten a sadness, underscore joy.
Those alone spoke to their dogs,
but also to plants, to the brilliant agreeableness
of air, while those together were left
to address the wall or open door of each other.
Oh for logs in the fireplace and a winter storm,
some said. Oh for Scotch and a sitcom, said others.
Daylight concealed, but only for those
fond of the enormous puzzle, and night rose up
earth to sky, pagan and unknowable.
How we saw it was how it was.

Stephen Dunn

With love all things may be redeeemed, all things may be rescued.

—Fyodor Dostoyevsky

A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.

Mahatma Gandhi

A man is only as good as what he loves.

Saul Bellow

Love is whatever you can still betray. Betrayal can only happen if you love.


John Le Carre

stevens

The Snow Man

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.








Wallace Stevens

Of what avail is an open eye, if the heart is blind?

—Solomon Ibn-Gabirol

What stays with you latest and deepest? of curious panics
Of hard-fought engagements or sieges tremendous what deepest remains?



Walt Whitman

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 loved 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!) like disaster.


-Elizabeth Bishop

True, there is silver under
The veils of darkness.
But few care to dig in the night
For the possible treasure of stars.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Curiosity

may have killed the cat; more likely
the cat was just unlucky, or else curious
to see what death was like, having no cause
to go on licking paws, or fathering
litter on litter of kittens, predictably.

Nevertheless, to be curious
is dangerous enough. To distrust
what is always said, what seems,
to ask old questions, interfere in dreams,
leave home, smell rats, have hunches
do not endear cats to those doggy circles
where well-smelt baskets, suitable wives, good lunches
are the order of things, and where prevails
much wagging of incurious heads and tails.

Face it. Curiosity
will not cause us to die --
only lack of it will.
Never to want to see
the other side of the hill
or that improbable country
where living is an idyll
(although a probable hell)
would kill us all.
Only the curious
have, if they live, a tale
worth telling at all.

Dogs say cats love too much, are irresponsible,
are changeable, marry too many wives,
desert their children, chill all dinner tables
with tales of their nine lives.
Well, they are lucky. Let them be
nine-lived and contradictory,
curious enough to change, prepared to pay
the cat price, which is to die
and die again and again,
each time with no less pain.
A cat minority of one
is all that can be counted on
to tell the truth. And what cats have to tell
on each return from hell
is this: that dying is what the living do,
that dying is what the loving do,
and that dead dogs are those who do not know
that dying is what, to live, each has to do.

-Alastair Reid

The worth of virtue lies in action.

Cicero

If you understand,
things are just as they are;
if you do not understand,
things are just as they are.

At the hour when the moon appears in the city
and the wide avenues slowly fill with its light
then the night swells with bronze and sadness,
time the barbarian smashes the wax songs,

then the cuckoo counts her griefs on the stone tower
and the pale woman with the sickle steps down
through the dead, scattering straw on the board floor,
rolling huge spokes of shadow slowly across it.




Osip Mandelstam

Your work is to discover your world and then with all your heart give yourself to it.


Buddha

poetry

Poetry is a means of redemption.

Wallace Stevens

You Fit into Me

you fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye



Margaret Atwood

Old trees are doomed to annual rebirth,
New wood, new life, new compass, greater girth,
And this is all their wisdom and their art --
To grow, stretch, crack, and not yet come apart.

-Richard Wilbur
from "A Black Birch in Winter"

I have tried to isolate and inspect the great talent that was in Ed Ricketts, that made him so loved and needed and makes him so missed now that he is dead. Certainly he was an interesting and charming man, but there was some other quality that far exceeded these. I have thought that it might be his ability to receive, to receive anything from anyone, to receive gracefully and thankfully, and to make the gift seem very fine. Because of this everyone felt good in giving to Ed--a present, a thought, anything.

Perhaps the most overrated virtue in our list of shoddy virtues is that of giving. Giving builds up the ego of the giver, makes him superior and higher and larger than the receiver...It is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it is well-done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness. It requires humility and tact and great understanding of relationships. In receiving, you cannot appear, even to yourself, better or stronger or wiser than the giver, although you must be wiser to do it well.

It requires self-esteem to receive--not self-love but just a pleasant acquaintance and liking for oneself.

John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez

Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.

. . . for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

-George Eliot

Elegy

The light in the eyes has dimmed,
The smile at the corner of the mouth has been extinguished.
But the day isn't dark,
People go by in the streets, laughing merrily.

How good that everything is thus appointed
That I may disappear from the flock while no one's taking heed.
Nothing happens in this world
Except matters of substance, bathed
In indifference.

[30 November 1996]


Marin Sorescu

The Swimming Lesson

Feeling the icy kick, the endless waves
Reaching around my life, I moved my arms
And coughed, and in the end saw land.

Somebody, I suppose,
Remembering the medieval maxim,
Had tossed me in,
Had wanted me to learn to swim,

Not knowing that none of us, who ever came back
From that long lonely fall and frenzied rising,
Ever learned anything at all

About swimming, but only
How to put off, one by one,
Dreams and pity, love and grace --
How to survive in any place.


-Mary Oliver

. . . what we were
and what we are today is not to be
tomorrow . . .

There is no thing that keeps its shape; for nature,
the innovator, would forever draw
forms out of other forms. In all this world---
you can believe me---no thing ever dies.
By brith we mean beginning to re-form,
a thing's becoming other than it was;
and death is but the end of the old state;
one thing shifts here, another there; and yet
the total of all things is permanent.


Ovid, Metamorphoses, book XV
trans. Allen Mandelbaum

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like a thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.


-W. S. Merwin

POEM

The eager note on my door said, "Call me,
call when you get in!" so I quickly threw
a few tangerines into my overnight bag,
straightened my eyelids and shoulders, and

headed straight for the door. It was autumn
by the time I got around the corner, oh all
unwilling to be either pertinent or bemused, but
the leaves were brighter than grass on the sidewalk!

Funny, I thought, that the lights are on this late
and the hall door open; still up at this hour, a
champion jai-alai player like himself? Oh fie!
for shame! What a host, so zealous! And he was

there in the hall, flat on a sheet of blood that
ran down the stairs. I did appreciate it. There are few
hosts who so thoroughly prepare to greet a guest
only casually invited, and that several months ago.



-Frank O'Hara

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.

---Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

She that has no one to love or trust has little to hope.

---Samuel Johnson, Rasselas

. . . consider them both, the sea and the land; and do you not find a strange analogy to something in yourself? For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half known life.

-Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

Loss is change and change is Nature's delight. This has been true from the beginning and will be true until the end. Then how can you say it is wrong, forever wrong, that no power in heaven can fix it, and that the world lies condemned to a thralldom of ills unrelenting?

-Marcus Aurelius

Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius.

---Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Macbeth

Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased;
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorry,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon the heart?

---Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

________________________

When in doubt, tell the truth.

Mark Twain