consider them both . . .

. . . 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

Metamorphoses

. . . 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 birth 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

human nature

Our ignorance of history makes us libel our own times. People have always been like this.
                       

Gustave Flaubert

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