January 2009
time and again we go out two together,
under the old trees, lie down again and again
between the flowers, face to face with the sky.
[Rainer Marie Rilke]
“[she had]…a rage for life, a rage to do something, a rage to achieve...”
Between Going and Staying
Between going and staying the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can’t be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the...
a few stanzas from Sad Steps [Philip Larkin]
Four o’clock: wedge-shadowed gardens lie
under a cavernous, a wind-pricked sky.
There’s something laughable about this,
The way the moon dashes through clouds that blow
loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-colored light sharpening the roofs below)
One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
Far-reaching singleness of that...
In A Station of the Metro
Some kind of trouble up the line somewhere, as yet unannounced, only its subtlest effects having arrived, premonitory. Absence gathers in the bedrock hush of a hall accustomed to an intermittent uproar. Utterly lost, a starling blunders from perch to perch, as if learning to fly, while we sit stiller and stiller, rehearsing our eventual departures. This hardly counts as travel, though, this...
...
There was nothing better on earth that could write, he had often thought, than his Parker Vacumatic fountain pen, a brown-striped, gold-nibbed model made in 1934. It wasn’t him but the pen, gliding across the foolscap, filling in the vastness of the page with words that may not have meant all that much but which looked beautiful because of the personality and the infinite variety of their...
