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Asher
Registered Member
Date Joined Apr 2003
Total Posts : 477
| Posted 6/20/2010 12:27 PM (GMT -6) |   | Just discovered her...
UNDER A CERTAIN LITTLE STAR
My apologies to chance for calling it necessity.
My apologies to necessity in case I'm mistaken.
Don't be angry, happiness, that I take you for my own.
May the dead forgive me that their memory's but a flicker.
My apologies to time for the quantity of world overlooked per second.
My apologies to an old love for treating a new one as the first.
Forgive me, far-off wars, for carrying my flowers home.
Forgive me, open wounds, for pricking my finger.
My apologies for the minuet record, to those calling out from the abyss.
My apologies to those in train stations for sleeping soundly at five in the morning.
Pardon me, hounded hope, for laughing sometimes.
Pardon me, deserts, for not rushing in with a spoonful of water.
And you, O hawk, the same bird for years in the same cage,
staring, motionless, always at the same spot,
absolve me even if you happen to be stuffed.
My apologies to the tree felled for four table legs.
My apologies to large questions for small answers.
Truth, do not pay me too much attention.
Solemnity, be magnanimous toward me.
Bear with me, O mystery of being, for pulling threads from your veil.
Soul, don't blame me that I've got you so seldom.
My apologies to everything that I can't be everywhere.
My apologies to all for not knowing how to be every man and woman.
I know that as long as I live nothing can excuse me,
since I am my own obstacle.
Do not hold it against me, O speech, that I borrow weighty words,
and then labor to make them light.
------------
On the Question of Pornography
No debauchery compares with thinking.
This licence breeds like some weed whose seed is carried by the wind
onto a bed laid out for daisies.
To all those who think nothing is ever sacred.
The shamelessly direct saying what they are driving at,
dissolute analyses, excessive syntheses,
rackish and hot pursuit of bare facts,
touching upon prickly subjects,
idea spawning, that is what they like best.
By daylight or under cover of the night,
they join in pairs, triangles and circles.
The partners' sex and age are immaterial.
Their eyes flash, their cheeks blush.
A friend leads a friend astray.
Degenerate daughters corrupt their father.
A brother procures his younger sister.
They delight in a fruit
Of the forbidden tree of knowledge
different from pink buttocks in illustrated magazines
which are, actually, a good-natured kind of pornography.
The books they enjoy have no pictures.
The only excitement comes from special sentences
marked with a fingernail or a pencil.
It is most shameful in what positions
and with what licentious ease
a mind manages to impregnate another mind.
Such positions have not been detailed even in Kamasutra.
All they do during these dates,
is making tea. Moving the lips,
people sit on chairs with their own legs crossed.
This way, one foot touches the floor while
the other one swings freely in the air.
Sometimes someone stands up,
approaches the window
and through the slit between the curtains
peeps at the street.
---------------
Three Oddest Words
When I pronounce the word Future,
the first syllable already belongs to the past.
When I pronounce the word Silence,
I destroy it.
When I pronounce the word Nothing,
I make something no nonbeing can hold.
------------
Utopia
Island where all becomes clear.
Solid ground beneath your feet.
The only roads are those that offer access.
Bushes bend beneath the weight of proofs.
The Tree of Valid Supposition grows here
with branches disentangled since time immermorial.
The Tree of Understanding, dazzling staight and simple.
sprouts by the spring called Now I Get It.
The thicker the woods, the vaster the vista:
the Valley of Obviously.
If any doubts arise, the wind dispels them instantly.
Echoes stir unsummoned
and eagerly explain all the secrets of the worlds.
On the right a cave where Meaning lies.
On the left the Lake of Deep Conviction.
Truth breaks from the bottom and bobs to the surface.
Unshakable Confidence towers over the valley.
Its peak offers an excellent view of the Essence of Things.
For all its charms, the island is uninhabited,
and the faint footprints scattered on its beaches
turn without exception to the sea.
As if all you can do here is leave
and plunge, never to return, into the depths.
Into unfathomable life.
--------------
Could Of
It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Nearer. Farther off.
It happened, but not to you.
You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. The left.
Because it was raining. Because of the shade.
Because the day was sunny.
You were in luck -- there was a forest.
You were in luck -- there were no trees.
You were in luck -- a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake,
A jamb, a turn, a quarter-inch, an instant . . .
So you're here? Still dizzy from
another dodge, close shave, reprieve?
One hole in the net and you slipped through?
I couldn't be more shocked or
speechless.
Listen,
how your heart pounds inside me.
---------------
One Version of Events
If we’d been allowed to choose,
we’d probably have gone on forever.
The bodies that were offered didn’t fit,
and wore out horribly.
The ways of sating hunger
made us sick.
We were repelled
by blind legacy
and the tyranny of the glands.
The world that was meant to embrace us
decayed without end
and the effects of causes raged over it.
Individual fates
were presented for our inspection:
appalled and grieved,
we rejected most of them.
Questions naturally arose, e.g.,
who needs the painful birth
of a dead child
and what’s in it for a sailor
who will never reach the shore.
We agreed to death,
but not every kind.
Love attracted us,
of course, but only love
that keeps its word.
Both fickle standards
and the impermanence of artworks
kept us wary of the Muses’ service.
Each of us wished to have a homeland
free of neighbors
and to live his entire life
in the intervals between wars.
No one wished to seize power
or be subject to it.
No one wanted to fall victim to his own or others’ delusions.
No one volunteered
for crowd scenes and processions,
to say nothing of dying tribes---
although without all of these
history couldn’t run its charted course
through the centuries to come.
Meanwhile, a fair number
of stars lit earlier
had died out and grown cold.
It was high time for a decision.
Voicing numerous reservations,
candidates finally emerged
for a number of roles as healers and explorers,
a few obscure philosophers,
one or two nameless gardeners,
artists and virtuosos---
though even these livings couldn’t all be filled
for lack of other kinds of applications.
It was time to think
the whole thing over.
We’d been offered a trip
from which we’d surely be returning soon,
wouldn’t we.
A trip outside eternity---
monotonous, no matter what they say,
and foreign to time’s flow.
the chance may never come our way again.
We were besieged by doubts.
Does knowing everything beforehand
really mean knowing everything.
Is a decision made in advance
really any kind of choice.
Wouldn’t we be better off
dropping the subject
and making our minds up
once we get there.
We looked at earth.
Some daredevils were already living there.
A feeble weed
clung to a rock,
trusting blindly
that the wind wouldn’t tear it off.
A small animal
dug itself from its burrow
with an energy and hope
that puzzled us.
We struck ourselves as prudent,
petty, and ridiculous.
In any case, our ranks began to dwindle.
The most impatient of us disappeared.
They’d left for the first trial by fire,
This much was clear,
especially by the glare of the real fire
they’d just begun to light
on the steep bank of an actual river.
A few of them
actually turned back.
But not in our direction.
And with something they seemed to have won in their hands.
--------------
Pi
The admirable number pi:
three point one four one.
All the following digits are also initial,
five nine two because it never ends.
It can't be comprehended six five three five at a glance,
eight nine by calculation,
seven nine or imagination,
not even three two three eight by wit, that is, by comparison
four six to anything else
two six four three in the world.
The longest snake on earth calls it quits at about forty feet.
Likewise, snakes of myth and legend, though they may hold out a bit longer.
The pageant of digits comprising the number pi
doesn't stop at the page's edge.
It goes on across the table, through the air,
over a wall, a leaf, a bird's nest, clouds, straight into the sky,
through all the bottomless, bloated heavens.
Oh how brief - a mouse tail, a pigtail - is the tail of a comet!
How feeble the star's ray, bent by bumping up against space!
While here we have two three fifteen three hundred nineteen
my phone number your shirt size the year
nineteen hundred and seventy-three the sixth floor
the number of inhabitants sixty-five cents
hip measurement two fingers a charade, a code,
in which we find hail to thee, blithe spirit, bird thou never wert
alongside ladies and gentlemen, no cause for alarm,
as well as heaven and earth shall pass away,
but not the number pi, oh no, nothing doing,
it keeps right on with its rather remarkable five,
its uncommonly fine eight,
its far from final seven,
nudging, always nudging a sluggish eternity
to continue.
------------
Tortures
Nothing has changed.
The body is a reservoir of pain;
it has to eat and breathe the air, and sleep;
it has thin skin and the blood is just beneath it;
it has a good supply of teeth and fingernails;
its bones can be broken; its joints can be stretched.
In tortures, all of this is considered.
Nothing has changed.
The body still trembles as it trembled
before Rome was founded and after,
in the twentieth century before and after Christ.
Tortures are just what they were, only the earth has shrunk
and whatever goes on sounds as if it's just a room away.
Nothing has changed.
Except there are more people,
and new offenses have sprung up beside the old ones--
real, make-believe, short-lived, and nonexistent.
But the cry with which the body answers for them
was, is, and will be a cry of innocence
in keeping with the age-old scale and pitch.
Nothing has changed.
Except perhaps the manners, ceremonies, dances.
The gesture of the hands shielding the head
has nonetheless remained the same.
The body writhes, jerks, and tugs,
falls to the ground when shoved, pulls up its knees,
bruises, swells, drools, and bleeds.
Nothing has changed.
Except the run of rivers,
the shapes of forests, shores, deserts, and glaciers.
The little soul roams among these landscapes,
disappears, returns, draws near, moves away,
evasive and a stranger to itself,
now sure, now uncertain of its own existence,
whereas the body is and is and is
and has nowhere to go.Post Edited (Asher) : 6/20/2010 12:33:05 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 6/26/2010 5:13 PM (GMT -6) | | | | |
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