However you see writing, reading can be a vacation. Words are unforgiving kids. They play freeze tag, they cut across neighbors well manicured lawns, they set shit on fire. They laugh & laugh. The point is this: I enjoy exploring repertoire in even the most tedium work jargon. I've been blessed enough to be able to graduate with a degree in words slightly scathed from lengthy student loans. Along the way, I've picked up great lines from poets & writers I would like to share in a slightly untiddy way with you today.
And on this Thursday where 'the daily grind' just keeps smacking me in the face, pulling me back down, "Oh, your toilet is stopped up Mr. Godsonlyson? Not a problem. I will come up to your room and plunge your compacted Mexican food down the right pipes." Or, "Mr. Leonardo I'm sorry for interrupting you while you were interrupting me. What I was saying wasn't important anyway. Please, keep staring at my tits." On days like today, awesome lines from awesome writers get me through the day. Here are some.
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Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;
And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being...
-excerpt from Wallace Stevens's "A Postcard from the Volcano"
__________________________________________________________________________________'My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
'What are you thinking of?' What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'
I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
'What is that noise?'
The wind under the door.
What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?'
Nothing again noing.
'Do
'You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
'Nothing?'
I remember
Those are perals that were his eyes.
'Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?'
But
OOOO that Shakespeherian Rag—
It's so elegant
So intelligent
'What shall I do now? What shall I do?'
'I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street
'With my hear down..."
-Excerpt from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land"
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In the room the women come and go 35
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—
(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!)
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)
Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons, 50
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons...
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile,
To have squeezed the universe into a ball
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—
-Excerpt from T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
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He danced with tall grass
for a moment, like he was swaying
with a woman. Our gun barrels
glowed white-hot.
When I got to him,
a blue halo
of flies had already claimed him.
I pulled the crumbed photograph
from his fingers.
There's no other way
to say this: I fell in love.
The morning cleared again,
except for a distant mortar
& somewhere choppers taking off.
I slid the wallet into his pocket
& turned him over, so he wouldn't be
kissing the ground.
-From Yusef Komunyakaa's "We Never Know" (My favorite poet!)
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I saw her powder her nose. When she finished, she closed the box, stood up again, and walked over to the lamp once more, saying: 'I'm afraid that someone is dreaming about this room and revealing my secrets...'
'I'm the one who comes into your dreams every night and tells you: 'Eyes of a blue dog.'' And she said that she went into restaurants and before ordering said to the waiters: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' But the waiters bowed reverently, without remembering ever having said that in their dreams. Then she would write on the napkins and scratch on the varnish of the tables with a knife: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' And on the steamed-up windows of hotels, stations, all public buildings, she would write with her forefinger: 'Eyes of a blue dog.' She said that once she went into a drugstore and noticed the same smell that she had smelled in her room one night after having dreamed about me. 'He must be near,' she thought, seeing the clean, new tiles of the drugstore. Then she went over to the clerk and said to him: 'I always dream about a man who says to me: 'Eyes of a blue dog.'' And she said the clerk had looked at her eyes and told her: 'As a matter of fact, miss, you do have eyes like that.' And she said to him: 'I have to find the man who told me those very words in my dreams.' And the clerk started to laugh and moved to the other end of the counter...
We had been seeing each other for several years. Sometimes, when we were already together, somebody would drop a spoon outside and we would wake up. Little by little we'd been coming to understand that our friendship was subordinated to things, to the simplest of happenings. Our meetings always ended that way, with the fall of a spoon early in the morning...
- Excerpt from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Eyes of a Blue Dog"
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And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.
I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed
the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun...
-Excerpt from Adrienne Rich's "Diving into the Wreck"
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Thanks for reading. Have to get back to work now. More later. -b
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