LEIGH HUNT
"Song of Fairies Robbing an Orchard"

We, the Fairies, blithe and antic,
Of dimensions not gigantic,
Though the moonshine mostly keep us,
Oft in orchards frisk and peep us.

Stolen sweets are always sweeter,
Stolen kisses much completer,
Stolen looks are nice in chapels,
Stolen, stolen, be your apples.

When to bed the world are bobbing,
Then's the time for orchard-robbing;
Yet the fruit were scarce worth peeling,
Were it not for stealing, stealing.

From Hearst’s International, 1922

NEIL GAIMAN
The Ocean at the End of the Lane

Adults follow paths. Children explore.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

Gods always behave like the people who made them.

KAZUAKI TANAHASHI
Zen Chants - Thirty-Five Essential Texts with Commentary

Our life may be seen as a dance in which one foot represents pluralism and the other singularism. At any given moment, one foot touches the ground. The next moment, we use both. The moment after that, the other foot is on the ground by itself. If there is a slight misstep, we wobble. If we step stiffly, we become rigid. Each step is a challenge.

Can we see our dance in life and meditation as something other than switching between these seeming opposites? When the dancing flows naturally, singularism and pluralism are no longer in opposition. The opposites merge, allowing us to dance freely and gracefully. This is the manifestation of wisdom beyond wisdom, which is a wholesome experience of freedom from and integrity in pluralistic and singularistic understanding and action.

PHILIP LEVINE
“Animals Are Passing From Our Lives”

It’s wonderful how I jog
on four honed-down ivory toes
my massive buttocks slipping
like oiled parts with each light step.

I’m to market. I can smell
the sour, grooved block, I can smell
the blade that opens the hole
and the pudgy white fingers

that shake out the intestines
like a hankie. In my dreams
the snouts drool on the marble,
suffering children, suffering flies,

suffering the consumers
who won’t meet their steady eyes
for fear they could see. The boy
who drives me along believes

that any moment I’ll fall
on my side and drum my toes
like a typewriter or squeal
and shit like a new housewife

discovering television,
or that I’ll turn like a beast
cleverly to hook his teeth
with my teeth. No. Not this pig.

Ricki Hall (@rickisamhall) by @josephsinclair

EDMUND WHITE
City Boy

There was something stubborn in me that didn’t want to lose weight to attract a man. If the right man came along, he’d be able to see my virtues magically. Once he kissed me, the frog would turn into a prince. I had become a trick question, a heavy disguise, but behind the disobliging exterior was the welcoming child I would always be.

Of course, what I’d forgotten was that he was not Parsifal and I was not the Grail; the medievalism of my imagination was not sufficiently up-to-date to recognize that the lover was a shopper and I a product.

theleathernomad - Shop Shot with Cody Vance of ML Leather

SUN BU'ER

The beginning of the sustenance of life
Is all in yin and yang.
The limitless can open up
The light of the great limit.
Diligently polished, the mirror of the mind
Is bright as the moon;
The universe in a grain
May rise, or it may hide.

GUY DAVENPORT from "Radi Os"

Originality houses many rooms, and the views from the windows are all different.

ISAAC ASIMOV (1977)

We cannot afford enemies any more. Within a generation or two human society will be in total destructive disarray.Heaven knows how bad it will be. The most optimistic view I can take is this: Things will get so bad within a dozen years that it will become obvious that we must, whether were like each other or not, work together.

Let’s consider it this way: by the time the world doubles its population, the amount of energy we will be using will be increased sevenfold which means probably the amount of pollution that we are producing will also be increased seven-fold. If we are now threatened by pollution at the present rate, how will we be threatened with seven-fold pollution by, say, 2010 A.D., distributed among twice the population?

We’ll be having to grow twice the food out of soil that is being poisoned at seven times the rate.

DŌGEN 

We must always be disturbed by the truth.

SUSAN STEWART“Poem from Hölderlin”

As from dark orchard leaves, from quiet scripts
where each shape sends its tendril reaching—
circle and line, the swaddled bud, the petiole
sprung, an envelope tendered.
 
By a window, the infant
turns, rooting
toward the breast,
                    sun-lit,
the mother humming.
(Those far things, sources
of power and
regret,
cliffs and waves,
continue
at a distance.)
 
          Here you’ll find
a name scrawled in the bark—
last words, left to chance
and strangers.
           There, the black ant, burdened
by a crumb, and the weight
of her lacquered armor,
crossing—climbing,
switching, doubling
back—gnarl and crevice and
cul de sac.
 
           Pinch-waisted,
driven on, and trembling,
does she have a notion
of her own, or is it
only species
memory—so
fearless, so abstract?
 
because it is winter everywhere,
           I spin my cocoon
           I dig my heart a grave
 
Indifferent, a blossom
drifting, the knob swelling,
the leaf turned to
shadow: filigree, smudged.
The petiole now brittle in
the first cold nights.
                       The burden, relieved,
weighs all the more
from the guilt
of its release.
 
Too light, too light, like a sudden
waking, the sun in your eyes:
you cannot see for it.
 
How long will we live
in this leaf-strewn place,
thinking we belong
to the sky?

CAROLYN FORCHÉ
“Elegy”

The page opens to snow on a field: boot-holed month, black hour
the bottle in your coat half voda half winter light.
To what and to whom does one say yes?
If God were the uncertain, would you cling to him?

Beneath a tattoo of stars the gate open, so silent so like a tomb.
This is the city you most loved, an empty stairwell
where the next rain lifts invisibly from the Seine.

With solitude, your coat open, you walk
steadily as if the railings were there and your hands weren’t passing
through them.

“When things were ready, they poured on fuel and touched off the fire.
They waited for a high wind. It was very fine, that powdered bone.
It was put into sacks, and when there was enough we went to a bridge
on the Narew River.”

And even less explicit phrases survived:
“To make charcoal.
For laundry irons.”
And so we revolt against silence with a bit of speaking.
The page is a charred field where the dead would have written
We went on. And it was like living through something again one
could not live through again.

The soul behind you no longer inhabits your life: the unlit house
with its breathless windows and a chimney of ruined wings
where wind becomes an aria, your name, voices from a field,
And you, smoke, dissonance, a psalm, a stairwell.

SAMUEL BECKETT
The Unnamable

There’s a time for everything, for the things that pass, the things that end, they could never get me to understand that, the things that stir, depart, return, a light changing, they could never get me to see that, and death into the bargain, a voice dying, that’s a good one, silence at last, not a murmur, no air, no one listening, not for the likes of me, amen, on we go.

CAMERON AWKWARD-RICH
"Cento Between the Ending and the End"

Sometimes you don’t die
when you’re supposed to
& now I have a choice
repair a world or build
a new one inside my body
a white door opens
into a place queerly brimming
gold light so velvet-gold
it is like the world
hasn’t happened
when I call out
all my friends are there
everyone we love
is still alive gathered
at the lakeside
like constellations
my honeyed kin
honeyed light
beneath the sky
a garden blue stalks
white buds the moon’s
marble glow the fire
distant & flickering
the body whole bright-
winged brimming
with the hours
of the day beautiful
nameless planet. Oh
friends, my friends—
bloom how you must, wild
until we are free.

GLORIA SWANSON

Never say never, for if you live long enough, chances are you will not be able to abide by its restrictions. Never is a long, undependable time, and life is too full of rich possibilities to have restrictions placed upon it.

ANSIE BAIRD
“What She Knows”

She finds no list of names to comfort her.
Do not nudge her shoulder and ask
What bird is perching on the branch.
Do not inquire where the oleander blooms.
Nor does she recognize the kinds of clouds.
Of stone or shells. Nature is not her kinsman.

She dreams he appears on latticed porches,
On terra-cotta roofs of slanting houses.
He is speaking, although he was mute,
Walking although he was lame,
Flushed and ruddy, although he is dead.
She is certain of nothing except this.

And that her father alters,
A madman who bloats in the dark.
She is able to play the piano not at all.
There is the oak and the common tree,
The rose and the common flower,
The crow and the common bird,
Venus in the sky and all the other stars.

DENISE LEVERTOV
"Wedding Ring"

My wedding-ring lies in a basket
as if at the bottom of a well.
Nothing will come to fish it back up
and onto my finger again.
                                      It lies
among keys to abandoned houses,
nails waiting to be needed and hammered
into some wall,
telephone numbers with no names attached,
idle paperclips.
                      It can’t be given away
for fear of bringing ill-luck
                      It can’t be sold
for the marriage was good in its own
time, though that time is gone.
                      Could some artificer
beat into it bright stones, transform it
into a dazzling circlet no one could take
for solemn betrothal or to make promises
living will not let them keep? Change it
into a simple gift I could give in friendship?

PHILIP K. DICK

The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

DŌGEN

The migrating bird
leaves no trace behind
and does not need a guide.

JAMES MERRILL
"The Mad Scene"

Again last night I dreamed the dream called Laundry.
In it, the sheets and towels of a life we were going to share,
The milk-stiff bibs, the shroud, each rag to be ever
Trampled or soiled, bled on or groped for blindly,
Came swooning out of an enormous willow hamper
Onto moon-marbly boards. We had just met. I watched
From outer darkness. I had dressed myself in clothes
Of a new fiber that never stains or wrinkles, never
Wears thin. The opera house sparkled with tiers
And tiers of eyes, like mine enlarged by belladonna,
Trained inward. There I saw the cloud-clot, gust by gust,
Form, and the lightning bite, and the roan mane unloosen.
Fingers were running in panic over the flute’s nine gates.
Why did I flinch? I loved you. And in the downpour laughed
To have us wrung white, gnarled together, one
Topmost mordent of wisteria,
As the lean tree burst into grief.

RYŌKAN

First days of Spring - the sky
is bright blue, the sun huge and warm.
Everything’s turning green.
Carrying my monk’s bowl, I walk to the village
to beg for my daily meal.
The children spot me at the temple gate
and happily crowd around,
dragging to my arms till I stop.
I put my bowl on a white rock,
hang my bag on a branch.
First we braid grasses and play tug-of-war,
then we take turns singing and keeping a kick-ball in the air:
I kick the ball and they sing, they kick and I sing.
Time is forgotten, the hours fly.
People passing by point at me and laugh:
‘Why are you acting like such a fool?’
I nod my head and don’t answer.
I could say something, but why?
Do you want to know what’s in my heart?
From the beginning of time: just this! just this!

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHSOn meeting Samuel Beckett

He gave me one of the greatest compliments that I ever heard. Someone asked him, “What do you think of Burroughs?” and he said - grudgingly - “Well, he’s a writer.”

CHARLES BUKOWSKI
Tales of Ordinary Madness

I felt like crying but nothing came out. It was just a sort of sad sickness, sick sad, when you can’t feel any worse. I think you know it. I think everybody knows it now and then. But I think I have known it pretty often, too often.

FRANCES PARK - “The Wakeful”

The restless pass the night hours in company
  forever about in the town; though many
  at half past three admit to being lonely.

The wakeful perceive the small hour as merely a
  digit on the clock’s dial, familiar
  as supper time.   This is not insomnia:

(a state of disturbance marked by anxiety,
  tears, veronal, prayers to the Deity,
  guilt, and a plenitude of self pity).

The wakeful are simply awake and quiet
  at any hour—little concerned about it;
  warm in the lamp’s glow, the soft bed jacket,

with cigarettes and fruit ready to hand;
  a waltz whispered over the radio and
  sleep hovering at the night’s end.

CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ

Tomber amoureux. To fall in love. Does it occur suddenly or gradually? If gradually, when is the moment “already”? I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags. With a plywood squirrel. With a botanical atlas. With an oriole. With a ferret. With a marten in a picture. With the forest one sees to the right when riding in a cart to Jaszuny. With a poem by a little-known poet. With human beings whose names still move me. And always the object of love was enveloped in erotic fantasy or was submitted, as in Stendhal, to a “cristallisation,” so it is frightful to think of that object as it was, naked among the naked things, and of the fairy tales about it one invents. Yes, I was often in love with something or someone. Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love. That is something different.

bell hooks
The Will to Change: Men and Masculinity

____________________

In patriarchal culture men are not allowed to simply be who they are and glory in their unique identity. Their value is always determined by what they do. In an anti-patriarchal culture males do not have to prove their value and worth. They know from birth that simply being gives them value, the right to be cherished and loved.

ELIZA GRISWOLD
“The Holy Loo”

When, in a church or chapel’s hush,
A distant toilet’s heard to flush,
And in the nave, above the drone
Of psalm or sermon, all alone,
A child is hiding, a girl of three—
She’s hiding in eternity.
Already, in these sacred walls,
The child has learned that nature calls
As well as God, at any time,
And any life, as any rhyme,
Is balanced only if, in all,
The sacred and the natural,
Are found together, one for one,
When prayer, oath, creed or day is done.

Vietnamese Folk Poem
(Ca dao)

The night is deep, the stars shining brightly
mist covers the rice fields
the bamboo rustles in the wind
the crickets chirp in all the corners
the monks are reciting hymns in the temple.

We hear the drums and singing in a distant village
the river flows by silently
sitting close to each other
we are talking softly
Life is wonderful!

Do you see above the hills
the pink moon rising?
It looks like a fire in the woods
the strong and beautiful trees.

There is a star of the north
scintillating like a glow-worm
there comes the breeze, refreshing our faces
A stone will be worn by the river,
but our love will stay all our lives.

Why do I feel this will never be history in my lifetime?

DARIAN LEADERWhat is Madness?

What is it, first of all, that acts on us from outside? As infants, it is our caregivers, whose discourse we are born into. We depend almost totally on them, and our own subjectivity tends to be asserted and formed through acts of refusal. When we say no to being fed, for example, we show that we are different from them, that we are not simply their puppets. If we can do this through action, we can also do it through speech, but this is complicated by the fact that speech, initially, comes from them. We learn words through them, and if we accept that thinking relies on verbal structures, our thought, at a certain level, derives from them too.