DENISE LEVERTOV

"Sound of the Axe"

Once a woman went into the woods.

The birds were silent. Why? she said.

Thunder, they told her,

thunder is coming.

She walked on, and the trees were dark

and rustled their leaves. Why? she said.

The great storm, they told her,

the great storm is coming.

She came to the river, it rushed by

without reply, she crossed the bridge,

she began to climb

up to the ridge where grey rocks

bleached themselves, waiting

for crack of doom,

and the hermit

had his hut, the wise man

who had lived since time began.

When she came to the hut

there was no one.

But she heard his axe.

She heard

the listening forest.

She dared not follow the sound

of the axe. Was it

the world-tree he was felling?

Was this the day?

The Paris Review - Issue 79 (Spring 1981)

May is World Masturbation Month

Day 11

FLANNERY O'CONNOR

____________________

She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity.

May is World Masturbation Month

Day 10

YO SOY LA FELICIDAD DE ESTE MUNDO
-
I AM HAPPINESS ON EARTH


Julián Hernández
Mexico, 2014

VIGGO MORTENSEN
____________________

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was: go slow to go fast. We live as though there aren’t enough hours in the day but if we do each thing calmly and carefully we will get it done quicker and with much less stress.

May is World Masturbation Month

Day 9

EL DESIERTO
-
THE DESERT


Christoph Behl
Chile, 2013

-

Had to have a second viewing. This is the zombie story you haven't seen.

E. B. WHITE

____________________

A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.

May is World Masturbation Month

Day 8

e.e. cummings - 

[if you like my poems let them]

____________________

if you like my poems let them
walk in the evening,a little behind you
then people will say
“Along this road i saw a princess pass
on her way to meet her lover(it was
toward nightfall)with tall and ignorant servants.”

May is World Masturbation Month

Day 7

ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI
"My Favorite Poets"

My favorite poets
never met
They lived in different countries
and different ages
surrounded by ordinariness
by good people and bad
they lived modestly
like an apple in an orchard
They loved clouds
they lifted their heads
a great armada
of light and shade
sailed above them
a film was playing
that still hasn’t ended
Moments of bitterness
passed swiftly
likewise moments of joy
Sometimes they knew
what the world was
and wrote hard words
on soft paper
Sometimes they knew nothing
and were like children
on a school playground
when the first drop
of warm rain
descends



Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh

The Paris Review - Issue 226 (Fall 2018)

JAMES MERRILL
“The Nihilist as Hero”
____________________

All our French poets can turn an inspired line;
who has written six passable in sequence?’
said Valéry. That was a happy day for Satan….
I want words meat-hooked from the living steer,
but a cold flame of tinfoil licks the metal log,
beautiful unchanging fire of childhood
betraying a monotony of vision….
Life by definition breeds on change,
each season we scrap new cars and wars and women.
But sometimes when I am ill or delicate,
the pinched flame of my match turns unchanging green,
a cornstalk in green tails and seeded tassel….
A nihilist wants to live in the world as is,
and yet gaze the everlasting hills to rubble.
Robert Lowell, “The Nihilist as Hero”

May is World Masturbation Month

Day 6

ADRIENNE RICH

____________________

One of the devastating weaknesses of university learning, of the store of knowledge and opinion that has been handed down through academic training, has been its almost total erasure of women’s experience and thought from the curriculum. 

What you can learn [in college] is how men have perceived and organized their experience, their history, their ideas of social relationships, good and evil, sickness and health, etc. When you read or hear about “great issues,” “major texts,” “the mainstream of Western thought,” you are hearing about what men, above all white men, in their male subjectivity, have decided is important.

May is World Masturbation Month

Day 5

STEPHEN DUNN

“Before the Sky Darkens”

____________________

Sunsets, incipient storms, the tableaus
of melancholy—maybe these are
the Saturday night-events
to take your best girl to. At least then
there might be moments of vanishing beauty
before the sky darkens,
and the expectation of happiness
would hardly exist
and therefore might be possible.

More and more you learn to live
with the unacceptable.
You sense the ever-hidden God
retreating even farther,
terrified or embarrassed.
You might as well be a clown,
big silly clothes, no evidence of desire.

SUSAN SONTAG

____________________

A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world. That means trying to understand, take in, connect with, what wickedness human beings are capable of; and not be corrupted — made cynical, superficial — by this understanding.

May is World Masturbation Month

Day 4

May is World Masturbation Month

Day 3

MAURICE SENDAK
____________________

I’m not Hans Christian Andersen. Nobody’s gonna make a statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up me. I won’t have it, okay?

May is World Masturbation Month

Day 2

RABINDRANATH TAGORE 
“Gitanjali 35″
____________________
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
    Where knowledge is free;
    Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow              domestic walls;
    Where words come out from the depth of truth;
    Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
    Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the                          dreary desert sand of dead habit;
    Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening                                thought and action—
    Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

MARY KARR
"Homo Perfectus Immaculately Conceives Himself"

To keep his blessed armor hard he ate
                                lean meat, cruciferous greens, few
                                grains. He liked his instants
parceled out in reps and sets, and he was glad
to dangle like an ape from an iron bar, admiring
his bicep bulge (amen): He worked hard
                the slant board, the oblique
                                twist, and his own form
waxed and polished, his house a bleached vault
where he lit votive candles to the clear
persistence of his little self though no one else
                                showed up. He liked
                                the slammed door, the map’s red line, to stomp
a clutch, to clutch the black wheel, to wheel
away in steaming rage.

                                                He was a preacher fond
of Revelation. His truth was slant,
his facts oblique. He sought a righteous girl, articulate,
                                whose slang he could steal
                                for his opaque and soporific sermons—
a girl all clean and bare in her nethers with mouth
of Cupid’s bow—someone
to dress in white and hold
                                struggling under water, to warp

the iron of, till she melted. To her
he gave and gave. He gave all
                                the all he had, which wasn’t much.

If you enjoyed this poem, why not read …



The Paris Review - Issue 178 (Fall 2006)

May is World Masturbation Month

Day 1

May is World Mastutrbation Month

SAMUEL R. DELANY
The Einstein Intersection
____________________

I must remember my own origins. Once I was as ignorant as you; I swear, though, I can’t remember when.

 UMBERTO SABA

“The Little Tree”

____________________

It’s raining hard today.
The day is more like night,
the spring is more like fall,
and in the yard a driving wind lays waste
to the little tree that, seeming not to, stands
steady and firm; it seems among the plants
like a too-green adolescent grown too tall.
You watch it. It may be
your pity stirs for all of those white flowers
the north wind strips from it; and they are fruit,
sweet preserves we set
aside for winter, those fallen flowers spread
across the grass. And your vast maternity
aches for them, all.

bell hooks
Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

____________________

The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist, and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.

POSTMODERN JUKEBOX featuring GUNHILD CARLING

"Dancing Queen"

JOHN KEATS
“To one who has been long in city pent“

____________________

To one who has been long in city pent,
’Tis very sweet to look into the fair
And open face of heaven,—to breathe a prayer
Full in the smile of the blue firmament.
Who is more happy, when, with hearts content,
Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair
Of wavy grass, and reads a debonair
And gentle tale of love and languishment?
Returning home at evening, with an ear
Catching the notes of Philomel,—an eye
Watching the sailing cloudlet’s bright career,
He mourns that day so soon has glided by:
E’en like the passage of an angel’s tear
That falls through the clear ether silently.

MELODICKA BROS
"Take On Me"

POSTMODERN JUKEBOX featuring CASEY ABRAMS
"Umbrella"

TOMAS TRANSTRÖMER
“Track”

____________________

2 A.M. moonlight. The train has stopped
out in a field. Far off sparks of light from a town,
flickering coldly on the horizon
As when a man goes so deep into his dream
he will never remember he was there
when he returns again to his view
Or when a person goes so deep into a sickness
that his days all become some flickering sparks, a swarm
feeble and cold on the horizon
The train is entirely motionless
2 o’clock: strong moonlight, few stars

My first thought upone seeing this:
Well, of course it is.

Seoond thought:
He's lost some weight, probably on account of the COVID.

Then, thought three:
Why aren't they using Rita's blood? What did Rita ever do to anyone?

NANCY ETCOFF

____________________

Attitudes toward beauty are entwined with our deepest conflicts surrounding flesh and spirit. We view the body as a temple, a prison, a dwelling for the immortal soul, a tormentor, a garden of earthly delights, a biological envelope, a machine, a home. We cannot talk about our response to our body’s beauty without understanding all that we project onto our flesh. 

OSCAR WILDE
The Importance of Being Earnest

____________________

I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we still had a few fools left.

e. e. cummings
[death(having lost)put on his universe]

____________________

death(having lost)put on his universe
and yawned:it looks like rain
(they’ve played for timelessness
with chips of when)
that’s yours;i guess
you’ll have to loan me pain
to take the hearse,
see you again.

Loving(having found)wound up such pretty toys
as themselves could not know:
the earth tinily whirls;
while daisies grow
(and boys and girls
have whispered thus and so)
and girls with boys
to bed will go,

PHILIP LEVINE

“The Water’s Chant”

____________________

Seven years ago I went into

the High Sierras stunned by the desire

to die. For hours I stared into a clear

mountain stream that fell down

over speckled rocks, and then I

closed my eyes and prayed that when

I opened them I would be gone

and somewhere a purple and golden

thistle would overflow with light.

I had not prayed since I was a child

and at first I felt foolish saying

the name of God, and then it became

another word. All the while

I could hear the water’s chant

below my voice. At last I opened

my eyes to the same place, my hands

cupped and I drank long from

the stream, and then turned for home

not even stopping to find the thistle

that blazed by my path.

Since then

I have gone home to the city

of my birth and found it gone,

a gray and treeless one now in its place.

The one house I loved the most

simply missing in a row of houses,

the park where I napped on summer days

fenced and locked, the great shop

where we forged, a plane of rubble,

the old hurt faces turned away.

My brother was with me, thickened

by the years, but still my brother,

and when we embraced I felt the rough

cheek and his hand upon my back tapping

as though to tell me, I know! I know!

brother, I know!

Here in California

a new day begins. Full dull clouds ride

in from the sea, and this dry valley

calls out for rain. My brother has

risen hours ago and hobbled to the shower

and gone out into the city of death

to trade his life for nothing because

this is the world. I could pray now,

but not to die, for that will come one

day or another. I could pray for

his bad leg or my son John whose luck

is rotten, or for four new teeth, but

instead I watch my eucalyptus,

the giant in my front yard, bucking

and swaying in the wind and hear its

tidal roar. In the strange new light

the leaves overflow purple and gold,

and a fiery dust showers into the day.

x

LUCA STRICAGNOLI
"The Real Slim Shady"

HAROLD BLOOM
Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

____________________

We read, I think, to repair our solitude, though pragmatically the better we read, the more solitary we become.

FRIEDRICH WILHELM HEINE
The Ash Yggdrasil

It hasn't all gone to hell.

Yet.

DAVID ROSENBERG
“Afternoon”
____________________

In the branches the light
                                            so that the limbs
                                                                  go out
on the moss
                      patient
                                    my cares
o nature—ah! less alone
                                    strange
                                                the earth
should clothe me
                        with my shadow
                                  nothing at all deceives me
it takes just everything
                                  we have
                                                to conceive this

HALLDÓR LAXNESS

____________________

A new generation forgets the spectres that may have tormented the old. And yet, always, to all eternity, it is the same spectre assailing the same man century after century.

FRANZ WRIGHT

“Entry in an Unknown Hand”

__________

And still nothing happens. I am not arrested.

By some inexplicable oversight

nobody jeers when I walk down the street.

I have been allowed to go on living in this

room. I am not asked to explain my presence

anywhere.

What posthypnotic suggestions were made; and

are any left unexecuted?

Why am I so distressed at the thought of taking

certain jobs?

They are absolutely shameless at the bank—

you’d think my name meant nothing to them. Non-

chalantly they hand me the sum I’ve requested,

but I know them. It’s like this everywhere—

they think they are going to surprise me: I,

who do nothing but wait.

ALDOUS HUXLEY

Ends and Means

____________________

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance; we don’t know because we don’t want to know. It is our will that decides how and upon what subjects we shall use our intelligence.

"This Little Light of Mine"

THE DEAD SOUTH

From THE DEAD SOUTH:

We miss seeing you dance along with us at shows, so let's do something fun together.
Let’s make an all-fan video for "In Hell I’ll Be In Good Company!" 

It's all gone to hell!
But we're in good company!
How about you? 

We miss seeing you dance along with us at shows, so let's do something fun together. Let’s make an all-fan video for CC! 

Just put on the song, fire up your camera (your smartphone or computer will work, too), and with the help of the ‘good company’ around you, shoot your own tribute version of the original video from the, um…‘comfort' of your own home or wherever you are isolating. 

Get creative! We love costumes, set pieces and props. Don’t have a fountain? Use the bathtub 

Bring the kids and pets! But guys, keep your social distance and please do this safely and legally. 

We’ll cut it all together into something amazing. And then we’ll share it with the world! 

——— ——— ——— ——— ——— 

INSTRUCTIONS:

• Use your smartphone, laptop or any video camera. Does not have to be professional or high-resolution.
• Shoot in horizontal frame (holding your phone sideways). Don’t hold the phone vertically.
• Don't wear clothes with trademarks and brands, please. Make sure you get everyone in your frame. Don’t cut off your family’s heads.
• Dance (and lip sync) to the whole song from start to finish, if you can! We will pick out the best bits.
• Don’t edit your video – we will do that. Please leave in any unplanned mistakes or bloopers, those are the best! 

UPLOAD YOUR VIDEO HERE.

EL DESIERTO
-
THE DESERT


Christoph Behl
Argentina, 2013

URSULA K. LE GUIN

“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”

____________________

The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain.

DESTRY RIDES AGAIN

George Marshall
USA, 1939

MASTER DŌGEN

____________________

Because the flowers blooming
In our original home
Are everlasting,
Though springtimes may come and go
Their colors do not fade.

NĀGĀRJUNA
“Body”
____________________

I have no body apart
From parts which form it.
I know no parts
Apart from a “body.”

A body with no parts
Would be unformed,
A part of my body apart from my body
Would be absurd.

Were the body here or not,
It would need no parts.
Partless bodies are pointless.
Do not get stuck in the “body.”

I cannot say,
“My body is like its parts.”
I cannot say,
“It’s something else.”

Feelings, perceptions,
Drives, minds, things
Are like this body
In every way.

Conflict with emptiness
Is no conflict;
Objections to emptiness,
No objections.

DOLEMITE

D'Urville Martin
USA, 1974

JAMES JOYCE

Ulysses

__________________

A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far. 

No, not like that. A barren land, bare waste. Vulcanic lake, the dead sea: no fish, weedless, sunk deep in the earth. No wind could lift those waves, grey metal, poisonous foggy waters. Brimstone they called it raining down: the cities of the plain: Sodom, Gomorrah, Edom. All dead names. A dead sea in a dead land, grey and old. Old now. It bore the oldest, the first race. A bent hag crossed from Cassidy’s, clutching a naggin bottle by the neck. The oldest people. Wandered far away over all the earth, captivity to captivity, multiplying, dying, being born everywhere. It lay there now. Now it could bear no more. Dead: an old woman’s: the grey sunken cunt of the world.

Desolation.

ANNE CARSON
"Town of the Dragon Vein"

____________________

If you wake up too early listen for it.
A sort of inverted whistling the sound of sound.
Being withdrawn after all where?
Does all the sound in the world.
Come from day after day?
From mountains but.
They have to give it back.
At night just.
As your nightly dreams.
Are taps.
Open reversely.
In.
To.
Time.

CHARLES BUKOWSKI
____________________

Understand me. I’m not like an ordinary world. 

I have my madness, I live in another dimension, and I do not have time for things that have no soul.

For God so loved the world ...

RYŌKAN

____________________

Though frosts come down

night after night,

what does it matter?

they melt in the morning sun.

Though the snow falls

each passing year,

what does it matter?

with spring days it thaws.

Yet once let them settle

on a man’s head,

fall and pile up,

go on piling up –

then the new year

may come and go,

but never you’ll see them fade away

PAUL AUSTER
“Clandestine”
____________________

Remember with me today—the word and counter-word of witness: the tactile dawn, emerging from my clenched hand: sun’s ciliary grasp: the stretch of darkness I wrote on the table of sleep. Now is the time to come. All you have come to take from me, take away from me now. Do not forget to forget. Fill your pockets with earth, and seal up the mouth of my cave. It was there…

PIT STOP

Jack Hill
USA, 1967/1969

WILLIAM FAULKNER

____________________

If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did.

The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn’t have needed anyone since.

LUCA STRICAGNOLI
"Clint Eastwood"

SAMUEL BECKETT
The Unnamable

____________________

And things, what is the correct attitude to adopt towards things? And, to begin with, are they necessary?

FRANCES PARK
“The Wakeful”

____________________

The restless pass the night hours in company
  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.

  forever about in the town; though many

EMILY DICKINSON

[We grow accustomed to the Dark -]

____________________

We grow accustomed to the Dark -

When Light is put away -

As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp

To witness her Good bye -

A Moment - We Uncertain step

For newness of the night -

Then - fit our Vision to the Dark -

And meet the Road - erect -

And so of larger - Darknesses -

Those Evenings of the Brain -

When not a Moon disclose a sign -

Or Star - come out - within -

The Bravest - grope a little -

And sometimes hit a Tree

Directly in the Forehead -

But as they learn to see -

Either the Darkness alters -

Or something in the sight

Adjusts itself to Midnight -

And Life steps almost straight.

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ

Love in the Time of Cholera

____________________

To him she seemed so beautiful, so seductive, so different from ordinary people, that he could not understand why no one was as disturbed as he by the clicking of her heels on the paving stones, why no one else’s heart was wild with the breeze stirred by the sighs of her veils, why everyone did not go mad with the movements of her braid, the flight of her hands, the gold of her laughter. He had not missed a single one of her gestures, not one of the indications of her character, but he did not dare approach her for fear of destroying the spell.

TRUCK TURNER

Jonathan Kaplan
USA, 1974

SAMUEL BECKETT
From a letter to Arland Ussher (6 November 1962)

____________________

My unique relation with my work—and it is a tenuous one—is the making relation. I am with it a little in the dark and fumbling of making, as long as that lasts, then no more. I have no light to throw on it myself and it seems a stranger in the light that others throw.

GANJA & HESS

Bill Gunn
USA, 1973

HARVEY FIERSTEIN

Torch Song Trilogy

____________________

I think my biggest problem is being young and beautiful. Oh, I've been young. God knows I've been beautiful. But never the twains have met.

ITALO CALVINO

Mr. Palomar

__________________

If all material were transparent—the ground that supports us, the envelope that sheathes our body—everything would be seen not as a fluttering of impalpable wings but as an inferno of grinding and ingesting. Perhaps at this moment a god of the nether world situated in the center of the earth with his eye that can pierce granite is watching us from below, following the cycle of living and dying, the lacerated victims dissolving in the bellies of their devourers, until they, in their turn, are swallowed by another belly.

FOXY BROWN

Jack Hill
USA, 1974

RYŌKAN

____________________

Too lazy to be ambitious,
I let the world take care of itself.
Ten days’ worth of rice in my bag;
a bundle of twigs by the fireplace.
Why chatter about delusion and enlightenment?
Listening to the night rain on my roof,
I sit comfortably, with both legs stretched out. 

SHAFT

Gordon Parks
USA, 1971

ISMAEL REED
"The Diabetic Dreams of Cake"

____________________

“Wall Street says that cake sales are low”
Or to put it bluntly
“Cake is fizz”
So why is a diabetic dreaming of cake
Asked to leave a temple
Because he didn’t know that rice cakes
Were sacrament?
(He managed to jam some into his pockets)
He dreamed that Mount Diablo was a Devil’s food cake
He began to munch it down until his path was
Interrupted by his Pancreas
The Pancreas had sticklike arms and legs
It was frowning
It put up a hand and beckoned him to halt
He pushed aside the Pancreas and finished his
Meal

Next, he was attending the Asparagus Festival
In Freiburg
It was held in a great medieval hall and before
Each person there was a plate of asparagus
He started banging on his plate
Asparagus Nicht, Kuchen Ja

Next he was running across Central
Park, juggling a wedding cake without
Losing a single flake
Safely in some Brooklyn room
The news said that he had stolen
The cake from a tony East Side wedding
He didn’t take it all in

He was too busy eating the cake
And watching Julia Child bake
A cake

He was on a plantation doing
What looked like a goose step
He was twirling a cane
He was wearing a monocle
A black top hat
And shiny black boots
The master said, That takes the cake
Some of the slaves applauded
Others grumbled and called him a dandy
You can sleep with my wife and daughter tonight,
The master said
He started running because they were as ugly
Or shall we say beauty challenged as well
As booty challenged

Under an old Southern pine tree
He ate the cake

He was chillin’ with his witch
Not the one with a wart on her nose
And wearing a black cone-shaped hat
But a centerfold witch
You’ve seen her
She was honored at the AVN Awards
In Vegas
She was riding his broomstick
Hard
While feeding him gingerbread

The walls were caked with
Gingerbread, the doors, the

Floor, and the windows were
Gingerbread

Finicky about neatness
She kept sweeping his feet from
The table
But something outside of the window
Got her attention
Holding hands, two blond children were coming down the road
And here he thought that the bones in the fireplace
Were animal bones

She pushed him through the back door
But he persuaded her to give him a piece
For the road

Next he was sitting in on a congressional
Hearing on whether to classify pancakes
As cake. A conservative senator warned of
A slippery slope. What next? he said,
Icing on biscuits?

His mother learned to make chocolate
Cake when working for
A German family
Charlayne, whose mother was German, said
That the Germans used real cocoa
And so he found himself as tiny as a baby fly
Inside of his mother’s favorite cake bowl
He was climbing
The ladle to reach the icing around the
Rim of the bowl
He and Sigmund Freud

He kept falling backward every time
He was about to reach the top
Now they tell him that he has no free will
That bacteria inside his gut have goals
That don’t jibe with his
Or as the scientist says,
“Microbial manipulations might fill in
Some of the puzzling holes
In our understandings about food cravings”
In other words,
For his microbiome he is just a delivery system that
Brings them sugar

For them his body is a bakery
Is there no end to subservience?
He would find the conversation that his cells have
About him hair-raising
They crave cake even though
Cake spikes his sugar
And so as one grows older
While the external adversaries with whom
One had been feuding either die or
Break bread with you 
The internal adversaries multiply

They couldn’t give a Twinkie about
Whether you live or die


The Paris Review - Issue 218 (Fall 2016)

ANAÏS NIN

Little Birds

____________________

We don't see people as they are. We see people as we are.

COFFY

Jack Hill
USA, 1973

CARL SANDBURG
"Monotone"

____________________

    The monotone of the rain is beautiful,
And the sudden rise and slow relapse
Of the long multitudinous rain.

    The sun on the hills is beautiful,
Or a captured sunset sea-flung,
Bannered with fire and gold.

    A face I know is beautiful—
With fire and gold of sky and sea,
And the peace of long warm rain.

SWEET SWEETBACK'S BAADASSSSS SONG

Melvin Van Peeples
USA, 1971

SEAMUS HEANEY
"Polder"

Today the sun was shining
so my neighbor washed her nightdresses in the river—
she comes home with everything folded in a basket,
beaming, as though her life had just been
lengthened a decade. Cleanliness makes her happy—
it says you can begin again,
the old mistakes needn’t hold you back.

A good neighbor—we leave each other
to our privacies. Just now
she’s singing to herself, pinning the damp wash to the line.

Little by little, days like this
will seem normal. But winter was hard:
the nights coming early, the dawns dark
with a gray, persistent rain—months of that,
and then the snow, like silence coming from the sky,
obliterating the trees and gardens.

Today, all that’s past us.
The birds are back, chattering over seeds.
All the snow’s melted; the fruit trees are covered with downy new growth.
A few couples even walk in the meadow, promising whatever they promise.

We stand in the sun and the sun heals us.
It doesn’t rush away. It hangs above us, unmoving,
like an actor pleased with his welcome.

My neighbor’s quiet a moment,
staring at the mountain, listening to the birds.

So many garments, where did they come from?
And my neighbor’s still out there,
fixing them to the line, as though the basket would never be empty—

It’s still full, nothing is finished,
though the sun’s beginning to move lower in the sky;
remember, it isn’t summer yet, only the beginning of spring;
warmth hasn’t taken hold yet, and the cold’s returning—

She feels it, as though the last bit of linen had frozen in her hands.
She looks at her hands—how old they are. It’s not the beginning, it’s the end.
And the adults, they’re all dead now.
Only the children are left, alone, growing old.

LEONARD COHEN

"Famous Blue Raincoat"

____________________

t's four in the morning, the end of December
I'm writing you now just to see if you're better
New York is cold, but I like where I'm living
There's music on Clinton Street all through the evening

I hear that you're building your little house deep in the desert
You're living for nothing now, I hope you're keeping some kind of record

Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear
Did you ever go clear?

Ah, the last time we saw you you looked so much older
Your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder
You'd been to the station to meet every train, and
You came home without Lili Marlene

And you treated my woman to a flake of your life
And when she came back she was nobody's wife

Well I see you there with the rose in your teeth
One more thin gypsy thief
Well, I see Jane's awake
She sends her regards

And what can I tell you my brother, my killer
What can I possibly say?
I guess that I miss you, I guess I forgive you
I'm glad you stood in my way

If you ever come by here, for Jane or for me
Well, your enemy is sleeping, and his woman is free

Yes, and thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes
I thought it was there for good so I never tried

And Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear

Sincerely, L Cohen

ELLA WHEELER WILCOX
“My Grave”

____________________

If, when I die, I must be buried, let
No cemetery engulf me – no lone grot,
Where the great palpitating world comes not,
Save when, with heart bowed down and eyelids wet,
It pays its last sad melancholy debt
To some outjourneying pilgrim. May my lot
Be rather to lie in some much-used spot,
Where human life, with all its noise and fret,
Throbs about me. Let the roll of wheels,
With all earth’s sounds of pleasure, commerce, love,
And rush of hurrying feet surge o’er my head.
Even in my grave I shall be one who feels
Close kinship with the pulsing world above;
And too deep silence would distress me, dead.

DakhaBrakha
ALEMBARI
 

MILAN KUNDERA
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

____________________

After pausing for a moment, she added, “On the surface, an intelligible lie; underneath, the unintelligible truth.”

DOWNRIVER

Grant Scicluna
Australia, 2015

THE WILDING

Grant Scicluna
Australia, 2012

BLOKES

Marialy Rivas
Chile, 2010

WREN BOYS

Harry Lighton
Ireland, 2017

BONNIE 'PRINCE' BILLY
“You Want That Picture”

____________________

What did you do when you saw that I’d gone
did you stand very still and did tears come falling?

O you want that picture don’t you darling
of poor little me standing there bawling?
well it’s true that I cried
but then I went outside
and I stood very still in the night
and I looked at the sky
and knew someday I’d die
and then everything would be all right

it’s all right
and everything comes
down to this
that everything there ever was
or will be
is all there is

Where did you go once you’d wrote me that note
was a weight lifted off of your shoulders did you fly?

O you want that picture, don’t you darling
of heartless cold me
flying not falling?
well, it’s true that I soared
but then I went outdoors
and I stood very still in the night
and I looked at the sky
and knew someday I’d die
and then everything would be all right

it’s all right
and everything comes
down to this
that everything there ever was
or will be
is all there is