Apples
–Laurie Lee
Photo by Andrii Podilnyk on Unsplash
apples
Month: July 2019
Songs from below
from Songs from Below
–Philippe Jaccottet
It’s easy to talk, and writing words on the page
doesn’t involve much risk as a general rule:
You might as well be knitting late at night
in a warm room, in a soft, treacherous light.
The words are all written in the same ink,
‘flower’ and ‘fear’ are nearly the same for example,
and I could scrawl ‘blood’ the length of the page
without splashing the paper or hurting
myself at all.After a while it gets you down, this game,
you no longer know what it was you set out to achieve
instead of exposing yourself to life
and doing something useful with your hands.That’s when you can’t escape,
when pain is a figure tearing the fog
that shrouds you, striking away
the obstacles one by one, covering
the swiftly decreasing distance, now
so close you can make out nothing
but his mug wider than the sky.To speak is to lie, or worse: a craven
insult to grief or a waste
of the little time and energy at our disposal.*
Might there be things which lend themselves
more readily to words, and live with them
-those glad moments gladly found in poems,
light that releases words
as if erasing them; while other things
resist them, change them, destroy them even –as if language resisted death,
or rather, as if death consumed
even the words?
Photo by Nathan Anderson on Unsplash
Said and read – June 2019
*It is time now for a short break.*
I am sad to report that there is no book report for June. I just did not have the capacity for it, and before I knew it, it was July. I did some minor reading but don’t even remember what I read. Not enough, and certainly nothing worth writing about.
extraordinary real estate
Real Estate
–Tony Hoagland
I don’t trust people who overuse the word extraordinary.
Nor those who tell you how much they adore everything,
as in, “I adore Susan Sarandon” or, “this apple pie” or, “the way you wear your hair.”I get lost inside of the exaggerations.
The tree will topple under all those promises.
The branch will break from all that heavy fruit.Why pretend? Not all human beings are beautiful.
People killed by bombs are not automatic heroes.
One Tuesday night’s unhappiness
does not make the world a terrible place.The four-star general on television says,
“Bombing that city was a serious mistake,
but it taught me a lot about myself.”
Perhaps he should give a medal to his therapist.When I hear how certain people speak,
I think of those mansions built along the north New Jersey shore,
that completely block ordinary people from a view of the ocean.
I think of the people who call that investment real estate.My heroes are the ones who don’t say much.
They don’t hug people they just met.
They use plain language even when they listen.
They stand back and let you see it for yourself.Wisdom doesn’t come to every Californian.
Chances are I too
will die with difficulty in the dark.If you want to see a lost civilization,
why not just look in the mirror?
If you want to talk about love, why not begin
with those marigolds you forgot to water?