February 2012
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Calendars
Back in the blue chair in front of the green studio another year has passed, or so they say, but calendars lie. They’re a kind of cosmic business machine like their cousin clocks but break down at inopportune times. Fifty years ago I learned to jump off the calendar but I kept getting drawn back on for reasons of greed and my imperishable stupidity. Of late I’ve escaped those fatal...
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“She moves in a happy thoughtlessness within the confined circle of her...”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | The Sorrows of Young Werther
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The Imagined
If the imagined woman makes the real woman seem bare-boned, hardly existent, lacking in gracefulness and intellect and pulchritude, and if you come to realize the imagined woman can only satisfy your imagination, whereas the real woman with all her limitations can often make you feel good, how, in spite of knowing this, does the imagined woman keep getting into...
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“I examine my own being, and find there a world, but a world rather of...”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | The Sorrows of Young Werther
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Some things I like
the sound of cellos, museums inside old houses, a cup of cappuccino, the present moment, second-hand markets, walking barefoot, empty libraries, soft voices, written words, German philosophy, light rain, random thoughts, closed eyes, little gardens, fresh water, white marble, Italian poetry, goose bumps, quiet moments, short hair, train rides, Japanese culture, little theaters, morning light, deep...
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Anonymous asked: What's your IQ?
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Xenia
Most days that summer your old dog came up, in the searing heat, with a failing heart, from your place, the half-mile uphill to mine― up the steep rise, past the pastured goats, on the buggy trail that swerves through blueberries. As you pointed out, The Odyssey is full of tears, everyone weeping to find and lose and find each other again. Spent, he struggled the last two hundred yards, ears low,...
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“Solitude in this terrestrial paradise is a genial balm to my mind, and the young...”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe | The Sorrows of Young Werther
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God is an American
I still love words. When we make love in the morning, your skin damp from a shower, the day calms. Shadenfreude may be the best way to name the covering of adulthood, the powdered sugar on a black shirt. I am alone now on the top floor pulled by obsession, the ink on my fingers. And sometimes it is a difficult name. Sometimes it is like the world before America, the kin- ship of fools and hunters,...
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“We shall never be able to tell of virtue’s brightness, unless by looking...”
– Plotinus | An Essay on the Beautiful
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Superbly Situated
you politely ask me not to die and i promise not to right from the beginning—a relationship based on good sense and thoughtfulness in little things i would like to be loved for such simple attainments as breathing regularly and not falling down too often or because my eyes are brown or my father left-handed and to be on the safe side i wouldn’t mind if somehow i became entangled in your...
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“What do you suffer respecting fair studies, and beautiful manners, virtuous...”
– Plotinus | An Essay on the Beautiful
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Fräulein, can you
sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I drag my sleeping bag into the meadow’s precise center & crawl inside, head first. Fräulein, there is the stars’ ceaseless drilling. I close my eyes. Somewhere below me a star-nosed mole cuts its webbed hand on a shard of glass. I close my ears & over my body the current of a young doe eddies, ripples across the field, a low-lying...
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