“Light thinks it travels faster than anything but it is wrong. No matter how fast light travels, it finds the darkness has always got there first, and is waiting for it.” ~ Terry Pratchett, from Reaper Man

“Black Bowl” (1907)
by George Seeley

                   

Two for Tuesday: From Light to Dark and Dark to Light

Within light there is darkness,
But do not try to understand that darkness.
Within darkness there is light,
But do not look for that light.
Light and darkness are a pair,
Like the foot before and the foot behind in walking.

~ Shih’tuo, a verse from the Sandokai

                   

Indistinguishable from the Darkness

The dark under the trees is filled with lightning bugs
and because I am in one of those strange moods
I start to think I have found one of the hollows
where the life of the world is created.  There is light
but in the dark circle of shadow under the oaks transformations
take place; small, accurate, invested points of light shiver
and rise wavering above the thin grass. I am in one of those moods
when I need this, this regenerative, tangibly formed
coinage, this dream or perception of the mixing vats
of the earth making out of nothing small light
that might continue to grow and change, become substantial.

The world of this field, sloping to a small black pond under trees,
is empty just now; on the side of the low mountain before me
the constructed lights of houses come on and shine like gold jackets
thrown up into the trees. It is spring and the breeze carries its mix
of summer and spring and the hint of dew that is not so much carried
as woven into the slippage of air; purplish clouds, thinned
nearly to haze, pile against the western rim. I have known
this mood before, and it comes sought but unbidden.
do not translate themselves into negotiable forms—a human
hand, the voice of a loved one. To become known
we must become unknown; the way out, I have learned,
is through. But I do not know
the names of the trees that are just now carefully laying
their long shadows across the body of the pond. The shadows
will lie on the surface of the water all night,
indistinguishable from darkness. It is not a matter
of being saved. I know this.

~ Charlie Smith

                   

“Four Cut Sunflowers” (1887, oil on canvas)
by Vincent van Gogh

Tom O’ Bedlam among the Sunflowers

To have gold in your back yard and not know it. . .

I woke this morning before your dream had shredded

And found a curious thing: flowers made of gold,

Six-sided—more than that—broken on flagstones,

Petals the color of a wedding band.

You are sleeping. The morning comes up gold.

Perhaps I made those flowers in my head,

For I have counted snowflakes in July

Blowing across my eyes like bits of calcium,

And I have stepped into your dream at night,

A stranger there, my body steeped in moonlight.

I watched you tremble, washed in all that silver.

Love, the stars have fallen into the garden

And turned to frost. They have opened like a hand.

It is the color that breaks out of the bedsheets.

This morning the garden is littered with dry petals

As yellow as the page of an old book.

I step among them. They are brittle as bone china.

~ Thomas James

“The names of the rivers remain with you.” ~ Czeslaw Milosz, from “Forget”

Futaleufu River, Patagonia
by Sebastian Dario (Creative Commons)

                   

“When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers.” ~ Czeslaw Milosz, from “Bobo’s Metamorphosis”

Corey and I have been watching “River Monsters,” which has made me think a lot about water, flowing water, river water, water of life . . .

“So lasting they are, the rivers!” Only think. Sources somewhere in the mountains pulsate and springs seep from a rock, join in a stream, in the current of a river, and the river flows through centuries, millennia. Tribes, nations pass, and the river is still there, and yet it is not, for water does not stay the same, only the place and the name persist, as a metaphor for a permanent form and changing matter. The same rivers flowed in Europe when none of today’s countries existed and no languages known to us were spoken. It is in the names of rivers that traces of lost tribes survive. They lived, though, so long ago that nothing is certain and scholars make guesses which to other scholars seem unfounded. It is not even known how many of these names come from before the Indo-European invasion, which is estimated to have taken place two thousand to three thousand years B. C. Our civilization poisoned river waters, and their contamination acquires a powerful emotional meaning. As the course of a river is a symbol of time, we are inclined to think of a poisoned time. And yet the sources continue to gush and we believe time will be purified one day. I am a worshipper of flowing and would like to entrust my sins to the waters, let them be carried to the sea.

~ Czeslaw Milosz, “Rivers” (trans. Robert Hass)

                    

Music by Sheryl Crow, “Easy”

“Touch and go, bank and stall, keeping a steady hand | as we flew beyond the bounds of the artificial horizon.” ~ Sue Standing, from “Artificial Horizon”

“The Japanese Lantern” (1912)
by Paul Burty Haviland

                   

Two for Tuesday: What is temporary

“No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.”

~ Wislawa Szymborska (trans. Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak), from “Nothing Twice”

                   

Untitled [I know now the beloved]

I know now the beloved
Has no fixed abode,
That each body
She inhabits
Is only a temporary
Home.
That she
Casts off forms
As eagerly
As lovers shed clothes.

I accept that he’s
Just passing through
That flower
Or that stone.

And yet, it makes
Me dizzy—
The way he hides
In the flow of it,
The way she shifts
In fluid motions,
Becoming other things.

I want to stop him—
If only briefly.
I want to lure her
To the surface
And catch her
In this net of words.

~ Gregory Orr

                   

Opening the Mona Lisa after WWII (photographer unknown)

Travel Elegy

Everything’s mine though just on loan,
nothing for the memory to hold,
though mine as long as I look.

Memories come to mind like excavated statues
that have misplaced their heads.

From the town of Samokov, only rain
and more rain.

Paris from Louvre to fingernail
grows web-eyed by the moment.

Boulevard Saint-MartinL some stairs
leading into a fadeout.

Only a bridge and a half
from Leningrad of the bridges.

Poor Uppsala, reduced to a splinter
of its mighty cathedral.

Sofia’s hapless dancer,
a form without a face.

Then separately, his face without eyes;
separately again, his eyes with no pupils,
and, finally, the pupils of a cat.

A Caucasian eagle soars
over the reproduction of a canyon,
the fool’s gold of the sun,
the phony stones.

Everything’s mine but just on loan,
nothing for the memory to hold,
though mine as long as I look.

Inexhaustible, unembracable,
but particular to the smallest fiber,
grain of sand, drop of water—
landscapes.

I won’t retain one blade of grass
as it’s truly seen.

Salutation and farewell
in a single glance.

For surplus and absence alike,
a single motion of the neck.

~ Wislawa Szymborska

                   

Music by Cat Power, “Who Knows Where the Time Goes”

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