Beautiful Cynicism III

Photo: robt via Flickr

It has a personality of its own;
is a character (like that old drunk Lacoste,
exhaling amber, and toppling on his pins);
it is alive; individual; and no less
an identity than those about it. And
it is tradition. Centuries have been flicked
from its arcs, alternatively flicked and pinned.
It rolls with the gait of St. Malo. It is act

A.M. Klein, The Rocking Chair

One need not be a chamber to be haunted;
One need not be a house;
The brain has corridors surpassing
Material place.

-Emily Dickinson

I want to tell you what hills are like in October
when colors gush down mountainsides
and little streams are freighted with a caravan of leaves,
I want to tell you how they blush and turn in fiery shame
and joy,
how their love burns with flames consuming and terrible
until we wake one morning and woods are like a smoldering
plain –

Margaret Walker

Photo: sacramento365.com

O nature! I do not aspire
To be the highest in thy choir,–
To be a meteor in thy sky,
Or comet that may range on high;
Only a zephyr that may blow
Among the reeds by the river low;
Give me thy most privy place
Where to run my airy race.

Henry David Thoreau

Of course, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies: The First Elegy (excerpt)

Photo: allposters.fr

What though the radiance
which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass,
of glory in the flower,
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.

William Wordsworth, Splendour in the Grass (excerpt)

Photo: clcookphoto.com

Someday, emerging at last from the violent insight,
let me sing out jubilation and praise to assenting angels.
Let not even one of the clearly-struck hammers of my heart
fail to sound because of a slack, a doubtful,
or an ill-tempered string. Let my joyfully streaming face
make me more radiant; let my hidden weeping arise
and blossom. How dear you will be to me then, you nights
of anguish. Why didn’t I kneel more deeply to accept you,
inconsolable sisters, and, surrendering,
lose myself
in your loosened hair. How we squander our hours of pain.
How we gaze beyond them into the bitter duration
to see if they have an end. Though
they are really
seasons of us, our winter-
enduring foliage, ponds, meadows, our inborn landscape
where birds and reed-dwelling creatures are at home.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Tenth Elegy [original version], excerpt

Take bread away from me, if you wish,
take air away, but
do not take from me your laughter.

Pablo Neruda, Your Laughter

Photo: applejournal.com

Robert Frost, Unharvested

Photo: oiseaux.net

If ignorance is bliss, Father said,
shouldn’t you be looking blissful?
You should check to see if you have
the right kind of ignorance. If you’re
not getting the benefits that most people
get from acting stupid, then you should
go back to what you always were -
being too smart for your own good.

Hal Sirowitz, The Benefits of Ignorance

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled,
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.

Noël Coward

I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

Pablo Neruda

Looking for Sartre
and Simone de Beauvoir
at the Café Deux Maggots
looking for Voltaire
in bookstalls along the Seine
looking for Van Gogh
to say I loved him
finding only fleas
racing round my midsection
stomach upset from the water
turning over and over
every half hour
drinking only wine

Al Purdy, To Paris Never Again

Is it thy will thy image should keep open
My heavy eyelids to the weary night?
Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,
While shadows, like to thee, do mock my sight?
Is it thy spirit that thou send’st from thee
So far from home, into my deeds to pry,
To find out shames and idle hours in me,
The scope and tenour of thy jealousy?
O, no! thy love, though much, is not so great:
It is my love that keeps mine eye awake;
Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat,
To play the watchman ever for they sake:
For thee watch I whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,
From me far off, with others all too near.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet #61

Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.
The stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In hopes that St Nicholas soon would be there.

Clement Clarke Moore, A Visit From St. Nicholas (1822)