reflection
Los Dos
That Memorable Night in March
“Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indigence until that memorable night in March, at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision, at last. This I fancy is what I have chiefly to record this last evening, against the day when my work will be done and perhaps no place left in my memory, warm or cold, for the miracle that…(hesitates)…for the fire that set it alight. What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going on all my life, namely—(Krapp switches off impatiently, winds tape forward, switches on again)…“—Samuel Beckett, Krapp’s Last Tape
Whoever Is Near
(for my ongoing Two by Two series)
DANCING ON NEW YEAR’S EVE AT DAVE AND SHEILA’S by W.S. Di Piero
“Everybody’s looking for something”
and everything smells good.
My sweating partner’s hips
push harder into mine,
tequila yeasting through our skin
and we’d lick each other dry,
drink more, do it again
while blue lamps twitch
between the others lost,
until someone at midnight
kills the music, calls us
to the front door where we grab
and kiss whoever’s near,
squeezed out into the night
where woolly pops like corks
or muffled distant gunshots
are gunshots in fact, high times,
bullets to the stars.
They won’t fall to earth here
where in June mysterious
citron lilies bloom, a perfume
more intense than lemons.
How did they get here?
Eyewitness News tells us
what guns cost beyond
the freeway. We smell ourselves,
the grand cedar by the door,
peanuts, booze, and sweat.
How can we not love them?
When the music snaps on again,
we weave back to the floor
adrift in each other’s arms,
and love it more, that constancy
of beat and song,
she presses her mouth
to my ear, rubs harder with me
and sings We’re here because
we’re here because we’re here.
(from Brother Fire, 2004, Knopf)
The Cracks of a Gate
ANYTHING RATHER THAN AN ANGEL – Zbigniew Herbert
If after our death they want to transform us into a tiny withered flame that walks along the paths of winds—we have to rebel. What good is an eternal leisure on the bosom of air, in the shade of a yellow halo, amid the murmur of two-dimensional choirs?
One should enter rock, wood, water, the cracks of a gate. Better to be the creaking of a floor than shrilly transparent perfection.
Sleepless Eye
NEEDLE – Charles Simic
At ghost hour,
Let one of your fingers
Walk the floor
Of this old house,
As if it were a
Dark forest,
With your dead mother’s
Silver needle
In a bird’s nest
One lone drop of blood
Sliding down
To its sleepless eye.
Skittish
from SIGNS by Larry Levis
…If there were messages or signs,
I might hear now a voice tell me
to walk forever, to ask
the mold for pardon, and one
by one I would hear out my sins,
hear they are not important—that I am
part of this rain
drumming its long fingers, and
of the roadside stone refusing
to blink, and of the coyote
nailed to the fence with its
long grin…
Portals
A short series of doorways to complement my set of Seattle stairways.
(You may click on the images for a larger view.)
The House in the Hill
Gorgeous afternoon today, so I went to Golden Gardens, probably my favorite spot in Seattle. The bright light made for some strong reflections and what I thought were some interesting images. Later I’ll post a few others that I liked, but this one in particular I wanted to put up today, it being 9/11, as this image evoked for me a feeling of remembrance—in the most positive, peaceful, and hopeful sense.
