I have always been one for paths myself

This new map, unrolled, smoothed,
seems innocent as the one we have discarded,
impersonal as the clocks in rows
along the upper border, showing time-zones.

The colours are pale and clear, the contours
crisp, decisive, keeping order.

I have been always one for paths myself.
The mole’s view. Paths and small roads and the next bend.
Arched trees tunnelling into a coin of light.
No overview, no sense of what lies where.

Pinning up maps now, pinning my attention,
I cannot hold whole countries in my mind,
nor recognise their borders.

These days I want to trace
the shape of every townland in this valley;
name families; count trees, walls, cattle, gable-ends,
smoke-soft and tender in the near blue distance.

Excerpt from Kerry Hardie's "We Change The Map"

Image via

the sea

Kobe and the Sea : Ben Shewry from Johnny Abegg Films on Vimeo.

This is pretty much how I would like to spend 2012.

the end of the year

This is my favorite time of the year. I've made it through the holiday parties and expectations of Christmas. I can relax again and just be myself. This morning I dropped Tadzio off at a friend's stable (I love abandoning him with a bunch of girls and horses) and went back home to make a cup of tea and begin reading through the stack of books that are piled next to my bed.

Image via

You’ve fetched a duvet and laid it

lightly over the shoulders
of someone beside you who’s slipped
unwittingly into sleep.
And drifting off yourself
on a sofa somewhere you’ve sensed
the same weight settle and known
how the warmth around you will soon
deepen your sleep. And that’s something,
whatever else you’ve done or not done.

Michael Laskey's "The Right Place"
Image via

moon, weather, windows

Mei-mei,what follows is autumn
Sleep with closed lips, and tenderness

Tender is your scarf, to and fro, in the breeze
What follows is 
The palm of my hand - warm and full of memory

Not you, it's a garden that I am watering
Mei-mei, a safe place is spacious
On those delicate petals, what follows is
A silent, fleeting message

Moon, weather, windows lightly open
Clear bright lake
Close your eyes, Mei-mei
What follows is 
A gentle rainfall
And my feelings hurt suddenly by the leaves

-Zheng Danyi

Halloween, Ohio, and an Appropriately Named Lake

See, I've reserved Lake Erie for us,
and as we push away in our canoe, our eyes
touch everything, and it turns to costume.
The sky is a negative of a ghost, a black sheet
with star-slits for eyes, the lighthouse a hero
flashing his x-ray eye, and the flagpole on the shore
is the world's tallest matador waving, Ole! Ole! Ole!

Forgive me. I'm from a state shaped like a heart,
and this thought raises my soul as though by séance:
the seaweed bending in our direction, extending a dance,
the undead eyes of infinite fish surrounding us. And me,
setting aside my oar, bobbing for you Adam's apple,
whispering, See what a haunted house my arms make.
Then like a bully child: I dare you. Spend one night inside.

Stacy Gnall, excerpt from Halloween, Ohio, and an Appropriately Named Lake

image via

I scrub and lather him like a salmon

until he spits
soapy water. "Pig" I smile—

This man smells better than his country
I throw his shoes
and glasses in the air,

take off his t-shirt and socks, and kneel
in honor of Sasha Petrov
who was amputated, in honor of Lesha Vatkii the taken.

I dip a glass in a bath-tub,
drink dirty water.
Soaping together—that

is sacred to me. Washing mouths together.
You can fuck
anyone—but with whom can you sit in water?

And the cuddling up
before sleep!—and back-scratching
in the morning. My back, not yours!

I knew I had caught the fish
and he knew he had been caught.
He sings as I dry his chest & penis

"Sonya, I was a glad man with you—"

Ilya Kaminsky's "After Sonya, Bombardment"

Image via

It shows no hours, only tides and moons

Doing what the moon says, he shifts his chair
Closer to the stove and stokes it up
With the very best fuel, a mixture of dried fish
And tobacco he keeps in a bucket with crabs

Too small to eat. One raises its pincer
As if to seize hold of the crescent moon
On the calendar which is almost like a zodiac
With inexplicable and pallid blanks. Meanwhile

A lobster is crawling towards the clever
Bait that is set inside the clock
On the shelf by the wireless—an inherited dried fish
Soaked in whisky and carefully trimmed

With potato flowers from the Golden Wonders
The old man grows inside his ears.
Click! goes the clock-lid, and the unfortunate lobster
Finds itself a prisoner inside the clock,

An adapted cuckoo-clock. It shows no hours, only
Tides and moons and is fitted out
With two little saucers, one of salt and one of water
For the lobster to live on while, each quarter-tide,

It must stick its head through the tiny trapdoor
Meant for the cuckoo. It will be trained to read
The broken barometer and wave its whiskers
To Scottish Dance Music, till it grows too old.

Then the old man will have to catch himself another lobster.
Meanwhile he is happy and takes the clock
Down to the sea. He stands and oils it
In a little rock pool that reflects the moon.

Ian Hamilton Finlay "Orkney Interior"

you drank a toast to him, and summer-time

In the window of the drawing-room
there is a rush of white as you pass
in which the figure of your husband is,
for a moment, framed. He is watching you.

His father will come, of course,
and, although you had not planned it,
his beard will offset your lace dress,
and always it will seem that you were friends.

All morning, you had prepared the house
and now you have stepped out
to make sure that everything
is in its proper place: the railings whitened,

fresh gravel on the avenue, the glasshouse
crystal when you stand in the courtyard
expecting the carriage to arrive at any moment.
You are pleased with the day, all month it has been warm.

They say it will be one of the hottest summers
the world has ever known.
Today, your son is one year old.
Later, you will try to recall

how he felt in your arms—
the weight of him, the way he turned to you from sleep,
the exact moment when you knew he would cry
and the photograph be lost.

But it is not lost.
You stand, a well-appointed group
with an air of being pleasantly surprised.
You will come to love this photograph

and will remember how, when he had finished,
you invited the photographer inside
and how, in celebration of the day,
you drank a toast to him, and summer-time.

Vona Groarke "The Family Photograph"


image via

A Shower of Summer Days

Violet had insisted that she must be allowed to do the flowers in peace before they started out on their long drive to town and to the mountains the next morning. And now she was standing before the piles of snapdragons, their heads heavy with rain, before the few tall spires of larkspur she had been able to save, and the careful faces of the zinnias (rain did not crumple them!) spread out on damp newspapers, covering almost the whole of the table in the study. At her feet she threw the withered stalks from the bunch which had stood there gradually disintegrating for the last two days. Sometimes the fugitive nature of this work into which she put so much thought and care depressed Violet. This was one of those days. They fade so fast, she was thinking. But what a rest it was to be arranging these passive stalks and stems, what a refuge from life with people who never stay put, who developed resentments and jealousies, or began to make demands just when one thought everything was settled.

May Sarton's "A Shower of Summer Days"

Coucou, I'm back after several weeks of adventure. To sum it up quickly, for the past three weeks I've been caring for large bands of children and trying to organize French people into a collective endeavour to start a public French immersion school. I'm happy to report that so far my efforts have been successful (although people never stay put!). And at one point, the highlight perhaps, there was even a pony.

Like Violet in Sarton's novel, I am ready to sit quietly and build my bouquet.

Image via

Mozart in E-flat Major

I turn around.
I fell Monday's well-shaven face lightly
caress my left shoulder

most cherished part
most crucial here and now

Hsia Yu

Image via Audrey Hepburn Complex

Each time you leave, something is lost

I’m the sort of person who sits with her coat on, always ready to leave. It’s a tendency of heart passed on from my parents, who no doubt learned it from their parents. The problem is that each time you leave, something is lost: a ring, a tooth, a last name. Some things replace themselves, but many things do not. At some point I realized that if I kept on living like this, always on the cusp of leaving, I was going to find myself completely alone at ninety sitting in a cramped room in a distant country, unable to speak the language. A small mining town in China, perhaps. So I have given myself the task of learning to stay. This is no small task. There is always the inclination to bolt or simply wander off when things become uncomfortable.

Image by Dusdin Condren

and you felt the old tug at your ankles

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
"Mend my life!"
each voice cried.
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save.

Mary Oliver "The Journey"

Image by Gary Isaac

Wesak

Happy birthday, Buddha. Today we celebrated Wesak, the festival of Buddha’s birth. This is a very precious time when the entire community — adults and kids, parents and those without children — celebrate together. In most forms of Buddhism, the festival of Wesak centers on children. This meant far more to me than a mother's day brunch, and I ate cake before noon.

image by Sarah Jaensch

avignon

"The sound of church bells and a procession of school kids dressed in black headed toward the end of the street where a wide set of stairs wrapped around the exterior of an ancient building.

I caught up and quickly passed without giving them a glance, climbed the stairs and waited at the half way point for them to pass me.

I held my camera low figuring i’d leave it mostly to chance.

Once past the last child gave me a face and stuck her tongue out. I stuck my tongue out in kind and she turned away laughing."

Photo and Text by Gary Issac

Happy Mother's day, tout le monde.

like the passionate daughter of a lighthouse keeper

It is a bright house;
not a single room is dim.
It is a house which rises high
on the cliffs, open
as a lookout tower.

When the night comes
I put a light in it,
a light larger than the sun and the moon.

Think
how my heart leaps
when my trembling fingers
strike a match in the evening.

I lift my breasts
and inhale and exhale the sound of love
like the passionate daughter of a lighthouse keeper.

It is a bright house.
I will create in it
a world no man can ever build.

-Fukao Sumako "Bright House" translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Image via Crush Cul de Sac

Compared to the pain Tsugumi gives me, this is nothing at all

Everyone gets annoyed about something at least once a day, me included. But I noticed there was something I did whenever this happened to me - that there was a sentence I would start chanting over and over deep down inside, like a sort of Buddhist chant, without even realizing that I was doing it. Compared to the pain Tsugumi gives me, this is nothing at all. It seemed that during the years I spent with Tsugumi, my body had come to understand in a hazy sort of way that, in the end, getting worked up really doesn't take you anywhere. And there was something else that I understood as I stared into the orange light of the gradually darkening sky - something that made me feel sort of like I wanted to cry.

Excerpt from Goodbye Tsugumi by Banana Yoshimoto translated from the Japanese by Michael Emmerich.

Rereading a favorite Yoshimoto book this sunny afternoon. This story has always been poignant, but recent events has made this even more true. Sitting here I can imagine Tsugumi's response to my musings, probably something along the lines of , "God you're a moron! Keep your mouth shut unless you've got something worth saying." Gallant, wise, and surprisingly unpleasant, Tsugumi is one of my literary heros.

image via

The best way to eat squid is to catch it first

best if you pull it out of the dripping net yourself,
a gift you didn’t ask for among the ordinary
bone-filled catch you did, and the purple sea-stars, inedible
bad luck you didn’t deserve.
Next to eat squid you waste a fire
To coals, nestling the flaccid bodies
Into the earth for as long as it takes, usually
long. Finally you may eat the small charred
legs, one by one, working your way
to the ink-filled heart. This is a shared
humiliation, and at this stage you are obliged
to press your lips to any nearby lover,
mark him as indelibly as you can.

Suzanne Matson "Squid"

image via

a wedding in a field-the old saying:

 it's good luck to be seen from a train dressed in white, you must be looking the other way, so many things work only if you're looking away. A woman in a field is walking away.
Gardens early in the evening. Trees
planted a few hundred years ago to line a road no longer there
. The water is pale teal, light, field after field. Spire, steeple, sea

of trees that line roads long disappeared along with their houses, which were
great houses in their time.

Cole Swensen from "Five Landscapes Two"

image via

To have picked up my heavy hem and run

To have been age enough.
To have been leg enough.
Been enough bold. Said no.
Been a girl grown into that
negative construction. Or said yes
on condition of a dress. To be yours
if my skirts skimmed the floors.
To have demanded each seam
celestial, appealed for planetary pleats.
And when you saw the sun a sequin,
the moon a button shaped from glass,
and in the stars a pattern
for a dress, when the commission
proved too minute, and the frocks
hung before me like hosts,
to have stood then at the edge
of the wood, heard a hound’s bark
and my heart hark in return.
To have seen asylum in the scruffs
of neck—mink, lynx, ocelot, fox,
Kodiak, ermine, wolf—felt a claw
curve over my sorrow then. Said yes
on condition of a dress. To be yours
if my skirts skimmed the floors.

-Stacy Gnall excerpt from "Self-Portrait as Thousandfurs"

image via