Most days, I

just don't really have anything to say. I have good poems to share, though. So that is what I shall do. Writing in verse is so hard to do.

This poem was in the latest New Yorker, and I like it a lot, though I'm not entirely sure I get it completely:

Rat Wheel, Dementia, Mont Saint Michel

My last god's a theodicy glutton, a good-evil gourmet--
peacock and plague, gene-junk; he gobbles it down.
Poetry, violence; love, war--his stew of honey and thorn.

For instance, thinks theodicy-god: Mont Saint Michel.
Sheep, sand, steeple honed sharp as a spear. And inside,
a contraption he calls with a chuckle the rat wheel.

Thick timber three metres around, two persons across,
into which prisoners were inserted to trudge, toil,
hoist food for the bishop and monks; fat bishop himself.

The wheel weighs and weighs. You're chained in; you toil.
Then they extract you. Where have your years vanished?
What difference? says theodicy-god. Wheel, toil: what difference?

theodicy-god has evolved now to both substance and not.
With handy metaphysical blades to slice brain meat from mind.
For in minds should be voidy wings choiring, not selves.

This old scholar, for instance, should have to struggle to speak,
should not remember his words, paragraphs, books:
that garner of full-ripened grain must be hosed clean.

Sometimes as the rat wheel is screaming, theodicy-god
considers whether to say he's sorry: That you can't speak,
can't remember your words, paragraphs, books.


Sorry, so sorry. Blah, his voice thinks instead, blah.
He can't do it. Best hope instead they'll ask him again
as they always do for forgiveness. But what if they don't?

What might have once been a heart feels pity, for itself, though,
not the old man with no speech--for him and his only scorn.
Here in my rat wheel, my Mont Saint Michel, my steeple of scorn.

-C.K. Williams

"against all reason,"

This poem does not apply to my life in the slightest, but still, it's beautiful.

Your Blinded Hand

Suppose that
            everything that greens and grows
should blacken in one moment, flower and branch.
I think that I would find your blinded hand.
Suppose that your cry and mine were lost among numberless cries
            in a city of fire when the earth is afire,
I must still believe that somehow I would find your blinded hand.
            Through flames everywhere
            consuming earth and air
I must believe that somehow, if only one moment were offered,
    I would
            find your hand.
I know as, of course, you know
            the immeasurable wilderness that would exist
            in the moment of fire.
But I would hear your cry and you'd hear mine and each of us
     would find
            the other's hand.
                         We know
            that it might not be so.
                          But for this quiet moment, if only for this
                             moment,
and against all reason,
            let us believe, and believe in our hearts,
            that somehow it would be so.
            I'd hear your cry, you mine--
                         And each of us would find a blinded hand.

-Tennessee Williams

Thank God For

the promise of spring. Or, in this case, actually spring! Jubilee!


Happy World Poetry Day, readers (Marianela, Babz)! So today, I post a spring poem to celebrate. I couldn't find the one I was thinking of, so we'll have to settle for this. Still good, though.


A Light exists in Spring


A Light exists in Spring
Not present on the Year
At any other period --
When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad
On Solitary Fields
That Science cannot overtake
But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,
It shows the furthest Tree
Upon the furthest Slope you know
It almost speaks to you.

Then as Horizons step
Or Noons report away
Without the Formula of sound
It passes and we stay --

A quality of loss
Affecting our Content
As Trade had suddenly encroached
Upon a Sacrament.


-Emily Dickinson (not the cat)

So much for

posting everyday this break. That obviously didn't work out. My streak of productivity lasted a grand total of two days. It was going quite strong until it was met with the daunting prospects of doing chemistry. I just  spent like five seconds trying to figure out if you spelled "met" like "meat" or "met." My brain on break is not doing ok.


I don't have the patience for paintings. I'm not a bad artist, but I don't have the patience to actually sit/stand there and make something--especially something creative. I'm a copier, at best.


Ramblings. None of this probably makes any sense. I can't think.


The problem is that I don't actually care all that much about doing, well, anything. There is nothing that I feel a drive for. Not even writing. There are things that I appreciate and there are things that I enjoy, but, at the end of the day, I don't appreciate or enjoy them enough to spontaneously do them. I don't have any passions--not any lasting passions, anyway. I'd really rather just sit or sleep. So I just pursue things that people tell me I'm good at doing. 


And that, my friends, is the cold, naked truth. 


Unless I'm PMSing. Then I care about everything.


The Second Coming


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? 


-William Butler Yeats

I need someone

to keep me from spending money for the rest of the year. Seriously. All I do at home is eat, sleep, and spend money. This is baaaad.

I've decided that I'm not going to bed tonight until I finish Uncle Tungsten. I've got about 200 pages left. Doable.

I really, really, really love Borges. I react to his poems the same way that I react to T.S. Eliot's, and that's saying something. Plus, we share a fascination with dust.

Maybe I'll start posting a poem a day. It's more for me than anything, though, 'cause it'll force me to read a poem a day. Hmm. Readers (Marianela, Babz), what do you think?

Remorse for Any Death

Free of memory and hope,
unlimited, abstract, almost future,
the dead body is not somebody: It is death.
Like the God of the mystics, whom they insist has no attributes,
the dead person is no one everywhere,
is nothing but the loss and absence of the world.
We rob it of everything,
we do not leave it one color, one syllable:
Here is the yard which its eyes no longer take up,
there is the sidewalk where it waylaid its hope.
It might even be thinking
what we are thinking.
We have divided among us, like thieves,
the treasure of nights and days.

-Jorge Luis Borges

So I've already

posted today, and I'm fairly sure no one reads these poems I post, but I just had to put this here, because it pretty much blew my mind:

To Whoever Is Reading Me

You are invulnerable. Have they not granted you,
those powers that preordain your destiny,
the certainty of dust? Is not your time
as irreversible as that same river
where Heraclitus, mirrored, saw the symbol
of fleeting life? A marble slab awaits you
which you will not read--on it, already written,
the date, the city, and the epitaph.
Other men too are only dreams of time,
not indestructible bronze or burnished gold;
the universe is, like you, a Proteus.
Dark, you will enter the darkness that awaits you,
doomed to the limits of your traveled time.
Know that in some sense you are already dead.

-Jorge Luis Borges

I read this

poem in Borders today and just had to buy the book, which brings my book-purchasing total of these last two days to 11 books and ~$90. Weakness? Probably.

I think it is wonderful.

The Alchemist

Slow in the dawn, a young man, hollow-eyed
from lengthy thought and unrewarding vigils,
is lost in his reflections, contemplating
the sleepless braziers and the silent stills.

He knows that gold, that Proteus, is lurking
in all chance happenings, like destiny;
he knows it hides in the dust along the way,
in the action of the bow, the arm, the arrow.

His occult vision of a secret being
hidden in the stars and in raw earth
echoes that other dream, that everything
is water, the dream of Thales of Miletus.

There's another vision, that of an eternal
God who appears in every single thing,
as Spinoza the geometer explains
in a book more tortuous than all of Hell.

In the vast blue expanses to the west,
the planets are beginning to grow pale.
The alchemist is thinking of his secrets,
the secret laws that link planet and metal.

And while he dreams of finding in the fire
that true gold that will put an end to dying,
God, who knows His alchemy, transforms him
to no one, nothing, dust, oblivion.

-Jorge Luis Borges


It must be awfully hard to translate poetry.

I think I'm going to try to blog everyday this break.

I've decided that

I am going to get my life in order this spring break. So in the spirit of Marianela emulation, here is a to-do list:

1) Read Brave New World
2) Read Uncle Tungsten
3) Write first draft of 5-page paper on Uncle Tungsten
4) Write chemistry lab report
5) Write biology lab report
6) Re-learn how photosynthesis works
7) Read, learn, and make index cards for three chapters in psych
8) Read and learn everything I've missed in bio
9) Read the current unit in chemistry
10) Read literature for the lab
11) Do Haslam readings
12) Write Haslam essay

I should try to write more poetry, too, but I doubt that will happen. So much to do, so little time.

On a brighter note, though, I just bought my Les Mis tickets! I am so, so, so excited. I've only been waiting for this moment for, you know, forever.

Once this break is over, no more skipping classes.

Jack Gilbert is

so, so good.

Michiko Dead

He manages like somebody carrying a box
that is too heavy, first with his arms
underneath. When their strength gives out,
he moves the hands forward, hooking them
on the corners, pulling the weight against
his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly
when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes
different muscles take over. Afterward,
he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood
drains out of the arm that is stretched up
to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now
the man can hold underneath again, so that
he can go on without ever putting the box down.

To See if Something Comes Next

There is nothing here at the top of the valley.
Sky and morning, silence and the dry smell
of heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.
Goats occasionally, and the sound of roosters
in the bright heat where he lives with the dead
woman and purity. Trying to see if something
comes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.
Maybe, he thinks, it is like the Noh; whenever
the script says dances, whatever the actor does next
is a dance. If he stands still, he is dancing.



Absolutely perfect.