deadlift poetry
May 26
Deutscher nachmittag - perfekt.
“While Plato wanted to leave the dark Cave of physical reality and find something better, Aristotle said that the cave was not so bad once you turned the lights on — particularly if you started dissecting the animals in it.”
— Anthony Gottlieb, “The Dream of Reason”
May 21
The Loneliest Job in the World
As soon as you begin to ask the question, Who loves me?,
you are completely screwed, because
the next question is How Much?,
and then it is hundreds of hours later,
and you are still hunched over
your flowcharts and abacus,
trying to decide if you have gotten enough.
This is the loneliest job in the world:
the be an accountant of the heart.
It is late at night. You are by yourself,
and all around you, you can hear
the sounds of people moving
in and out of love,
pushing the turnstiles, putting
their coins in the slots,
paying the price which is asked,
which constantly changes.
No one knows why.
—Tony Hoagland
May 14
Busy exploring Mt. Cameroon and the surrounding area this week (as well as being charged an exorbitant amount to tell you this via the interwebs)—be back soon, everyone.
May 09
May 07
Yves Klein, “Le Saut dans le Vide” (The Jump in the Vacuum), October 1960
May 06
Grab Somebody Sexy Tell ‘Em, “Hey!”
Arguments for one-night stands, in order:
1. Andrew Marvell’s “To his Coy Mistress”.
“Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime…”
2. Nathaniel West’s, “The Dream Life of Balso Snell”
“And now, finally, we come to the Time-argument. Do not confuse what I shall say under this head with the theories so much in vogue among the metaphysicians and physicists, those weavers of the wind. My ‘Time’ is that of the poets. In a little while, love, you will be dead; that is my burden. In a little while, we all will be dead. Golden lads and chimney-sweeps, all dead. And when dying, will you be able to say, I turn down an empty glass, having drunk to the full, lived to the full? Is it not madness to deny life? Hurry! Hurry! for all is soon over. Blown, O rose! in the morning, thou shalt fade ere noon. Do you realize the tune the clock is playing? The seconds, how they fly! All is soon over! All is soon over! Let us snatch, while yet we may, in this brief span, whose briefness merely gilds the bubble so soon destroyed, some few delights. Have you thought of the grave? O love! have you thought of the grave and of the change that shall come over your fair body? Your most beautiful bride—though now she be pleasant and sweet to the nose—will be damnably mouldy a hundred years hence. O how small a part of time they share, that are so wonderous sweet and fair. Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend before we too into the dust descend. Into the dust, Mary! Thy sweet plenty, in the dust. I tremble, I burn for thy sweet embrace. Be not miserly with thy white flesh. Give your gracious body, for such a short time lent you. Give, for in tile giving you shall receive and still have what you give. Only time can rob you of your flesh, I cannot. And time will rob you—it will, it will! And those who husbanded the golden grain, and those who flung it to the wind like rain…”
3. Ne-Yo’s “Let’s Do It Tonight”
“…give me everything tonight
for all we know we might not get tomorrow
lets do it tonight
i will love love you tonight
give me everything tonight
for all we know we might not get tomorrow
lets do it tonight…”
And people say we’re evolving.
May 01
When the pain was fresh,
for a while the problem got very clear
and the clarity constituted a kind of relief
as if the problem had withdrawn
to watch what you would do.
But after a while the clarity began to fade,
and three days later you couldn’t have articulated
precisely what the problem was,
and three days after that you forgot
that there even was a problem,
and your old way of thinking resumed…
Tony Hoagland, The Situation
Spring is upon the valley.
The evening light is blue jazz. I can’t help but think of Rilke as I sit outside and watch the color invade: ”live yourself to the answers,” he says in his letters. Though I feel a great calm upon me with the world, I can’t help but feel a shadow of doubt in it all, a small voice that whispers that this cannot last. I think of the questions I once asked that have morphed into the quiet imperatives that I now live by, the same way I watch others in their conversation struggle with satisfaction and terror and frustration at the days that their life would be filled with. How could we have ever known?
Comfort how you can—listen more than you speak—be grateful for the quiet moments. How can one live life in any other manner?
Apr 29
“In the nets are a bass and six gray mullet. We let go the two small flounders, or butts, and they snake back into the water like miniature waves, mud-brown above, sky-gray beneath. The mullet have tangled themselves; Peter unhooks the nylon filament from their bleeding gills and popping eyes of fish panic and eases the fish back through the net. Most are still alive when we reach them, and being released from the nets gives them a little more twitch. Peter takes the wooden fish priest, or club, strung on his waist and hits each mullet very hard three or four times on its head. It is bone crunching, a loud finite noise amidst the never-ending ripple and blow of wind and water. As he hits them, Peter talks to the fish in a soft voice. “I know, I know,” he says.”
- Tim Dee
Whether into birding or not, this book is so beautiful rendered that I’m spell-bound even as I’m lost in the thick prose, constantly checking on species that Dee writes of or struggling with his British lexicon, dizzy in the real and sometimes painful scenes he relates.
This is what memoir should be; this is life distilled and put to word in the most wondrous manner.
Apr 26
Windmills
Great white arms,
churning through the air,
turning toward the wind;
heliotropes facing the sun.
At night
they blink a low red warning
light, and in the calm
the drone of their motion
hums down into my valley
where they keep watch.
When I hear this sound
I think of pop-culture music
reviews and some DJ some-
where calling the sound
“sweet” with no connection
to the rain-soaked ground
beneath my feet, or the memories
that haunt me.
But what would my memories
have to do with the drone,
or the DJ, or the rain-soaked
ground, other than this is where
they form, as the world shimmers
through air I cannot see,
and gears turn in ways
I do not understand, and I
am filled with a warmth,
like a drone in a hive
filled purpose, shivering
while the world glistens.
Apr 24
Description
A bird with a cry like a cell phone says something
to a bird which sounds like a manual typewriter.
Out of sight in the woods, the creek trickles
its ongoing sentence; from treble to baritone,
from dependent clause to interrogative.
The trees rustle over the house: they are excited
to be entering the poem
in late afternoon, when the clouds are creamy and massive,
as if to illustrate contentment.
And maybe a wind will pluck off the last dead leaves;
and a cold rain will splash
dainty white petals from the crab apple tree
down to the ground,
the pink and the brown mingled there,
like two different messages scribbled over each other.
In all of this a place must be
reserved for human suffering:
the sick and unloved, the chemically confused;
the ones who believe desperately in insight;
the ones addicted to change.
How our thoughts clawed and pummeled the walls.
How we tried but could not find our way out.
In the wake of our effort, how we rested.
How description was the sign of our acceptance.
—Tony Hoagland
Apr 23
A State of Knowing
Apr 21
“A man will live thus, not to the extent that he is a man, but to the extent that a divine principle dwells within him.”
— Aristotle
Apr 13
[video]
Of course, touring the covered bridges of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is traditionally done on scooters.
