3 enero 2013

from Haruki Murakami’s TheWind-Up Bird Chronicle (1998):

Maybe this was it: the fatal blow. Or maybe it was just the beginning of what would be the fatal blow. I might be standing in the entrance of something big, and inside lay a world that belonged to Kumiko alone, a vast world that I had never known. I saw it as a big, dark room. I was standing there holding a cigarette lighter, its tiny flame showing me only the smallest part of the room.

Would I ever see the rest? Or would I grow old and die without ever really knowing her? If that was all that lay in store for me, then what was the point of this married life I was leading? What was the point of my life at all if I was spending it in bed with an unknown companion?

Miss Vee slept until 5:00; it’s another cool morning, the sky draped with filmy cocoons

RT headlines:

A 6-year-old elementary school student has been suspended for forming a gun with his hands, pointing it at a student and saying ‘pow.’

A federal judge issued a 75-page ruling on Wednesday that declares that the US Justice Department does not have a legal obligation to explain the rationale behind killing Americans with targeted drone strikes.

I walked west early this morning with Beth

saw a very big-leafed plant growing low to the ground at the edge of a vineyard

with clusters of yellow snapdragon-like flowers

& long thin pointed fuzzy green fruits like unridged okra, inside & out

a thorn tree, huge, a trunk inside a living cavern

new pix of gardens here

Michael Patrick Cronan, one of the very best people I have known in my life: too soon, RIP

Michael Patrick Cronan [pic by Terry Lorant]

Michael led the naming process & more for Silicon Graphics's Iris Indigo, for which I was director of engineering.

Iris Indigo

Michael was good, affectionate, excitable, gorgeous, charming, brilliant, breathtakingly creative, patient, funny, artful, tasteful, skillful, untiring & relentless in search of excellence.

Michael taught me that when you're driving with a woman in the passenger seat, you always find a parking space.

from Jack Gilbert’s Refusing Heaven (2005)

Horses at Midnight without a Moon

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.

Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.

But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down

but the angel flies up again taking us with her.

The summer mornings begin inch by inch

while we sleep, and walk with us later

as long-legged beauty through

the dirty streets. It is no surprise

that danger and suffering surround us.

What astonishes is the singing.

We know the horses are there in the dark

meadow because we can smell them,

can hear them breathing.

Our spirit persists like a man struggling

through the frozen valley

who suddenly smells flowers

and realizes the snow is melting

out of sight on top of the mountain,

knows that spring has begun.

from Barbara Guest’s MoscowMansions

(1973):

                                                                     as a basin

is filled then emptied yet its curve remains and its depth . . .

Collapsing so this is now what I expected

the vision had more altitude and escapes,

a broader seam, certainly more current laced

with green, altogether outstanding not

this sash of door or mantel or knob or lintel

or stair swindle certainly not a curb it was a street

not a bottle cap, a volume rather than envelope or paste,

it was scissors and meat, not hive but swarm.

The ladder slipping away from the roof

to where one landed in a disguising sort of way

on one’s side, a pause in the day’s

precariousness fitting ill, but regularly

into the wild snow.