Japanese garden at the Huntington Library, San Marino CA Wait Chop, hack, slash; chop, hack, slash; cleaver, boning knife, ax— not even the clumsiest clod of a butcher could do this so crudely, time, as do you, dismember me, render me, leave me slop in a pail, one part of my body a hundred years […]
Poetry
Occultation
I’m Going to Start Living Like a Mystic Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall. The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field, each a station in a pilgrimage—silent, pondering. Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies are the ciphers of a […]
The Ideal of Emptiness
The ideal of emptiness: Not there yet, but moving in that direction, the Fisher Center at Bard College designed by Frank Gehry I’ve written previously about the slim but beguiling book that I found at the William Stout bookstore in San Francisco, Poems for Architects by Jill Stoner (my earlier post is Poetry and Space). […]
Ready to Embrace You, If You Would Just Turn Around
It’s so fragile anything can kill it— one cold night, the smoking chimney too far off in the distance, another drought, everyone at the table either drunk or estranged; but like a fisted bud, it rides out even the deluge that bends bough to ground, and so persists—sometimes unsure, like leaves curling and uncurling outside […]
The Pity of the World Has Leaked
Carol Ann Duffy Carol Ann Duffy, England’s poet laureate, has assembled a remarkable trove of poems written by “senior” British poets about ageing. Published in the Guardian, the selection reflects Duffy’s deft hand (and I mean that as a compliment.) I read them all and was moved by every one. Here are two that stood […]
Sages of Silence and Fear
A painter and a poet. Martin and Stafford have been (and continue to be) elemental influences on me. *** Agnes Martin (Photo: Charles R. Rushton) To discover the conscious mind in a world where intellect is held to be valuable requires solitude, quite a lot of solitude. We have been very strenuously conditioned against solitude. […]
- Aesthetics
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A Beyond of Color
Rainer Maria Rilke More on the theme of poets and artists: Good friend Sally Reed steered me to a slender volume, Letters on Cézanne by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. These letters were written mostly to his wife Clara while he was living in Paris in 1907, a time when he was spellbound by Cézanne’s […]
Up and Down: Auden
The second half of the Auden pairing (see yesterday’s post): Up There (for Anne Weiss) Men would never have come to need an attic. Keen collectors of glass or Roman coins build Special cabinets for them, date on, index Each new specimen: only women cling to Items out of their past they have no use […]
- Architecture
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Poetry and Space
One of the treasures I found on a recent visit to San Francisco’s famed art/architecture/design bookstore mecca, William Stout, is Jill Stoner’s Poems for Architects. The book was new to me, which isn’t surprising given it was published by the in house publishing division, William Stout Publishers.* Stoner is an architect who also studied poetry, […]
Women and Wilderness
View of the wilderness in New Mexico from my friend Anne’s remote home Women Women have no wilderness in them, They are provident instead, Content in the tight hot cell of their hearts To eat dusty bread. They do not see cattle cropping red winter grass, They do not hear Snow water going down under […]