Decisions

some decisions come quickly
announcing themselves
welcome guests

other decisions, i have learned
are slow accretions
grain by grain of sand--
thought layered on thought--
brought in by the water
as it takes its journey elsewhere

discernment, he called it
an incremental purification
of vision

All I Need

the half-light of morning
from a grey-white sky
falls on my windowsill,
floats into my room

i am alive
i witness this moment
absolutely unique in all of time

this is why i am alive

was i fretting overmuch:
which job? which school? what to do?
the rest of my life
hanging in the balance?

i had forgotten (only briefly)
that i have a dear heart
and eyes that see beauty
and a beautiful mind---

all i will ever need

Paradise Lost, Book III, Line 575

By centre, or eccentric, hard to tell.

Thought Upon Crossing the Iowa River by Bridge and Observing the Play of Light on the Glassy Water as it Poured over the Lock

liquefaction

****

(Cliff's Note: This one-word poem refers to Robert Herrick's poem Upon Julia's Clothes, written in 1648.)

if i tried to tell you
what i saw
in the twilight:

pylons in the river
massy
mottled
upholding rusted rail tracks
water dancing
then diffusing
continuing
content

it would be no use

words are not the things they describe
words have no mass
words are no pylons

i am the river
that is itself

an unexpected ray
grazed my cheek

i am the squirrel
i saw today
running across the road
too slow
oncoming cars

I love Kristi!

The following conversation took place on facebook today:

Edward Jones
"An actor can really weep while feeling nothing yet all my tears / congeal before they fall to form small paper boats because a ship / capsized inside me." -- from The Muse's Marginal Notes, by Hagar Peeters

Kristi Cartwright Hurd
Well I know that's a lie. If he was crying paper boats wouldn't they be all soggy and crap? They wouldn't even look like boats, more like spit balls.

Edward Jones
Kristi, you are the earth to my sky, the pin to my balloon. Half the fun of putting up quotes on facebook is awaiting your response!

a sandaled foot
in the coffee house
transports my mind
to old Alexandria

sand
sandal
foot
sky

crisp layers of desire

motorcycle stopped at the light
a tanned leg extends downward
toe connecting with the pavement en pointe:
synapse

bridge floating over the freeway:
lilies on a pond

i saw one stone
on top of another

From "The Making of Samuel Beckett"

I am not comparing myself to Samuel Beckett, but I do hope that my current efforts yield some fruit. From a review of the first volume of Beckett's letters:

While the decade of the 1930s may have felt to Beckett like years of blockage and sterility, we can in retrospect see that they were being used by deeper forces within him to lay the artistic and philosophical—and perhaps even experiential—foundations of the great creative outburst that came in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Despite the idleness for which he continually castigates himself, Beckett did an enormous amount of reading. But his self-education was not just literary. In the course of the 1930s he turned himself into a formidable connoisseur of painting, with a concentration on medieval Germany and the Dutch seventeenth century. [. . .]

The moment of breakthrough in Beckett's aesthetic Bildung comes during the German visit, when he realizes he is able to enter into dialogue with paintings on their own terms, unmediated by words. "I used never to be happy with a picture till it was literature," he writes to McGreevy in 1936, "but now that need is gone."

www.nybooks.com/articles/22612

Endpoint

Yesterday I read some of the last poems written by John Updike, who died in January. He knew he was dying when he wrote the poems, and I was moved by his attempts to understand his death. (I tried to think of a time when I will not exist, and was reminded of a piece of art by Damien Hirst entitled "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of the Living.")

One of Mr. Updike's poems:

Creeper

With what stoic delicacy does
Virginia creeper let go:
the feeblest tug brings down
a sheaf of leaves kite-high,
as if to say, To live is good
but not to live--to be pulled down
with scarce a ripping sound,
still flourishing, still
stretching toward the sun--
is good also, all photosynthesis
abandoned, quite quits. Next spring
the hairy rootlets left unpulled
snake out a leafy afterlife
up that same smooth-barked oak.

Literature at its finest

Witness this morning's interchange on Facebook:

Edward Jones
When I look down into myself to see a scattering of birds, /
do I put on the new garments? /
On which side of the river should I wait?
-- Deborah Digges, from Greeter of Souls

Kristi Cartwright Hurd
What the hell does that mean? Have you been eating live birds?

Edward Jones
Yes, Kristi, I have been eating live birds. :-)
Or . . . it's a quotation from Knopf's poem of the day (celebrating National Poetry Month): poem-a-day.knopfdoubleday.com

Tracy Cartwright Christensen
Oh, hell, *LAUGH*...that felt good.

Kristi Cartwright Hurd
When I look down into myself I see pretzel crumbs. Damn these boobs!

Edward Jones
A poetess is born!!