Friday, July 19, 2019

The House Was Quiet & The World Was Calm By Wallace Stevens





The House Was Quiet and The world was calm
By Wallace stevens

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Wallace Stevens, "The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm" from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Copyright © 1954 by Wallace Stevens 

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

Samuel Taylor Coleridge - What If You Slept?



What if you slept ... 

What if you slept 
And what if 
In your sleep 
You dreamed 
And what if 
In your dream 
You went to heaven 
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower 
And what if 
When you awoke 
You had that flower in you hand 
Ah, what then?   

~Samuel Taylor Coleridge

_________________________

I haven’t slept all night in years,
Pain, nightmares, fear, hot/cold/hot/cold.  
PTSD.  More nightmares.  FULL MOON!
Listen to true crime podcasts.
Stomachache, heartache, 
children & grandchildren ache, bite my cheeks,
cough, hurt all over, sadness, regret, anxiety, thirsty, 
WORRY, pray without ceasing, 
existential crisis, ageing horrors, melancholy, 
reading, listening to books, soothing music, 
cats making scary noise sounds, 
poetry circling in my brain,
etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...

Friday, July 5, 2019

Reading Patti Smith & Paris Nocturne by Patrick Modiano

"Birds no longer curious cease to wing." ~ Patti Smith, 'Devotion, Why I Write'

I am in love
with these
two books.
A dream sequence,
flowing, floating,
flavoring my
painful existence.
Escape into the
spaces between the
words and find
an entirely
new world.

Marion, still scribbling & making art...

I love kitty paws.  :-)