Dusk singing –
I fall asleep dancing
with fireflies.
2021
7 notes
·
View notes
A Map to Where You Are
Find a quiet room.
You may find it wherever there is a quiet room.
In a house. In your mind. In an apartment.
Sit. In a chair. On the floor.
Try not to move with the room.
It will be imperceptible at first,
the impenetrable stillness.
Windows, if you have them, will distract you.
Outside, the motion of things –
it overlies a seeming. A vast, looming shadow.
Doors will tell you their lies.
Your heart will move through the doors and into the world.
The ground you imagine beneath you
is not the ground beneath you now.
Bring your heart back into the room.
You will feel the ground beneath you.
Try not to breathe with the room.
Remember where you are.
Find the room again. Find yourself in it.
Try not to move with the room.
It will be easy. It will take only a little effort.
What you know will not be what you feel.
What you feel will be what you feel.
Find something else in the room.
A lamp. A bookcase. A crumb.
Find yourself in relation.
Try now to move with the room,
outside the motion of things.
Windows will not distract you.
It will be imperceptible at first,
the force of acceleration.
You will not feel the ground beneath you.
Your heart will move through the door and out of the world.
The world you imagine beneath you
is not the world beneath you now.
Find a quiet place. You may find it
wherever there is a quiet place.
It will be imperceptible at first,
the impenetrable stillness.
Remember where you are,
outside the motion of things.
What you feel will be what you feel.
A vast, looming shadow.
Find yourself in relation.
It will be imperceptible at first,
the force of the realization.
Remember where you are.
Find the room again. A lamp. A bookcase. A crumb.
Find yourself in it.
Your heart will move through the door and into the room.
The ground you imagine beneath you
is the ground beneath you now.
Remember where you were.
You will feel the ground beneath you.
What you feel will be what you feel.
What you know will be what you know.
2019
6 notes
·
View notes
Café
In the window light
I am reduced
to another patron
drinking
such bitterness,
and readily.
2005
2 notes
·
View notes
A Comparison
by Nikolai Karamzin
trans. by @andrewbroz
What is our life? – A novel.
Author? – Anonymous.
We start, we laugh, we weep,
And then we fall asleep...
1797
2 notes
·
View notes
Present Confusion
Nonsense is the only sense
that happens in the present tense;
and when I find some sense at last,
I find the sense is in the past.
2019
7 notes
·
View notes
Study in Monochrome
You — you in the coat of gray,
the dappled gray, the threaded gray,
whose figure stops, who stops to sway
in the lavender haze of a winter day;
you — you in that threaded coat,
the coat now dappled a lavender-gray,
your head arched back to look and see
the branches of a spreading tree;
the crooked branches of a tree,
a spreading tree, the silhouette branches
crazed across a field of gray on a winter day,
across the clouds, the clouds a cool white-silver gray —
the silhouette branches, swaying in strokes of deep warm gray —
the strings of the tree and the clouds and the evening
pull at your head to dance and sway
with the breeze that dances dappled branches
in a round, hypnotic way —
and you, and I, and the winter sky
dance in a trance-like reverie,
as who are you and who am I
and where is the end of the winter sky
all blend with the gray and the gray in the gray,
in a deepening field of gray.
2018
16 notes
·
View notes
Thoughts on a Quiet Night
by Li Bai (李白)
trans. by @andrewbroz
Moonlight glistens by my bed –
I thought an autumn frost had come.
I watch the bright moon overhead.
Looking back, I think of home.
8th Century C.E.
16 notes
·
View notes
Hills and towers
wander through smoke – dreams
half there, half ashes.
2018
11 notes
·
View notes
Last Leaves
They who expect
unchecked dominion
of their opinion,
who always seek
to speak last,
by none surpassed,
may they await
the fate of all
last leaves that fall –
and be the first
thinned
by changing wind.
Those below
nourish what will grow.
2019
3 notes
·
View notes
A Guess
I could have guessed,
and haven't guessed wrong yet,
that out in West
the sun would set.
Stupid as that may seem
to some of you,
the ones who'd dream
it wasn't true
are few.
But even for all the certainty
that guess would seem
to have for me
I must confess —
it's still just a guess.
2018
1 note
·
View note
Speak, Nonsense
I was a slave to nonsense once;
nonsense made more sense to me.
My images and sentences
were independent, always free.
Then changing did what changing does –
and with the chain of life’s events,
that wooed me by effect and cause,
I chose to chain myself to sense.
But I am under no illusion
that the sentence and the sense,
in constant whirlwinds of confusion,
ever form experience.
Experience, that always was
a wildfire in the brain,
kindles worlds that were the cause
until the ash of words remain.
In ice and order there is beauty,
but disorder is desire.
If my government is logic,
still – my God is fire.
2019
6 notes
·
View notes
Cosmologist's Note to Self
When the world's shape
differs from my guess –
I hope I've found
a willingness
to come around.
2019
1 note
·
View note
The Constant Law
The Sun’s a constant sphere of constant laws,
and I know that I’m a child of the Sun.
I rise and fall with the arc its circle draws,
then rise again at the point where I begun.
The Sun and I both make our journeys here
among the stars – our stuff is of a kind –
and, like the Sun, a little worldly sphere
was born with me too, and spins around my mind.
But squeeze the life of the Sun into the span
of years a person walks the Earth, and run
the clock: it shares the fate of every man.
I know that I’m a child of that Sun —
I rage in light, spending steadily
as seconds burn to cold eternity.
2017
10 notes
·
View notes
A Skeptical Forecast
The future’s present surfeit of direction
forgets the present’s perfect imperfection.
2019
0 notes
Unquestionably Blue
We use such simple words to weave
the tapestry of light
into our language. Red. Yellow.
Green. Blue. Black. White.
But what is blue? Did Homer know
when sailing on a wine-dark sea?
Why did he paint the sky with bronze
and layer green with honey?
The ancient brain is not the new;
when, with modern eyes, I view
the ocean and the midday sky
they look, unquestionably, blue.
With other simple words, we paint
the colors that we feel.
Sadness, joy, fear, hate,
love: all these signs reveal
some inner state. But what is love?
How can we call that one emotion
longing, ecstasy, respect,
infatuation, and devotion?
I grasp with these imperfect pigments,
try to catch the palette of
experience — and fail. What tint
can be, unquestionably, love?
My blue is not a simple sine,
nor is my love Euclidean:
no matter how I flatten it,
my love’s oblique meridian
will not lie on a paper map,
nor nanometers ever be
Pacific waves, a robin’s egg,
or what a person meant to me.
Just as the different shades of blue
have secondary colors there,
so love can be tinged green with lust
or dyed in indigo despair
and still be love. Love’s many things,
and though its boundaries aren’t defined
its subtle thread is intricately
laced throughout the tender mind,
intertwining feelings that,
at first, might seem quite different
within a tapestry of sense
that weaves around love’s referent.
In that tapestry, love cries
while flying on blue swallow’s wings;
it flowers pink in fruiting trees
and runs with umber wild things.
You’re in it, too, in faded fields
of tangled thread, a knotted part
(the untrained work of younger hands)
whose weft still binds my heart.
Our love may not have been for years,
been made, at best, imperfectly,
even at our hyperbolic
orbits' heated perigee,
and cast us both on fast and far
trajectories to where we are:
you, caught in the gravity
of some bright northern star,
and me to where I settled, bound
with two firm feet on loving ground.
But, sometimes — when I look on high —
I see your color in the sky.
2017
2 notes
·
View notes
On this, the planet of my choosing
1
On this, the planet of my choosing I am a boy, a man without his inhibitions;
And here, the trees stand unfelled by me;
And here, the angels sing unconducted;
And here, it is a glory unconducted.
The sky, a thicket of wood and light -
The ground, my heavenly body, planet of my choosing,
It draws the leaves to itself.
We bend and flex, cycles out of phase, my feet, her feet beating;
Natural, synthetic, in a consequent pulse most real, resisting much, obeying little.
And with a run I hug the ground, and with a fall;
And with my buried hands.
Dream to me sphere! Break upon my body vastness and desire, curves that defy the far call.
I observe the inwardness, and it is a moist plain
where the stars, my souls, are waiting in the cold;
My planet, my reflection, a graven image its own unshaken commandment.
And I quit it all at once; And it resumes a silent pulse;
And it is I and another body alone.
My warm hands are removed and moving, wandering and wanting unconducted.
2
Loudly and joyously I set forth,
The gift drawn, the truck started, the axe thrust to the stump;
With passing identity and waxing identity I go unto the city.
I was one to dare and break the law of dependence;
Escaping mind, yet I hope you shall be free without me,
Dependence a plague wiped from your flesh.
3
There they lie dead, the silences and inhibition;
Gyrating along lines I knew not of, and vibrating along strings I knew not of;
On echelons undreamed and unremembered do these desires sing.
I wished to wake them and they have awoken, yet it is wakefulness beyond my wakefulness –
They bring to me sensations as a caravan that brims with spices,
My long outfurled and wandering desires that are hands more than these I have grown,
That are feeling far to the others and far from the others;
Unfinished until the wild's depths are prodded and a wild heart is calmed again.
4
That force which set this sphere in motion, that commands the waves
With one decision I arrest from its high pedestal, a scientist of my making,
That I should know better than any other the nature of my universe, to which I all along have held the key;
That I should render it, that I should unrender it.
My planet, spinning quick upon its axis, fire blazing against a different fire.
When it is extinguished, then should my planet break free of its logic,
And it is my body that shall be loosed to the farthest reaches –
Are they then departed from my will, desire from desire,
An ego flammable, to flare and trace the currents of the air,
Rising fast unto the thicket of fuel above,
Sinking fast across the bodies;
That body fixed against a stilling cold,
The liquid blinking quick to free the image sinking quickly into itself;
And up again, my newborn senses rejoice, unshackled by former desires
Replaced by these, new and stronger set desires.
2005
0 notes
Pareidolia
Flickering, humming
fluorescent lights are years and years
from violent stars. Palms against
plastic chambers press
the monologue
into awful moments
of listening, fingers tensed
bent abstractions, forgetting
that I have eyes.
Radio static evolves into cells, pulses.
I can faintly tune in to the sea-rush of capillaries.
I seek for the minutes to Jupiter
and hear whale songs there.
What's the difference,
astronomer? Astrologer?
Modern depths and distances,
hell and heaven of ancient understanding
both, far and near emptinesses crawl
uncomprehending chasms that hear
minds, see echoes ―
Cut the audio.
Monitors pulse
in sterile clarity, flay sinusoids from vital
static by soundless analysis.
Feel cracked lips.
Touch the keys.
This isn’t that abyss.
2017
4 notes
·
View notes