Seek the quiet hill

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F e a t h e r   R e p o r t

Hermitage Golf Course

Nashville, Tennessee

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Some day, when trees have shed their leaves

and against the morning's white

The shivering birds beneath the eaves

Have sheltered for the night,

We'll turn our faces southward, love,

Toward the summer isle

Where bamboos spire to shafted grove

And wide-mouth orchids smile.

And we will seek the quiet hill

Where towers the cotton tree,

And leaps the laughing crystal rill,

And works the droning bee.

And we will build a cottage there

Beside an open glade,

With black-ribbed blue-bells blowing near,

And ferns that never fade.

> Claude McKay <

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Happy Friday

Our paintings see daylight

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S t r a i g h t   U p

Beneath the Bridge

Peak, South Carolina

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Despondency breaks off its course.
Anguish breaks off its course.
The vulture breaks off its flight.

The eager light streams out,
even the ghosts take a draught.

And our paintings see daylight,
our red beasts of the ice-age studios.

Everything begins to look around.
We walk in the sun in hundreds.

Each man is a half-open door
leading to a room for everyone.

The endless ground under us.

The water is shining among the trees.

The lake is a window into the earth.

> Tomas Tranströmer <

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Happy Thursday

I am the patient gardener

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S h i n i n g   A w a y

Mount Hope Cemetery

Florence, South Carolina

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I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years ... .

I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper ... .

When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me ... .

I am food on the prisoner's plate ... .

I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills ... .

I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden ... .

I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge ... .

I am the heart contracted by joy ... .
the longest hair, white
before the rest ... .
I am there in the basket of fruit
presented to the widow ... .

I am the musk rose opening
unattended, the fern on the boggy summit ... .

I am the one whose love
overcomes you, already with you
when you think to call my name ... .

> Jane Kenyon <

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Happy Wednesday

Resemblance to that sound

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I   C a n   S e e   F o r e v e r

Rose Hill Cemetery

Macon, Georgia

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"Nothing Is Really Hard but to Be Real -- "

-- Now let me tell you why I said that.

Try to put yourself into an experimental mood.

Stop right here and try to review everything

you felt about that line. Did you accept it

as wisdom? as perception? as a gem, maybe,

for your private anthology of Telling Truths?

My point is that the line is fraudulent.

A blurb. It is also relevant that I know

at least a dozen devoutly intellectual

journals that will gladly buy any fourteen

such lines plus a tinny rhyme scheme and

compound the felony by calling that a sonnet.

-- Very well, then, I am a cynic. Though, for

the record, let me add that I am a cynic with

one wife, three children, and other investments.

Whoever heard of a cynic carrying a

pack for the fun of it? 

It won't really do

I'm something else.

Were I to dramatize myself,

I’d say I am a theologian who keeps meeting

the devil as a master of make-up, and that

among his favorite impersonations he appears,

often as not, as the avuncular old ham who winks,

tugs his ear, and utters such gnomic garbage

as: “Nothing is really hard but to be real.”

I guess what the devil gets out of this -- if he is

the fool he seems to be -- is the illusion of

imitating heaven. If, on the other hand, he is no

fool, then his deceptions are carefully practiced

and we are all damned. For all of us, unless

we are carefully warned, will accept such noises

as examples of the sound an actual mind makes.

Why are we damned then? -- I am glad you asked that.

It is, as we say to flatter oafs, a good question.

(Meaning, usually, the one we were fishing for. Good.)

In any case. I may now pretend to think out the answer

I have memorized:

We are damned for accepting as

the sound a man makes, the sound of something else,

thereby losing the truth of our own sound.

                                                               

How do we

learn our own sound? (Another good question. Thank you.)

-- by listening to what men there have been and are

-- by reading more poets than jurists (without scorning

Law) -- and by reading what we read not for its

oration, but for its resemblance to that sound in which

we best hear most of what a man is. Get that sound into

your heads and you will know what tones to exclude.

-- if there is enough exclusion in you to keep the

pie plates out of the cymbals, the tin horns out of

the brass section, the baling wire out of the strings,

and thereby to let the notes roll full to the ear

that has listened enough to be a listener.

As for the devil -- when he has finished every impersonation,

the best he will have been able to accomplish

is only that sound which is exactly not the music.

> John Ciardi <

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Happy Friday

Taking the telescope apart

>>>>>>>>++++<<<<<<<<

A   S t r a i g h t   S h o t

Biggin Church Ruins :: Moncks Corner

Berekeley County, South Carolina

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There is a moment after you move your eye away
when you forget where you are
because you’ve been living, it seems,
somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky.

You’ve stopped being here in the world.
You’re in a different place,
a place where human life has no meaning.

You’re not a creature in body.
You exist as the stars exist,
participating in their stillness, their immensity.

Then you’re in the world again.
At night, on the cold hill,
taking the telescope apart.

You realize afterward
not that the image is false
but the relation is false.

You see again how far away
every thing is from every other thing.

> Louise Glück <

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Happy Thursday