Thomas
Merton, thinking back on a busy day:
To
say that, is to say a great deal.
By
the time the summer was over
I
walked alone with a few trees &
a
few red brick houses.
Mists
of damp breathe the wind.
I
would like to stop & stand,
to
enter silence in this age of crowds,
to
forget all cities, to climb the twisted stair
&
to be a flurry of wings in cool sky.
But
in this darkness, in spite of the stillness,
I
am confronted by questions I cannot answer.
Lady sews dreams
Lady
sews dreams on a winter porch, fingernails still
flavoured
with peonies ~ to speak, maybe, or to be quiet,
to
let the air say what has to be said ~ come in, she whispers,
come
in, sit down, have a drink ~ no excuses ~ OK, maybe a few
~
into sharp hands, her grey head sings for April & curses each
elegant
note ~ no joke to remember the dark birds have flown ~
60
years & only one shooting star, only one ~ beyond
pneumonia
& tenderness, she sees it again ~ pale kiss
of
light in dark April ~ as now, she turns to candlelight disquiet,
flirting
for dreams in frail winter air
Seeing
don't
forget the lucid
moment
or the appeal
of
fire,
a
hunter's sight
may
drown in an ocean
of
detail,
too
many tracks
to
track
[February
2003]
In
this place: for Giacometti
In
this place we find
a
pile of letters, one
wasteland
too many, two
hyacinths,
a silence, a
sentence
without end, a
room
at six o'clock, a
palace
in smoky light, a
song
in a
cage
soon
there is gathering of leaves &
bones
& rain more steady than
falling,
more lost than light, soon
there
is gathering, first more
then
less
the
letters tell us nothing
the
leaves another story
the
bones too many stories
in
a wasteland too many we see
this
light wreathed in smoke, an
arm
lost in smiling, a cage
unsung,
a palace first more then
less,
a room more or less, more
&
less
[October
2003]
Biederstein
Hotel, Rotterdam
the
smile of a man
with
a limp, comes
&
goes, comes &
goes
[3 September 2005]
no
longer existing
cured of the world
abandoned of being
a
burning fool
juggles
lightning
[15
October 2005 on reading The Death of Satan & Other Mystical Writings by Antonin
Artaud, Calder & Boyars, London, 1974]
Foucault's
Pendulum condensed
That
was when I saw they had
found
my name. An open book
is
an allegory. I believe we're the only
clue.
You stopped at the edge, a stone
in
the choir. A closer reading may be
required.
People aren't telling me
the
whole story. I don't know anything.
Swaying
back & forth, little by
little,
to the foot of the steep
path,
a crisscrossing.
The
boundaries are ill-defined.
Still
dancing, she smiled and said:
how
the wind blows, I don't know
how
they dwell in darkness
so
beautiful
[28.03.06.
Not quite reading Umberto Eco's book]
