we guessed that held low
because if my prayer away
then reluctant turn
meadows run
and a vest that i softly into the same
i fumbled at sunrise in a legacy of the birds at the bay
perusal to the western mystery
so when birds in their bed time
i fail what if spoken by just reminded me
the roe
the gold mistake
telling my ears and earth seems so perfect yesterday
but just before
So I've been trying to get healthier for three weeks now,
And i haven’t been perfect, but I’ve made progress. So much. i feel like i have control over my choices now and I’m not fighting with myself. Good choices are easier to make, I can sense when I’m hungry and when I’m full, and I dunno. I’m happy. This is a slow journey, and learning patience and rewarding myself for progress instead of belittling myself for being human feels pretty good.
Opening lines of The New Spirit
I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be
one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave
all out would be another, and truer, way.
clean-washed sea
The flowers were.
These are examples of leaving out. But, forget as we will,
something soon comes to stand in their place. Not the
truth, perhaps, but - yourself. It is you who made this,
therefore you are true. But the truth has passed on
to divide all.
John Ashbery
I hate family gatherings.
Mainly because of my mother. She’s so mean but I’m still constantly waiting for her approval. If i weigh 140, which is a healthy weight for my height and body type, I’m too fat. But at 120 I’m too skinny. What do you want from me?? You don’t know me at all anymore. I’m awkward, shy, insecure, emotionally unstable, stressed, and i have anxiety. Yes put me on blast and draw Attention to me. Make a whole family look at me that isn’t even mine. I didn’t know anyone here. I’m so thankful that my husband was with me the entire time.
from The Warbler Road
Saigyo and other old-Asian-timers referred to bird song so frequently in their poems that I eventually bought a field guide to Japanese birds in order to guess in more educated fashion at the songs they invoke - like the oft-mentioned bush warbler calling in various weathers from eighth-century shrubbery.
Birds were a critical point of stabilization for those poets’ constant, insistent attention to Placement, in their daily refining and tracking of coordinates and footing in the universe. The insistence is of such an existential magnitude that the bearings it seeks become an ur-Placement and the coordinates of the moment (season, blossom, and bird in relation) become continuous framings of questions on the order of, “Where, in the Enigma, are we?” and “What, in the Enigma, is our lot?” Questions seeking a proper, as in fully awake, human situs in the whirling seasons: primordial crux, with cuckoo calling.
For many years I thought such insistence, persistence, to be little more than poetic/Buddhist convention in the hands of remote masters. Later I happened across the gestaltists’ on the perpetual unconscious placement-within-world known as “auditory streaming” (or even “auditory sense analysis”), wherein each creature’s nervous system segregates the endless sounds of existence into various “streams,” assigns them differentiated sources, pertinences, and planes: the world sorted and weighted via the ears.
And now it seems apparent that those poets of a thousand years ago, when they harked and measured, when they gauged the bush warbler in the bush and the pheasant calling up the hill, were instinctively-as-artists wooing and cultivating those intuited limbic levels of fundamental Placement. They wielded the archetypal joy/need of the process in the same ways troubadours, or any dimestore love song, celebrate the joy/need of the sensual/sexual.
Merrill Gilfillan
from An Episode In The Life Of A Landscape Painter
When we strike up a conversation, we are often trying to work out what our interlocutor is thinking. And it seems impossible to ascertain those thoughts except through a long series of inferences. What could be more closed off and mediated than someone else’s mental activity? And yet this activity is expressed in language, words resounding in the air, simply waiting to be heard. We come up against the words, and before we know it, we are already emerging on the other side, grappling with the thought of another mind. Mutatis mutandis, the same thing happens with a painter and the visible world. It was happening to Rugendas. What the world was saying was the world.
Cesar Aira
Sometimes all those pains that we experienced would lead us to sarcasm and hatred. We would doubt and doubt the sincerity or even the lack of it by the people surrounding us. Sometimes people declare right in front of us their feelings and intentions but at the back of our mind there is that nagging feeling of doubt. That’s sad sometimes because instead of drowning to the moment of happiness, we can’t help but be sad.
