I love Maya!
 

“I'm no angel, but I've spread my wings a bit.”
- Mae West

Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness, and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again. ~ Og Mandino

"I don't want to live in a culture of despair - I'd like to live in a culture of hope," ~ Natalie Merchant

The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.

~Joan Didion

.

"If every life is a river, then it's little wonder that we do not even notice the changes that occur until we are far out in the darkest sea. One day you look around and nothing is familiar, not even your own face.
My name once meant daughter, grandaughter, friend, sister, beloved. Now those words mean only what their letters spell out; Star in the night sky. Truth in the darkness.
I have crossed over to a place where I never thought I'd be. I am someone I would have never imagined. A secret. A dream. I am this, body and soul. Burn me. Drown me. Tell me lies. I will still be who I am."
— Alice Hoffman (Incantation)

If you do not tell the truth about yourself you cannot tell it about other people.

--Virginia Woolf

a few years ago I wrote this poem for a dear friend. It is very special to me.


Asian Pears
Your story was this: you were happy
then you were sad.
You slept, You awakened...
Sometimes you ate persimmons.
At times you spoke, at other times you were silent.
What could you say? mostly it seems you were silent.
Actions were taken
or not-
It doesn't matter what they will make of you.
Of your days... they will be wrong.
They will never speak of the little girl propelled into womanhood.
All the stories they tell will be of their own bromidic invention.
You were happy, then you were sad.
Sometimes you ate asian pears.

Esse

I looked at that face, dumbfounded.

The lights of métro stations flew by; I didn't notice them.

What can be done, if our sight lacks absolute power to devour objects ecstatically, in an instant, leaving nothing more than the void of an ideal form, a sign like a hieroglyph simplified from the drawing of an animal or bird?

A slightly snub nose, a high brow with sleekly brushed-back hair, the line of the chin - but why isn't the power of sight absolute? - and in a whiteness tinged with pink two sculpted holes, containing a dark, lustrous lava.

To absorb that face but to have it simultaneously against the background of all spring boughs, walls, waves, in its weeping, its laughter, moving it back fifteen years, or ahead thirty.

To have. It is not even a desire. Like a butterfly, a fish, the stem of a plant, only more mysterious.

And so it befell me that after so many attempts at naming the world, I am able only to repeat, harping on one string, the highest, the unique avowal beyond which no power can attain: I am, she is. Shout, blow the trumpets, make thousands-strong marches, leap, rend your clothing, repeating only: is!

She got out at Raspail. I was left behind with the immensity of existing things: A sponge, suffering because it cannot saturate itself; a river, suffering because reflections of clouds and trees are not clouds and trees.

(1954)


~ Czeslaw Milosz: The Collected Poems 1931-1987

Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Pinsky
Copyright © Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Pinsky (1988)

For the Austin crew at Threadgill's this evening!
 

>>>>> *amen* <<<<<<