Anything Can Happen

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter
Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head
Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now
He galloped his thunder cart and his horses

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth
And the clogged underearth, the River Styx,
The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself.
Anything can happen, the tallest towers

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune
Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,
Setting it down bleeding on the next.

Ground gives. The heaven's weight
Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid.
Capstones shift, nothing resettles right.
Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away.

 

 

--Horace

Translated by Seamus Heaney

 

Poem

Whenever I feel loss or lack, I imagine 
The wind roaming outside of my childhood’s lair
—as I am a child again, with my red knapsack 
bouncing lightly on my back— 
Beckoning me to run to it, into its slurry white expanse . . .
And in my heart, I am already on my way 
To some thrilling future 
Which is not yet weak and diluted with a lonely pain.
There, I am someone who wishes to be 
An exception and I am. A third and ringing note 
Edges the banal alternatives of 
Yes, and No. A lyric possibility rises 
Everywhere and at once, a thousand roses—allusive, corrosive.
Think how much you must change. Even more than you dare. 

--Sandra Lim

* * *

And that which was 'I' 

is only a word

in the darkness of December's mouth

--Tomas Transtromer

translated by Robin Robertson

The Pogues - Fairytale Of New York

For S. You sent this to me years ago, remember? I can't sign in to reply in your blog. Be well, stay alive. Until the next stop on the road. Love

Notes From a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel (excerpt)

On the linen wrappings of certain mummified remains
found near the Etrurian coast are invaluable writings
that await translation.

Quem colorem habet sapientia?

Ordinary men fulfill themselves
in the company of their fellows.

I am told of a peasant who, one morning when mists
lay across his field,
picked up a feather that had dropped from
the great horse, Pegasus; who placed the feather
in his cap and abandoned the world
for a dream.

I have heard that when the wild geese move in their season
a strange tide is raised; and long after they have gone
the fowl of the barnyard leap up frantically into the air
with shrill, desperate cries—their nut-like heads
stuffed and disordered with vestigial recollections
urging them from domestic felicity toward unremembered
chasms in the presence of another, bolder skein.

Nothing existed before me; nothing will exist after me.

Myth, art, and dreams are but emanations
from ancestral spheres.

Karma, which is the wheel of fate,
is indestructible. A new world shall be born
that it may continue to fulfill its endless process.

We are to regard the world as an empty trifle,
so said Buddha; then alone
will it yield happiness, enabling us to live blissfully
throughout life’s vicissitudes.

Let us become Yasoda, the soul of woman, which calls out
to Lord Krishna in the fullness of her love, and sees
in him the universe.

As thou to me,
so I to thee.

--Evan S.Carrol

Song

Love that is bound has gone

with the late alchemy of stars at dawn

affirming as they die 

what day's accustomed clarities deny.

 

Love that is lost remains

with the green advent of next season rains

that start the trees to flower

through their impetuous, unreported hour.

 

--Rosamund Stanhope

Recurring

 

Whatever the time of day, whether the sky is florescent,
                   or fluorescent, or dissolving color

to impression, or I'm not tracking the sky, perhaps for once
                   not inhabiting the subjunctive mood,

whether with a beloved, whose face is turning away—no
                   matter if I am in fact alone, on a beach,

looking out toward the doctrine of horizon, there is
                   always, in the dream, a wall of water

before me, impossible to outrun, azure, cruel, how
                   beauty exists with no regard for goodness or the living,

and if I'm inside, even if I cannot see that weather,
                   I can feel it, eroding the floorboards, disintegrating

reason, it is ceaseless. It has an appetite.

 

--Patrycja Humienik