Love

I believed:
a tree when kissed
would not lose its leaves --
leaves fall
from kissed
trees.

A river hugged
by a hand in love
would not flow away --
it flows away
into fog.

There are in my landscape
errors of colours and scents
yet always
always I love
what incessantly
changes.

As a golden ball
she runs before me:
approached again and again,
my beloved,
Earth.

-Tymoteusz Karpowicz

Two or Three Incidents Recollected

An overturned cup of wine.
A stone path sailing in moonlight.
Where the blue grass is flattened,
an azalea flower is abandoned.

The eucalyptus wood swirls.
Stars above teem into a kaleidoscope.
On a rusty anchor,
eyes mirror the dizzy sky.

Holding up a book to shade the candle,
and with a finger in between the lips,
I sit in an eggshell quiet,
having a semitransparent dream.

-Shu Ting

On the Grey Wolf River

-----Little ouzel bird,
under
------cliffs of pillow lava,
over
-------ice-green
glacier rapids,
---------should I
------go back to the university,
-----------or what?

-Lewis Hyde, 1988

I'm taking a course on Jacques Ellul this semester, and every piece of reading gives me something to chew on, or something that bears repeating. An example of the first is this list; an example of the second is this quote (from this video): "When we oppose things which are too efficient we mustn't try to be even more efficient. For that will not turn out to be the most efficient way."

Efficiency comes up constantly in discussion for environmental studies courses--and what more can you say than that?

Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf

At various times, I have asked myself what reasons 

moved me to study, while my night came down, 

without particular hope of satisfaction, 

the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons. 

Used up by the years, my memory

loses its grip on words that I have vainly 

repeated and repeated. My life in the same way

weaves and unweaves its weary history. 

Then I tell myself: it must be that the soul

has some secret, sufficient way of knowing 

that it is immortal, that its vast, encompassing

circle can take in all, can accomplish all. 

Beyond my anxiety, beyond this writing,

the universe waits, inexhaustible, inviting. 

-Jorge Luis Borges

 I feel compelled to say, that maybe it's not the universe, but it's God. 

Now that time seems all mine

Now that time seems all mine

and no one calls me for lunch or dinner,

now that I can stay to watch

how a cloud loosens and loses it color,

how a cat walks on the roof

in the immense luxury of a prowl, now

that what waits for me every day

is the unlimited length of a night

where there is no call and no longer a reason

to undress in a hurry to rest inside

the blinding sweetness of a body that waits for me,

now that the morning no longer has a beginning

and silently leaves me to my plans,

to all the cadences of my voice, now

suddenly I would like a prison.

-Patrizia Cavalli

Well, I guess I took a month's vacation. And now I'm back at school, in America.