I need a quick break from the diversity of animals ... Ali's writing a paper on a philosopher poet from Victoria. Her name is Jan Zwicky:
Absence
When the sky is no longer a roof
one's eyes are finally open:
it is in the valley one draws breath.
The pines are so slender. They weave
gently, almost without noise,
pushed by currents that do not reach us here.
Now the cities are behind us,
and the wars. Lantern-light
streams from the solitary window.
What is past drifts up then
without effort: river-scent
at twilight, through the rubble of the day.
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About Me
- Bodhisaxva
- 21st century scientific buddhist musician
4 comments:
That a letter might honestly begin,
Dear Beloved.
Musicians
I pass a bunch of musicians in the street.
It's about 12:30, rehearsal just over, they're
standing around outside the side door of the church.
A good rehearsal; and it's April. They're laughing,
horsing around, talking about shoes, or taxes, where
to go for lunch, anything
except what their heads are full of.
It's a kind of helplessness, you can see
they're still breathing almost in unison, like people
the searchlight has passed over
and spared, their attention
lifts, swerves, settles; even
the gravel dust stuttering at their feet
is coherent.
--Jan Zwicky
The afternoon blue light in the fjord.
Did I tell you
I can understand the villagers?
Being, I have come to think, is music; or perhaps
it's silence. I cannot say.
Love, I'm pretty sure,
is light
You know, it isn't
what I came for, this bewilderment
by beauty. I came
to find a word, the perfect
syllable, to make it reach up,
grab meaning by the throat
and squeeze it till it spoke to me.
I wanted language to hold me still, to be a rock,
I wanted to become a rock myself. I thought
if I could find, and say,
the perfect word, I'd nail
mind to the world, and find
release.
-Zwicky
They tell me despair is a sin.
I believe them.
The hand moving is the hand thinking,
and despair says the body does not exist.
Something to do with bellies and fingers
pressing gut to ebony,
thumbs on key. Even the hand
writing is the hand thinking. I wanted
speech like diamond because I knew
that music meant too much.
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