Dear City,

Permit us to refresh your memory: what comes from heaven is always a blessing, the enemy is not rain. Rain is the subject of prayer, the kind gesture of saints. Dear City, explain your irreverence; in you, rain is a visitor with nowhere to go. Where is the ground that knows only the love of water? Where are the passageways to your heart? Pity the water that stays and rises on the streets, pity the water that floods into houses, so dark and filthy and heavy with rats and dead leaves and plastic. How ashamed water is to be what you have made it. What have you done to its beauty, its graceful body in pictures of oceans, its clear face in a glass? We walk home in the flood and cannot see our feet. We forget to thank the gods for their kindness. We look for someone to blame and turn to you, wretched city, because we are men and women of honor, we feed our children three meals a day, we never miss an election. The only explanation is you, dear city. This is the end of our discussion. There is no other culprit.

-Conchitina Cruz, from Dark Hours-

Sonnet XVII

-Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Darkness

Victor Hugo:
"Darkness is dizzying. We need light: whenever we plunge into the opposite of day we feel our hearts chilled. When the eye sees darkness, the mind sees trouble. In an eclipse, at night, in the sooty darkness, even the strongest feel anxiety. Nobody walks alone at night in the forest without trembling. Darkness and trees, two formidable depths--a chimeric reality appears in the indistinct distance. An outline of the Inconceivable emerges a few steps away with a spectral clarity. You see floating in space or in your brain something strangely vague and unseizable like the dreams of sleeping flowers. There are fierce shapes in the horizon. You breathe in the odors of the great black void. You are afraid and are tempted to look behind you. The socket of night, the haggard look of everything, taciturn profiles that fade away as you advance, obscure dishevelments, angry clumps, livid pools, the gloomy reflected in the funereal, the sepulchral immensity of silence, the possible unknown beings, swaying of mysterious branches, frightful torsos of the trees, long wisps of shivering grass--you are defenseless against all of it. There is no bravery that does not shudder and feel the proximity of anguish. You feel something hideous, as if soul were melting into shadow.
-Les Miserables, "Cosette" book 3, chapter 5 "The Little Girl All Alone" pp 388-389-
*this section of my copy is shamelessly dog-eared and has been so for the past eleven years*

Neil Gaiman:
""Darkness is happening," said the leather woman, very quietly. "Night is happening. All the nightmares that have come out when the sun goes down, since the cave times, when we huddled together for safety and for warmth, are happening. Now," she told them, "now is the time to be afraid of the dark." Richard knew that something was about to creep over his face. He closed his eyes: it made no difference to what he saw or felt. The night was complete."
-Neverwhere, chapter IV, p.103-

*Painting: Sunflower by Gustav Klimt*

I was in one of my pensive moods this morning and a line from Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood" blew across my thoughts, as the line was connected to the chains my mind was piecing together. I decided to look the poem up and I found myself starting to feel sad upon reading the first lines of the first verse and grew even sadder as I moved onward...

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more...

Oh, to be a kid again! Adulthood is such a sad affair.

Revisiting Rilke

For I don't think back; all that I am
stirs me because of you. I don't invent you
at sadly cooled-off places from which
you've gone away; even your not being there
is warm with you and more real and more
than a privation. Longing leads out too often
into vagueness. Why should I cast myself,
when, for all I know, your influence falls on me,
gently, like moonlight on a window seat.

Duino, late autumn 1911

p. 15

happy birthday

i carry your heart with me

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

ee cummings

Moonbeam (by Louise Gluck)

The mist rose with a little sound. Like a thud.
Which was the heart beating. And the sun rose, briefly diluted.
And after what seemed years, it sank again
and twilight washed over the shore and deepened there.
And from out of nowhere lovers came,
people who still had bodies and hearts. Who still had
arms, legs, mouths, although by day they might be
housewives and businessmen.

The same night also produced people like ourselves.
You are like me, whether or not you admit it.
Unsatisfied, meticulous. And your hunger is not for experience
but for understanding, as though it could be had in the abstract.

Then it's daylight again and the world goes back to normal.
The lovers smooth their hair; the moon resumes its hollow existence.
And the beach belongs again to mysterious birds
soon to appear on postage stamps.

But what of our memories, the memories of those who depend on images?
Do they count for nothing?

The mist rose, taking back proof of love.
Without which we have only the mirror, you and I.

(from The Seven Ages)

from James Merrill's "Lost in Translation"

And after rain
A deep reverberation fills with stars.

Lost, is it, buried? One more missing piece?

But nothing's lost. Or else: all is translation
And every bit of us is lost in it
(Or found—I wander through the ruin of S
Now and then, wondering at the peacefulness)
And in that loss a self-effacing tree,
Color of context, imperceptibly
Rustling with its angel, turns the waste
To shade and fiber, milk and memory.

"What is a mirror but water that refuses to budge?" -Conchitina Cruz-

Borrowed

"In the end, life is no more than the sum of contingent facts, a chronicle of chance intersections, of flukes, of random events that divulge nothing but their own lack of purpose."

-Paul Auster, "The Locked Room," The New York Trilogy-

"Is not an event in fact more significant and noteworthy the greater number of fortuities necessary to bring it about? Chance and chance alone has a message for us. Everything that occurs out of necessity, everything expected, repeated day in and day out, is mute. Only chance can speak to us. We read its message much as the gypsies read the images made by coffee grounds at the bottom of the cup."

-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being-

"Heaven, perhaps, is what we imagine happiness to be. And hell, the failure of the imagination, the failure of faith, the triumph of fear, the triumph of despair, the inablility to rise above the suffering self."
-Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, A Book of Dreams-

The Panther

by Rainer Maria Rilke

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,
has grown so weary that it cannot hold
anything else. It seems to him there are
a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,
the movement of his powerful soft strides
is like a ritual dance around a center
in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils
lifts, quietly. An image enters in,
rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles,
plunges into the heart and is gone.

This is the Rilke I fell in love with, the poem that led me to search for his The Sonnets To Orpheus and buy it, no matter what the cost:

You Who Never Arrived

You who never arrived
in my arms, Beloved, who were lost
from the start,
I don't even know what songs
would please you. I have given up trying
to recognize you in the surging wave of
the next moment. All the immense
images in me -- the far-off, deeply-felt landscape,
cities, towers, and bridges, and un-
suspected turns in the path,
and those powerful lands that were once
pulsing with the life of the gods--
all rise within me to mean
you, who forever elude me.
You, Beloved, who are all
the gardens I have ever gazed at,
longing. An open window
in a country house-- , and you almost
stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced
upon,--
you had just walked down them and vanished.
And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors
were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back
my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same
bird echoed through both of us
yesterday, separate, in the evening...

From 'Ahead of All Parting:The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke'
Edited and Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Luis Katigbak, On Music

You find your music like you find anything you love for a lifetime: through head-spinningly intense first impressions, deepened by increments, by glances and tastes, flashes of bliss, the slow rush, the terrifying exhilaration of knowing and being known, and finally: hands and heart clasped in commitment, days and years sealed against decay. The beauty of a cascading guitar line, of a voice in flight singing words that mean something to you--these are permanent and ephemeral, as are everything that matters, and when you first fall for your music you almost never appreciate the paradox.

from "The Dawn: Everything that Matters",by Luis Katigbak,PULP, March 2005