(no subject)

You have cut me off, after endangering me by crowding in too closely.
Your vehicle is one of a class whose emissions are harming all nature.
There was a mean smugness to your face, as seen sideways, under sunglasses, though perhaps my imagination alone put it there.

And yet what was I doing, to say such things about you as I did, or thought to say, or prepared to think to say?

I made you stupid and vicious and smaller than woman or man,
with a special high-pitched voice,
with abdomen given over to unnatural traffickings,
with family and social circle secretly hating you,
with ill luck and accidents in your future
and unspecifiedly humiliating premature death.

Were I to have drawn you then, there would have been squiggles,
flat open hoops representing the trash of your insides,
exploding and exposing you like a split tennis ball.

This was wrong of me and I apologize, remembering now:

You were born just as I was, in another room. For I was born in another room than I think.

Like me you had a first record, prayed a first prayer. Unlike me you said something to someone I cannot imagine.

Like me you kicked balls and had good results, bad results. Unlike me you excelled at activities I found to be unenterable mansions.

Like me you had hair, but yours grew at other speeds in other patterns, and meant something specific to you that it would mean much to me to fully understand.

Yours have kissed other lips than mine have. This is statistically necessary. Think of the differences there, in those lips. Expressions, lines, curvings; some lips puff right out from the face. Others seem no part of it. Others seem painted on with watercolors. You have noticed something I will never notice about a pair of lips I will never meet.

The thoughts you will think as you enter your home, a home I have no right to mispicture, are thoughts I have no ability to anticipate. Perhaps they will be about your family, a family of another flavor than my own, with other, deep rules whose meaning is in their coral continuity.

Something in your head would solve a puzzle so deep in mine I never think of it, solve it to my immense relief and advantage.

Yours is a world farther from mine than anything describable. Heaven and hell, the future past my death and the past behind my birth, are closer to me than that world.

And yet I think you remind me of cinnamon candies and patches of no rain in rain and the snortings of geese. Little pains of taste, dry by luck, sending noisy air sculpted by obstacular beaks into downy wingpits. They don't make a picture but all of them letter your word.

May a call come for you someday to climb the cobbled steps, curving left, to the square hotel with all its windows lit, where, past a great door watched by friendly greeters, and through a hallway high with healthful pictures, a small red elevator will take you to a suite of bright dusty rooms lavish with colorful plants, spiralling in on a raised warm chamber with one low paisley-quilted bed, on which, wrapped in brown paper, is everything you miss.

And may we both be more careful.

(no subject)

( Verses )

(no subject)

from Notes to Queen Mab, Shelley

But even supposing that a man should raise a dead body to life before our eyes, and on this fact rest his claim to being considered the son of God;--the Humane Society restores drowned persons, and because it makes no mystery of the method it employs, its members are not mistaken for the sons of God. All that we have a right to infer from our ignorance of the cause of any event is that we do not know it...

(no subject)

Hazlitt's Week-at-a-Glance

To see the golden sun, the azure sky, the outstretched ocean; to walk upon the green earth, and be lord of a thousand creatures; to look down yawning precipices or over distant sunny vales; to see the world spread out under one's feet on a map; to bring the stars near; to view the smallest insects through a microscope; to read history, and consider the revolutions of empire and the successions of generations; to hear the glory of Tyre, of Sidon, of Bablyon, and of Susa, and to say all these were before me and are now nothing; to say I exist in such a point of time, and in such a point of space; to be a spectator and a part of its ever-moving scene; to witness the change of seasons, of spring and autumn, of winter and summer; and to feel hot and cold, pleasure and pain, beauty and deformity, right and wrong; to be sensible to the accidents of Nature; to consider the mighty world of eye and ear; to listen to the stock-dove's notes amid the forest deep; to journey over moor and mountain; to hear the midnight sainted choir; to visit lighted halls, or the cathedral's gloom, or sit in crowded theatres and see life itself mocked; to study the works of art and refine the sense of beauty to agony; to worship fame, and to dream of immortality; to look upon the Vatican, and to read Shakespear; to gather up the wisdom of the ancients, and to pry into the future; to listen to the trump of war, and the shout of victory; to question history as to the movements of the human heart; to seek for truth; to plead the cause of humanity; to overlook the world as if time and Nature poured their treasures at our feet -- to be and to do all this and then in a moment to be as nothing...