Orion breaks clear, Rigel and Betelgeuse in place
The courtyard fragrant with rain
A lone silhouette bars the window without blinds
In the oval mirror, a single stroke.

-Karin Lessing,
from “Yunnan Sketches”

6.30 a.m. first light … cool dry air … coucals … call & response … my wife turns seventy-three today

thinking of you❤️

I know the feeling

I’ll admit to falling asleep at only one reading — maybe because it was evening and I was tired from work. The reader was Alice Notley — the reading was long, and she spoke in a quiet, lulling monotone . . .

I too recall Walcott’s rumbling sonorities! (A reading in Austin — it was a full house to see the Nobel Laureate). Nice about the “gaps and breathings” …

Waving from the corner
of the room,

this thought is a dragon,
that thought is a snake–

one has wisdom, one has venom.
The light that comes in

at the window
is a different animal.

16.II.25

"The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself."

William Blake

the beginning of this Canto
could almost be a passage from
Matthiessen’s Far Tortuga

Derek Walcott,
from Epitaph for the Young:
XII Cantos

(I remembered that Peter Matthiessen
& Derek Walcott were friends)

Swallows dart over black tiles
Earth-brown houses by the rushing stream
The water-buffalo takes his ease, drinks slow and deep
The hills alive with white worms

-Karin Lessing,
from “Yunnan Sketches”

translated by Helen R. Lane

… a boulder on which the initials of the Congress Party have been daubed with tar … a mound that was perhaps once a cenotaph … a marsh covered with lotuses and above them a cloud of butterflies … glints of broken shards of bottles set into the top of a wall …

-Octavio Paz,
The Monkey Grammarian

Agnes Giberne's The Story of the Sun, Moon, and Stars (1898) transports us to the most remote astral bodies, but also quickens every reader’s lost seven-year-old sensibility that the universe was made to be brought within one’s humble yet unbounded reach: publicdomainreview.org/collection/s...

Pinks #40: How It Feels Rubbing Down a Gravestone Personal insights into a poetic masterpiece

I wrote about Basil Bunting’s modernist masterpiece, Briggflatts — published 60 years ago this month — and what I learned from the poet’s own comments on his poem

9 a.m.
Jungle babblers squabble
in the half-dead garden
I see dozens of prints in the dirt
birds, people, a cat

In summer I tend watermelons
And in flood I stay
Near the postman’s house

-Arvind Krishna Mehrotra,
from “Songs of the Ganga”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVBZ...

thanks, David🙏

🙏

🙏

don’t know that cover

No fishing, no boats on Dian Lake
Emperors had their say; they’re dead
Yet how fine-looking this old man
Who gently touches the turtle of long life.

-Karin Lessing,
from “Yunnan Sketches”

5.30 p.m. my wife was washing clothes in the river … two otters emerged several feet away, looked straight at her and hissed … she took it as a warning and quickly gathered her clothes and clambered up the stone steps leaving the water …

I still remember the first time I heard it on the radio — I was 14

(notes)

Everything’s in need of repair and new
things seem out of place
Birds gather in the holy trees
Walls are covered with the faces of politicians
A shiny new hospital looms over tea stalls and auto rickshaws
Old men sit by the road in plastic chairs and watch the traffic

(on Shivaratri)

Listen, O lord of the meeting rivers,
things standing shall fall,
but the moving ever shall stay.

-Basavaņņa
(tr. A. K. Ramanujan)

I’ve often wondered what could be meant when people say the “real America”. There used to be the term (rarely used anymore) “Americana” which (as I recall) referred to cultural vestiges (images, music, words, objects) of the 19th and 18th centuries.

Gorge narrowing, gorge opening up again
Green water crashing, white water leaping
Arms or hearts, which is the more violent
I cannot say.

-Karin Lessing,
from “Yunnan Sketches”

I go out into the world
I am the world

I am nations, cities, people
I am the pages of an unbound book

My room is the air around me

-Arvind Krishna Mehrotra,
from “Songs of the Ganga”