— ONT WTF (@OntWtf) June 11, 2021
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Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.
Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice.
With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress.
In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountains start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
– – WH Auden
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother may yet line up with brother:
This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.
There are men who can’t be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can’t hinder the wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief
the people march.
In the night, and overhead a shovel of stars for keeps, the people
march:
“Where to? what next?”
— Carl Sandberg
Down valley a smoke haze
Three days heat, after five days rain
Pitch glows on the fir-cones
Across rocks and meadows
Swarms of new flies.
I cannot remember things I once read
A few friends, but they are in cities.
Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup
Looking down for miles
Through high still air.
BY GARY SNYDER
Starry-eyed an’ laughing as I recall when we were caught
Trapped by no track of hours for they hanged suspended
As we listened one last time an’ we watched with one last look
Spellbound an’ swallowed ’til the tolling ended
Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an’ worse
An’ for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An’ we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing
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That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
– – W. B. Yeats, 1865 – 1939
Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained
thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.
— Robinson Jeffers
Sometimes it seems I had a dream, and, as a dreamer woke immersed in mineral baths closed within a cool, dark chamber fed by streams flowing in from the center of nowhere.
Hanging from the granite ceiling a kerosene lantern cast shards of light through the pale steam rising from the surface of the pools.
Ripples radiated outwards from the edges of my body and tapping faintly on the rock revealed the edges of the chamber.
Outside I could hear the wind slide across the spine of the mountains, speaking in a language that I remembered but could no longer understand.
Steam filled my nostrils and heat penetrated my bones until, after a time, I had no body, only a sense of silence and distance and calm.
As if I had just woken from all water into dream.
— Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, 1973
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Now THAT was funny.
OK. I’m going out with my cat tonight.
Damn cat has more fun than I do.
Here at suburban hermitage, that role is played by the Most Mysterious Skinamalink.
Buddy the Cat just flops. He hangs out in the gazebo, and meyowls for attention when I stop for a break, but Skinnies?
A few days ago I was out front. Ol’ Skinnies appeared out of nowhere, and wanted a pet and a scratch. Just then, a couple about our age walked by, and the woman saw The Skinamalink.
“OOOH, Panther, there you are!” She turned to me, “Is this your kitty?” he shows up at our screen door…”
I looked at ol’ Skinnies, “You are sooo busted dude!”
We all laughed. The two-timin’ cat was noticeably embarrassed.
JWM
if cats could talk, and they can, they’d never let you in on this.
Does this cat know Hunter?
I bet Olive the Editor Cat would delete large portions of his fur if he ever came a-courting.
My cats (I think we have 5 right now) are an open book. They leave body parts strewn around the porch or the hallways if they can bring in their prey. Yesterday, it was a weasel, in perfect rigor, outside the bedroom window.
I tell my wife that she forever loses the opportunity to fully bond with her cats when she refuses to just haul off and bite into these love-gifts. So far, she has rebuffed that suggestion every time. Damn price of food will be so high soon, we may hafta start eating those critters. I was eyeing that fawn in the toddler and fawn video the other day. Around here, we call deer: “food”.
Here in the AZ desert, the cat would need to contend with coyotes, owls and other hawks.
Needless to say, there aren’t a lot of cats out and about.
We once had a cat, or more precisely, it had us, who did all that shit, or near enough, without leaving the house.
That video could be from the cat across the street. The Russian grandmother is always scolding Czaravitch Miko. That’s his name. He is a pompous peach cream colored Persian cat and he owns the hood. He tries to terrorize our cat through the windows. He uses the neighbor’s garden as a sandbox and climbs their wooden fence to take a leak. He is one angry, Russian mob kitty. I’ve discovered his one fear. The sound of the sprayer on my Windex bottle.