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Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way.
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles –
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
Gary Snyder
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.
Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.
This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
— BY THEODORE ROETHKE
The scientists are in terror
and the European mind stops
Wyndham Lewis chose blindness
rather than have his mind stop.
Night under wind mid garofani,
the petals are almost still
Mozart, Linnaeus, Sulmona,
When one’s friends hate each other
how can there be peace in the world?
Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
A blown husk that is finished
but the light sings eternal
a pale flare over marshes
where the salt hay whispers to tide’s change
Time, space,
neither life nor death is the answer.
And of man seeking good,
doing evil.
In meiner Heimat
where the dead walked
and the living were made of cardboard.
His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.
I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
— Eliot
I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form’d from this soil, this
air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
— Walt Whitman
Gerard Van der Leun
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Gerard, I think the cat train toy is a kind of homage to Tama, a Japanese cat who became the honorary stationmaster of a train on the Wakayama Line in Kishi Prefecture in 2007. Her appointment as stationmaster led to a 10% increase in ridership on the Wakayama Line. In 2010, the station building at Kishi was remodeled to look like a cat’s face. Tama died in 2015 at the cat equivalent of 80 human years but has been succeeded by two cat assistants and a deputy named Nitama.
Per Wikipedia: “After her passing, thousands of her fans from all over Japan came to pay their respect. She was honored with a Shinto-style funeral at the station and was given the posthumous title, ‘Honorary Eternal Stationmaster.’ She was enshrined at a nearby Shinto cat shrine as spirit goddess Tama Daimyōjin on August 11, 2015. . . . Nitama’s first official duty was to be conveyed to her predecessor’s shrine to pay her respects.”
Photos of Tama, her assistants and deputy, the Wakayama train painted to look like a cat, the Kishi Station after remodeling, and the Shinto shrine to Tama at the link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tama_(cat)
I hope you don’t volunteer Miss Olive to be the feline face of California High-Speed Rail.
Absotively nyet!
Wandering ’round the net, looking for a bit more background on Tama, the Station Master cat in Japan, I somehow ended up reading about a little publication called The Organ, made on San Fran, edited by some guy called van der Leun.
Reading Richard Lupoff’s intro to The Organ Reader, http://www.ramblehouse.com/organreaderchapter.htm , leave me wondering if that guy van der Leun, was nuked too much, not enough, or just right. 😉
IF I had a cat, I just might get one.
IF.
Hmmm … my kittie my actually like that thing … hmmm
Gerard, you and Miss Olive might enjoy Neko Cafe, aka Cat Cafe the movie; Miss Olive can view it from her perch in the Cat Train that I’m sure you have on order for her.
“In Akihabara, Sakura Sakuragi (Yurika Kubo) runs cat cafe “Mocha.” She listens to her customers’ troubles there. The various customers that enter her cafe also take comfort in the cats that reside there.” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9703882/?ref_=nv_sr_1?ref_=nv_sr_1
I’d tell you what I thought of it, but alas! I haven’t yet found any subtitles, and my Japanese is quite limited (i.e. nonexistent) so I can’t, at least not yet!
Jim in Alaska…. Yes I was nuked far far too much… far far af faaa rrrr toooo moooch!@@$#%$
Cats like boxes with escape holes and lookouts, and humans like watching cats in cute situations.