Notebook Nov. 6, 2021

One makes the world while drinking tea
Another—running for his life

No matter—the old soupy mind
Runs cold…this is something

To love

**

Meanwhile
Catbirds drift me

Under yellow leaves
Among birches—

Since wandering blind
Isn’t straight

**

& slow life is the work
We turn to good
So we think

Let us be slow
Let us be very slow

**

Happily sharing our sanity
Is losing a thing together

We didn’t know it
A game we played

We will not meet
I enter the woods

The long day runs away
People I remember
Up late beside a lamp

**

“And here’s where the labor of death comes in: within the philosopher’s self-fashioning project, death is not only an integral part of biography, but it may end up being as important as life itself. Simone Weil, who knew more about these things than most people, was less concerned that she would not find the “meaning of life” than she could miss the meaning of her death: “I have always had the fear of failing, not in my life, but in my death.””

Simone Weil

**

Winter with a Book
Alone with old man teeth, what a thing!
Steam from lake, what a thing!
Drum roll Shostakovich—
Train whistle;
Dog barking far;
Hot tea;
Fireside;
Odysseus sailing….

**

“When spirits come in the forest something happens first. It gets quiet. You get about ten minutes of acute, padded stillness. It’s not like any other kind of stillness, any other kind of quiet, any other kind of atmosphere. This is your moment to run, if you still have the legs underneath you. Otherwise, the assumption is, you’re in.”

Martin Shaw, Small Gods

I write a poem a day sometimes two
I speak to a neighbor’s parakeet
Pull books at random from their shelves
No one is in charge no locksmith
I do not know my maker
My voice is a mystery
This life is a ship board affair—
Radio signals come
Turn eighty degrees left
Reduce speed
At this longitude
I own a notebook
Of mid-ocean static
Simply crossing a room