THESE DAYS — @avec - Tumblr Blog

Fixation

– Ron Padgett

It's not that hard to climb up on a cross and have nails driven into your hands and feet. Of course it would hurt, but if your mind were strong enough you wouldn't notice. You would notice how much farther you can see up here, how there's even a breeze that cools your leaking blood. The hills with olive groves fold in to other hills with roads and huts, flocks of sheep on a distant rise.

#ronpadgett

Prose Poem ("The morning coffee.")

by Ron Padgett The morning coffee. I'm not sure why I drink it. Maybe it's the ritual of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the day on. It's something to do between being asleep and being awake. Surely there's something better to do, though, than to drink a cup of instant coffee. Such as meditate? About what? About having a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee whose first drink is too hot and whose last drink is too cool, but whose many in-between drinks are, like Baby Bear's por- ridge, just right. Papa Bear looks disgruntled. He removes his spectacles and swivels his eyes onto the cup that sits before Baby Bear, and then, after a discrete cough, reaches over and picks it up. Baby Bear doesn't understand this disruption of the morning routine. Papa Bear brings the cup close to his face and peers at it intently. The cup shatters in his paw, explodes actually, sending fragments and brown liquid all over the room. In a way it's good that Mama Bear isn't there. Better that she rest in her grave beyond the garden, unaware of what has happened to the world.

#ronpadgett

Unrelenting Flood

Black key, white key. No. That’s wrong. It’s all tactile; it’s not the information of each struck key we love, but how the mind and leavened heart travel by information. Think how blind and near- blind pianists range along their keyboards by clambering over notes a sighted man might notice to leave out, by stringing it all on one longing, the way bee-fingered, blind, mountainous Art Tatum did, the way we like joy to arrive: in such unrelenting flood the only way we can describe it is by music or another beautiful abstraction, like the ray of sunlight in a child’s drawing running straight to a pig’s ear tethering us all to our star

William Matthews

#williammatthews

Varieties of Quiet

"God is distant, difficult," writes Geoffrey Hill, a contemporary religious poet whose work—distant, difficult— might be said to have grown out of the seed of that assumption. But in fact distance from God—the assumption of it—is often not the terror and scourge we make it out to be, but the very opposite: it is false comfort, for it asks nothing immediate of us, or what it asks is interior, intellectual, self-enclosed. The result is a moment of meditative communion, perhaps, or even a work of art, or even—O my easy, hazy God—one more little riff on the Ineffable.

To believe in—to serve—Christ, on the other hand, is quite difficult, and precisely because of how near he is to us at all times. In Seattle once, when I was twenty-one and working at some crap temp job downtown, I used to spend my lunch hours near the docks. One particular day when everything was crisp, blue, new—and even the molten men emerging from the metal with which they were working, and the bickering gulls buoyed up in gusts, and my own release of numbing office efficiency seemed to verge on some mysterious, tremendous articulation of light and time—suddenly a tattered, gangrenous man staggered toward me with his arms out like a soul in hell.

Modern spiritual consciousness is predicated upon the fact that God is gone, and spiritual experience, for many of us, amounts mostly to an essential, deeply felt and necessary, but ultimately inchoate and transitory feeling of oneness or unity with existence. It is mystical and valuable, but distant. Christ, though, is a shard of glass in your gut. Christ is God crying I am here, and here not only in what exalts and completes and uplifts you, but here in what appalls, offends, and degrades you, here in what activates and exacerbates all that you would call not-God. To walk through the fog of God toward the clarity of Christ is difficult because of how unlovely, how "ungodly" that clarity often turns out to be.

I thrust my lunch into the man's hands, one of which was furred green as if a mold were growing on it, and fled.

from My Bright Abyss, Christian Wiman

#christian wiman

The Lazy Susan — Adrienne Su

All of the two poems of the November 7th New Yorker are by Asian American poets. It’s as if they knew what would happen immediately afterward.

The lazy Susan, in antiquity, would have been a fire. Drinking all night, the parents never get drunk. This is an ancient brew, with nuts, seeds, fruit to fuel the hours, to light a center. The tea dispenser’s orange light reminds us: they’re in the dining room, laughing in Chinese while we play Scrabble or Monopoly out here. They’re telling stories we don’t bother to record because the nights are long. We’ve heard them before. We don’t comprehend the punch lines. They’re tired. They live this way because of us.

We live this way because of them. We don’t comprehend the punch lines. They’re tired because the nights are long. We’ve heard them before, telling stories we don’t bother to record. While we play Scrabble or Monopoly out here, they’re in the dining room, laughing in Chinese. The tea dispenser’s orange light reminds us to fuel the hours, to light a center. This is an ancient brew, with nuts, seeds, fruit. Drinking all night, the parents never get drunk. The lazy Susan, in antiquity, would have been a fire.

#adriennesu #poem #newyorker

“...the best life is...”

On my way home I passed a Hasidic man talking to his son on the street. They were headed in the opposite direction and out of earshot before I could find out.

#life

nevver

Pattern recognition, Andrej Remnev

#harukimurakami

woods

year in the wild more a child than ever before chubby impatience gimme! that free soul sustenance once i held back once i was told: a birthright right? lost track too scenic a route not to have drawn a map

greenlightbklyn

Just Sarah Jessica Parker reading Maggie Shipstead’s Astonish Me at a hockey game.

penguinrandomhouse

Nothing is gonna be better than this. Look at her! She’s completely ignoring Tom Hanks and everything else that’s going on. Perfect. Everything is perfect.