Mertoniana
via volume six of the journals

from October 13, 1966

So many things have happened in the last ten days or so. The death of Fr Stephen under the tree by the gatehouse on the 4th. I was among the little group kneeling in the grass to pray by him as he died. Then sat with Fr Flavian saying psalms by his body in the post office before he was taken up to the third floor chapel. He was buried on the 5th with much singing of birds on a bright morning.

*

Monday I had to go to the proctologist. It was a beautiful day.

*

Downtown Louisville at the bar of the Brown Hotel in mid afternoon, drinking bottled beer and finishing a letter to M.

*

from October 14, 1966

A dark October morning with clouds. Extraordinary purple in the North over the pines. Ruins of gnats on the table under the lamp.

*

from October 16, 1966

Three small harlequins -- two sweetgums and a maple -- stand bright against the dark background of pine and cedar. Dim brilliance of the woods on a grey day. [...] I am full of obscure lonely happiness because of her and because of the miracle of her existence. I tried to write a poem for her about it but the poem could come nowhere near.

*

Basil Bunting found for the first time yesterday -- very fine, rough, Northumbrian, Newcastle stuff of the Kingdom of Caedmon.

*

from October 27, 1966

Tonight walked up and down on the cool clear evening, in the full moon, meditating, enjoying the quiet, the peace, the cool silence of the valley, and the freedom. All I have ever sought is here : how foolish not to be content with it -- and let anything trouble it, without need. True, the moon did make me think of May 5th at the airport -- and that was something else again!! I can't regret it. It still seems so obviously to have been a gift of God.

Psalm 46 (Psalm 45 in Vulgate)
trans. Msgr Ronald Knox

God is our refuge and stronghold; sovereign aid he has brought us in the hour of peril. Not for us to be afraid, though earth should tumble about us, and the hills be carried away into the depths of the sea. See how its waters rage and roar, how the hills tremble before its might! The Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge.

But the city of God, enriched with flowing waters, is the chosen sanctuary of the most High, God dwells within her, and she stands unmoved; with break of dawn he will grant her deliverance. Nations may be in turmoil, and thrones totter, earth shrink away before his voice; but the Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge. Come near, and see God's acts, his marvellous acts done on earth; how he puts an end to wars all over the world, the bow shivered, the lances shattered, the shields burnt to ashes! Wait quietly, and you shall have proof that I am God, claiming empire among the nations, claiming empire over the world. The Lord of hosts is with us, the God of Jacob is our refuge.

Anima Christi

Anima Christi, sanctifica me.
Corpus Christi, salva me.
Sanguis Christi, inebria me.
Aqua lateris Christi, lava me.
Passio Christi, conforta me.
O bone Iesu, exaudi me.
Intra tua vulnera absconde me.
Ne permittas me separari a te.
Ab hoste maligno defende me.
In hora mortis meae voca me,
et iube me venire ad te
ut cum sanctis tuis laudem te
in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

Jean Vanier
from today's Magnificat meditation

Jesus often uses the word "abide." To abide in Jesus is what prayer is about. We must live this word and open the chalice of our being to the presence of God, enter into his silence.

*

He will give us the courage to forgive -- for many of us bear the scars of resentment and have yet to learn to forgive, to love those who have hurt us, to attain interior freedom.

*

To enter into this healing process, we have to learn to be silent. It is very easy, after having heard the Word of God, to go out and shout it. This can be a form of escape from letting the Word of God penetrate those parts of our hearts where we may feel a certain guilt, a lack of faith and of generosity.

Sometimes a word or a phrase

... just sounds a little odd.

Venerable Charles de Foucauld
from the Magnificat of last March (2002) -- meditation for Thurs. 21st

However wicked I may be, however great a sinner, I must hope that I shall go to heaven. You forbid me to despair. however ungrateful or lukewarm or cowardly I may be, however much I may misuse your graces, O God, you make it my duty to hope to live eternally at your feet in love and holiness. You forbid me ever to be discouraged by my shortcomings, or to say to myself, "I can go no further. The road is too bad. I must go back -- right back to the bottom." You forbid me to say to myself at the prospect of the sins I renew daily, the sins I ask you daily to forgive and continually fall back into : "I can never correct myself : holiness is not for me; heaven and I have nothing in common and I am too unworthy to go there." Even when I think of the infinite graces you have heaped on me and the unworthiness of my present life, you forbid me to say to myself, "I have gone too far in misusing my graces; I ought to be a saint, but I am a sinner; I cannot correct myself, it is too difficult; I am nothing but wretchedness and pride; after everything God has done, there is still no good in me; I shall never go to heaven."

In spite of everything, you want me to hope, to hope always that I shall receive enough grace to be converted and to attain glory. What is there in common between heaven and me -- between its perfection and my wretchedness? There is your heart, O Lord Jesus. It forms a link between these two so dissimilar things. There is the love of the Father who so loved the world he gave his only Son. I must always hope, because you have commanded me to, and because I must believe both in your love, the love you have so firmly promised, and in your power.

+++++++++++++++

This speaks to me, rather directly, it would seem. I hope it speaks to others, in a salutary and encouraging fashion!

Pro, con or neutral?

1. Andy Warhol
2. Jackson Pollock
3. Robert Frost
4. Norman Rockwell
5. Salvador Dalí
6. Buffy the Vampire Slayer
7. Franish
8. Spench
9. The New York Yankees
10. California
11. Henri J. M. Nouwen
12. Sean John (P. Diddy) Combs

Gospel acc. to St John 1:1-16
trans. Msgr Ronald Knox

At the beginning of time the Word already was; and God had the Word abiding with him, and the Word was God. He abode, at the beginning of time, with God. It was through him that all things came into being, and without him came nothing that has come to be. In him there was life, and that life was the light of men. And the light shines in darkness, a darkness which was not able to master it.

A man appeared, sent from God, whose name was John. He came for a witness, to bear witness of the light, so that through him all men might learn to believe. He was not the Light; he was sent to bear witness to the light. There is one who enlightens every soul born into the world; he was the true Light. He, through whom the world was made, was in the world, and the world treated him as a stranger. He came to what was his own, and they who were his own gave him no welcome. But all those who did welcome him he empowered to become children of God, all those who believe in his name; their birth came, not from human stock, not from nature's will or man's, but from God. And the Word was made flesh, and came to dwell among us; and we had sight of his glory, glory such as belongs to the Father's only-begotten Son, full of grace and truth. We have John's witness to him; I told you, cried John, there was one coming after me who takes rank before me; he was when I was not. We have all received something out of his abundance, grace answering to grace.

Spring : two poems
from Wishes, Lies, and Dreams : Teaching Children to Write Poetry

Spring is like a ladybug climbing a flower.
Spring is flowers growing in the garden.
Spring is the sun, sky and grass.
Spring is going to the swimming pool.
Spring is going to the beach and tasting the salt water.
Spring is wearing your new summer play suit.
Spring is planting new flowers in your garden.
Spring is getting a new pair of sandals.

But best of all, spring is a part of nature, like the baby next door
She's grown so big.

Vivien Tuft, 4th grade

+++++++++++++++

Flyin' High

Spring is like a beetle coming out of its hole
Spring is like rolling on a damp lawn
Spring is a blue sky and blue as I dunno what
Spring is sailing a boat
Spring is a flower waking up in the morning
Spring is like a plate falling out of the closet for joy
Spring is like a spatter of grease
Flying high like Lucy in the sky
Spring is like doing a cartwheel on the sidewalk
Spring is like a bird flying over a lake
Spring is like putting on tennis shoes
Spring is like walking in flowers
Spring is like doing a bellyflop in a mudpuddle

Jeff Morley, 4th grade

+++++++++++++++

Kenneth Koch and the students of PS 61, op. cit. (Vintage, 1971), pp. 182, 188.

This Unbidden Love

earliest version December 1985
revised periodically since then

The most unthinkable
Flower that ever will have grown
Is the explicit lilac with its lurid scent,
With its vivid hungering and tremulous lips,
A breath alive, a flesh unknown,
A world springlike and full.

The ripest sweetest fruit
Turned liquid on the swirling tongue
Becomes a wine-drunk whisper tasting loud,
Revives forgotten midnights in the gut
And blackish dreamlike saccharines
Stimulate the tooth.

Two souls, four lungs : each nerve
Breathes fulfillment of its dream
While this unbidden love, the tide's great surge,
Turbulent ecstasy of rapturous urge,
Makes live, in one climactic rhyme,
Epitome of sense.

Monday mission
via chirp, but originating at whoever thinks these things up!!

1. How old will you be on your next birthday?

34.

2. What is your favorite gadget?

The book. Or perhaps, the bookmark.

3. Tell me about someone that you lost touch with several years ago. Would you like to get back in touch with them again? What caused the separation? Has enough time passed? Would you still get along?

M., une française de quarante ans; perhaps; my failure to forgive a secret spilled (she did so out of genuine concern); no; perhaps not.

And of course, there's Cynthia. (Violins, please.)

4. Is there a difference between your online personality and your real-life version? Or are you pretty much the same person either way?

Perhaps I'm wittier online. I'm certainly handsomer online! I have a good face for radio. But otherwise, pretty much the same. Heavier, more burdensome, in person.

5. Can you think of any ways that the Internet hinders person-to-person communication? What could we do to change things?

Actually, am ceaselessly marvelling at how it immeasurably enhances person-to-person communication!

6. When was the last time you felt truly happy, or had that sense of perfect inner-peace? What does it take to get that feeling back when you need it?

Can we adopt a "don't ask, don't tell" policy on this one? Too heavy a question to ponder. "Perfect inner peace" this side of paradise is surely hyperbole. One is grateful for those small surprising moments of grace that do occur from time to time. Today, after initial distress, I felt happy. So there!

7. If you could just verbally let loose on someone and be able to say anything you want, without repercussions, who would you say it to and what would you say?

Without repercussions? Please, don't tempt me! Where would I start? But letting loose in such a fashion can be truly damaging. Maybe I should let loose, in prayer, even angry prayer, on the good Lord God, a bit more often, as the psalmist & certainly some of the prophets (quare via impiorum prosperatur) did from time to time.

BONUS: Are we alive or just a dying planet?

Perhaps the silliest question since the Fixx asked "Are we ourselves, and do we really know?"

And Mary said

My soul magnifies the Lord; my spirit has found joy in God, who is my Saviour, because he has looked graciously upon the lowliness of his handmaid. Behold, from this day forward all generations will count me blessed; because he who is mighty, he whose name is holy, has wrought for me his wonders. He has mercy upon those who fear him, from generation to generation; he has done valiantly with the strength of his arm, driving the proud astray in the conceit of their hearts; he has put down the mighty from their seat, and exalted the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things, and sent the rich away empty-handed. He has protected his servant Israel, keeping his merciful design in remembrance, according to the promise which he made to our forefathers, Abraham and his posterity for evermore.

Luke 1.46-55, trans. Msgr Knox

Mertoniana
from journal entry for Sept. 21, 1966

Fog all around the hermitage this morning (pre-dawn). I have a new coffee percolator that seems to work well.

+++++++++++++++

dylan : I confess to liking these little snippets of "grounded" life in his journals, the two-or-three-sentence snapshots of the quotidian, almost like prose equivalents to the wheelbarrow of William Carlos Williams. Call it the devotional practice of attention to the quotidian. Or (if you're so inclined) call it poetry! Almost accidental poetry, but poetry nonetheless.

Psalm 23 (22 in Vulgate)
trans. Msgr Knox

The Lord is my shepherd; how can I lack anything? He gives me a resting-place where there is green pasture, leads me out to the cool water's brink, refreshed and content. As in honour pledged, by sure paths he leads me; dark be the valley about my path, hurt I fear none while he is with me; thy rod, thy crook are my comfort. Envious my foes watch, while thou dost spread a banquet for me; richly thou dost anoint my head with oil, well filled my cup. All my life thy loving favour pursues me; through the long years the Lord's house shall be my dwelling-place.

Doxos!

As Roman Catholics celebrated Laetare Sunday yesterday, the Orthodox commemorated the Sunday of the Veneration of the Cross. Read Mr Huw's reflection on his priest's sermon -- is it "nothing new"? It is the obvious, the necessary, that always wants restating.

One day in the Boston Globe the "Reflection for the Day" came via Katharine Anne Porter : "Love must be learned, and relearned, again and again; there is no end to it. Hate needs no instruction, but waits only to be provoked."

The simple truths -- see Christ in others, treat others as Christ -- always warrant visitation and revisitation, because we dare not live them yet. I dare not live them yet.

Pragger-wagger

The only other fortress of privacy afforded a boy at Uppingham came in the shape of the tish, a dormitory cubicle that housed his bed, a small table and such private items as might be fitted into the table or under the bed and vice versa. A curtain could be pulled across and then a tish, too, became a boy's castle. One assumes that the word "tish" descends, not from the German for table, but from a contraction of the word "partition," but applying logic to English slang is never a sound idea. I think we can be fairly sure however, that "ekker," the word used at Uppingham for games, derived from "exercise." "Wagger," or "wagger-pagger-bagger," which was used to denote "waste-paper basket," is an example of that strange argot prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s that caused the Prince of Wales to be known as the Pragger-Wagger. Even today, in the giddy world of High Anglicanism in such temples of bells, smells and cotters as St Mary's, Bourne Street, SW3, I have heard with my own two ears Holy Communion referred to by pert, campy priests as "haggers-commaggers" and my mother still describes the agony and torture of anything from toothache to an annoying traffic jam as "aggers and torters."

Stephen Fry, from Moab Is My Washpot : An Autobiography (Random House, UK 1997, USA 1999), pp. 167-8.

from I, in my intricate image
by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels,
Forged in man's minerals, the brassy orator
Laying my ghost in metal,
The scales of this twin world tread on the double,
My half ghost in armour hold hard in death's corridor,
To my man-iron sidle.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels,
Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season
Worked on a world of petals;
She threads off the sap and needles, blood and bubble
Casts to the pine roots, raising man like a mountain
Out of the naked entrail.

Beginning with doom in the ghost, and the springing marvels,
Image of images, my metal phantom
Forcing forth through the harebell,
My man of leaves and the bronze root, mortal, unmortal,
I, in my fusion of rose and male motion,
Create this twin miracle.

This is the fortune of manhood : the natural peril,
A steeplejack tower, bonerailed and masterless,
No death more natural;
Thus the shadowless man or ox, and the pictured devil,
In seizure of silence commit the dead nuisance,
The natural parallel.

My images stalk the trees and the slant sap's tunnel,
No tread more perilous, the green steps and spire
Mount on man's footfall,
I with the wooden insect in the tree of nettles,
In the glass bed of grapes with snail and flower,
Hearing the weather fall.

The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (New Directions, 1954), pp. 40-1.

From the Orthros prayer
via the online chapel of goarch

You are more holy than all the Powers of Heaven, More honored than all, you are our foundation, O Theotokos, Mistress of the World. Entreat the Savior to save us from the multitude of stumbling blocks and rescue from danger those who pray to you, as you are the good one.

Sirach (Ecclesiasticus) 43:12-25
trans. Msgr Ronald Arbuthnott Knox

Look up at the rainbow, and bless the maker of it; how fair are those bright colours that span heaven with a ring of splendour, traced by an almighty hand. Swift comes the snow at his word, swift flashes the fire that executes his vengeance; he has but to unlock his store-house, and the clouds hover, bird-fashion, arsenals of his might, whence the pounded hail-stones fall. How his glance makes the hills tremble! Blows the south wind at his bidding, earth echoes with the crash of his thunder; blows the north wind, and there is whirling storm. Soft as roosting bird falls the snow, spread all around; not more silently comes locust-swarm to earth; what eye is but captivated by its pale beauty, what heart but is filled with terror at the dark cloud that brings it? He it is pours out the frost, that lies white as salt on the earth, the frozen earth that seems covered with thistle-down.

Cold blows the north wind, and ice forms on the water; no pool but it rests there, arming the water as with a breast-plate; frost gnaws at the mountain-side, parches the open plains, strips them, as fire might have stripped them, of their green. Remedy for all these is none, but the speedy coming of the mist; frost shall be overmastered by the showers the sirocco drives before it, and at the Lord's word the chill blast dies away.

Saint Joseph's Abbey

Spencer, Massachusetts
visited 30 March - 6 April 1992

Here, no television
to put forth candidates
for the multitudinal eye,
no advertisements to entice
the urge for acquisition:
here there is naught but space,
grace, and monk-built walls.

The grass of the hill
south of the guest-cottage
accepts what weather comes
(chill rain, warm beam, white flake),
and does not complain.

Three hours before dawn
(first-time retreatant
rising for vigils)
leave the fieldstone house;
let night's chill scorch
soul and skin; walk the path
unlit but for one light
near a statue of the Virgin;
enter the cloister, fear-
fully, wonderfully dark.

Cistercians file churchward:
a dew like that of Hermon
graces psalming Spencer!
As if with pentecostal flame,
the brothers' gathered hearts
are inexhaustibly enkindled,
by grace made one.

It snows ! ! !


... and is coating the rooves of the parked cars hereabouts!

Looking for pictures

{removed}

estlin

i am a little church(no great cathedral)
far from the splendor and squalor of hurrying cities
--i do not worry if briefer days grow briefest,
i am not sorry when sun and rain make april

my life is the life of the reaper and the sower;
my prayers are the prayers of earth's own clumsily striving
(finding and losing and laughing and crying)children
whose any sadness or joy is my grief or my gladness

around me surges a miracle of unceasing
birth and glory and death and resurrection:
over my sleeping self float flaming symbols
of hope,and i wake to a perfect patience of mountains

i am a little church(far from the frantic
world with its rapture and anguish)at peace with nature
--i do not worry if longer nights grow longest;
i am not sorry when silence becomes singing

winter by spring,i lift my diminutive spire to
merciful Him Whose only now is forever:
standing erect in the deathless truth of His presence
(welcoming humbly His light and proudly His darkness)

from 95 poems by e e cummings (harcourt, brace & world, 1958), #77

Jessica Powers (1905-88)
Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, OCD

The Cloud of Carmel

"The Lord promised that He would dwell in a cloud."
-- 2 Paralipomenon [=Chronicles] vi. 1


Symbol of star or lily of the snows,
Rainbow or root or vine or fruit-filled tree :
These image the Immaculate to me
Less than a little cloud, a little light cloud rising
From Orient waters cleft by prophecy.
And as the Virgin in a most surprising
Maternity bore God and our doomed race,
I who bear God in mysteries of grace
Beseech her : Cloud, encompass God and me.

Nothing defiled can touch the cloud of Mary.
God as a child willed to be safe in her,
And the Divine Indweller sets His throne
Deep in a cloud in me, His sanctuary.
I pray, Oh, wrap me, Cloud, light Cloud of Carmel
Within whose purity my vows were sown
To lift their secrecies to God alone.
Say to my soul, the timorous and small
House of a Presence that it cannot see,
And frightened acre of a Deity,
Say in the fulness of thy clemency:
I have enclosed thee all.
Thou art in whiteness of a lighted lamb wool,
Thou art in softness of a summer wind lull.
O hut of God, hush thine anxiety.
Enfolded in this motherhood of mine
All that is beautiful and all divine
Is safe in thee.

Via I Sing of a Maiden : The Mary Book of Verse, ed. Sister Thérèse Lentfoehr (Macmillan, 1947), pp. 329-30.

Also posted at error503 -- La vita nuova on 8th September 2002.

Imagining the words
of Daniel Patrick Moynihan (RIP) on glass houses

A person who inhabits ... a vitreous abode ... ought not to hurl projectiles ... that are petrine.

[A bit of whimsy inspired by some recent correspondence. Would anyone else like to, as an affectionate tribute to the late statesman, have a go at translating proverbs, saws, clichés, nostrums, & bromides into the sesquipedalian patois of DPM ??]

By the way

How can you not like a man who, in his first race for the US Senate, challenging incumbent James Buckley (William F.'s brother) and being tweaked with "Professor Moynihan" this-and-that, and "the distinguished professor from Harvard" ... responds by exclaiming "I see the mudslinging has begun!"

Vanish like a gambler's lucky streak

I think I'm beginning to like this song a whole lot.

If I were the snow : two poems
from Wishes, Lies, and Dreams : Teaching Children to Write Poetry

If I Were the Snow

If I were the snow
I would snow every
single Christmas.
I would snow on my
brother and make his
toes so red he
would hit me.
I would snow all over the
universe on Mars,
the earth. I would
snow so hard on
the moon, I
would show the man
on there who's boss.
I would not be just white
I'd be red, blue, and
green. I'd be yellow
dots, orange dots
black ones too.

Kathy Kennedy, 5th grade

===============

Snow, Snow

Snow, snow, I'm the snow
Drift, drift, far I drift
Friends, friends, with my friends
Deep, deep, deep I drift
In and out, out of windows
Into Paris, out of London
          But!!
Melt, melt, soon I'll melt.
But while I can, can, can
Drift, drift, I will drift
Snow, snow, I'm the snow
Drift, drift, far I drift.
Friends, friends, with my friends
Deep, deep, deep I drift
But now I must MELT!

Amy Levy, 5th grade

===============

Kenneth Koch and the students of PS 61 NYC, op. cit. (Vintage, 1971), pp. 176, 178

an in-dwelling

god makes his home
in you
(incredible
but true)

i see in your
sweet face
the dwelling-place
of grace

1996

Psalm 8
(trans. Msgr Ronald Knox)

O Lord, our Master, how the majesty of thy name fills all the earth! Thy greatness is high above heaven itself. Thou hast made the lips of children, of infants at the breast, vocal with praise, to confound thy enemies; to silence malicious and revengeful tongues. I look up at those heavens of thine, the work of thy hands, at the moon and the stars, which thou hast set in their places; what is man that thou shouldst remember him? What is Adam's breed, that it should claim thy care? Thou hast placed him only a little below the angels, crowning him with glory and honour, and bidding him rule over the works of thy hands. Thou hast put them all under his dominion, the sheep and the cattle, and the wild beasts besides; the birds in the sky, and the fish in the sea, that travel by the sea's paths. O Lord, our Master, how the majesty of thy name fills all the earth!

===============

Luke 1.68-79 : Benedictus
(Knox)

Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel; he has visited his people, and wrought their redemption. He has raised up a sceptre of salvation for us among the posterity of his servant David, according to the promise which he made by the lips of holy men that have been his prophets from the beginning; salvation from our enemies, and from the hand of all those who hate us. So he would carry out his merciful design towards our fathers, by remembering his holy covenant. He had sworn an oath to our father Abraham, that he would enable us to live without fear in his service, delivered from the hand of our enemies, passing all our days in holiness, and approved in his sight. And thou, my child, wilt be known for a prophet of the most High, going before the Lord, to clear his way for him; thou wilt make known to his people the salvation that is to release them from their sins. Such is the merciful kindness of our God, which has bidden him come to us, like a dawning from on high, to give light to those who live in darkness, in the shadow of death, and to guide our feet into the way of peace.

Six Untitled Poems


Let us compose
An idiom of blue.

*

Here we approach
The meaning of such --

*

Acolyte, be still :
Hear the vesper bell.
Scholars, cease your casual causerie.

*

We must compel, force the scurry of snow
Into a system, canonical, legitimate,
Catechize the rainbow, lesson the butterfly.

*

Monks of the east
Drink light, write life.
Troparia of endless heaven.

*

Silence
Keep deepest.
Forsake the praise
Of happy trifles, of gaudy naught.
This, the poem's birth, the poet's vocation.


2000

from Louisville Airport, May 5, 1966
by Thomas Merton, OCSO (1915-1968)

Here on the foolish grass
Where the rich in small jets
Land with their own hopes
And their own kind

We with the gentle liturgy
Of shy children have permitted God
To make again that first world
Here on the foolish grass
After the spring rain has dried
And all the loneliness

Is for a moment lost in that simple
Liturgy of children permitting God
To make again that love which is His alone

His alone and terribly obscure and rare
Love walks gently as a deer
To where we sit on the green grass
In the marvel of this day's going down

[...]

Found in Learning to Love : Exploring Solitude and Freedom (The Journals of Thomas Merton, Volume Six 1966-1967), HarperCollins 1997, pp. 52-53

Luke 2:29-32 : Nunc dimittis
(Msgr Ronald Knox)

Ruler of all, now dost thou let thy servant go in peace, according to thy word; for my own eyes have seen that saving power of thine which thou hast prepared in the sight of all nations. This is the light which shall give revelation to the Gentiles, this is the glory of thy people Israel.

Hosea (Osee) 6:1-6
as translated by Msgr Ronald Knox

Ay, in their distress they will be waiting full early at my door; Back to the Lord! will be their cry; salve he only can bring, that wounded us; hand that smote us shall heal. Dead men to-day and to-morrow, on the third day he will raise us up again, to live in his presence anew. Acknowledge we, cease we never to acknowledge the Lord, he will reveal himself, sure as the dawn, come back to us, sure as the rains of winter and spring come back to the earth. What way will serve with you, men of Ephraim? Juda, what way will serve? Ruth of yours is but momentary, fades like the early mist, like morning dew. What wonder I should send prophets first, to shape men to my will if they could, and then utter my sentence of ruin? Believe me, this doom of thine shall be clear as daylight. A tender heart wins favour with me, not sacrifice; God's acknowledging, not victim's destroying ...

Wisdom 7.7 to 8.2
in the translation of Msgr Ronald Knox (Sheed & Ward, NY 1956)

Whence, then, did the prudence spring that endowed me? Prayer brought it; to God I prayed, and the spirit of wisdom came upon me. This I valued more than kingdom or throne; I thought nothing of my riches in comparison. There was no jewel I could match with it; all my treasures of gold were a handful of dust beside it, my silver seemed but base clay in presence of it. I treasured wisdom more than health or beauty, preferred her to the light of day; hers is a flame which never dies down. Together with her all blessings came to me; boundless prosperity was her gift. All this I enjoyed, with wisdom to prepare my way for me, never guessing that it all sprang from her. The lessons she taught me are riches honestly won, shared without stint, openly proclaimed; a treasure men will find incorruptible. Those who enjoy it are honoured with God's friendship, so high a value he sets on her instruction.

God's gift it is, if speech answers to thought of mine, and thought of mine to the message I am entrusted with. Who else can shew wise men the true path, check them when they stray? We are in his hands, we and every word of ours; our prudence in act, our skill in craftsmanship. Sure knowledge he has imparted to me of all that is; how the world is ordered, what influence have the elements, how the months have their beginning, their middle, and their ending, how the sun's course alters and the seasons revolve, how the years have their cycles, the stars their places. To every living thing its own breed, to every beast its own moods; the winds rage, and men think deep thoughts; the plants keep their several kinds, and each root has its own virtue; all the mysteries and all the surprises of nature were made known to me; wisdom herself taught me, that is the designer of them all.

Mind-enlightening is the influence that dwells in her; set high apart; one in its source, yet manifold in its operation; subtle, yet easily understood. An influence quick in movement, inviolable, persuasive, gentle, right-thinking, keen-edged, irresistible, beneficent, kindly, gracious, steadfast, proof against all error and all solicitude. Nothing is beyond its power, nothing hidden from its view, and such capacity has it that it can pervade the minds of all living men; so pure and subtle an essence is thought. Nothing so agile that it can match wisdom for agility; nothing can penetrate this way and that, etherial as she. Steam that ascends from the fervour of divine activity, pure effluence of his glory who is God all-powerful, she feels no passing taint; she, the glow that radiates from eternal light, she, the untarnished mirror of God's majesty, she, the faithful image of his goodness. Alone, with none to aid her, she is all-powerful; herself ever unchanged, she makes all things new; age after age she finds her way into holy men's hearts, turning them into friends and spokesmen of God. Her familiars it is, and none other, that God loves. Brightness is hers beyond the brightness of the sun, and all the starry host; match her with light itself, and she outvies it; light must still alternate with darkness, but where is the conspiracy can pull down wisdom from her throne?

Bold is her sweep from world's end to world's end, and everywhere her gracious ordering manifests itself.

She, from my youth up has been my heart's true love, my heart's true quest; she was the bride I longed for, enamoured of her beauty.

Conceptual poem

qwertyuiop

asdfghjkl

zxcvbnm

Out of hospital

and many thanks -- in fact, thanks of incalculable quantity & unfathomable profundity to those of you who prayed, wrote, sent well-wishes cybernetically or via the mails. My physical health was never in danger, nor even appreciably impaired. But it was necessary for me to spend the last 11 days within the secular cloister, if you will, of a psychiatric hospital.

I mention this only to assure all of you that my physical health remains good (but for that gross and laggard girth which obstinately balks at self-diminishment), and to convey that I did not undergo any great degree of physical suffering or pain. There are those in St Blog's (Mr Serafin and Miss Knapp, most notably) who have borne heavier crosses than I. But it is no small cross to have one's liberty restricted, and to be subjected to sundry interviews and medications, to be sundered most cruelly from one's friends in blogdom!

But owing to the exceedingly humane and gracefully sagacious staff at (name invented) Robin Grove Hospital, my stay in the ward was for the most part pleasant, and exceedingly rehabilitative.

I may have more tonight; if not, condone my Cal Coolidge-ism. Although I raise the topic of the nature of my hospitalization, I don't see the need to expatiate about the precise circumstances that got me in. But, I do have to say :


Thank you ! ! !


to those members of the parish I spoke to in person, to those whose emails and good wishes I received through the offices of a diligent and faithful and loyal and most loving and sisterly intermediary ... and to those two incredible souls (New Englanders, both -- and one outside Massachusetts!!) who offered to visit me.

I marvel at the Christian charity of all those to whom I have alluded in this all too hasty summary of the kindnesses paid to me in recentest days and weeks. God bless you all.

John, believe it or not, Keats

Two or three posies
With two or three simples --
Two or three noses
With two or three pimples --
Two or three wise men
And two or three ninnies --
Two or three purses
And two or three guineas --
Two or three raps
At two or three doors --
Two or three naps
Of two or three hours --
Two or three cats
And two or three mice --
Two or three sprats
At a very great price --
Two or three sandies
And two or three tabbies --
Two or three dandies
And two Mrs Abbeys --
Two or three smiles
And two or three frowns --
Two or three miles
To two or three towns --
Two or three pegs
For two or three bonnets --
Two or three dove's eggs
To hatch into sonnets.

an excerpt

                    Your poetry, if possible, should be extended
Somewhat beyond your experience, while still remaining true to it;
Unconscious material should play a luscious part
In what you write, since without the unconscious part
You know very little; and your plainest statements should be
Even better than plain. A reader should put your work down puzzled,
Distressed, and illuminated, ready to believe
It is curious to be alive.

-- Kenneth Koch, from "The Art of Poetry"

Flying revision's flag
via the Academy of American Poets -- poets.org

The poet Donald Hall (b. 1928) on the need for poets to take second, third, and even eighty-third looks, at their work. On the inauthenticity of spontaneity. On revising into the direction of truth.

Most poets don't revise enough. Most poems that I see--in the mail and in print--have not been gone over thoroughly enough, and include dead metaphors and redundancies and other errors that ought to expose themselves to the inquiring or depressive intellect. I've said it before: You should stare at a poem long enough so that you have one hundred reasons for using every comma, one hundred reasons for every linebreak, one hundred reasons for every and and or. Reasons include rhythm, the emphasis that rhythm bestows, consonants and vowels, and the mouth-joy or dance-movement that enforces a line or activates the metaphorical workings of the brain. Reasons can be visual, how the poem looks on the page; reasons can be semantic or formal or the two together. The point is: Try to be every bit as conscious as you can possibly be.

What she said
when she found out I hadn't yet seen Amélie

"Oh, you have to see it! You hella hella do."

Wishes, Lies, and Dreams : Teaching Children to Write Poetry
from the "Lies" section

I am in New York in a cow's head.
I am still in New York in a cow's head.
I am still in New York in a cow's head.
Now I'm in New York in a flower.
I'm now in New York in a cow's head.
Now I'm in Spain taking a bath.
Now I'm in Spain taking a bath tub.
Now I'm in New England eating my friend in the bathroom.
Now I'm still in the bathroom eating my friend but I'm on a cow.
Now I'm in New York in a cow's head.

Marion Mackles, 4th grade

=============

I am grass as green as can be.
I am in a tree on a leaf.
I am in New York on a flying blueberry.
Mud is pretty.
Rain is ugly.
I am on a vine.
I am snow.
I am snow in Spain.
I am rain in Spain.
I am the sun in Spain.
I am a cloud in Spain
I am in Spain
I am Spain

Marion Mackles, 4th grade

=============

from the "I Used to/But Now" section

Last Time and This Time

When I was a baby I had no pets.
Now I have three pets.
When I was a baby I couldn't swim, I couldn't even play.
When I was a baby I wore baby clothes but little clothes.
And now I wear big clothes like size 12½.
When I was a baby I went to bed early.
And now I go to bed at 10:00 in the night.
When I was a baby my mother and father loved me,
But now love and hate me sometimes.
I just like both? Do you? I just like both.
When I was a baby I looked so pretty,
But now just forget me.
When I was a baby I couldn't play,
I couldn't play because somebody might get hurt and you know who.
But now I am strong, and I am glad I am me. Are you? I'm just glad.

Tomas Torres, 4th grade

=============

Kenneth Koch & the students of PS 61, op. cit. (Vintage, 1971), MM poems p. 193, TT poem p. 170

via dappled & flos





I'm exceptionally artistic!

Find your soul type at kelly.moranweb.com.

Apostasy of Love
2003

When I wrote "Apostasy," it was December of 1985. The first draft had thirty lines. I was still at 43 Merritt St., in the small cozy quiet room with the purple carpet and the scenic back alley. Plenty of Smiths cassettes. Plenty of John Irving novels. And I had Dylan Thomas and those Oscar Williams anthologies as boon companions. I was learning how to make stanzas, iambic and aggressive, sinewy and lush, like a slam-dance collision between Baudelaire and Hopkins. It was the first of my two senior years. I wrote it on math paper, those big yellow-beige pads of perishable stuff. The ode was immortal. I had never been older than sixteen, at least, not to that point. I was ignorant of Strunk & White, but did well enough without them. Zac Beaulac was my friendly archrival. I liked "Original Sin" by INXS. I had no pets. The Breakfast Club was a quotidian obligation -- well, perhaps that was months before. I couldn't be persuaded to read Persuasion. (Thought of re-trying Trollope recently!) I wonder what Gillian thought of the poem. I gave the world a cup of explicit lilacs, and this in December, just before Christmas. I hadn't yet met Heather. (Or maybe I had! But we hadn't yet become best friends.) I recited "Be My Girl, Sally" with J. Chan in the crowded cafeteria. And the stars of Hamilton were far in the future. I wasn't going to church. I was seeing French movies with Lewis, who was to become a physicist, a word I can scarcely type. And Jim was only 23, and not yet a teacher. Seamus Heaney, who had signed my copy of Station Island the previous spring, was still a decade away from his Nobel. I wouldn't touch the Beats with a yardstick. I idolized Rimbaud, but that was on the wane. I met Michelle the following September. She was pregnant then. We don't talk anymore. I carried The Colossus in my pocket, even to weddings. Certainly, I had read a little Robert Lowell -- The Dolphin, most likely. Still rode the ten-speed to Winthrop and back. Bragdon still existed. At least, that's what he called himself. Sam existed, too (he was Mr. D back then -- an evangelist of addenda Catullana, the parts too racy, too earthy, too alive for the textbook). Deb existed, but I didn't know her yet (She was twelve! And she'll be thirty in the summer!). The Harvard Book Store certainly existed (with its capacious basement full of paperback classics bon marché), as did Reading International and the Caffè Avventura. Always there was pizza before Newbury Comics -- Zac and Ben added Mountain Dew, which I thought strange. Mr. Willoughby was still making puns as an English teacher at Number 78. That's an aloe plant. Speak to it. Say "aloe!" Tall fellow, conservative, Catholic, impeccable wit. Didn't like gay books, but didn't hector. Would gently admonish : "I don't think André Gide's the most salubrious reading." Hated La Nausée for being so damn depressing. He liked Eliot, Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Debussy, jazz, and atrocious puns. May he rest in peace. The Celtics still had the Big Three (Bird, Parish, McHale), plus Dennis Johnson and Danny Ainge. Ronald Reagan was president. Michael Dukakis was governor. Ray Flynn was mayor, and only halfway through his first term. The Pope was 65. Venus was five, Serena was four. The world was a wee bit younger than it is today. I have to find that poem. Where did I put it?

And they call this an Irish movie list?
via O'Rama

The USCCB recommends ... these films for 3/17.

Where, for St Patrick's sake, is The Nephew (1998), with Hill Harper, Donal McCann, Aislin McGuckin, Sinead Cusack, and Pierce Brosnan???? Where, where, said Mrs O'Hare??

Don't tell anyone I said so

Let's just keep this between you, me and the venetian blinds, but listening to Stevie Nicks sing is a sensation much like violating the innocence of a box of Brillo pads.

And when you combine that with the iconically luminous, inefffably splendid (NOT!!!) Tom Petty in "Stop Dragging My Heart Around," you have what I believe is a foretaste of veriest hell.

She
by Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)

I think the dead are tender. Shall we kiss? --
My lady laughs, delighting in what is.
If she but sighs, a bird puts out its tongue.
She makes space lonely with a lovely song.
She lilts a low soft language, and I hear
Down long sea-chambers of the inner ear.

We sing together; we sing mouth to mouth.
The garden is a river flowing south.
She cried out loud the soul's own secret joy;
She dances, and the ground bears her away.
She knows the speech of light, and makes it plain
A lively thing can come to life again.

I feel her presence in the common day,
In that slow dark that widens every eye.
She moves as water moves, and comes to me,
Stayed by what was, and pulled by what would be.

from The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (Anchor Books, 1975), p. 124

And more poetry

at Flos Carmeli, poems which Mr Riddle describes as inchoate, but in which this reader finds considerable splendor and magnitude.

The last two or three days, especially. Just start with the most recent posts & scroll down. Don't miss the excerpt of 31 Poems for 31 Days.

Wishes, Lies, and Dreams : Teaching Children to Write Poetry

Run Appalosa Run!

The plants are the shadow of the Jolly Green Giant
Mr. Koch is a very well-dressed poetry book walking around in shining shoes.

Tara Housman, 4th grade

=============

The light is a seagull
Mrs. Wiener is a pretzel she is worth two cents
The dog is a door opening and closing
The book is a written reindeer
The yellow letter is a moon

Anthony Gomes, 4th grade

=============

Blank is a Blank

The snow is a snowflake.
The blue sky is an ocean.
The blackboard is a black notebook.
An apple is a red rose.
A bat is a big fat stick.
Mrs. Wiener is a lovely flower which shouts.

Tomas Torres, 4th grade

=============

I used to be a fish
But now I am a nurse
I used to read My City
But now I am up to Round the Corner
I used to be as silly as David
But now I am sillier than David

Andrea Dockery, 1st grade

=============

Kenneth Koch & the students of PS 61, op. cit. (Vintage, 1971), pp. 144-5, 156.

and oh the harvard book store

was good to me yesterday. They took a quartet of books off my hands (Ferlinghetti, Lamott [I apostatize from the state religion on Bird by Bird], a New Jerusalem Bible [dreadful translation, esp. the Psalms], & an underinspiring book called "Praying with the Church") & gave me $8.20 credit, so I browsed for books & came up with these three, that cost me only $3.35 more than my credit.

-- The Metaphysical Poets (ed. Dame Helen Gardner, Penguin Classics)

-- The Pocket Book of Modern Verse, ed. Oscar Williams, 3rd rev. ed. by Hyman Sobiloff (1972). I used to have the 50s version -- also bought at Hvd Bk Store -- but the 70s version has (in addition to just about everybody from Walt Whitman to Dylan Thomas) a lot of the 60s folks : Dugan, Logan, Creeley, Bly, Ginsberg, O'Hara, and an excerpt from a mammoth whimsical colorful poem called "Faces" by Kenneth Koch! -- a finer book that the earlier editions, livelier, more capacious. Begins with the Dong with a Luminous Nose.

And last but greatestly :

-- 84, Charing Cross Road by Helene Hanff. Saw the film 16 years ago & many times since. Borrowed the book from the lye-berry a few times. But now I own it, under circumstances (bookbartering! a famous old New England custom!) that must please miss hanff's ghost.

You might be seeing excerpts of 84 hereabouts. Yes, in addition to the Wishes, Lies & Dreams, and the promised-but-not-proffered Anselm of Canterbury, and the dylanpoems, and the kitchen sink.

Books!

Ah, used bookstores! Quite the trio I found today. Trio of books, that is, not of stores.

And so to bed, to read them, by the light of the bedside lamp ... buona notte a tutti !!

Sam Pepys gives us a chuckle

The recentest entry begins in this wise :

This day the wench rose at two in the morning to wash, and my wife and I lay talking a great while.

And from March 10th, this delightful sentence :

He went with me to my office, whither also Mr. Madge comes half foxed and played the fool upon the violin that made me weary.

A swan of bees
continuing with Kenneth Koch's Wishes, Lies, and Dreams : Teaching Children to Write Poetry

A chapter in WL&D is called "A Swan of Bees." Koch got the idea from a third-grade poem which mentioned a swarm of bees, but spelled it "a swan of bees." And so he had the kids imagine if one thing were made of something else : a window of ice, a teacher of freckles, a blackboard of nightmares, a pencil of lightning, and so on.

Sort of the same idea that goes behind the group-names for animals : An exaltation of larks, a kindle of kittens, a convocation of eagles, a grunt of dylans ...

Here are two of the students' poems :

I Would Like To Have

I would like to have a door of hearts
I would like to have a room of roses
I would like to have a window of flowers
I would like to have a book of stripes
I would like to have a desk of red strawberries
I would like to have a boat of kittens
I would like to have a surfboard of daisies
I would like to have a pocketful of bows
I would like to have a pillow full of air
I would like to have a brush full of spots
I would like to have a name full of designs
I would like to have a tree full of money.

Ilona Baburka, 3rd grade

===============

Strange Things

A blackboard of moons
A window of kisses
A flag of boxes
A swimming pool of doorknobs
A shirt made of tulips
A heart of squares
A teacher made of hearts
A man made out of balloons
A girl made out of popcorn
A boat made out of clocks
A girl made out of kittens.

Jeannie Turner, 3rd grade

===============

I'm thinking we could do this, for fun. Come up with about six or seven of these combinations, and put them in the comment box. Make them outlandish, ironic, apt, musical, whimsical -- and yes, add colors if you like.

A quibble of pebbles
A generosity of thieves
A calculation of skeptics
An ebullience of Drew Barrymores
A magnificence of deep blue sleepers
A hustle of charlatans
An intimacy of whisperings
A spool of buttons
A syrup of homilies
A perfection of bishops
A wrinkle of senators
A brace of barmaids
A divinity of troubadours

For the Cherub Cat is a term of the Angel Tiger

Eve Tushnet gives us Kit Smart's tribute to his cat Jeoffry.

millisecond epic

'twixt sky and snow
flies the delicate knife
of a bluejay

2003

ceci-cela surréaliste

1. Married or single?
2. Knit or crochet?
3. Homebody or world traveller?
4. Star Search or American Idol?
5. Dancing or karaoke?
6. Elvis Presley or Elvis Costello?
7. Bus or train?
8. Batman or Superman?
9. Chocolate or vanilla?
10. Which came first...the chicken or the egg?

1. Single
2. Crotchety. Darning his socks in the night when there's nobody there. What does he care?
3. Worldbody home-travel.
4. Star Search & Billy Idol.
5. Karaoke.
6. Every day. Every day. Every day. Every day I write the book.
7. Train.
8. Regis!
9. Hoodsies.
10. Paramecium! Big paramecium! All over the place.

your name

your name
is a white
rose

is
a bright
sparrow

awakening
the sleeping
leaves

*

your name
is a psalm

is a warm
world

is a dark
star

*

your
name

is coronation
and consolation

*

your name
is a silent
dove

singing canticles
of tumultuous
peace

1997

Poems

Added links to a bunch of silly and solemn, serious and surreal, comic and tragic, experimental and old-fashioned, radical and reactionary, rhymed and unrhymed, versed and unversed poems in the left margin. Am thinking of adding links to the famous poetry found here, but ere long I'll have links to every post in the blog! Oh, well, maybe a few.

Hope every one had a good day. I think I did. Am too tired to know at the moment.

Cal Ripken

Have to put something here today. Can't leave a day blank. Wouldn't be right.

Wouldn't be prudent. Break my streak.

And the rocks melt wi' the sun

My love is a purple snowflake that's newly tumbled in January, earthward from the æther;

My love is a timorous groundhog that blesses its own shadow in the flinchings of February;

My love is a sun-porch, homey and embracing, blazing with glacial light in the middle of March;

My love is a boon, an unexpected windfall, my true love embodies the spendless treasures of April;

My love is a mint julep, a winning wager, a blue blossom with yellow streaks, a silver sky with tracks of teal, in most adventurous Maytime;

My love is a splendid saint, a candid apparition, a white-robed roisín dubh in the secret places of June;

My love is a forest of fireworks (out-bursting politely : drastically glowing) in the luminous night skies of July;

My love is an unexpected cool spell, a Saint Lawrence autumn, arriving timely in August;

My love is the impatience of scholars, the vehemence of evangelists, the sharp first frost in the suburbs of September;

My love is a scientist (not unlike a scientist), circumambulating the cloistergarth of a ruddy blushing October;

My love is a bastion of withered foliage, a glorious cadence, a crisp epigram, a blind and desperate bluster in November;

And as for December -- well, what of it? Take your bewitching solstices, and your bright red-green eternities. And add a spark-and-a-half of miracle and glory. Plus hope, plus faith. And laughter for good measure.

She's the thirteenth month of the year, with a billion birthdays of grace, every minute, every second, every sleeping millisecond, every lively wakeful thousand dreaming hours.

Sestina
by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321)

I have reached, alas, the long shadow
and short day of whitening hills
when color is lost in the grass.
My longing, all the same, keeps green
it is so hooked in the hard stone
that speaks and hears like a woman.

In that same way this new woman
stands as cold as snow in shadow,
less touched than if she had been stone
by the sweet time that warms the hills
and brings them back from white to green,
dressing them in flowers and grass.

Who, when she wreathes her hair with grass,
thinks of any other woman?
The golden waves so mix with green
that Love himself seeks its shadow
that has me fixed between small hills
more strongly than cemented stone.

More potent than a precious stone,
her beauty wounds, and healing grass
cannot help; across plains and hills
I fled this radiant woman.
From her light I found no shadow
of mountain, wall, or living green.

I have seen her pass, dressed in green,
and thought the sight would make a stone
love, as I, even her shadow.
And I have walked with her on grass,
speaking like a lovesick woman,
enclosed within the highest hills.

But streams will flow back to their hills
before this branch, sappy and green,
catches fire (as does a woman)
from me, who would bed down on stone
and gladly for his food crop grass
just to see her gown cast shadow.

The heavy shadow cast by hills
this woman's light can change to green,
as one might hide a stone in grass.

(trans. James Schuyler)

Article on the rosary

by Carol Zaleski, writing in Christian Century. Link spotted chez Serafin.

Anselm of Canterbury
from "Prayer to St Mary (1)" -- when the mind is weighed down with heaviness

Mary, holy Mary,
among the holy ones the most holy after God.
Mother with virginity to be wondered at,
Virgin with fertility to be cherished,
you bore the Son of the most High,
and brought forth the Saviour of the lost human race.
Lady, shining before all others with such sanctity,
pre-eminent with such dignity,
it is very sure that you are not least in power and in honour.
Life-bearer, mother of salvation,
shrine of goodness and mercy,
I long to come before you in my misery,
sick with the sickness of vice,
in pain from the wounds of crimes,
putrid with the ulcers of sin.
However near I am to death, I reach out to you,
and I long to ask that by your powerful merits
and your loving prayers,
you will deign to heal me.
Good Lady,
a huge dullness is between you and me,
so that I am scarcely aware of the extent of my sickness.
I am so filthy and stinking
that I am afraid you will turn your merciful face from me.
So I look to you to convert me,
but I am held back by despair,
and even my lips are shut against prayer.

The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm with the Proslogion, trans. with intro. by Sister Benedicta Ward, SLG (Penguin Classics, 1986), p. 107

Thomas Carew

When we began, we were convinced
Of literature's innocence.

Lord Herbert of Cherbury

When we adored these vestiges, we knew great joy.

Caught between

Rules, the ebony star.

Spenser, or Spender

Philomel's brink, the setting of façades.

Belaurelled

Sailing alone above around about. How these sloops, these sleeps, meander.

Spring

Fourteenth anniversary of a single sestina.

Marginalia, or the words you use should be your own

A sarabande the wind mowed on the mead.

The missing diaeresis

Zoë found it.

Ah, yes!

The archbishop. Due back in the library on Thursday. And fifty-odd, sixty-odd pages to go.

Good night, all.

Spent the 10 to 11 hour

watching a show that started promising and turned rancid. I need mouthwash for the mind, to get the taste of the last ten minutes out. And to add insult (almost typed "inslut") to injury, there was a wonderfully correct message about the death penalty. And of course, the timeworn device of the criminal who's done a lot of bad stuff, but just might be innocent of the one thing that got him a date with the lethal-injection gurney. The coda of the show was a ten-minute rap video, which made my heart rejoice.

But now I'm awake, and rather fully awake, whereas at 9.30 or so, I was more than half asleep.

Memoranda to self

1. Add that Herbert index to the Poetry & Culture part of Places Oft. (Okay, did that. Now what about the Plath page?)

2. Start the Anselm of Canterbury tomorrow !! (Hm. Maybe not. Can't decide what, or how much, to excerpt.)

3. Climb Mount Everest. (Nah.)

4. What about the haiku?

5. Ah, forget about the haiku. (A haiku-writing contest, with first line given, might be fun.)

6. Hope those captions keep coming. (Haloscan, mon amour !!)

7. Remember, man, that thou art dust; and unto dust shalt thou return.

Wishes, Lies, and Dreams : Teaching Children to Write Poetry


My dress is as pink as a rose
The color red is like blood
The zoo is like Africa
The light is as bright as a star
Cecilia's socks are as bright as a sun shining

Magaly Rotgers, 5th grade

===============

Venice reminds me of a model of an ant hill.

The eraser is like a dusty old book.

A glass reminds me of the Atlantic Ocean.

Roberto Marcilla, 6th grade

===============

The letter Z is like a moon, almost gone.

Ruth Cobrinik, 6th grade

===============

The Things I Hear in the City

I hear traffic
I hear the Bronx bridge
When I ride on it
I hear cats go mew
I hear yelling.

Andrea Dockery, 1st grade

===============

a cat goes mewmew mewmew
a car goes PPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

Valerie Chassé, 1st grade

===============

I hear the car go honk-honk.
The dog went to the hog and said you little dog and the hog said you are a dog not me.
I hear the people go quark-quark.
I hear the drum go bum-bum.
I hear the piano go be-be.
I hear the mice go squeak-squeak.
The cat sat on the mat and the cat said meor-meor.
I heard a bird go go-go.
The Monkees sound like donkeys.

Ruby Johnson, 4th grade

===============

Kenneth Koch and the students of PS 61, NYC, op. cit. (Vintage, 1971), pp. 100-113, passim

These poems, from the two sections entitled "Comparisons" and "Noises."

Worth noting : When he read poetry to the children, he didn't read "children's poetry." He read Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams ("This is just to say" and "Between walls" among others), Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens (the "Bantams in Pine-woods" poem) and García Lorca in Spanish and in English!

He did compile another book of children's poems, which take direct inspiration from the famous poets of the past and of modernity, called Rose, where did you get that red? in which he juxtaposed the students' poems with the classics by which they were inspired. When one thinks of elementary and middle-school students reading Thomas Carew, William Blake, and the other poets mentioned above !!

Raymond Arroyo on Mel Gibson's Passion

In opinionjournal. Link spotted at Fructus Ventris.

February 37th

Winter has been bitchy of late, vexing the insomniac with its dolorous crooning, afflicting the pedestrian with its lachrymific sting, at almost all hours of the day. Or more than all. Twenty-five eight.

The snowdrifts, what's left of them, appeal to the imagiste bailiff to extend freezing temperatures through April, or May, or next May.

And just the other day, the wee sleekit shivering daystar was bouncing up and down in the heavens, just to keep itself warm.

It's 600 degrees below the IQ of a Belgian waffle. The spiral-bound notebooks require fuel assistance. The flatlanders pay steep heating bills, as do the barnacles on their uncozy pierstakes.

"It's been one hell of a season, I tell you," said the oldtimer in red flannel, hashing it out with the greenhorn in plaid. He sipped steam from from his coffee, or what passes for coffee in this epoch, and groaned, impervious, or at best, hemidemisemipervious, to the particulars of God's great plan. "But spring impends, you hear me? And when it comes, you don't want to be caught unawares, nodding off, asleep at the wheel, woolgathering or even lintgathering, twiddling your clichés -- in short, less than fully prepared. Best take the miscellanies out of the toolshed, just in case."

The shepherd's calendar (not to be confused with the goatherd's calendar) turns its prosaic faccia bella toward the abbreviated breviary. In between the celebrity gossip, the radio intones "...falling through the teens." Just the way we like it. The tobogganing this year has been splendid, even uphill.

Ah, second-hand bookstores !!

Found the Ashbery book mentioned below ... and also (a drumroll might be fitting) ...

... the Penguin Classics edition of The Prayers and Meditations of Saint Anselm [of Canterbury], with the Proslogion, translated and with an introduction by Benedicta Ward, SLG. This volume, three dollars! Huzzah!

Might, someday soon, begin excerpting some of the prayers at this page.

Today might be surrealist poetry day.

As opposed to, you know, all the previous days that weren't surrealist poetry days.

John Ashbery

Sailboat of the Luxembourg! Vibrations of crisp mornings ripple ever closer, the joiner joins, the ostler ostles, the seducer seduces, nor stirs far from his crimson hammock. Delphic squibs caparison the bleak afternoon and the critics love it ...

from "Theme Park Days" in Chinese Whispers (FSG, 2002), p. 9

Coming soon ...

Anselm & Ashbery. But especially Anselm.

Or, what I found this day at the used bookstore ...

This picture



could use a caption, couldn't it?

Place suggestions in the comment-box.

Karl Rahner, of all people

Two different weblogs this week have shown this theologian to advantage :

At Dappled Things, a meditation on the Heart of Christ from the eighth volume of Theological Investigations ...

... and at the Catholic Blog for Lovers, birthday wishes for the theologian, and a gentle exhortation not to dismiss the earlier work because of the later.

BJG vs DMN
redux

Fr Groeschel's response to that piece (or piece of ... ) in the Dallas Morning News.

Via Annunciations.

Today, this insect
by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Today, this insect, and the world I breathe,
Now that my symbols have outelbowed space,
Time at the city spectacles, and half
The dear, daft time I take to nudge the sentence,
In trust and tale have I divided sense,
Slapped down the guillotine, the blood-red double
Of head and tail made witnesses to this
Murder of Eden and green genesis.

The insect certain is the plague of fables.

This story's monster has a serpent caul,
Blind in the coil scrams round the blazing outline,
Measures his own length on the garden wall
And breaks his shell in the last shocked beginning;
A crocodile before the chrysalis,
Before the fall from love the flying heartbone,
Winged like a sabbath ass this children's piece
Uncredited blows Jericho on Eden.

The insect fable is the certain promise.

Death : death of Hamlet and the nightmare madmen,
An air-drawn windmill on a wooden horse,
John's beast, Job's patience, and the fibs of vision,
Greek in the Irish sea the ageless voice :
'Adam I love, my madmen's love is endless,
No tell-tale lover has an end more certain,
All legends' sweethearts on a tree of stories,
My cross of tales behind the fabulous curtain.'

from The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (New Directions, 1954), pp. 47-48

In the margin of this weblog

you can now find a daily proverb (underneath "Within more last" and above Places Oft) ...

Abortionists

in addition to their other evils, protect statutory rapists, according to this article -- spotted at Fructus Ventris.

Wednesday
an acrostic

Sometimes, a flurry vexes the northern pines.
I claim these woods, these hospitable forest-frosts;
Wonder lives here. You can discern its ample majesty
If you simply listen to its limpid silences.
I'm a wholesomer chap in these wintry precincts,
Able to chill, keep fretfulness on the down-low,
To meditate as eastern polymaths
Do quite oft during soberest Twelfthmonth.
The deep tmesis of these gray mornings, these
Things of dim sound, of mute glow -- quanta dolcezza !
I seem fresh out of phrases, for real; they've all been
Said and resaid, old school, the gaveller's going-gone.
I resort to sly vernacularities, word-somersaults :
Would that the snowflakes could respond in kind !

2001

Notable quotation

The only difference between the Surrealists and me is that I am a Surrealist.
Salvador Dalí

Spotted at Video meliora ...

Thomas Hibbs at National Review gives us a cheerfully depressing denunciation of February vacation, a weeklong pause in the damage inflicted by academic activity of Massachusetts schools.

Also he quotes Keats, praises Jack Nicholson, and harbors "the radical if forlorn hope that Massachusetts will someday adopt a two-party system" (for offices besides governor) ...

Yes

The biggest problem facing some members of the black community is not the color of their skin, but the thinness of it. Such people will never find happiness in this life or the next as long as their lives are one endless and microscopic search for things to take offense at.

Mark Shea, three weeks ago, on this story.

A New Zealand woman

has offered to be crucified by President George W. Bush in exchange for a guarantee that the US will not launch a military strike on Iraq.

Via the Rat. We are inclined to agree with the Rat's assessment -- that the woman from New Zealand has her cabeza firmly and cozily ensconced in proctology's paradise.

I hate to break this to you, Mr Morrison .......

but if you've recently turned 40, you are not beginning your fourth decade of life. You have just ended it.

Forty years = four complete decades.

You are beginning your fifth decade. Just as I am approximately 37.5% of the way through with my fourth.

A child who is 18 months old (1.5 years old) is not in his first year of life; he's in his second. When he turns two, he begins his third year.

Am I turning into the mathematical version of nihil obstat? Oh well.

Te Deum Laudamus
by request

Te Deum laudamus : te Dominum confitemur.
Te aeternum Patrem omnis terra veneratur.

Tibi omnes Angeli; tibi caeli et universae Potestates;
Tibi Cherubim et Seraphim incessabili voce proclamant:
Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus, Dominus Deus Sabaoth.
Pleni sunt caeli et terra maiestatis gloriae tuae.

Te gloriosus Apostolorum chorus,
Te Prophetarum laudabilis numerus,
Te Martyrum candidatus laudat exercitus.

Te per orbem terrarum sancta confitetur Ecclesia,
Patrem immensae maiestatis:
Venerandum tuum verum et unicum Filium;
Sanctum quoque Paraclitum Spiritum.

Tu Rex gloriae, Christe.
Tu Patris sempiternus es Filius.
Tu ad liberandum suscepturus hominem, non horruisti Virginis uterum.
Tu, devicto mortis aculeo, aperuisti credentibus regna caelorum.
Tu ad dexteram Dei sedes, in gloria Patris.
Iudex crederis esse venturus.
Te ergo quaesumus, tuis famulis subveni : quos pretioso sanguine redemisti.
Aeterna fac cum sanctis tuis in gloria numerari.

Salvum fac populum tuum, Domine, et benedic hereditati tuae.
Et rege eos, et extolle illos usque in aeternum.
Per singulos dies benedicimus te.
Et laudamus nomen tuum in saeculum, et in saeculum saeculi.
Dignare, Domine, die isto sine peccato nos custodire.
Miserere nostri, Domine, miserere nostri.
Fiat misericordia tua, Domine, super nos, quemadmodum speravimus in te.
In te, Domine, speravi: non confundar in aeternum.

[The English translation of the 1928 Book of Common Prayer can be found here.]

I should try that sometime

Someone I worked with a few years ago told of being at Mass one Sunday, and at the exchange of peace, a cranky four-year-old child -- with an impeccably misanthropic attitude toward people thrusting their mitts at him and demanding a handshake -- shouted, "I DON'T WANT PEACE!"

Great Lent

for Orthodox Christians begins on March 10th; in anticipation, here is the Archpastoral Message of His Beatitude Metropolitan HERMAN, Metropolitan of All America and Canada. At the OCA website.

Incarnate devil
by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

Incarnate devil in a talking snake,
The central plains of Asia in his garden,
In shaping-time the circle stung awake,
In shapes of sin forked out the bearded apple,
And God walked there who was a fiddling warden
And played down pardon from the heavens' hill.

When we were strangers to the guided seas,
A handmade moon half holy in a cloud,
The wisemen tell me that the garden gods
Twined good and evil on an eastern tree;
And when the moon rose windily it was
Black as the beast and paler than the cross.

We in our Eden knew the secret guardian
In sacred waters that no frost could harden,
And in the mighty mornings of the earth;
Hell in a horn of sulphur and the cloven myth,
All heaven in a midnight of the sun,
A serpent fiddled in the shaping-time.

From The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (New Directions, 1954), p. 46.

John Montague

Hinge of silence
            creak for us
Rose of darkness
            unfold for us
Wood anemone
            sway for us
Blue harebell
            bend for us
Moist fern
            unfurl for us
Springy moss
            uphold us
Branch of pleasure
            lean on us
Leaves of delight
            murmur for us
Odorous wood
            breathe on us
Evening dews
            pearl for us
Secret waterfall
            pour for us
Hidden cleft
            speak to us
Portal of delight
            inflame us
Hill of motherhood
            wait for us
Gate of Birth
            open for us

J. Montague, quoted in Seamus Heaney's Preoccupations : Selected Prose 1968-1978 (FSG, 1980), p. 143.

Meditation on a March Wind
by Sister Mary Gilbert (dates unknown)

Should man oppose a rash rigidity
Then may the mad March strip his proud, resisting limbs
And strew the green, incipient wonder
Of his May afar;
Or may the hailstones fall as loud as summer thunder
And blast his springtime promise to an ugly scar
Before white glory rims
The naked silhouette of undelivered tree.

What childless woe to kill the unborn flower!
To summon back a fruitless world of frost
Wherein no womb-life stirs, no leafy shoot.
Wed pliancy to wisdom : let the anchored root
Give leash to swaying branches, Spirit-tossed
To pinnacles of trust and quiet power.

From Joyce Kilmer's Anthology of Catholic Poets, with a supplement edited by James Edward Tobin (Liveright, 1955), p. 356.

I can't believe it!

There she goes again!

She's tidied up ... and I can't find anything !!

Anyone else

sick of Yahoo's anti-Americanism?

Irish stuff redux
from the Carmina Gadelica

THE INVOCATION OF THE GRACES

I bathe thy palms
In showers of wine,
In the lustral fire,
In the seven elements,
In the juice of the rasps,
In the milk of honey,
And I place the nine pure choice graces
In thy fair fond face,
The grace of form,
The grace of voice,
The grace of fortune,
The grace of goodness,
The grace of wisdom,
The grace of charity,
The grace of choice maidenliness,
The grace of whole-souled loveliness,
The grace of goodly speech.

Dark is yonder town,
Dark are those therein,
Thou art the brown swan,
Going in among them.
Their hearts are under thy control,
Their tongues are beneath thy sole,
Nor will they ever utter a word
To give thee offence.

A shade art thou in the heat,
A shelter art thou in the cold,
Eyes art thou to the blind,
A staff art thou to the pilgrim,
An island art thou at sea,
A fortress art thou on land,
A well art thou in the desert,
Health art thou to the ailing.

Thine is the skill of the Fairy Woman,
Thine is the virtue of Bride the calm,
Thine is the faith of Mary the mild,
Thine is the tact of the woman of Greece,
Thine is the beauty of Emir the lovely,
Thine is the tenderness of Darthula delightful,
Thine is the courage of Maebh the strong,
Thine is the charm of Binne-bheul.

Thou art the joy of all joyous things,
Thou art the light of the beam of the sun,
Thou art the door of the chief of hospitality,
Thou art the surpassing star of guidance,
Thou art the step of the deer of the hill,
Thou art the step of the steed of the plain,
Thou art the grace of the swan of swimming,
Thou art the loveliness of all lovely desires.

The lovely likeness of the Lord
Is in thy pure face,
The loveliest likeness that
Was upon earth.

The best hour of the day be thine,
The best day of the week be thine,
The best week of the year be thine,
The best year in the Son of God's domain be thine.

Peter has come and Paul has come,
James has come and John has come,
Muriel and Mary Virgin have come,
Uriel the all-beneficent has come,
Ariel the beauteousness of the young has come,
Gabriel the seer of the Virgin has come,
Raphael the prince of the valiant has come,
And Michael the chief of the hosts has come,
And Jesus Christ the mild has come,
And the Spirit of true guidance has come,
And the King of kings has come on the helm,
To bestow on thee their affection and their love,
To bestow on thee their affection and their love.

***************

And here it is, if you like, in Gaelic !!

And speaking of dappled things !!

A beautiful diptych at Gerard Serafin's praiseofglory.com : a picture in words by Gerard Manley Hopkins (Glory be to God for dappled things, &c.) and a picture in paint by Marc Chagall.

From Dappled Things today

Part of Fr Jim Tucker's Ash Wednesday sermon :

Lent reminds us that Catholics don't believe in a once-in-a-lifetime conversion, after which no further work is necessary. Every day, we are called into deeper conformity to Christ Jesus, every day we are called to conversion. Lent helps to make that possible. Our penances aim in two directions, inward and outward. Inwardly, our goal is to conquer our selfishness, pride, and self-indulgence through works of self-discipline and asceticism. Outwardly, our goal is to grow in holy charity -- love and service for God, and love and service for our neighbor. Our penances are successful to the degree that they lead us to accomplish those goals. Throughout Lent, periodically ask yourself: am I becoming less self-centered; am I concretely loving and serving God more fully; am I concretely growing in charity toward my neighbor? And if not, why not?

Lent
by Eric Milner-White (1884-1961)

Lord, bless to me this Lent.

Lord, let me fast most truly and profitably,
by feeding in prayer on thy Spirit :
reveal me to myself
in the light of thy holiness.

Suffer me never to think
that I have knowledge enough to need no teaching,
wisdom enough to need no correction,
talents enough to need no grace,
goodness enough to need no progress,
humility enough to need no repentance,
devotion enough to need no quickening,
strength sufficient without thy Spirit;
lest, standing still, I fall back for evermore.

Shew me the desires that should be disciplined,
and sloths to be slain.
Shew me the omissions to be made up
and the habits to be mended.
And behind these, weaken, humble, and annihilate in me
self-will, self-righteousness, self-satisfaction,
self-sufficiency, self-assertion, vainglory.

May my whole effort be to return to thee;
O make it serious and sincere
persevering and fruitful in result,
by the help of thy Holy Spirit
and to thy glory,
my Lord and my God.

E. Milner-White, My God, My Glory : Aspirations, Acts, and Prayers on the Desire for God, ed. Joyce Huggett (Triangle/SPCK, 1994), p. 29

Carmina Gadelica

Hymns and poems in both English and Gaelic. Found it, stumbled onto it, whilst searching for something else. O happy find!

Lent
by George Herbert (1593-1633)

Welcome deare feast of Lent : who loves not thee,
He loves not Temperance, or Authoritie,
                        But is compos'd of passion.
The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church sayes, now :
Give to thy Mother, what thou wouldst allow
                        To ev'ry Corporation.

The humble soul compos'd of love and fear
Begins at home, and layes the burden there,
                        When doctrines disagree.
He sayes, in things which use hath justly got,
I am a scandall to the Church, and not
                        The Church is so to me.

True Christians should be glad of an occasion
To use their temperance, seeking no evasion,
                        When good is seasonable;
Unlesse Authoritie, which should increase
The obligation in us, make it lesse,
                        And Power it self disable.

Besides the cleannesse of sweet abstinence,
Quick thoughts and motions at a small expense,
                        A face not fearing light:
Whereas in fulnesse there are sluttish fumes,
Sowre exhalations, and dishonest rheumes,
                        Revenging the delight.

Then those same pendant profits, which the spring
And Easter intimate, enlarge the thing,
                        And goodnesse of the deed.
Neither ought other mens abuse of Lent
Spoil the good use; lest by that argument
                        We forfeit all our Creed.

It 's true, we cannot reach Christ's fortieth day;
Yet to go part of that religious way,
                        Is better than to rest:
We cannot reach our Savior's purity;
Yet are bid, Be holy ev'n as he.
                        In both let 's do our best.

Who goeth in the way which Christ hath gone,
Is much more sure to meet with him, than one
                        That travelleth by-ways:
Perhaps my God, though he be far before,
May turn, and take me by the hand, and more
                        May strengthen my decays.

Yet Lord instruct us to improve our fast
By starving sin and taking such repast
                        As may our faults control:
That ev'ry man may revel at his door,
Not in his parlor; banqueting the poor,
                        And among those his soul.