Ulysses

 by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

 

It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy'd

Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those

That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart

Much have I seen and known; cities of men

And manners, climates, councils, governments,

Myself not least, but honour'd of them all;

And drunk delight of battle with my peers,

Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

         This is my son, mine own Telemachus,

To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle,—

Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfil

This labour, by slow prudence to make mild

A rugged people, and thro' soft degrees

Subdue them to the useful and the good.

Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere

Of common duties, decent not to fail

In offices of tenderness, and pay

Meet adoration to my household gods,

When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

         There lies the port; the vessel puffs her sail:

There gloom the dark, broad seas. My mariners,

Souls that have toil'd, and wrought, and thought with me—

That ever with a frolic welcome took

The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed

Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil;

Death closes all: but something ere the end,

Some work of noble note, may yet be done,

Not unbecoming men that strove with Gods.

The lights begin to twinkle from the rocks:

The long day wanes: the slow moon climbs: the deep

Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends,

'T is not too late to seek a newer world.

Push off, and sitting well in order smite

The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

Of all the western stars, until I die.

It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

 

A Meditation on a Marriage

 by Ursula K. Le Guin

 

From my California, my great land
of gold and complications, wilderness,
enormous cities built on faults,
austere, bizarre, and inexhaustible
vineyards, valleys crowded with visions,

to your Georgia of red dirt
farms, where trees are all one green,
a bony piny sandy silence,
your Georgia of slow rivers, graves,
islands, that quiet place,

how could I come with all my California?

I see them come with open hands,
transparent, sharing everything,
giving and cleaving, nothing kept,
the emigrants that leave their motherland
for love and never look behind.

But if I would how could I give you
California? And I have to live
there, working the creeks my veins for gold.
Or you, could you leave Georgia,
leaving your bones behind,
and give me more than silence?

So we have made these no-one’s-lands
by meeting where we never know

when we shall meet or not,
like spies or pioneers,
telling the news in low voices
down in the willow coulees
in a grey evening, inland.

We met at sea, we married
in a foreign language: what wonder
if we cross a continent on foot
each time to find each other
at secret borders, bringing
of all my streams and darknesses of gold
and your deep graves and islands
a feather
a flake of mica
a willow leaf
that is our country,
ours alone. 

The Chance

by Arthur Sze

The blue-black mountains are etched 

with ice. I drive south in fading light.

The lights of my car set out before 

me, and disappear before my very eyes.

And as I approach thirty, the distances 

are shorter than I guess? The mind 

travels at the speed of light. But for 

how many people are the passions

ironwood, ironwood that hardens and hardens?

Take the ex-musician, insurance salesman, 

who sells himself a policy on his own life; 

or the magician who has himself locked 

in a chest and thrown into the sea, 

only to discover he is caught in his own chains.

I want a passion that grows and grows.

To feel, think, act, and be defined 

by your actions, thoughts, feelings.

As in the bones of a hand in an X-ray, 

I want the clear white light to work 

against the fuzzy blurred edges of the darkness:

even if the darkness precedes and follows 

us, we have a chance, briefly, to shine.

Sabbaths, 1998: III

by Wendell Berry 

 

 

Early in the morning, walking

in a garden in Vancouver

three thousand miles from your grave,

the sky dripping, song

sparrows singing in the borders,

I come suddenly upon

a Japanese dogwood, a tree

you loved, bowed down with bloom. 

By what blessedness do I weep? 

In honor of Wendell Berry's passing

 In Rain 

by Wendell Berry

 

 

1.

I go in under foliage

light with rain-light 

in the hill's cleft,

and climb, my steps

silent as flight

on the wet leaves.

Where I go, stones

are wearing away

under the sky's flow.

 

2.

The path I follow

I can hardly see

it is so faintly trod

and overgrown. 

At times, looking,

I fail to find it

among dark trunks, leaves

living and dead. And then

I am alone, the woods

shapeless around me.

I look away, my gaze

at rest among leaves,

and then I see the path

again, a dark way going on

through the light.

 

3.

In a mist of light

falling with the rain

I walk this ground

of which dead men

and women I have loved

are part, as they

are part of me. In earth,

in blood, in mind,

the dead and living

into each other pass,

as the living pass

in and out of loves

as stepping to a song.

The way I go is

marriage to this place,

grace beyond chance,

love's braided dance

covering the world. 

 

4.

Marriages to marriages

are joined, husband and wife

are plighted to all

husbands and wives,

any life has all lives

for its delight. 

Let the rain come,

the sun, and then the dark,

for I will rest

in an easy bed tonight.  

 

Benediction as Disdained Cuisine

by Jihyun Yun

 

Give me now

what scalds and reeks.

Give me chilis and garlic

raw. Give me dropwort,

chrysanthemum greens.

Buckwheat and tea. The bite

of a well-ripened kimchi.

Let me wrap my meat

in what others mistake

for spoil. Let me unearth months

-old jars of ponytail radish,

turned just so, and bless

rice with its sunny juices.

Give me that funk and meju pungency.

Let the fried fish stare vacuous

as I eat the reel of its body, mouth

lolling and teethed. The egg sac

nestled inside, give me that too.

Pouch of possibility, multitude and sweet.

So crisp the oil-puffed dorsal fins,

the tail fins. How good the flesh

off the cheeks, the grease off blistered

scales. Give me now what disgusts.

 

Grilled tongue, entrails fatly

gleaming. Fiery chicken

feet with the nails neatly trimmed.

Minutia of bone. Spit and keep eating.

Give me stink. Give me pig

skin dipped in powdered grain.

Give me krill and pickled octopus:

suckers up and gaping.

Food that makes you honor

what was killed for your sake.

Vein of the cod roe. Blistered

hair of the intact hock. Evidence

of bodies carved from.

What makes you clasp your palms

to your nose is the bell that calls in

my hunger. I don't care anymore

what you think. Give me sesame oil

and fat. Give me bloodied and raw.

The white broth of famine food.

Food made to last. To transform

with the seasons. To survive 

other nations. Give me all

I avoided so long for your sake. 

 

Give me my heritage back.

Let me suck meat off the shell

of every animal you won't eat.

Give me refuse, and I'll make it

worthy.  

Savaging

 by Jihyun Yun

 

(verb)

The ethnological term for an animal maiming or killing her own offspring. Though observed in the wild and across various species, it most severely impacts pigs bred in captivity and subjected to severe environmental stressors. 

 

Dear daughters, when the mind leaves

it leaves swiftly. Today I woke not knowing

which country holds me or if those love

motels stringing neon cords outside my window

were those of Oakland or Seoul. I woke having

forgotten even your faces, but remembered

my hunger. What if this is all I am left with:

memories of my young body rifling through refuse

at the U.S. bases, the slow arc of a dust-bloodied moon

illuminating garbage: animal bones I picked through

for their tears of toothed sinew, wads of gum

studded with gristle and American spit. We did our best

to rinse off the dirt, but that too is sustenance. 

After all, I've seen the hungry drink soups of mud

or their own vomit, and if pride serves no man,

then let us be animal, full and unmoored

from whatever shame names us human. We boiled

trash in a big pot, watched the chicle bloom

into nothing and broth, the bone's faint bouquet

of rot brought us kids to drooling. The stock boiled

itself white. We spiced it with crushed cigarette butts

and wild weeds, called it 꿀꿀이죽, or oink-oink gruel

after the swine we had become. To this day, nothing

has tasted as good. Home that evening, my eldest sister

seized me by the hair, throttled my face red for eating

American garbage. You weren't raised like this,

you weren't raised like this, but in a year, my sister

in all her beauty and pride would be dead. It was like

we already knew it back then, my girl body half-transformed

into a pig, screeching its pink forfeit. My sister

thrashing my wire-haired skin, weeping for all the lives

neither of us would live. 

[Untitled] from the collection Stray Birds

by Andrew Robin 

 

In the autumn

before she died

 

she planted them

 

so that one

morning

 

in March

he would wake

 

from the winter

of his grief

 

to six

hundred

crocuses

 

pale

lavender

 

her

color 

November

 by Maggie Dietz

  

Show's over, folks. And didn't October do

A bang-up job? Crisp breezes, full-throated cries

Of migrating geese, low-floating coral moon.

Nothing left but fool's gold in the trees.

Did I love it enough, the full-throttle foliage,

While it lasted? Was I dazzled? The bees

Have up and quit their last-ditch flights of forage

And gone to shiver in their winter clusters.

Field mice hit the barns, big squirrels gorge

On busted chestnuts. A sky like hardened plaster

Hovers. The pasty river, its next of kin,

Coughs up reed grass fat as feather dusters.

Even the swarms of kids have given in

To winter's big excuse, boxed-in allure:

TVs ricochet light behind pulled curtains.

The days throw up a closed sign around four.

The hapless customer who'd wanted something

Arrives to find lights out, a bolted door.

 

The Wild Under the Wilderness

 by Ansley Clark

 

 

Touching the dune grasses and their tall glow

an easy way to locate oneself

 

I have a pile of something here     elemental nouns

which disperse     like seasonal insects

 

quinces poach in pink cinnamon syrup

plant cuttings on the windowsill embroider

 

water with soft roots    and suddenly I am more

committed to everything than I realized 

 

isn't this just

so consistently my weakness    that I want to stay 

 

stay here I mean    on earth

accumulating these little houses

 

and I tie this old     childhood love around my waist

while I wade out farther and I wade out farther 

Beggar's Song

 by Gregory Orr

 

Here’s a seed. Food

for a week. Cow skull

in the pasture; back room

where the brain was:

spacious hut for me.

Small then, and smaller.

My desire’s to stay alive

and be no larger

than a sliver

lodged in my own heart.

And if the heart’s a rock

I’ll whack it with this tin

cup and eat the sparks,

always screaming, always

screaming for more.

 

To Be Alive

 by Gregory Orr 

To be alive: not just the carcass 

But the spark. That's crudely put, but… 

 

If we're not supposed to dance, 

Why all this music?