Sunday, March 24, 2013

"Demand It Courageously" - Julia Hartwig

      Make some room for yourself, human animal.
      Even a dog jostles about on his master's lap to
improve his position. And when he needs space he
runs forward, without paying attention to commands
or calls.
      If you didn't manage to receive freedom as a gift,
demand it as courageously as bread and meat.
      Make some room for yourself, human pride and
dignity.
      The Czech writer Hrabal said:
      I have as much freedom as I take.


Saturday, March 23, 2013

Philip Roth on naps:

"'Let me tell you about the nap,' he laughs. 'It's absolutely fantastic. When I was a kid, my father was always trying to tell me how to be a man, and he said to me, I was maybe 9, and he said to me, "Philip, whenever you take a nap, take your clothes off, put a blanket on you, and you're going to sleep better." Well, as with everything, he was right. ... Then the best part of it is that when you wake up, for the first 15 seconds, you have no idea where you are. You're just alive. That's all you know. And it's bliss, it's absolute bliss.'"

---

From this NPR story.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

"Every Day" - Tom Clark

Awake the mind's hopeless so
At a quarter to six I rise
And run 2 or 3 miles in
The pristine air of a dark
And windy winter morning
With a light rain falling
And no sound but the pad
Of my sneakers on the asphalt
And the calls of the owls in
The cypress trees on Mesa Road

And when I get back you're
Still asleep under the warm covers
Because love is here to stay
It's another day and we're both still alive

Wednesday, March 20, 2013

"Fiction" - Lisel Mueller

Going south, we watched spring
unroll like a proper novel:
forsythia, dogwood, rose;
bare trees, green lace, full shade.
By the time we arrived in Georgia
the complications were deep.

When we drove back, we read
from back to front. Maroon went wild,
went scarlet, burned once more
and then withdrew into pink,
tentative, still in bud.
I thought if only we could go on
and meet again, shy as strangers.

Monday, March 18, 2013

"The Sometime Sportsman Greets the Spring" - John Updike

When winter's glaze is lifted from the greens,
And cups are freshly cut, and birdies sing,
Triumphantly the stifled golfer preens
In cleats and slacks once more, and checks his swing.

This year, he vows, his head will steady be,
His weight-shift smooth, his grip and stance ideal;
And so they are, until upon the tee
Befall the old contortions of the real.

So, too, the tennis-player, torpid from
Hibernal months of television sports,
Perfects his serve and feels his knees become
Sheer muscle in their unaccustomed shorts.

Right arm relaxed, the left controls the toss,
Which shall be high, so that the racket face
Shall at a certain angle sweep across
The floated sphere with gutty strings—an ace!

The mind's eye sees it all until upon
The courts of life the faulty way we played
In other summers rolls back with the sun.
Hope springs eternally, but spring hopes fade.

Thursday, March 14, 2013

"Goods" - Wendell Berry

It's the immemorial feelings
I like the best: hunger, thirst,
their satisfaction; work-weariness,
earned rest; the falling again
from loneliness to love;
the green growth the mind takes
from the pastures in March;
The gayety in the stride
of a good team of Belgian mares
that seems to shudder from me
through all my ancestry.

Friday, March 1, 2013

"Report from the West" - Tom Hennen

Snow is falling west of here. The mountains have more than a
foot of it. I see the early morning sky dark as night. I won't lis-
ten to the weather report. I'll let the question of snow hang.
Answers only dull the senses. Even answers that are right often
make what they explain uninteresting. In nature the answers
are always changing. Rain to snow, for instance. Nature can
let the mysterious things alone—wet leaves plastered to tree
trunks, the intricate design of fish guts. The way we don't fall
off the earth at night when we look up at the North Star. The
way we know this may not always be so. The way our dizziness
makes us grab the long grass, hanging by our fingertips on the
edge of infinity.