There are times when I run across something interesting in a magazine of sorts while siting in waiting rooms. There's a bit of an internal struggle to either rip it out and take it with me, let it be, ask if I can have a copy of the page or just take the whole damn book with me. It really depends on the interest of the article. Shame on me right? So what do I do with these things you may ask? Usually, I place the article in whatever book I'm reading at the moment. If I have no book and just reading from my iPad, upon returning home, I will walk over to my bookcase and pick a book to drop it into. Never, never, ever just throw it away.
This morning I was needing a little help with a meditation. I went to my bookshelf and found my "wheels of life". Glancing through the pages something wonderful happened. One of my thieved articles fell out and it was a poem. I thieve poems more than anything. I'm going to share this with you today. Enjoy!
A VISION OF NOW
Here we are, my dears, the autumn of twenty-o-five.
And it's very strange. The sultry summer lingers
Into October; the foliage that by now was always
Bright is drab and withered; and we are far
Too dry, except where hurricanes rage and floods
Carry off our houses. Is this then our last Autumn?
The radio is insisting, "log on, log on."
And the Television is pleading, "log on, log now."
And signs and portents are everywhere, although
They are bewildering, because no one knows how
To interprete them. Persons of faith are tremulous
And unsure, while those of science apparently
Cannot read nature's peculiar new vocabulary.
Each of us proceeding at a different pace,
Stumbling or running, aimless or headed straight
To a distant remembered door. The spendthrifts
Sing Auld Lang Syne and tip up goblets of fine
European brandy. Others are creeping and
wandering, weeping and wondering. For we are
The new refugees, going nowhere. We are the
Old and horrifying pitiful dream come true.
Hension of the present whiteout all the tribes,
human, animal, floral and stones, river and dry wash,
at the table taking part in talk.
Nor do the disciplines convince me. Science
cannot be kept safe from poetry, the cyclotron
must deal with St. Francis and his little flowers,
and the wolf cannot escape the fore of the lupines
blue with spring.
I also believe in the wisdom of microorganisms.
Scholars of dung heaps command my attention.
Years ago, I concluded that all concentrated
forms of energy in human hands become dangerous.
The state mutates into the tsar, the lane
becomes the sterile corridor of the freeway,
the fire morphs into a nuclear pile, the songs go
corrupt and become propaganda. Freedom becomes
slavery and valor descends to shock and awe.
God becomes the church.
I do not know what art means but I know
what it is. Edward Hopper is in Paris between
1906 and 1910 and he is lovely because he is always
lonely and will always be lonely.
He is the figurative painter, an idea then slipping
from fashion, but his paintings capture desolation so
complete it will take decades, until the summer of 1945
to replicate what he sees in his mind.
The young woman has dark hair and sits on the
floor with a white sheet under her, one half
pulled from the bed. Her chemise is awry, black
hair blooms beneath her legs, and one foot
basks in a shaft of yellow light penetrating her
lonely chamber. Her lover has left, or more
likely has never come. She is warm and the
world is cold and so slowly, ever so slowly, she
will become chilled and become one with the world.
-Hayden Carruth, from "The Beginning of the End."
Published by Harper's Magazine/ January 2010
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