The young composer, working that summer at an artist's colony, had
watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and
he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work
was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him
directly when she made amused and considered answers to his questions.
One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her door and she
turned to him and said, "I think you would like to have me. I would
like that too, but I must tell you that I have had a double
mastectomy," and when he didn't understand, "I've lost both my
breasts." The radiance he had carried around in his belly and chest
cavity - like music - withered very quickly, and he made himself look
at her when he said, "I'm sorry. I don't think I could." He walked
back to his own cabin through the pines, and in the morning he found a
small blue bowl on the porch outside his door. It looked to be full of
rose petals, but he found when he picked it up that the rose petals
were on top; the rest of the bowl - she must have swept them from the
corners of her studio - was full of dead bees.

~ Robert Hass

At the Tidal Basin the other day I was reminded that the most stimulating experiences are the unmediated ones. I was educated for mediation, for middle terms that unified logical or lived discrepancies and conquered them with a category. Contradictions were to be eliminated, like dissonances in music, or shown to be false, and in their resolution lay a release. But I have lost my confidence in single descriptions, and I am a little bored with the dream of release. The world has many hooks in me now and on some of them I dangle quite happily, or at least with the satisfaction of one who can justify his commitments. Anyway, the cherry blossoms are out at the Tidal Basin, a sweet date in my religious calendar, a kind of personal pilgrimage festival, when Washington, of all places, becomes, for a week or so, a capital of the senses and the speculations that they provoke. I know of no more regular demonstration of the beauty of transience than these trees in bloom. When it rained the tiny flowers held fast, offering the additional instruction that delicacy of substance is no obstacle to firmness of attachment. I was lying on the cold ground beneath the riot of white tenderness when the scene was broken by a nasty sound. I sat up and saw two war-green helicopters heading importantly to the White House, no doubt from the Pentagon. At the same time I caught a glimpse of the sharp skylight of the Hall of Remembrance at the Holocaust Museum in the distance: it made a tear in the enchanted natural copse by the water. I cannot say that my experience was completely ruined. This is Washington, after all, where, in my way, I also participate in the soulless but honorable enterprise of helping the state get it right; and this is what I mean by a lack of mediation. The terms collide, but they do not go together; they are alien to each other, antithetical, but they share a place, a realm. Power and beauty; policy and epiphany; blossoms and choppers: they are equally real. In the heterogeneity of the world, everything is real. Even illusions are real. There is only reality. And even before the helicopters invaded my transfigured visual field, it was hard to stay focused on the spectacle before my eyes: I kept thinking of Brega and Ras Lanuf, of Manama and Damascus. I came to clear my head, but I was arguing with the president. We always bring our own distractions. Interruptedness is our lot. There are many legitimate claims on our attention. I recalled Tu Fu, the Chinese poet of the eighth century who composed some of the most exquisite verses in the literature of blossoms. “A thick frenzy of blossoms shrouding the riverside,/ I stroll, listing dangerously, in full fear of spring.” His achievement was all the more remarkable because it took place against the collapse of the Tang empire— decadence, corruption, rebellion, defeat, exile. The poet wrote worriedly, with no diminution of lyrical refinement, about politics, and the condition of the government and the country, and his desire to find an official position. “Rivers and mountains survive broken countries./... Blossoms scatter tears thinking of us....” He lived inside history and outside history. He owed his poise to his contrasts, which according to David Hinton, whose translations I have given here, is also how his poetics worked.

~ Leon Wieseltier

"Yes, you can 'break' the brain, but I think it is like breaking a musical instrument. Music cannot be reduced to the piano. It is the same with the brain - thought cannot be reduced just to the brain."

"Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you now have was once among the things you only hoped for." - Epicurus

The bedroom is no place for politics- it's where we discover and share our most essential selves.

~ a user nicknamed "liveandlearn"

Some days we all feel trapped in our particular life circumstances, and other days we find there’s more freedom inside their limits, and more room inside our heads, than we ever knew.

I have trouble speaking to women in bars. A simple "hello" always feels abrupt, and yet most "lines" are cheesy. Any advice for how to get things started?

Memorize Keats’s sonnet beginning with the line, “When I have fears that I may cease to be.” Practice reading it aloud until you can speak the lines naturally and have committed them to memory. Once you have successfully done this, move on to the same poet’s sonnet on first reading Chapman’s Homer, his odes on melancholy and on the Grecian urn, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” and “To Autumn,” and, for variety and contrast, Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and “Ode to the West Wind” and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” and “Work Without Hope.” Once you have memorized these poems and can unfailingly produce them at a moment’s notice, you will be a better man, and questions about breaking the ice and avoiding cheesy lines will cease to bother your teeming brain.

~ David Lehman

I imagine the gods saying, We will
make it up to you. We will give you
three wishes, they say. Let me see
the squirrels again, I tell them.
Let me eat some of the great hog
stuffed and roasted on its giant spit
and put out, steaming, into the winter
of my neighborhood when I was usually
too broke to afford even the hundred grams
I ate so happily walking up the cobbles,
past the Street of the Moon
and the Street of the Birdcage-Makers,
the Street of Silence and the Street
of the Little Pissing. We can give you
wisdom, they say in their rich voices.
Let me go at last to Hugette, I say,
the Algerian student with her huge eyes
who timidly invited me to her room
when I was too young and bewildered
that first year in Paris.
Let me at least fail at my life.
Think, they say patiently, we could
make you famous again. Let me fall
in love one last time, I beg them.
Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present. Help me to find
the heft of these days. That the nights
will be full enough and my heart feral.

~ Jack Gilbert

Source: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=172185

Aubade

My love,
you have the right to remain
silent. Anything you say
can and will be recorded
in my pillow. If you desire,
you may request a transcript
of every crushed feather.
You have that right, too.

Knowing
and understanding these
rights as I sing them,
are you willing to answer
without a moon present?
Put your hands in the air
and walk toward me.
Tell me what you know.

© Brendan Constantine, all rights reserved. This poem can be found in
Letters To Guns. (2009 Red Hen Press)
http://www.brendanconstantine.com