I have become a later life fan of The Cure. Songs of a Lost World is beautiful.

I lose all my life like this
Reflecting time and memories
And all for fear of what I’ll find
If I just stop and empty out my mind
Of all the ghosts and all the dreams
All I hold to in belief
That all I ever am
Is somehow never quite all I am now

—from All I Ever Am

Last night I stood in my dark kitchen.
I saw the moon fit in a single opening
of the horizontally divided outside.
I said I love you moon.

Not for your indifference,
but for your steadfastness.

Am I a stupid, silly man?

Would I add my desires to the weight of her struggles?
Would I hold her a pixie, a sprite I conjure to relieve my lonely hours?

But yes.

I would have her fall into me and
feel what strength remains in my arms and
I would lift her up and kiss her eyes.

What is it to anyone else if I am a stupid, silly man?

—d.j.

It was the birthday of Mary Oliver two days ago. Oliver passed in 2019. I am just now discovering the wealth of poetry she left for us.

Read more…

To give mind to machines, they are calling it
out of the world, out of the neighborhood, out of the body.
They have bound it in the brain, in the hard shell
of the skull, in order to bind it in a machine.
From the heron flying home at dusk,
from the misty hollows at sunrise,
from the stories told at the row’s end,
they are calling the mind into exile
in the dry circuits of machines.

—Wendell Berry, collected in The Peace of Wild Things and other Poems

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence   
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind   
While there is still time.

—Philip Larkin

I called her beautiful, although I don’t believe she heard it.
But others did, and so began, a little trial with a verdict.

Please demonstrate you understand her journey and her dreams.
And did you consult this 12 point list of all that beauty means?

I was called out I must admit, I spoke before I thought.
I stand corrected once again, as often as is not.

I hemmed, I hawed, I dropped my gaze, I was really on the spot.
Let me re-phrase, I begged the court, I meant to say, “She’s hot.”

d.j.-2021-03-18

Between here and her are rolling hills where
wind-weathered peoples once cornered game.
They walked and hunted and walked and lived.

You can save money crossing those hills if you have a K-Tag on your windshield.

Then great flats we only desire to know
as vectors of acceleration over time, sit upon
the largest unbroken tectonic plate in the world.

“This was once under a vast inland sea,” she said. “More than once.” he replied.

Between here and her is a massive orogenic phantasm.
Buried to its shoulder in its own eroded silt, still it looms.
Cloaked in a shroud of green, it is the preferred home
of the larger, more secretive mammals.

“A full-grown grizzly can stand as tall as a…”

Then desert, where they built a city to accelerate
the process of gaining and losing riches.
Beyond the light and noise of it, slow, ancient processes unfold.
The birth and death of that city will be an unnoticed flicker in time.

“If you have seventeen showing, it’s usually best to stick.”

Between here and her is
everything seen and everything hidden,
everything learned and forgotten,
everything created and destroyed
and it’s all just so damned beautiful and mysterious.

My arms would gauge the weight of her mysteries too,

If I could get from here to her.

—dj. 2020-12-03