postcards from italy

The times we had

Oh, when the wind would blow with rain and snow
Were not all bad
We put our feet just where they had, had to go
Never to go

The shattered soul
Following close but nearly twice as slow
In my good times
There were always golden rocks to throw
At those who admit defeat too late
Those were our times, those were our times

And I will love to see that day
That day is mine
When she will marry me outside with the willow trees
And play the songs we made
They made me so
And I would love to see that day
Her day was mine

Postcards from Italy. Beirut.

Rocks. Goats. Dry shrubs.

Buffaloes. Thorns. A fallen tamarind tree. Tents. Red bricks in heaps. White graves, flashes in a brown-yellow universe. A motorbike on an earthen path. An auto rickshaw, yellow and black. Palm trees. Bicycles. Orange saris. A white flower in her hair. Eyes.

Mahbubabad. The morning ride across Telangana, the high plateau east of Hyderabad, seems synchronized with my need for a slow reentry. "Time" again presents itself as a question: does it exist, all of it, all past-future, as a dusty, viscous elastic casing for the mind, twisted into the mind? Each of us gets to see a small segment buried in one of the twists. For example, I have been offered the second half of the so-called twentieth century - an arbitrary boundary, after all - and on for some ways into the twenty-first. One could also run the segment backward. There is even knowledge, however uncertain, of the part that supposedly lies ahead. In fact, one can see it from the train window. Yellow and brown, flashes of white, a grave.

Spring, Heat, Rains: A South Indian Diary. David Dean Shulman.

dorothy dorothy

If I didn't care for fun and such,

I'd probably amount to much.

But I shall stay the way I am,

Because I do not give a damn.

First printed in New York World, (16 August 1925).

Dorothy Parker.

Alfred

Calm and deep peace in this wide air,
These leaves that redden to the fall;
And in my heart, if calm at all,
If any calm, a calm despair:

Calm on the seas, and silver sleep,
And waves that sway themselves in rest,
And dead calm in that noble breast
Which heaves but with the heaving deep.

From: In Memoriam. Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

Love is like a tree

it shoots of itself; it strikes its roots deeply into our whole being, and frequently continues to put forth green leaves over a heart in ruins. And there is this unaccountable circumstance attending it, that the blinder the passion the more tenacious it is. Never is it stronger than when it is most unreasonable.

Victor Hugo. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

the only living boy in new york

Tom, get your plane right on time.
I know your part'll go fine.
Fly down to Mexico.
Da-n-da-da-n-da-n-da-da and here I am,
The only living boy in New York.

I get the news I need on the weather report.
I can gather all the news I need on the weather report.
Hey, I've got nothing to do today but smile.
Da-n-da-da-n-da-da-n-da-da here I am
The only living boy in New York

Half of the time we're gone but we don't know where,
And we don't know where.

Here I am..........

Half of the time we're gone but we don't know where,
And we don't know where.

Tom, get your plane right on time.
I know you've been eager to fly now.
Hey let your honesty shine, shine, shine now
Da-n-da-da-n-da-da-n-da-da
Like it shines on me
The only living boy in New York,
The only living boy in New York.


Here I am...................

Here I am.................

He remembered

the books of poetry upon his shelves at home. He had bought them in his bachelor days and many an evening, as he sat in the little room of the hall, he had been tempted to take one down from the bookshelf and read out something to his wife. But shyness always held him back; and so the books had remained on their shelves.

“A Little Cloud”. Dubliners. James Joyce.

french

It takes courage to push yourself to places that you have never been before, to test your limits, to break through barriers. And the day came when the risk it took to remain tight inside the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.

Anaïs Nin

waiting booth

A star looks down at me,

And says: 'Here I and you

Stand, each in our degree:

What do you mean to do, -

Mean to do?'

I say: 'For all I know,

Wait, and let Time go by,

Till my change come,' - 'Just so,'

The star says: 'So mean I: -

So mean I.'

Thomas Hardy. Waiting Booth.

there are no eternal facts,

just as there are no absolute truths...The understanding does not draw its law from nature...it prescribes them to nature. Sense impressions naively supposed to be conditioned by the outer world are, on the contrary, conditioned by the inner world.

Randall Stevenson. Modernist Fiction: An Introduction