Shitao

In Port Angeles, Washington, it was Tess Gallagher.

I had stopped for a lunch of yogurt and fresh figs on the way to the coast, and, as so often happens, I wound up wandering into a local bookstore. This one was Port Book & News on First Street, and by the time I'd left, about five minutes later, the frayed strap of my shoulder bag was straining with the weight of three extra volumes: Gallagher's Amplitude: New and Selected Poems, Moon Crossing Bridge, and Instructions to the Double.

Two days later, at the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, it was Kim Addonizio's What Is This Thing Called Love and Yusef Komunyakaa's Dien Cai Dau. I had a flight back to New York the next morning, and by now my carry-on bag had become an instrument of vertebrae-crunching torture. I could tell that the march through the Delta terminal at Sea-Tac was going to be brutal. But that's how it is when I travel, and I travel a lot.

ODLIS -- Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science


Lovesong

He loved her and she loved him.
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Off that moment's brink and into nothing
Or everlasting or whatever there was

Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy palace
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His words were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assassin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
His glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
Her vows put his eyes in formalin
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall

Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage
In the morning they wore each other's face

--Ted Hughes

Rivera's stormy relationship with Communism is relevant to his relationship with the idea of Modernism. For much of his career he was trying to make art which would achieve objectives closely related to those of Soviet Socialist Realism. Rivera was a greater artist than any Stalin had at his disposal, and his work was less closely controlled than that of his Russian contemporaries. To say this, however, does not really address the main issue - that of Rivera's own aims. These were to speak directly to the Mexican people, and in order to achieve them he had to abandon much that was typical of modern art, at least in formal terms, such as fragmentation of imagery and the disguise of appearances. Above all, he had to subject himself to the demands of narrative - something which the early Modernists had been most concerned to reject.

Retrato de Lupe Mar��,­n by Diego Rivera



Sensation

Through blue summer nights I will pass along paths,
Pricked by wheat, trampling short grass:
Dreaming, I will feel coolness underfoot,
Will let breezes bathe my bare head.

Not a word, not a thought:
Boundless love will surge through my soul,
And I will wander far away, a vagabond
In Nature - as happily as with a woman.

-- Arthur Rimbaud

Dear people trying to sell me on something new: stop humping my leg. You know what I mean. You've seen dogs do this, right? That's what it feels like when you jump on me breathlessly to share your new product or service when you don't really much know whether I'm the right guy for your services.

I was recently leg-humped at Web 2.0 Expo, by someone I like, and who I think is smart and has a lot of good potential. The thing is, I politely declined a demo, and he persisted. Immediately, I shifted to my back foot. I felt defensive. I rolled up my interest and tucked it away.

Woodblock Prints by Jim Meyer

WOODBLOCK PRINTS

One of the oldest of all forms of printmaking, woodblock prints are made by carving a design into the surface of a flat piece of wood, applying ink to the remaining surface--either by a roller or a brush, and then pressing a piece of paper onto the inked surface.The piece of paper with the ink pressed into it is an original print, a piece of original art.

Color woodblock prints are made either by using a separate block for each color in the print (multi-block prints) or by using the same block for each successive color, but cutting parts of the block away after each color is printed (reduction prints).



IN THE MOUNTAINS ON A SUMMER DAY

Gently I stir a white feather fan,
With open shirt sitting in a green wood.
I take off my cap and hang it on a jutting atone;
A wind from the pine-trees trickles on my bare head.



WAKING FROM DRUNKENNESS ON A SPRING DAY

" LIFE in the World is but a big dream;
I will not spoil it by any labour or care."
So saying, I was drunk all the day,
Lying helpless at the porch in front of my door.
When I woke up, I blinked at the garden-lawn;
A lonely bird was singing amid the flowers.
I asked myself, had the day been Wet or fine?
The Spring wind was telling the mango-bird.
Moved by its song I soon began to sigh,
And as wine was there I filled my own cup.
Wildly singing I waited for the moon to rise;
When my song was over, all my senses had gone.



SELF-ABANDONMENT

I SAT drinking and did not notice the dusk,
Till falling petals filled the folds of my dress.
Drunken I rose and walked to the moonlit stream;
The birds were gone, and men also few.



SICK LEAVE

[While Secretary to the Deputy-Assistant-Magistrate of
Chou-chih, near Ch'ang-an, in A. D. 806]

PROPPED on pillows, not attending to business;
For two days I've lain behind locked doors.
I begin to think that those who hold office
Get no rest, except by falling ill!
For restful thoughts one does not need space;
The room where I lie is ten foot square.
By the western eaves, above the bamboo-twigs,
From my couch I see the White Mountain rise.
But the clouds that hover on its far-distant peak
Bring shame to a face that is buried in the World's dust.

--all poem's by Li Po

A macro shot of a tulip in my backyard.


Iowa & Other Accidents


There was snow that afternoon covering the road
which twisted toward the secret
of water, the mysterious surge

of sludge & loam, the living
Mississippi, unlike the rest of the Midwest,

drawing itself through landscape. There was an appointment
you were keeping

in Moline: a cheap hotel, booze, a little blow. On the Lower
East Side, a woman

spills her martini, makes a gesture
like erasure, or regret. It was almost Christmas.
In the rear view

suddenly, the car you will always describe as oncoming
must have slipped into a skid

and now, rising up over the bank,
it startles you--that reflection. In Moline

the maid corners the bed, straightens the clean
line of sheet. Almost Christmas. On the road,
swirls of snow. On the road

the car hovering behind you, a witness,
unfortunate & so unlike the audience permitted
the distance of fictions, the artifice

of plot. And worse, of course, the law

of cause & effect: I looked up,
it started to fall. You must attach

subject to verb, must say
I saw, and did, in your rear view, the car you'd thought
nothing of,

the gray sedan lifting slowly from the common snow,
turning, and the accident
always there, about to happen.

--Kate Northrop

Siren Song

This is the one song everyone
would like to learn: the song
that is irresistible:

the song that forces men
to leap overboard in squadrons
even though they see beached skulls

the song nobody knows
because anyone who had heard it
is dead, and the others can't remember.
Shall I tell you the secret
and if I do, will you get me
out of this bird suit?
I don't enjoy it here
squatting on this island
looking picturesque and mythical
with these two feathery maniacs,
I don't enjoy singing
this trio, fatal and valuable.

I will tell the secret to you,
to you, only to you.
Come closer. This song

is a cry for help: Help me!
Only you, only you can,
you are unique

at last. Alas
it is a boring song
but it works every time.

Margaret Atwood

Quality here is marginal, but that's because this is the last remaining analog copy of Costello's first television performance, and from the looks of it, it was got marginalized in a few moves methinks......



Oh it's so funny to be seeing you after so long, girl.
And with the way you look I understand
that you were not impressed.
But I heard you let that little friend of mine
take off your party dress.
I'm not going to get too sentimental
like those other sticky valentines,
'cause I don't know if you are loving some body.
I only know it isn't mine.

Alison, I know this world is killing you.
Oh, Alison, my aim is true.

Well I see you've got a husband now.
Did he leave your pretty fingers lying
in the wedding cake?
You used to hold him right in your hand.
Bet he took all he could take.
Sometimes I wish that I could stop you from talking
when I hear the silly things that you say.
I think somebody better put out the big light,
'cause I can't stand to see you this way.

Alison, I know this world is killing you.
Oh, Alison, my aim is true.
My aim is true.