Yahweh my Shepherd

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Kubla Khan

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1798

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced;
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail:
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean:
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves:
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 't would win me
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

- This poem is beautiful one of the best poems / stories I've ever read.

Thursday, May 1, 2014

Visions and Such

Select visionary retreat

a gliff node wildabeast melting storm furnace

if just answers become something

your broke heart is enthroned in jealousy

my ownership and destiny

in a cauldron of helpless hope

Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Must Read

Istanbul 1983

In the frozen square, the student asks me if I will

sell him the books from my backpack. He hides them

under his winter coat. Steam rises from the whole

wheat rolls we break open at the breakfast table.

We drink hot apple tea and pronounce the skyline

“charming.” In a jail a man counts the visible bones,

and recounts them in the blaze of morning. To turn

a self to light proves painful — each piece must

be dissected in turn; you pass through every feeling

imaginable, so many you might make a dictionary —

dread to disgust, delight to degradation. The prisoner

remembers wanting only to read as if in a fever —

running fingers over pyramids of words as if he might

translate himself from this life to a more vivid existence

in which he cuts open the pages with a knife in

plain sight of everyone like a man eating meat and

potatoes at the dinner table. Not that world; this one

where blue light and sharpened files, where identikit

and stamps on passports, where the book in his back-

pack is a crime, and I have sold him down the river

for ideas I barely value — the volumes flung carelessly

across my hotel room, while he picks mushrooms on

the edge of dread, pallid ghosts of what won’t speak

or be spoken. Or where I remember what it is to

be present in the world, and I turn away, unable to

bear it — so much light and dread, so much in the darkness

growing or simply how hard to ever remain in place.

Laughing the Day Away

A poem of sorts

Unwitting accomplice in the scheme of law

she thought to violate, man-set as it was,

and, here, inconsequential as the sun

at midnight, drought at flood-time—

when she heard a baby in the tall reeds

at the river’s brink, she was nobody’s

daughter, subject of no rule

but the one his need for her established

as she knelt down to quell his crying

with a little tune just seeing him there

had taught her how to hum.

Now as then,

it is the same tune, timelessly in time,

your mother hums as she kneels down

beside your little barge of foam,

smiling to see you smile when she wrings

out from the sponge a ragged string

of water over the chest and belly,

the dimpled loins, the bud so far

from flowering, and the foot slick

as a fish your hand tries to hold up

till it slips back splashing

with such mild turbulence that she laughs,

and you laugh to see her laugh.

Here now, as it was then, it is still

so many years before the blood’s smeared

over doorposts, before the Nile clots

with the first-born, and the women

wailing,wailing throughout the city;

here now again is the kingdom of pleasure,

where they are safe still, mother and child,

from the chartered rod of the Fathers,

and where a father can still pray, Lord,

Jealous Chooser, Devouring Law, keep

away from them, just keep away.

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Alan Shapiro, “In the Kingdom of Pleasure” from Covenant (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991). Copyright © 1991 by Alan Shapiro. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Source: Covenant (The University of Chicago Press, 1991)
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POET
Alan R. Shapiro b. 1952

Monday, April 14, 2014

An Old Trip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9ok0SKmvdY

"Certainly things happen reoccur in continuous promise all of us have found a safe niche where we can store up riches and speak to our fellows on the same premise of disaster"

Jim Morrison