In humility is the greatest freedom.


As long as you have to defend the imaginary self
that you think is important, you lose your peace of heart.
As soon as you compare that shadow
with the shadows of other people, you lose all joy,
because you have begun to trade in unrealities
and there is no joy in things that do not exist.

thomas merton

O, most beautiful flower of Mount Carmel,
Fruit of the Vine, splendorous of Heaven.
Blessed Mother of the Son of God,
Immaculate Virgin,
assist me in this my necessity.
O, Star of the Sea, help me
and show herein you are my mother.
O, Holy Mary, Mother of God, Queen of Heaven and earth,
I humbly beseech you from the bottom of my heart
to succour me in my necessity.
There are none that can withstand your power,
O, show me here you are my mother.
O, Mary, conceived without sin,
pray for us who have recourse to Thee.
Sweet Mother, I place this cause in your hands.
Amen.

prayer to the virgin mary - for assistance

Our old women gods, we ask you!
Our old women gods, we ask you!
Then give us long life together,
May we live until our frosted hair is white;
May we live till then.
This life that now we know!

tewa prayer

Just for the record, I would like it known by anybody who cares that I don't think life is a perpetual dive. And even though it's genuinely frightening, I don't think Richard Hell's fascination with death is anything else but stupid. I suspect almost every day that I'm living for nothing, I get depressed and I feel self-destructive and a lot of the time I don't like myself. What's more, the proximity of other humans often fills me with overwhelming anxiety, but I also feel that this precarious sentience is all we've got and, simplistic as it may seem, it's a person's duty to the potentials of his own soul to make the best of it. We're all stuck on this often miserable earth where life is essentially tragic, but there are glints of beauty and bedrock joy that come shining through from time to precious time to remind anybody who cares to see that there is something higher and larger than ourselves. And I am not talking about your putrefying gods, I am talking about a sense of wonder about life itself and the feeling that there is some redemptive factor you must at least search for until you drop dead of natural causes.

-- Lester Bangs
on "Richard Hell: Death Means Never Having to Say You're Incomplete"
from Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung

Twenty.


Orange enters the green
crawls to the edge of a leaf
until it becomes fire,
a word falling
from the fingers of trees.

There are always two searching in the night.
It is easy to pretend
what is offered is not hollow;
a sound hiding in your hand.

I want to say it is a wing, the touch of a feather
after years of calling

but it is more
of an absence, color of leaves,
green, to orange, to brown
then dust.

My father believed us holy,
taught his daughters to be afraid
not of men in cars or guns or rape
but of silence. For days
he would sit with a question,
hold it over us
as if it were a knife.

Tonight we will not speak

now place your hand here,
now here

explain with your tongue graves
the holes we dig to love
tell me
where will our bodies lie -- who will be the bird,
the sheep?

-- T.E. Ballard

Nineteen.


A man in Utah hates my work.
Do not disappoint him, Excellence.

She did her best to starve the air by growing fat.

When I am with you, I am two places at once.
When you are with me, you have just arrived
with a suitcase which you pack
with one hand and unpack with the other.

Is it something meaningful or not
that wakens the deep man
from his shallow sleep?

I am thinking of HB and RH and HM and SF
and WB and DJ as I sit reading HV on WS.

Wisdom in a dull man
is like prolonged applause.

He told himself she no longer existed.
When he saw her in the street
he knew he had seen her somewhere,
but could not place himself.

When a poet loves, he loves himself.
When he hates, he hates everybody else.

If I say it, it cannot be.
If I said it, I didn't.

The poet could not speak of himself,
but only of the gradations leading toward him and away.

-- Mark Strand

The nights are now full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain-pipes and scatter damp paths.

-- V.W., To the Lighthouse

clatterclattershhh.

Eighteen
in gematria is a nine.
Numerology is silly.

x

Friday night I lit one candle
(not two though my mother I'm sure didn't think of it this week, nor the last nor the one before);
Last night I watched the stars flicker and dance as long as I didn't focus on one at a time
and tonight I read about Leah's eyes under a new moon,
stained my fingers red with pomegranate
one seed for each star.
The flesh I have saved: some to eat
the rest to mix with the crumbling leaves
of what promises to be a bitter winter.