A Letter
Yehuda Amichai

To sit on a hotel balcony in Jerusalem
and to write: "Sweetly pass the days
from desert to sea." And to write: "Tears
dry quickly here. This blot is a tear that
made the ink run." That's how they used to write
in the last century. "I have drawn
a little circle around it."

Time passes, as when someone's on the phone
laughing or crying far away from me:
whatever I hear, I can't see;
what I see, I don't hear.

We weren't careful when we said "Next year"
or "A month ago." Those words
are like broken glass: you can hurt yourself with them,
even slash an artery, if
that's what you're like.

But you were as beautiful as the commentary
on an ancient text.
The surplus of women in your distant country
brought you to me, but
another law of probability
has taken you away again.

To live is to build a ship and a harbor
at the same time. And to finish the harbor
long after the ship has gone down.

And to conclude: I remember only
that it was foggy. And if that's what you remember--
what do you remember?

For Z.

Letter in November

Love, the world
Suddenly turns, turns color. The streetlight
Splits through the rat's tail
Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.
It is the Arctic,

This little black
Circle, with its tawn silk grasses -- babies hair.
There is a green in the air,
Soft, delectable.
It cushions me lovingly.

I am flushed and warm.
I think I may be enormous,
I am so stupidly happy,
My Wellingtons
Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.

This is my property.
Two times a day
I pace it, sniffing
The barbarous holly with its viridian
Scallops, pure iron,

And the wall of the odd corpses.
I love them.
I love them like history.
The apples are golden,
Imagine it ---

My seventy trees
Holding their gold-ruddy balls
In a thick gray death-soup,
Their million
Gold leaves metal and breathless.

O love, O celibate.
Nobody but me
Walks the waist high wet.
The irreplaceable
Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.

-- Sylvia

three -- make that four -- snowflakes

Playlist a year ago:

Joni Mitchell - California
Beatles - Mother Nature's Son
Elliot Smith - Angeles
Nico - These Days
Paul Simon - Homeless -> Under African Skies
Toad the Wet Sprocket - Crazy Life
DJ Shadow - Giving Up the Ghost
Joe Hishaisi - The Journey to the West (Princess Mononoke)
Mark Mothersbaugh - Sparkplug Minuet
Etta James - Swing Low, Sweet Chariot