Month: April 2009

The Tiger

The tiger, on the other hand,
Is kittenish and mild,
And makes a pretty playfellow
For any little child.
And mothers of large families
(Who claim to common sense)
Will find a tiger well repays
The trouble and expense.

I’m a pessimist about probabilities; I’m an optimist about possibilities.

Mutability is our tragedy, but it’s also our hope.

Some other Just Ones

a footnote to Borges

The printer who sets this page with skill, though he may not admire it.

Singers of solo expertise who defer and find harmonies instead.

Anyone whose skeleton is susceptible to music.

She who, having loved a book or record, instantly passes it on.

Whose heart lilts at a span of vacant highway, the fervent surge of acceleration, psalm of the tires.

Adults content to let children bury them in sand or leaves.

Those for whom sustaining hatred is a difficulty.

Surprised by tenderness on meeting, at a reunion, the persecutors of their youth.

Likely to forget debts owed them but never a debt they owe.

Apt to read Plutarch or Thich Naht Hahn with the urgency of one reading the morning news.

Frightened ones who fight to keep fear from keeping them from life.

The barber who, no matter how long the line, will not rush the masterful shave or cut.

The small-scale makers of precious obscurios – pomegranate spoons, conductors’ batons, harpsichord tuning hammers, War of 1812 re-enactors’ ramrods, hand-cranks for hurdy-gurdies.

The gradeschool that renewed the brownfields back of the A & P and made them ample miraculous May and June.

The streetgang that casts no comment as they thin out to let Bob the barking man squawk past them on the sidewalk.

The two African medical students in Belgrade, 1983, who seeing a traveller lost and broke took him in and fed him rice and beans cooked over a camp stove in their cubicle of a room and let him sleep there while one of them studied all night at the desk between the beds with the lamp swung low.

Those who sit on front porches, not in fenced privacy, in the erotic inaugural summer night steam.

Who redeem from neglect a gorgeous, long-orphaned word.

Who treat dogs with a sincere and comical diplomacy.

Attempt to craft a decent wine in a desperate climate.

Clip the chain of consequence by letting others have the last word.

Master the banjo.

Are operatically loud in love.

These people, without knowing it, are saving the world.

The mayor of London was asked by an interviewer about “power”:

Q: Does power corrupt
A: Power reveals

The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.

Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself.

It ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.

The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.

Substance is a convenient word for a gap in our thoughts.

There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.

of someone’s politics

…further to the left than the soup spoon

of a referee, perhaps

…blinder than a welder’s dog

90% of success is turning up

Admiration, n Our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves.

A Clear Midnight

This is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,
Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,
Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes thou
lovest best.
Night, sleep, and the stars.

Somebody was trying to tell me that CDs are better than vinyl because they don’t have any surface noise. I said, ‘Listen, mate, “life” has surface noise.’

There is nothing that sharpens a man’s senses so acutely as to know that bitter and determined enemies are in pursuit of him night and day.

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

He who tooteth not his own horn, the same shall not be tooted.

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

1831 Business Failled
1832 Lost job Defeated for state legislature
1833 Failed in business
1836 Had nervous breakdown
1838 Defeated for legislature
1844 Defeated for Congress
1846 Defeated for Congress
1848 Defeated for Congress
1849 Rejected for land officer
1855 Defeated for U.S. Senate
1856 Defeated for nomination for Vice President
1858 Defeated for U.S. Senate

1860 Elected President

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other thing

All greatness is unconscious, or it is little and naught.