The privilege of your eyes

For Dolce.

A heaven in a gaze,
A heaven of heavens, the privilege
of one another's eyes.

From: T'was a Long Parting, but the Time by Emily Dickinson

Risk by Anaïs Nin

Risk

And then the day came,
when the risk
to remain tight
in a bud
was more painful
than the risk
it took
to Blossom.

--Anaïs Nin

Appropriation

I watch you touch one
wrapping your arms around her shoulders
closing your eyes and pulling her close

I watch you bend your head
pressing your lips against the hair of another
smiling down into her face

I watch you squat to greet a little one
rubbing your face against his curving belly
making him giggle

I watch your love in action
and tuck away a piece each time
for me.

--Chantelle Franc

He loves me?

pink petals fall
a drift of pink on the floorboard
till only a stalk stands
with one or two petals clinging

I will leave them there till they disintegrate
and then breathe the dust

On Eucharistic Adoration

An Hour In Paradise

Look upon the hour of adoration assigned to you
as an hour in Paradise.
Go to your adoration
as one would go to Heaven,
to the divine banquet.
You will then long for that hour
and hail it with joy.
Take delight
in fostering a longing for it in your heart.
Tell yourself, “In four hours, in two hours,
in one hour, our Lord will give me an audience
of grace and love.
He has invited me;
He is waiting for me;
He is longing for me.”

- Fr Vincent Martin Lucia

Jam tomorrow

Today
I hunger for you
hunger for you
today.

--Chantelle Franc

On hope for faithfulness

From The Head of Barley:

It's hard to know what to say about the marvels
Inside the soul. Even those of us who have broken
Many promises can still hope for faithfulness.

--Robert Bly

(and being reassured, I hope.)

Topography of you

Let me explore you.
I want to taste every scar
feel each texture against my lips
as you tell me their stories
one by one.

--Chantelle Franc

Loan me a book

Loan me a book that I might write
a sonnet in the margins
in future years
when I am gone
read it
and remember me.

-- Suzanne DeWitt Hall

Ode on a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea-shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul, to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form! dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

-- John Keats

More Thomas Howard on poetry

Howard's thoughts below echo recent comments by Dr. Ken Craven.

"It is the language whose first halting utterances are our efforts to describe our experience by getting images of it from other realms of experience. ... It is the language, skipping or solemn, that elevates our experience by imposing a form upon it, not arbitrarily, but because it suspects that the truest way of speaking of that experience is formally. It is the language that... disposes and arrays the common stuff of experience so that it is ritually transfigured from mere function into an instance of glory.

For it is the language that takes a serious view of experience. It is not satisfied with the idea of mere random tumble. It is not mere random tumble, it insists. There is something here. There is something to be said. There is something, oddly, to be elicited from this tumble. Take it. Grasp it. Handle it. Try one thing and another. Try to shape it. Impose some form on it. Lo... lo... when you are finally satisfied that you have imposed the right form on it, you will wonder whether that form was imposed by you, or whether it emerged from the thing itself.

This is the business of the poets. They are burdened and happy spirits who can do this--this that we all try to do. Burdened because they know that the most important thing is the most daunting thing--to seek and find and utter that significance that emerges from the union of form and content; happy because from time to time they succeed."

(from pages later...)

"There is the paradox of poetry. What seems to have been imposed rather arbitrarily by the poet... ends up seeming to rise from the stuff itself"

Never enough

You are
cool drink
and unquenchable thirst
you are
quiet satiety
and unapeasable hunger
you are
soft touch
and howling itch
the more I get of you
the more I want.

--Suzanne DeWitt Hall

on poetry

Thinking a lot about poetry while reading this book by Thomas Howard.

It occurred to me that poetry signifies order and harmony and serenity and joy; in other words, the supreme reality. These aspects of things are the real and true. The physical details are merely the accidents of deeper truth.

He's built perfection out of hunger

The Rumi poem in the previous post from this morning echoes the theme of a separation between truth and love.

It reminds me of an exhibit I saw a few years ago at the Corning Museum of Glass; a collection of unbelievably lifelike plants, flowers, and fruit all made of glass.

They were in cases and could not be touched but were so incredibly real that in many cases you could not tell that they were not.

So there they were, these creations of man, mimicking the wonder of God's creative power, but lacking the softness, the scent, and the fruition of His work.

Beautiful imitations. Brittle and fragile and forced, like facts without love.

The poem below says it well (and even mentions peaches).

The Ware Collection of Glass Flowers and Fruit, Harvard Museum
by Mark Doty

Strange paradise, complete with worms,
monument of an obsessive will to fix forms;
every apricot or yellow spot's seen so closely,
in these blown blooms and fruit, that exactitude
is not quite imitation. Leaf and root,
the sweet flag's flaring bud already,
at the tip, blackened; it's hard to remember
these were ballooned and shaped by breath
they're lovely because they seem
to decay; blue spots on bluer plums,
mold tarring a striped rose. I don't want to admire
the glassblower's academic replica,
his copies correct only to a single sense.
And why did a god so invested in permanence
choose so fragile a medium, the last material
he might expect to last? Better prose
to tell the forms of things, or illustration.
Though there's something seductive in this impossibility:
transparent color telling the live mottle of peach,
the blush or tint of crab, englobed,
gorgeous, edible. How else match that flush?
He's built a perfection out of hunger,
fused layer upon layer, swirled until
what can't be swallowed, won't yield
almost satisfies, an art
mouthed to the shape of how soft things are,
how good, before they disappear

How delicate yesterday

So delicate yesterday,
the night-singing birds by the creek.
Their words were:
You may make a jewelery flower
out of gold and rubies and emeralds,
but it will have not fragrance.

-- Rumi

Night Song

I never understood
the power of a name
until a love affair began
with yours.

Now the whisper of it
is in my ear
the shape of it
is in my mouth
the feel of it
is on my tongue
the taste of it
is on my lips
the sweet rush of it
is in my breast.

In the still of night
when I hunger for you
your name fills my heart
and I wait.


--Chantelle Franc

I Sing the Body Electric (IV)

Bridegroom night of love working surely and softly into the prostrate dawn,

Undulating into the willing and yielding day,

Lost in the cleave of the clasping and sweet-flesh’d day.

--Walt Whitman

I Sing the Body Electric (III)

I have perceiv’d that to be with those I like is enough,
To stop in company with the rest at evening is enough,
To be surrounded by beautiful, curious, breathing, laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them or touch any one, or rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment, what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight, I swim in it as in a sea.

There is something in staying close to men and women and looking on them, and in the contact and odor of them, that pleases the soul well,
All things please the soul, but these please the soul well.

--Walt Whitman

I Sing the Body Electric (II)

You would wish long and long to be with him, you would wish to sit by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other.

--Walt Whitman

I Sing the Body Electric (I)

...the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face,

It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists,

It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him,

The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth,

To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more

--Walt Whitman