Image Marriages

You cannot unburn what is burned. Although you scrape the ruined toast, You can’t go back. It’s time you learned The butter cannot be unchurned, You can’t unmail the morning post, You cannot unburn what is burned– The lovers in your youth you spurned, The bridges charred you needed most. You can’t go back. It’s time you learned Smoke’s reputation is well earned, Not just as an acrid, empty boast– You cannot unburn what is burned. You longed for home, but while you yearned, The black ships smoldered on the coast; You can’t go back. It’s time you learned That even if you had returned, You’d only be a kind of ghost, You can’t go back. It’s time you learned That what is burned is burned is burned. A.E. Stallings End of the Road, Chris Delle

My cat Gray likes killing birds, which makes my heart too sad for words. I ask him what the good Lord thinks of all the starlings’ blood he drinks? “If I’m a predatory cat, the good Lord wanted me like that. He sends me starlings every day, for God is Love,” says my cat Gray. Gail White Two Cats Blue and Yellow, Franz Marc

                                   For Joshua Mehigan These are the dawn thoughts of an atheist Vaguely embarrassed by what looks like grace: Though colors don’t objectively exist, And have no form, and occupy no space, So that the carpet’s sumptuous dyes must make Bold arabesques untrue as Santa Claus, And all Matisse’s pigments are a fake Fobbed off on us by intellectual laws, And neither Fauve nor Esfahan survive The deconstructed physics of our seeing – Still we consent, and actively connive In their unreal adjustments to our being. So the thin rhetoric we use to cope With being so peculiarly here, Which cannot but be based on baseless hope And self-constructed images of fear, Serves to interpret what we are, although We hesitate to say that what it says Refers to anything that we could know Beyond the mind’s perpetual paraphrase . . . And sensing that no quiddity rem...

We stood on the rented patio While the party went on inside. You knew the groom from college. I was a friend of the bride. We hugged the brownstone wall behind us To keep our dress clothes dry And watched the sudden summer storm Floodlit against the sky. The rain was like a waterfall Of brilliant beaded light, Cool and silent as the stars The storm hid from the night. To my surprise, you took my arm– A gesture you didn’t explain– And we spoke in whispers, as if we two Might imitate the rain. Then suddenly the storm receded As swiftly as it came. The doors behind us opened up. The hostess called your name. I watched you merge into the group, Aloof and yet polite. We didn’t speak another word Except to say goodnight. Why does that evening’s memory Return with this night’s storm– A party twenty years ago, Its disappointments warm? There are so many might have beens, What ifs that won’t stay buried, Other cities, other jobs, Strangers we might have mar...

Nothing can ever happen twice. In consequence, the sorry fact is that we arrive here improvised and leave without the chance to practice. Even if there is no one dumber, if you’re the planet’s biggest dunce, you can’t repeat the class in summer: this course is only offered once. No day copies yesterday, no two nights will teach what bliss is in precisely the same way, with precisely the same kisses. One day, perhaps some idle tongue mentions your name by accident: I feel as if a rose were flung into the room, all hue and scent. The next day, though you’re here with me, I can’t help looking at the clock: A rose? A rose? What could that be? Is it a flower or a rock? Why do we treat the fleeting day with so much needless fear and sorrow? It’s in its nature not to stay: Today is always gone tomorrow. With smiles and kisses, we prefer to seek accord beneath our star, although we’re different (we concur) just as two drops of water are. Wislawa Szymborska, 1...

I knew it the first of the summer, I knew it the same at the end, That you and your love were plighted, But couldn’t you be my friend? Couldn’t we sit in the twilight, Couldn’t we walk on the shore With only a pleasant friendship To bind us, and nothing more? There was not a word of folly Spoken between us two, Though we lingered oft in the garden Till the roses were wet with dew. We touched on a thousand subjects – The moon and the worlds above, - And our talk was tinctured with science, And everything else, save love. A wholly Platonic friendship You said I had proven to you Could bind a man and a woman The whole long season through, With never a thought of flirting, Though both were in their youth, What would you have said, my lady, If you had known the truth! What would you have done, I wonder, Had I gone on my knees to you And told you my passionate story, There in the dusk and the dew? My burning, burdensome story, Hidden and hushed so long – My s...

Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color. W.S. Merwin Photo Nuraj Shrestha

Your levees break And overflow Like promises Made long ago The city stop Signs disappear Black water crests At level: FEAR Old family photos Float away With furniture and yesterday. Then come the tears Like rivulets A Mississippi Of Regrets. Peter Kostin Photo by  Marko Višacki

The good Lord sends me gifts I didn’t earn, sometimes far in excess of what I’ve sought. I give him grateful thanks, and then return to shake the wrappings as an afterthought. The more I have, the more I seem to need; I hunger, though my cupboards almost burst. Each acquisition fans a spark of greed. My cup is full to brimming; still, I thirst. When I was younger, people called me poor, yet I had all the gifts I ever wanted. Now, happiness depends on getting more expensive toys I’ll quickly take for granted. My life was richer when I did without. Let others pray for rain. God grant me drought. Carol Taylor Photo by Pratyay on Flickr

Out of a motionless infernal shudder and clang of steel on steel as wagons moved toward the eternal, a sudden silence: I was healed. The stormcloud of my sickness fled on a breath. A flickering of eyes, and I saw my mother by my bed and gazed at her without surprise. Free! Helpless, yes, to move the hands clasped on my chest—but I had no desire to move. The rustling sounds (like cypress trees, like streams that flow across vast prairies seeking seas that don’t exist) were thin, insistent: I followed after those vain sighs, ever the same, ever more distant. By Giovanni Pascoli Translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock Photo by  Juergen Huettel

Black the coniferous darkness, White the snow track between, And the moon, skull-white in its starkness, Watches upper ledges lean, And regards with the same distant stare, And equal indifference, How your breath goes white in steel air As you trudge from whither to whence. For from somewhere you rose to go, Maybe long before daylight withdrew, With the dream of a windowpane’s glow And a path trodden to invite you. And, indeed, there may be such a place, Perhaps at the next corner or swerve, Where someone presses a face To the frost-starred glass, though the curve Shows yet only mocking moonlight. But soon, but soon! –Alone, I wish you well in your night As I pass you in my own. We each hear the distant friction, Then crack of bough burdened with snow, And each takes the owl’s benediction, And each goes the way he will go. Robert Penn Warren Photo by  古 天熱

(After Georges de La Tour) A nocturne shadow deepens to frame the pensive Magdalen as she sits alone, her glinting jewels darken to common stone, her fine clothes weave a red brocade of shame. She contemplates the image of the flame in the mirror, a taller chaperone to the candle's graceful plume of light, shown twice, as if meant to enlighten and inflame. Conversion by candlelight: Mary's hands rest on a skull in her lap, its ochre stain the color of regret--to watch her choose between mirror and candle, the demands of self and truth, evokes a kindred pain in anyone who has a past to lose. Lorna Knowles Blake

Perhaps the crescent moon smiles in doubt at being told that it is a fragment awaiting perfection. Rabindranath Tagore Photo by Cassin Stacy

Just stand aside and watch yourself go by Think of yourself as “he” instead of   “I.” Note, closely as in other men you note, The bag-kneed trousers and the seedy coat. Pick flaws; find fault; forget the man is you, And strive to make your estimate ring true. Confront yourself and look you in the eye — Just stand aside and watch yourself go by. Interpret all your motives just as though You looked on one whose aims you did not know. Let undisguised contempt surge through you when You see you shirk, O commonest of men! Despise your cowardice; condemn whate’er You note of falseness in you anywhere. Defend not one defect that shames your eye — Just stand aside and watch yourself go by. And then, with eyes unveiled to what you loathe, To sins that with sweet charity you’d clothe, Back to your self-walled tenement you’ll go With tolerance for all who dwell below. The faults of others then will dwarf and shrink, Love’s chain grow stronger...

I leant upon a coppice gate       When Frost was spectre-grey, And Winter’s dregs made desolate       The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky       Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh       Had sought their household fires. The land’s sharp features seemed to be       The Century’s corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy,       The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth       Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth       Seemed fervourless as I. At once a voice arose among       The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong       Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,       In b...

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come garg...

Some say love’s a little boy, And some say it’s a bird, Some say it makes the world go round, Some say that’s absurd, And when I asked the man next door, Who looked as if he knew, His wife got very cross indeed, And said it wouldn’t do. Does it look like a pair of pyjamas, Or the ham in a temperance hotel? Does its odour remind one of llamas, Or has it a comforting smell? Is it prickly to touch as a hedge is, Or soft as eiderdown fluff? Is it sharp or quite smooth at the edges? O tell me the truth about love. Our history books refer to it In cryptic little notes, It’s quite a common topic on The Transatlantic boats; I’ve found the subject mentioned in Accounts of suicides, And even seen it scribbled on The backs of railway guides. Does it howl like a hungry Alsatian, Or boom like a military band? Could one give a first-rate imitation On a saw or a Steinway Grand? Is its singing at parties a riot? Does it only like Classical stuff? Will it stop when one ...

Obscurely yet most surely called to praise, As sometimes summer calls us all, I said The hills are heavens full of branching ways Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead; I said the trees are mines in air, I said See how the sparrow burrows in the sky! And then I wondered why this mad instead Perverts our praise to uncreation, why Such savour's in this wrenching things awry. Does sense so stale that it must needs derange The world to know it? To a praiseful eye Should it not be enough of fresh and strange That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay, And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day? Richard Wilbur Diary of Discoveries by Vladimir Kush

Every love counts, the puppy you were given At six, the tadpoles that you tried to raise; Even your silly parents and the siblings You couldn’t stand were loved on certain days. The first love of your adolescence, later Spoken of slightingly as immature, The love of marriage, even if it ended In bitterness, the friends that still endure. Into the mix, put in your charity To those who had no one but you to love them. All the loves given, even reluctantly, Are still our loves. Let’s not make little of them. They form the empyrean that burns on when sun and moon and stars have packed and gone. Gail White ( First published in FIRST THINGS ) Painting: Nativity, Rein Nomm, on Flickr

An atom’s 99.9% nothing at all. The world’s an empty place. Its solid shapes are objects we invent to give a form to nuclei and space. But these constructions aren’t exactly fake– it hurts when, as a test, we kick a stone; electrons charge across the void and make illusions hard enough to break a bone. Outside the window, photons waver, glow, collapsing to what matters here: your bright blue scarf, dark hair; a body that I know is not a trick of late November light. You and I–more than a thought, thin air– unique arrangements of what isn’t there. Robert Crawford Photo: “I’m Not There” by PoL Úbeda Hervàs on Flickr