ANTIGONE:

 

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We begin in the dark and birth is the death of us.

–Anne Carson
Antigonick


 
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wait - what?
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Brilliant Sky

 

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Never between the branches has the sky
burned with such brilliance, as if
it were offering all of its light to me,
to say – what? what urgent mystery
strains at that transparent mouth?
No leaf, no rustle . . . It's in winter,
in cold emptiness and silence, that the air
suddenly arches itself like this into infinity,
and glitters.

This evening, far from here,
a friend is entering his death,
he knows it, he walks
under bare trees alone,
perhaps for the last time. So much love,
so much struggle, spent and worn thin.
But when he looks up, suddenly the sky
is arrayed in this same vertiginous clarity.


–Jean Joubert
Denise Levertov translation
In The Gift of Tongues

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the depths

 

 

 

 

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When the white fog burns off,
the abyss of everlasting light
is revealed. The last cobwebs
of fog in the
black fir trees are flakes
of white ash in the world's hearth.

Cold of the sea is counterpart
to this great fire. Plunging
out of the burning cold of ocean
we enter an ocean of intense
noon. Sacred salt
sparkles on our bodies.

After mist has wrapped us again
in fine wool, may the taste of salt
recall to us the great depths about us.


–Denise Levertov
The Jacob's Ladder

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from The English Patient

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We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.

—Michael Ondaatje

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parkstepp
largerloves
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A Life

 

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That the stars are adamant

everyone understands—

but I won’t give up seeking joy on each blue wave

or peace below every gray stone.

If happiness never comes, what is a life?

A lily withers in the sand

and if its nature has failed? The tide

                                         washes the beach at night.

What is the fly looking for on the spider’s web?

What does a dayfly make of its hours?

(Two wings creased over a hollow body.)

Black will never turn to white—

yet the perfume of our struggle lingers

as each morning fresh flowers

spring up from hell.

The day will come

when the earth is emptied, the skies collapse

and all goes still—

when nothing remains but the dayfly

                                         folded in a leaf.

But no one knows it.

–Edith Södergran

Averill Curdy translation
translator's notes

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no death

 

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There is no death. 

Only a change of worlds. 

–Chief Seattle

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hmmm ...

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If the slayer thinks he kills and the slayed thinks he dies, both are wrong.
The eternal in man cannot kill. The eternal in man cannot die.

–The Upanishads

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subcognition
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