[In Praise of Idleness]

 ;D


In Praise of Idleness




By  Paul Violi  


For the second time this week

I've watched snow fall at sunrise,

dawn arrive on a breeze

(the way I think it always does).

I don't know which, time or the weather,

woke me, charmed me out of a dream

where a few of us floated around,

gravity's jokers,

face-up in the quiet water

and the jetsam of a slow life.

I had one line that I'd saved

and let it go as though it were mine,

calling for "Darker days and brighter gods!"

Then I only had my waking instant,

but it opened with that same shadowless light,

a sense of change, of something both near

and remote, first and last,

blowing with the wind and snow

through my reflection in the window.

And then I lost it.


So here I am, with cigarettes and cold coffee,

an unfinished ode to idleness,

cobwebs in high places,

a spider that rappels down the bookshelves,

and a commotion recollected in tranquility;

sunlight pouring through,

and another bright page

with a peculiar darkness flowing over it

—shadows of heatwaves from the radiator,

or my thoughts going up in smoke.


The glass, when misted over,

reminds me of store windows,

how they're swathed with soap,

shrouded in secrecy

before a grand opening

or after an ignominious closing.

Either way, not very interesting

except, perhaps, when the grafitti,

the anonymous messages appear

scrawled across them

by some child of the air,

words you can see through

or a clear smear.


And at twilight I'm still here,

the same place, the same light.

Nothing to do but move with the view:

snow, wind over soft ruins,

unfinished buildings that loom

like monuments to a spent curiosity.

I'm in the tallest, up here with the Nopes

roosting on soggy flunkgirders.

Want a cigarette? Nope.

Got a match? Nope.

See any alternative to solipsism? Nope.

Hedonism? Nope. Sloppy stoicism? Nope.

Did you know that Maryland

has no natural but only man-made lakes? Nope.


The creatures of idleness

are pure speculation.

They follow the weather,

shadow the wind, fill in the blanks.

Some are big and clumsy and sly

and like to lick my watch;

others, like gerunds,

have already drunk themselves

into a state of being.

Another, with time on his hands

and the sense of how windows

are both inside and outside a place,

stands there watching his silhouette

change to a reflection

as the light shifts

and he moves forward or back,

plays like a god

stepping in and out of himself,

and hears the wind as the breath of change

when the last flurry whirls away in the light.


The last flake grows larger

as it descends, and presents

when it lands in a burst of brilliance

the floorplan for a new building

where every wet, beaded window

is a picture of pleasure and expectation.

The drops ripen, moments in the light,

questions that, answered by a feeling,

slide away as clear as my being,

a drop at a time down the glass.

When the wind blows this hard

it's about to say something at last.

The earth down to its bare magic,

wind and glass, water and light.

:) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :) :)

Speak to Us


For all of my years, I've read only living signs—

bodies in jealousy, bodies in battle,

bodies growing disease like mushroom coral.

It is tiresome, tiresome, describing

fir cones waiting for fires to catch their human ribs

into some slow, future forest.


My beloved, he tires of me, and he should—

my complaints the same, his recourse

the same, invoking the broad, cool sheet suffering drapes

over the living freeze of heart after heart,

and never by that heart's fault—the heart did not make itself,

the face did not fashion its jutting jawbone

to wail across the plains or beg the bare city.


I will no longer tally the broken, ospreyed oceans,

the figs that outlived summer

or the tedious mineral angles and

their suction of light.


Have you died? Then speak.

You must see the living

are too small as they are,

lonesome for more

and in varieties of pain

only you can bring into right view.

Katie Ford   

Measured By The Soul

The size of one's heaven is the exact dimensions of his soul.  
Happiness is a matter of appetite and capacity.  
As well prepare dinner for a corpse as Heaven for a soul whose spiritual functions are dead.

The problem of the hereafter is not the matter of a celestial climate and a city beautiful.
It is the problem of the eternal in man.  The kingdom is within him.  The greatest concern of a human being
therefore should be to feel God's presence, to be stirred by His message, to have faith in the invisible, and to follow aspirations
which leap over the boundaries of time and seek satisfaction in the infinite.
For to be devoid of all this is to fall a victim to the disease that destroys character, paralyses progress,
and forbids happiness.

James Isaac Vance

A subtle chain of countless rings
The next unto the farthest brings;
The eye reads omens where it goes,
And speaks all languages the rose;
And, striving to be man, the worm
Mounts through all the spires of form.

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836

Each In His Own Tongue

A fire mist and a planet.
A crystal and a cell.
A jellyfish and saurian.
And caves where the cavemen dwell.
Then a sense of law and beauty
And a face turned from the clod,
Some call it Evolution ,and others call it God.

A picket frozen on duty, a mother starved for her brood,
Socrates drinking hemlock, and Jesus on the rood,
And millions who humble and nameless, the straight hard pathway plod.
Some call it Concecration, and others call it God.
H.W. Carruth

[now]

No, that's as far as it goes between you and I.  Verily, verily I say unto you, not now.

Eternity Affirms the Hour

All we have willed or hoped or dreamed of good shall exist;

Not in semblance, but itself; no beauty, nor good, nor power
Whose voice has gone forth, but each survives for the melodist
When eternity affirms the conception of an hour.
The high that proved too high, the heroic for the earth too hard.

The passion that left the ground to love itself in the sky.
Are music sent up to God by the lover and the bard;

Enough he heard it once: we shall hear it by and by.

~ Robert Browning.

Unlimited.... He is the beginning and ending.

I'm not a Bible thumper, however, I know how it feels to receive the Holy Spirit .  No chanting, just open up the mind and heart and ask to receive his love.  It's nothing like you will ever experience it is a love greater than that of a mothers love for her child. 

I will say it did have an electric feel to it.  I could feel it enter my body. It was the best feeling I've ever experienced.
I pray the Lord's Prayer everyday, many times a day.
I guess each to their own.

To me your post came off like you're a medium.  Not judging, but you never explained what you feel or think is the purpose of life. :)

WOW! Deep stuff. How about Jesus????

Love cat photos. Long time no see or read..My life is a bit of a bore these days. I just don't seem to care whats happening.  Just thought I would revisit an old place and see if it could stir some emotion. lol I'll let you know.:(

So Long   
by Walt Whitman 


1

To conclude—I announce what comes after me;   
I announce mightier offspring, orators, days, and then, for the present, depart.
   
I remember I said, before my leaves sprang at all,   
I would raise my voice jocund and strong, with reference to consummations.   
   
When America does what was promis'd,
When there are plentiful athletic bards, inland and seaboard,   
When through These States walk a hundred millions of superb persons,   
When the rest part away for superb persons, and contribute to them,   
When breeds of the most perfect mothers denote America,   
Then to me and mine our due fruition.
   
I have press'd through in my own right,   
I have sung the Body and the Soul—War and Peace have I sung,   
And the songs of Life and of Birth—and shown that there are many births:   
I have offer'd my style to everyone—I have journey'd with confident step;   
While my pleasure is yet at the full, I whisper, So long!
And take the young woman's hand, and the young man's hand, for the last time.   
     

2

I announce natural persons to arise;   
I announce justice triumphant;   
I announce uncompromising liberty and equality;   
I announce the justification of candor, and the justification of pride.
   
I announce that the identity of These States is a single identity only;   
I announce the Union more and more compact, indissoluble;   
I announce splendors and majesties to make all the previous politics of the earth
     insignificant.   
   
I announce adhesiveness—I say it shall be limitless, unloosen'd;   
I say you shall yet find the friend you were looking for.
   
I announce a man or woman coming—perhaps you are the one, (So long!)   
I announce the great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate,
     compassionate, fully armed.   
   
I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold;   
I announce an end that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation;   
I announce myriads of youths, beautiful, gigantic, sweet-blooded;
I announce a race of splendid and savage old men.   
   

3

O thicker and faster! (So long!)   
O crowding too close upon me;   
I foresee too much—it means more than I thought;   
It appears to me I am dying.
   
Hasten throat, and sound your last!   
Salute me—salute the days once more. Peal the old cry once more.   
   
Screaming electric, the atmosphere using,   
At random glancing, each as I notice absorbing,   
Swiftly on, but a little while alighting,
Curious envelop'd messages delivering,   
Sparkles hot, seed ethereal, down in the dirt dropping,   
Myself unknowing, my commission obeying, to question it never daring,   
To ages, and ages yet, the growth of the seed leaving,   
To troops out of me, out of the army, the war arising—they the tasks I have
     set promulging, 
To women certain whispers of myself bequeathing—their affection me more
     clearly explaining, 
To young men my problems offering—no dallier I—I the muscle of their
     brains trying,   
So I pass—a little time vocal, visible, contrary;   
Afterward, a melodious echo, passionately bent for—(death making me really
     undying;)   
The best of me then when no longer visible—for toward that I have been
     incessantly preparing.
   
What is there more, that I lag and pause, and crouch extended with unshut mouth?   
Is there a single final farewell?   
   

4

My songs cease—I abandon them;   
From behind the screen where I hid I advance personally, solely to you.   
   
Camerado! This is no book;
Who touches this, touches a man;   
(Is it night? Are we here alone?)   
It is I you hold, and who holds you;   
I spring from the pages into your arms—decease calls me forth.   
   
O how your fingers drowse me!
Your breath falls around me like dew—your pulse lulls the tympans of my
     ears;   
I feel immerged from head to foot;   
Delicious—enough.   
   
Enough, O deed impromptu and secret!   
Enough, O gliding present! Enough, O summ'd-up past!
   

5

Dear friend, whoever you are, take this kiss,   
I give it especially to you—Do not forget me;   
I feel like one who has done work for the day, to retire awhile;   
I receive now again of my many translations—from my avataras ascending—while others
     doubtless await me;   
An unknown sphere, more real than I dream'd, more direct, darts awakening rays
     about me—So long!Remember my words—I may again return,   
I love you—I depart from materials;   
I am as one disembodied, triumphant, dead.

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning   
by John Donne 


As virtuous men pass mildly away,
   And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
   "The breath goes now," and some say, "No,"

So let us melt, and make no noise,
   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
   To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
   Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
   Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
   Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined
   That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
   Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion.
   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
   As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
   To move, but doth, if the other do;

And though it in the center sit,
   Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
   Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
   And makes me end where I begun.

 ;)Sven, thanks for the new poetry links you sent to me.

I like the last paragraph.

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

The Snow Man   
by Wallace Stevens 


One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Winter Morning   
by William Jay Smith 


All night the wind swept over the house
And through our dream
Swirling the snow up through the pines,
Ruffling the white, ice-capped clapboards,
Rattling the windows,
Rustling around and below our bed
So that we rode
Over wild water
In a white ship breasting the waves.
We rode through the night
On green, marbled
Water, and, half-waking, watched
The white, eroded peaks of icebergs
Sail past our windows;
Rode out the night in that north country,
And awoke, the house buried in snow,
Perched on a
Chill promontory, a
Giant's tooth
In the mouth of the cold valley,
Its white tongue looped frozen around us,
The trunks of tall birches
Revealing the rib cage of a whale
Stranded by a still stream;
And saw, through the motionless baleen of their branches,
As if through time,
Light that shone
On a landscape of ivory,
A harbor of bone.