Sunday, February 23, 2014

Wallace Stevens


July Mountain

We live in a constellation
Of patches and of pitches,
Not in a single world,
In things said well in music,
On the piano, and in speech,
As in a page of poetry--
Thinkers without final thoughts
In an always incipient cosmos,
The way, when we climb a mountain,
Vermont throws itself together.


Tuesday, February 4, 2014

Ron Padgett


History Lesson

I think that Geoffrey Chaucer did not move
the way a modern person moves.
He moved only one inch at a time, in what
we call stop action. Everyone in his day
moved like that, so they could be shot into a tapestry,
but also because time moved in small lurches
and was slightly jagged and had fewer colors
for them to be in. But that was good. Humanity
has to take it one step at a time.

--fr. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, How to Be Perfect (2007)