Professor, Poet, Dog Dad "Imitate Jesus & Socrates" - Ben Franklin "We must cultivate our garden" - Candide
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ALT Grief is busy, right now, explaining itself -its remit, its desired outcomes at a dinner table at a conference about grief; it is turning itself inside out; no one is able to eat, is either bored, concerned, or embarrassed, the margins are thin. One day or one month from now it might be a window looking out onto another window across a harbour of years. Until then, it is not the sun standing by after an afternoon of rain, sorry. And it is not this poem which is nothing if not the last word on that moment the rain stops but the windscreen wipers keep going, clearing-what?-away; or a night of close, almost-unbearable heat, the car alarm outside you sort of miss once it stops.
ALT A Question of Weather "Hot enough for you?" If another raspy-voiced stranger asks this question of me, I shall throw my dirty sweatshirt in his face. Just like that. Or throw this cool tropical drink in the waitress's pretty face. Of course, it is hot enough. The lantana's bright blossoms radiate a tropical glory beneath a sun that beams and beams. Oh happy entity. My God, the last time birds sang like this I was thirteen. My limbs ached. And every gland shivered in anticipation. I want this sour taste on my tongue to leave. If only my companions could greet the heat with different words. Words as generous, kindly, dazzling as the sun. We humans sweat. We try to make contact. But, once the gargantuan lawn mower stops, the birds utter a conspiracy of voices. A secret about to be broken. And every dance I know itches my feet.
ALT When We Look Up by Denise Levertov He had not looked, pitiful man whom none pity, whom all must pity if they look into their own face (given only by glass, steel, water barely known) all who look up to see-how many faces? How many seen in a lifetime? (Not those that flash by, but those into which the gaze wanders and is lost and returns to tell Here is a mystery, a person, an other, an I?
ALT We shun because we prize her Face Lest sight’s ineffable disgrace Our Adoration stain
ALT UNICORN This is the animal that never was. Not knowing that, they loved it anyway: its bearing, its stride, its high, clear whinny— right down to the still light of its gaze. It never was. And yet such was their love the pure beast arose; they had cleared the space. And in the stable of its nothingness it shook its white mane out and stamped its hoof. They fed it, then, not with hay or corn, but with the chance that it might come to pass. All this gave the creature such a power its brow put out a horn; one single horn. It grew inside a maiden's looking-glass then one day walked out, and passed into her.
