I exist

 A man said to the universe:
 "Sir I exist!"
 "However," replied the universe,
 "The fact has not created in me
 A sense of obligation."


-- Stephen Crane

Clock

Clock
by Linda Pastan


Sometimes it really upsets me—
the way the clock's hands keep moving,


even when I'm just sitting here
not doing anything at all,


not even thinking about anything
except, right now, about that clock


and how it can't keep its hands still.
Even in the dark I picture it, and all


its brother and sister clocks and watches,
even sundials, all those compulsive timepieces

whose only purpose seems to be
to hurry me out of this world. 


"Clock" by Linda Pastan from Traveling Light. © Norton, 2010.

Let us go then you and I

HELLO, I’M LARRY, AND I’LL BE YOUR POET THIS EVENING
Posted by John Kenney

A short drive from the ferry, Steve Wynn has a complex with two hotels, where the Louis Vuitton outlet is said to generate more sales per square foot than any other Louis Vuitton outlet worldwide. Walking past a tank of luminescent jellyfish, which require a specially designed curtain to sleep at night, the casino official who was showing me the place told me that the Chinese clientele demand a heightened level of luxury, because “Everyone is a president or a chairman.” We stopped into the complex’s newest Michelin-starred restaurant, which has an in-house poet who writes a personal verse for every V.I.P.

—New Yorker story by Evan Osnos about Macau, China, the gambling capital of the world


 To Read more click Here. 


Let us go then, you and I,
Misters Lee and Wee-Fong of Beijing & Shanghai Container Shipping International operating out of Nassau, The Bahamas.
Let us go while you are able.

You look like a patient etherized upon a table.
And indeed there will be time.
But not tonight, as the kitchen is closed and the last waiters wait only for you.
There is no more Johnnie Walker Blue.
Do I dare have the bouncer pull you from your chair?
Oh look, bald spot in the middle of your hair.
And indeed there will be time.
But not here.
In the room the women come and go, talking of Prada and Foxconn.

A Question About Birds

A Question About Birds
Billy Collins


I am going to sit on a rock near some water
or on a slope of grass
under a high ceiling of white clouds,


and I am going to stop talking
so I can wander around in that spot
the way John James Audubon might have wandered


through a forest of speckled sunlight,
stopping now and then to lean
against an elm, mop his brow,

and listen to the songs of birds.
Did he wonder, as I often do,
how they regard the songs of other species?


Would it be like listening to the Chinese
merchants at an outdoor market?
Or do all the birds perfectly understand one another?


Or is that nervous chittering
I often hear from the upper branches
the sound of some tireless little translator?


From Horoscopes for the Dead: Poems by Billy Collins

Wel gay watz þis gome gered in grene.

May 15, 2012
THE THORN WORD
Posted by Mary Norris

A rare excitement ran through the The New Yorker’s copy department last week when it was discovered that a line of Middle English poetry quoted in a piece by Peter Hessler about standing in police lineups had a thorn in it. Usually a thorn, like a splinter, is something you want to remove, with tweezers, or maybe a sterilized needle, but this thorn was something we wanted desperately to insert.

Thorn is an obsolete letter from the Anglo-Saxon alphabet representing the sound we now write as “th”: it looks like the letter “p” with the vertical stroke extending above as well as below the protuberance. In fact, a thorn looks pretty much like a thorn, as in one of those prickly things on the stem of a rose. You will not find it on your keyboard unless you are J. R. R. Tolkien. I hadn’t seen one since graduate school—which was exactly the context in which Peter Hessler was using it, in a throwaway reference to “Gawain and the Green Knight.”

It started with the fact-checker, who looked up the source of the quote and showed it to the editor: Wel gay watz þis gome gered in grene. The editor came to me and asked, “Can we do this?” I didn’t see why not. It is just the kind of perfectionism our shop specializes in. We have used characters from the Greek alphabet, some of which require not one but two accents, and the Cyrillic alphabet. Two weeks ago, we put a simplified Chinese character into a piece by Evan Osnos (its shape was crucial to illustrate a point, and the fact-checker on the piece, fortunately, spoke Mandarin). For a while, we tried faithfully to reproduce the backward “R” in Toys “R” Us, but it went rogue and ran loose on the page every time we turned our back.

I approached the head of the makeup department with a crude drawing of a thorn. He rummaged around and found something—it looked like a capital “P”—which he imported into the piece. But his thorn was in roman and upper-case, and it fell in the middle of a line that was set in italics. It looked like an ill-fitting crown in an otherwise even row of teeth.

I left it alone overnight, and in the morning, with renewed strength, I showed it to my boss. She is a true wizard. With one hand hovering over the italics, she used the other to scroll through a chart showing hundreds of glyphs, all in italics, and instantly picked out the thorn. We dropped it into place, I smothered my doubts about whether the line should actually have been in roman all along (does Middle English qualify as a foreign language?), and took the piece back to makeup.

Later, a proofreader came to me with a query on the piece, and I was certain that it would be about the strange character on page 26. By this time, I had eyeballed the Middle English so many times that I felt I could translate it loosely myself: “Well gay was this guy garbed in green.” But my co-worker had been reading for content, which is to be commended—the piece was about police lineups, not medieval studies—and his question was a facetious one about whether or not I ought to recuse myself from working on such a piece. (I don’t know where he got the idea that I had been picked out of a police lineup—I hardly told anyone about that incident involving the bottle of extra-virgin olive oil and the Greek restaurant. I tried to pay for it! And they said they wouldn’t prosecute.) I attempted to distract him by drawing his attention to our carefully crafted thorn. “Looks like a ‘p,’ ” he said.

In Praise of My Bed

In Praise of My Bed
by Meredith Holmes


At last I can be with you!
The grinding hours
since I left your side!
The labor of being fully human,
working my opposable thumb,
talking, and walking upright.
Now I have unclasped
unzipped, stepped out of.
Husked, soft, a be-er only,
I do nothing, but point
my bare feet into your
clean smoothness
feel your quiet strength
the whole length of my body.
I close my eyes, hear myself
moan, so grateful to be held this way.

by Meredith Holmes, from Shubad's Crown (Pond Road Press)

Making a Bed

Making a Bed
by Howard Moss


I know how to make a bed
While still lying in it, and
Slip out of an imaginary hole
As if I were squeezed out of a tube:
Tug, smooth—the bed is made.
And if resurrections are this easy,
Why then I believe in all of them:
Lazarus rising from his tomb,
Elijah at the vertical—

Though death, I think, has more than clever
Household hints in mind and wants
The bed made, once, and for good. 


"Making a Bed" by Howard Moss, from New Selected Poems. © Athenaeum, 1985.