Say you could view a time lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.”The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting, and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up- mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back. A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash-frames.Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and crumble, like paths of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any image but the hunched shadowless figures of ghosts.Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.

We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don'tgrow on trees, like in the old days. So wheredoes one find love? When you're sixteen it's easy, like being unleashed with a credit cardin a department store of kisses. There's the first kiss.The sloppy kiss. The peck.The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The weshouldn't be doing this kiss. The but your lipstaste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.The I wish you'd quit smoking kiss.The I accept your apology, but you make me really madsometimes kiss. The I knowyour tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you getolder, kisses become scarce. You'll be drivinghome and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road, with its purple thumb out. If youwere younger, you'd pull over, slide open the mouth'sred door just to see how it fits. Oh wheredoes one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile.Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss. Now what? Don't invite the kiss overand answer the door in your underwear. It'll get suspiciousand stare at your toes. Don't water the kiss with whiskey. It'll turn bright pink and explode into a thousand luscious splinters, but in the morning it'll be ashamed and sneak out ofyour body without saying good-bye, and you'll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it lefton the inside of your mouth. You mustnurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how itilluminates the room. Hold it to your chestand wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from aspecial beach. Place it on the tongue's pillow, then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia: beneatha Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.But one kiss levitates above all the others. Theintersection of function and desire. The I do kiss.The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth, like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.

The following year the house was substantially remodeled, and the conservatory removed. As the walls of the now crumbling wall were being torn down, one of the workmen chanced upon a small leatherbound book that had apparently been concealed behind a loose brick or in a crevice in the wall. By this time Emily Dickinson was a household name in Amherst. It happened that this carpenter was a lover of poetry- and hers in particular- and when he opened the little book and realized that that he had found her diary, he was “seized with a violent trembling,” as he later told his grandson. Both electrified and terrified by the discovery, he hid the book in his lunch bucket until the workday ended and then took it home. He told himself that after he had read and savored every page, he would turn the diary over to someone who would know how to best share it with the public. But as he read, he fell more and more deeply under the poet’s spell and began to imagine that he was her confidant. He convinced himself that in his new role he was no longer obliged to give up the diary. Finally, having brushed away the light taps of conscience, he hid the book at the back of an oak chest in his bedroom, from which he would draw it out periodically over the course of the next sixty-four years until he had virtually memorized its contents. Even his family never knew of its existence. Shortly before his death in 1980 at the age of eighty-nine, the old man finally showed his most prized possession to his grandson (his only son having preceded him in death), confessing that his delight in it had always been tempered by a nagging guilt and asking that the young man now attempt to atone for his grandfather’s sin. The grandson, however, having inherited both the old man’s passion for poetry and his tendency towards paralysis of conscience, and he readily succumbed to the temptation to hold onto the diary indefinitely while trying to decide what ought to be done with it.

ياللى انتو قاعدين فـ السما ! ..بقالكوا فتره مزورتونيش فـ الحلم ليه ؟!يا جدتى : طب عامله إيه ؟!أخبارك ايه فـ الجنه من بعد المماتدانا لسه فاكر كل قاعده قعدتهاوياكى نحكى بالساعاتمن بعد موتك حبى للشاىقل خالص ..يمكن عشان الشاى أساساحلاوته كانت فـ إجتماعنامبقتش أحس لأوضتك المقفولهمعنى ..وكرهت حتى الوقفه فـ الشباكانا روحت مره بعد موتك بعدهامبقتش عايز أروح هناك

The first inkling of this notion had come to him the Christmas before, at his daughter's place in Vermont. On Christmas Eve, as indifferent evening took hold in the blue squares of the windows, he sat alone in the crepuscular kitchen, imbued with a profound sense of the identity of winter and twilight, of twilight and time, of time and memory, of his childhood and that church which on this night waited to celebrate the second greatest of its feasts. For a moment or an hour as he sat, become one with the blue of the snow and the silence, a congruity of star, cradle, winter, sacrament, self, it was as though he listened to a voice that had long been trying to catch his attention, to tell him, Yes, this was the subject long withheld from him, which he now knew, and must eventually act on.He had managed, though, to avoid it. He only brought it out now to please his editor, at the same time aware that it wasn't what she had in mind at all. But he couldn't do better; he had really only the one subject, if subject was the word for it, this idea of a notion or a holy thing growing clear in the stream of time, being made manifest in unexpected ways to an assortment of people: the revelation itself wasn't important, it could be anything, almost. Beyond that he had only one interest, the seasons, which he could describe endlessly and with all the passion of a country-bred boy grown old in the city. He was beginning to doubt (he said) whether these were sufficient to make any more novels out of, though he knew that writers of genius had made great ones out of less. He supposed really (he didn't say) that he wasn't a novelist at all, but a failed poet, like a failed priest, one who had perceived that in fact he had no vocation, had renounced his vows, and yet had found nothing at all else in the world worth doing when measured by the calling he didn't have, and went on through life fatally attracted to whatever of the sacerdotal he could find or invent in whatever occupation he fell into, plumbing or psychiatry or tending bar. ("Novelty")

في مدن العزلة أختار هواءً مرئيّاً كي يصحبَني أبتكر له ظلاً وأدرّب قدميه على موسيقى الخطواتْ نتحدث كغريبين عن الطقس المعتمونفكر في فصل لا يأتي .. أو في عاصمةٍ للحلم تلاحقنا أشباح الوقت وفي أيديها ساعات موقوتةْ نتجاهلها ونسير على أرصفة اللحظة.. حذرَين لكي لا نخطئ وندوس على قدم غريب يتوسطنا كي لا نخطئ .. وندوس على قدم الموتْ !

The TypeEveryone needs a place. It shouldn't be inside of someone else. -Richard SikenIf you grow up the type of woman men want to look at,you can let them look at you. But do not mistake eyes for hands.Or windows.Or mirrors.Let them see what a woman looks like.They may not have ever seen one before.If you grow up the type of woman men want to touch,you can let them touch you.Sometimes it is not you they are reaching for.Sometimes it is a bottle. A door. A sandwich. A Pulitzer. Another woman.But their hands found you first. Do not mistake yourself for a guardian.Or a muse. Or a promise. Or a victim. Or a snack.You are a woman. Skin and bones. Veins and nerves. Hair and sweat.You are not made of metaphors. Not apologies. Not excuses.If you grow up the type of woman men want to hold,you can let them hold you.All day they practice keeping their bodies upright--even after all this evolving, it still feels unnatural, still strains the muscles,holds firm the arms and spine. Only some men will want to learnwhat it feels like to curl themselves into a question mark around you,admit they do not have the answersthey thought they would have by now;some men will want to hold you like The Answer.You are not The Answer.You are not the problem. You are not the poemor the punchline or the riddle or the joke.Woman. If you grow up the type men want to love,You can let them love you.Being loved is not the same thing as loving.When you fall in love, it is discovering the oceanafter years of puddle jumping. It is realizing you have hands.It is reaching for the tightrope when the crowds have all gone home.Do not spend time wondering if you are the type of womanmen will hurt. If he leaves you with a car alarm heart, you learn to sing along.It is hard to stop loving the ocean. Even after it has left you gasping, salty.Forgive yourself for the decisions you have made, the ones you still callmistakes when you tuck them in at night. And know this:Know you are the type of woman who is searching for a place to call yours.Let the statues crumble.You have always been the place.You are a woman who can build it yourself.You were born to build.

The hours I spent in this anachronistic, bibliophile, Anglophile retreat were in surreal contrast to the shrieking horror show that was being enacted in the rest of the city. I never felt this more acutely than when, having maneuvered the old boy down the spiral staircase for a rare out-of-doors lunch the next day—terrified of letting him slip and tumble—I got him back upstairs again. He invited me back for even more readings the following morning but I had to decline. I pleaded truthfully that I was booked on a plane for Chile. 'I am so sorry,' said this courteous old genius. 'But may I then offer you a gift in return for your company?' I naturally protested with all the energy of an English middle-class upbringing: couldn't hear of such a thing; pleasure and privilege all mine; no question of accepting any present. He stilled my burblings with an upraised finger. 'You will remember,' he said, 'the lines I will now speak. You will always remember them.' And he then recited the following:What man has bent o'er his son's sleep, to broodHow that face shall watch his when cold it lies?Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?The title (Sonnet XXIX of Dante Gabriel Rossetti)—'Inclusiveness'—may sound a trifle sickly but the enfolded thought recurred to me more than once after I became a father and Borges was quite right: I have never had to remind myself of the words. I was mumbling my thanks when he said, again with utter composure: 'While you are in Chile do you plan a call on General Pinochet?' I replied with what I hoped was equivalent aplomb that I had no such intention. 'A pity,' came the response. 'He is a true gentleman. He was recently kind enough to award me a literary prize.' It wasn't the ideal note on which to bid Borges farewell, but it was an excellent illustration of something else I was becoming used to noticing—that in contrast or corollary to what Colin MacCabe had said to me in Lisbon, sometimes it was also the right people who took the wrong line.

هر کجا هستم،باشمآسمان مال من است.پنجره،فکر،هوا،عشق،زمین مال من است.چه اهمیت دارد؟گاه اگر می رویندقارچ های غربت؟من نمی دانمکه چرامیگویند:اسب حیوان نجیبی است،کبوترزیباست؟وچرادرقفس هیچ کسی کرکس نیست؟گل شبدرچه کم ازلاله ی قرمزدارد؟چشمهارابایدشست،جوردیگربایددید.واژه ها رابایدشست.واژه بایدخودباد،واژه بایدخودباران باشد.چترهارابایدبست،زیرباران بایدرفت

Terror is an artery. Running unfailing channels of bloodied thoroughfares by dint of the wilds beyond our knowing. Fluctuations and murmurs are audible within the splintered leeway of our preserve as a consequence of interstices modeled in such brutality. This appended artery offers no direction; idle and at times desultory. Bloodstained tracks and avenues guide casualties. Terror, like death, is not complicated, nor is it simple. It is but routine—natural. To call it otherwise is to parsimoniously say that birth is effortless, hurricanes are facile, and earthquakes are meek when they are a lot more.Myths, parables, and allegories lie in the construct of terror. Kings have fallen and succeeded in the yarns of terror. Simple men have been turned into heroes due to terror. Villains have been great orchestrators in the art of terror, allowing sole individuals and denizens to feel their makings. A soul never needed God to feel terror. The most nihilistic can undergo such a dreadful emotion. Animals are perfect examples of this. They are well-equipped creations to the world of terror and death, holding no cognizance to deity or creator.Terror is quite exclusive as it is a function of the mind, conducted by the intersections and throughways of nerves and bounded to that alone. Although it approaches with university, like hunger or sickness, it is selfish by fashion and segregating in nature. But death is quite opposite… death is all embracing. Disregarded and glossed over, it is never reserved or inaudible, especially if you listen hard enough.Death transmits a signal that can be discerned if you listen hard enough. Frail in birthing, the airing is not limited to the clairvoyant, though they are a standard audience. The most simple-minded can hear this. But they choose to ignore it for whatever grounds. Even in the obviousness of it when it comes in dream, awaking its public in night terrors and cold sweats, it should be heeded.In lurk of dark uncertainties the signal should be adhered in this societal horrific caprice.Death is a declaration waiting to broadcast the haunting awareness of our own deterrence.And within these pages is its proclamation.

Seigneur je suis très fatigué.Je suis né fatigué.Et j'ai beaucoup marché depuis le chant du coqEt le morne est bien haut qui mène à leur école.Seigneur, je ne veux plus aller à leur école,Faites, je vous en prie, que je n'y aille plus.Je veux suivre mon père dans les ravines fraîchesQuand la nuit flotte encore dans le mystère des boisOù glissent les esprits que l'aube vient chasser.Je veux aller pieds nus par les rouges sentiersQue cuisent les flammes de midi,Je veux dormir ma sieste au pied des lourds manguiers,Je veux me réveillerLorsque là-bas mugit la sirène des blancsEt que l'Usine Sur l'océan des cannesComme un bateau ancréVomit dans la campagne son équipage nègre...Seigneur, je ne veux plus aller à leur école,Faites, je vous en prie, que je n'y aille plus.Ils racontent qu'il faut qu'un petit nègre y aillePour qu'il devienne pareilAux messieurs de la villeAux messieurs comme il fautMais moi je ne veux pasDevenir, comme ils disent,Un monsieur de la ville,Un monsieur comme il faut.Je préfère flâner le long des sucreriesOù sont les sacs repusQue gonfle un sucre brun autant que ma peau brune. Je préfère vers l'heure où la lune amoureuseParle bas à l'oreille des cocotiers penchésEcouter ce que dit dans la nuitLa voix cassée d'un vieux qui raconte en fumantLes histoires de Zamba et de compère LapinEt bien d'autres choses encoreQui ne sont pas dans les livres.Les nègres, vous le savez, n'ont que trop travaillé. Pourquoi faut-il de plus apprendre dans les livresQui nous parlent de choses qui ne sont point d'ici ?Et puis elle est vraiment trop triste leur école,Triste commeCes messieurs de la ville,Ces messieurs comme il fautQui ne savent plus danser le soir au clair de luneQui ne savent plus marcher sur la chair de leurs piedsQui ne savent plus conter les contes aux veillées.Seigneur, je ne veux plus aller à leur école.

- Но какво е поезия всъщност?- Поезията е красота! - отвърна Лос убедено.- И природата е красота- Не, това е красотата на тяхното отношение към природата. Красотата на тяхното отношение към любовта... Не зная как точно да се изразя, Алек. Поезията е материализиран израз на движението на душите им. Това са просто квантите на тяхното духовно излъчване, на тяхното непонятно за нас щастие...

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring that’s landed on your finger, a massiveinsect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the endof a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurtin your voice under a blanket and said there’s two kindsof women—those you write poems aboutand those you don’t. It’s true. I never brought youa bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed.My idea of courtship was tapping Jane’s Addictionlyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M., whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I workedwithin the confines of my character, castas the bad boy in your life, the Magellanof your dark side. We don’t have a past so muchas a bunch of electricity and liquor, powernever put to good use. What we had togethermakes it sound like a virus, as if we caughtone another like colds, and desire was merelya symptom that could be treated with soupand lots of sex. Gliding beside you now, I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy, as if I invented it, but I’m still not immuneto your waterfall scent, still haven’t developedantibodies for your smile. I don’t know how longregret existed before humans stuck a word on it.I don’t know how many paper towels it would taketo wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the lightof a candle being blown out travels fasterthan the luminescence of one that’s just been lit, but I do know that all our huffing and puffinginto each other’s ears—as if the brain was a trickbirthday candle—didn’t make the silenceany easier to navigate. I’m sorry all the kissesI scrawled on your neck were writtenin disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of youso hard one of your legs would pop outof my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you’d pressyour face against the porthole of my submarine.I’m sorry this poem has taken thirteen yearsto reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skiddingoff the shoulder blade’s precipice and joyridingover flesh, we’d put our hands away like chocolateto be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphyof each other’s eyelashes, translated a paragraphfrom the volumes of what couldn’t be said.

MarginaliaSometimes the notes are ferocious,skirmishes against the authorraging along the borders of every pagein tiny black script.If I could just get my hands on you,Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,they seem to say,I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -that kind of thing.I remember once looking up from my reading,my thumb as a bookmark,trying to imagine what the person must look likewho wrote "Don't be a ninny"alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.Students are more modestneeding to leave only their splayed footprintsalong the shore of the page.One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.Another notes the presence of "Irony"fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,Hands cupped around their mouths.Absolutely," they shoutto Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation pointsrain down along the sidelines.And if you have managed to graduate from collegewithout ever having written "Man vs. Nature"in a margin, perhaps nowis the time to take one step forward.We have all seized the white perimeter as our ownand reached for a pen if only to showwe did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;we pressed a thought into the wayside,planted an impression along the verge.Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoriajotted along the borders of the Gospelsbrief asides about the pains of copying,a bird singing near their window,or the sunlight that illuminated their page-anonymous men catching a ride into the futureon a vessel more lasting than themselves.And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,they say, until you have read himenwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.Yet the one I think of most often,the one that dangles from me like a locket,was written in the copy of Catcher in the RyeI borrowed from the local libraryone slow, hot summer.I was just beginning high school then,reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,and I cannot tell youhow vastly my loneliness was deepened,how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,when I found on one pageA few greasy looking smearsand next to them, written in soft pencil-by a beautiful girl, I could tell,whom I would never meet-Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love.

My wife with the hair of a wood fireWith the thoughts of heat lightningWith the waist of an hourglassWith the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tigerMy wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitudeWith the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earthWith the tongue of rubbed amber and glassMy wife with the tongue of a stabbed hostWith the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyesWith the tongue of an unbelievable stoneMy wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writingWith brows of the edge of a swallow's nestMy wife with the brow of slates of a hothouse roofAnd of steam on the panesMy wife with shoulders of champagneAnd of a fountain with dolphin-heads beneath the iceMy wife with wrists of matchesMy wife with fingers of luck and ace of heartsWith fingers of mown hayMy wife with armpits of marten and of beechnutAnd of Midsummer NightOf privet and of an angelfish nestWith arms of seafoam and of riverlocksAnd of a mingling of the wheat and the millMy wife with legs of flaresWith the movements of clockwork and despairMy wife with calves of eldertree pithMy wife with feet of initialsWith feet of rings of keys and Java sparrows drinkingMy wife with a neck of unpearled barleyMy wife with a throat of the valley of goldOf a tryst in the very bed of the torrentWith breasts of nightMy wife with breasts of a marine molehillMy wife with breasts of the ruby's crucibleWith breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dewMy wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of daysWith the belly of a gigantic clawMy wife with the back of a bird fleeing verticallyWith a back of quicksilverWith a back of lightWith a nape of rolled stone and wet chalkAnd of the drop of a glass where one has just been drinkingMy wife with hips of a skiffWith hips of a chandelier and of arrow-feathersAnd of shafts of white peacock plumesOf an insensible pendulumMy wife with buttocks of sandstone and asbestosMy wife with buttocks of swans' backsMy wife with buttocks of springWith the sex of an irisMy wife with the sex of a mining-placer and of a platypusMy wife with a sex of seaweed and ancient sweetmeatMy wife with a sex of mirrorMy wife with eyes full of tearsWith eyes of purple panoply and of a magnetic needleMy wife with savanna eyesMy wife with eyes of water to he drunk in prisonMy wife with eyes of wood always under the axeMy wife with eyes of water-level of level of air earth and fire