ESOTERIKOS DAIMONAS: Where NTodd's thoughts come to die.
To answer Kant’s last question she should take the curtains from her eyes
and lay them on the bed.
She should stand on her head and dream,
empty herself of I, I, I, I.
She should walk inside the living and the dead,
become some other passerby.
Catherine Barnett.
She recognizes its crest in the way he looks at her.
The wave is as vast as the roiling mass in the Japanese
Print they had paused in front of at the museum,
Capped with ringlets of foam, all surging sinew.
That little village along the shore would be
Totally lost. There is no escaping this.
The wave is flooding his heart,
And he is sending the flood
Her way. It rushes
Over her.
Can you look at one face
For the whole of a life?
Does the moon peer down
At the tides and hunger for home?
Michele Wolf.
The strident high
civic trumpeting
of misrule. It is
what we stand for.
Wild insolence,
aggregates without
distinction. Courage
of common men:
spent in the ruck
their remnant witness
after centuries
is granted them
like a pardon.
And other fealties
other fortitudes
broken as named—
Respublica
brokenly recalled,
its archaic laws
and hymnody;
and destroyed hope
that so many times
is brought with triumph
back from the dead.
Geoffrey Hill.
I hate how this unsummoned sigh-sound, sob-sound,
not sound really, feeling, sigh-feeling, sob-feeling,
keeps rising in me, rasping in me, not in its old disguise
as nostalgia, sweet crazed call of the blackbird;
not as remembrance, grief for so many gone,
nor either that other tangle of recall, regret
for unredeemed wrongs, errors, omissions,
petrified roots too deep to ever excise;
a mingling rather, a melding, inextricable mesh
of delight in astonishing being, of being in being,
with a fear of and fear for I can barely think what,
not non-existence, of self, loved ones, love;
not even war, fuck war, sighing for war,
sobbing for war, for no war, peace, surcease;
more than all that, some ground-sound, ground-note,
sown in us now, that swells in us, all of us,
echo of love we had, have, for world, for our world,
on which we seem finally mere swarm, mere deluge,
mere matter self-altered to tumult, to noise,
cacophonous blitz of destruction, despoilment,
din from which every emotion henceforth emerges,
and into which falters, slides, sinks, and subsides:
sigh-sound of lament, of remorse; sob-sound of rue,
of, still, always, ever sadder and sadder sad joy.
C. K. Williams.
"Fortune, it is you that I follow. Away with bargaining! We have put our trust in fate. We must proceed with war as the judge." Then he pressed straight on at the head of his men through the darkness of the night, swifter than the bullet from a Balearic sling or a Parthian’s parting arrow; and, full of menace, moved on nearby Ariminum. Leaving only the morning star behind, the stars fled before the fires of the sun, and the day broke that was to see the first upheavals of the war.
Lucan.
“No, you’re right, I’m wrong”:
No, you’re right, I’m wrong ...
Allow me to drift off from this pointless argument,
I’m wrong in my opinion, that’s fine, I’m not deeply attached to that opinion anyway ...
I’m not even listening, you say? I don’t know.
I think I am. But repeat what you just said.
Love should be constant?
Yes, it should be constant.
But only in love, of course.
Say it again, will you? ...
People make life so very complicated!
Yes, fine, I’ll bring the money tomorrow.
O great sun, you know nothing of this,
A joy we cannot even contemplate in the serene blue unreachable sky.
Álvaro de Campos.
Its quiet graves were made for peace till Gabriel blows his horn.
Those wise old elms could hear no cry
Of all that distant agony—
Only the red-winged blackbird, and the rustle of thick ripe corn.
The blue jay, perched upon that bronze, with bright unweeting eye
Could never read the names that signed
The noblest charter of mankind;
But all of them were names we knew beneath our English skies.
And on the low gray headstones, with their crumbling weather-stains,
—Though cardinal birds, like drops of blood,
Flickered across the haunted wood,—
The names you’d see were names that woke like flowers in English lanes
John Applegate was fast asleep; and Temperance Olden, too.
And David Worth had quite forgot
If Hannah’s lips were red or not;
And Prudence veiled her eyes at last, as Prudence ought to do.
And when, across that patch of heaven, that small blue leaf-edged space
At times, a droning airplane went,
No flicker of astonishment
Could lift the heavy eyelids on one gossip’s upturned face.
For William Speakman could not tell—so thick the grasses grow—
If that strange humming in the sky
Meant that the Judgment Day were nigh,
Or if ’twere but the summer bees that blundered to and fro.
And then, across the breathless wood, a Bell began to sound,
The only Bell that wakes the dead,
And Stockton Signer raised his head,
And called to all the deacons in the ancient burial-ground.
“The Bell, the Bell is ringing! Give me back my rusty sword.
Though I thought the wars were done,
Though I thought our peace was won,
Yet I signed the Declaration, and the dead must keep their word.
“There’s only one great ghost I know could make that ’larum ring.
It’s the captain that we knew
In the ancient buff and blue,
It’s our Englishman, George Washington, who fought the German king!”
So the sunset saw them mustering beneath their brooding boughs,
Ancient shadows of our sires,
Kindling with the ancient fires,
While the old cracked Bell to southward shook the shadowy meeting house.
Alfred Noyes.
"The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!":
The day is gone, and all its sweets are gone!
Sweet voice, sweet lips, soft hand, and softer breast,
Warm breath, light whisper, tender semi-tone,
Bright eyes, accomplish’d shape, and lang’rous waist!
Faded the flower and all its budded charms,
Faded the sight of beauty from my eyes,
Faded the shape of beauty from my arms,
Faded the voice, warmth, whiteness, paradise –
Vanish’d unseasonably at shut of eve,
When the dusk holiday – or holinight
Of fragrant-curtain’d love begins to weave
The woof of darkness thick, for hid delight,
But, as I’ve read love’s missal through to-day,
He’ll let me sleep, seeing I fast and pray.
John Keats.
Her eyelids were painted blue.
When she closed her eyes the sea
rolled in like ten thousand fiery chariots,
leaving behind silence above & below
a thousand years old. He stood beneath
a high arched window, gazing out
at fishing boats beyond the dikes, their nets
unfurled, their offshore gestures
a dance of living in bluish entourage.
He was only the court’s chief jester.
What he said & did made them laugh,
but lately what he sometimes thought he knew
could cost him his polished tongue & royal wig.
He was the masked fool unmasking the emperor.
Forget the revelation. Forget the briny sea.
He had seen the ravishing empress naked
in a forbidden pose. Her blue eye shadow.
Aquamarine shells crusted with wormy mud.
Anyway, if he said half of what was foretold,
the great one would become a weeping boy
slumped beneath the Pillars of Hercules.
Yusef Komunyakaa.
I explore old waters
I search for the first fire.
Infancy,
that house filled with ghosts;
my grandmother’s courtyard,
the earth, the trees from which I’m made.
The guava smashing against the patio’s red tiles midafternoon,
afternoons where I watched life pass by from a sidewalk.
And I fooled myself believing my hands were made to narrate the world.
I write, that’s for sure,
there’s so much I want to name and that I can’t;
so much life slipping through my hands,
so much shadow ruffling my hair
so many words suspended in the air
—miniscule dust particles
lit by the light from the window—
that I must shake off
the way someone shakes off the last layer of skin.
And I lie
if I say that it’s stone, mountain, sea, river,
the birds taking flight, the corners of a house,
my grandmother’s face, her numerous ghosts
the ones who today
ask to be counted.
There is so much that I want to name and that I cannot.
I write, that’s for sure.
Death, from the other side,
is levitating.
Melissa Sauma.
In a turning instant, my head
Catches light of a leaping star
Over my left shoulder in a
Green region of space darkened
Into distance beyond distance,
A cold, green star, not rising like
Sons and empires, slow as breath,
In the way of stars, but as no
Darkened water could have mirrored
The partly glimpsed meteor in
Surging reversal of falling—
That sort of rising. They return
Bright rightings of our sinisters,
The mirrors; but this rise of light—
As if in summer nights at still
Moments a death could yet retract,
Or a dim candle gutter on—
Freshens the held air; far away,
Somewhere a breath has been taken.
John Hollander.
The almanac of time hangs in the brain ;
The seasons numbered by the inward sun,
The winter years, move in the pit of man ;
His graph is measured as the page of pain
Shifts to the redwombed pen.
The calendar of age hangs in the heart,
A lover's thought tears down the dated sheet,
The inch of time's protracted to a foot
By youth and age, the mortal state and thought
Ageing both day and night.
The word of time lies on the chaptered bone,
The seed of time is sheltered in the loin :
The grains of life must seethe beneath the sun,
[The syllables be said and said again :]*
Time shall belong to man.
Twinwalled faces
and legs
and frontier dresses
tall limbs gazing
at border garrisons
of erotic women
as they fold themselves
in two
in four
at eighteen
and whisper
in the ears
of the northern wind
wonderful breast
I went to Skopelos to Skopia
to every shipyard
almost feverish
to the shop of love
to the library the grocer
the movies the lift
everywhere the signals
the written notes
of erotic conspiracy
Yiorgos Chouliaras.
some words are better left to silence autumn wind Basho
— Basho Society (@BashoSociety) October 25, 2026
After I had cut off my hands
and grown new ones
something my former hands had longed for
came and asked to be rocked.
After my plucked out eyes
had withered, and new ones grown
something my former eyes had wept for
came asking to be pitied.
Denise Levertov.
The shirt touches his neck
and smooths over his back.
It slides down his sides.
It even goes down below his belt—
down into his pants.
Lucky shirt.
Jane Kenyon.
PS - Reminded me of an old Brut ad.
O mystic, delicate chalice of the world,
Jeweled with 'pallid moons! Exquisite arch
Of the quiet sky; carven 'twixt dusk and dusk
Of smoky Indian jade, a summer night,
By God the Artist, God the deaf and blind,
Who fashions masterpiece on masterpiece,
And through the Window of the Universe
Hurls them forever and forever. . .
Pale cup,-wherein all tears and mirth of men
Distil, that men may drink of thee and live. . .
Thrice-precious Grail, that holds the Wine of Earth !
John Reed.
Joy:
Like the time I dreamt about a loon family,
just some common loons—not metaphors
in any way, just real loons in a lake swimming
near each other so it was clear they were a set,
preferring each other’s company in the cold
still lake with its depth of reflected pines.
The curve of their black heads and sleek
necks, black and white stripes then checks
on their folded wings, floating so low
atop their reflections they almost seem
inside them. Their wails like wolves, their
calls like an echo without origin, their
calls like an echo of lake, or what makes lake
lake. How nice to think the male and female
loons cannot be told apart by their plumage
and that they build a nest and sit on eggs
together. One of their calls is called “tremolo.”
Miller Oberman.
PS - I miss sitting on the porch of my camp on Bald Hill Pond in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, listening to our local pair of nesting loons. Sometimes I bust out ole Robert J Lurstema's Voices Of The Loon just to feel something.
And:
Withstand pandemonium
and scandalous
nightstands
commanding candlelight
and
quicksand
and zinfandel
clandestine landmines
candy handfuls
and contraband
and
handmade
commandments
and merchandise
secondhand husbands
philandering
and
landless
and vandal
bandwagons slandered
and branded
handwritten reprimands
and
meander
on an island
landscaped with chandeliers
abandon handcuffs
standstills
and
backhands
notwithstanding
thousands of oleanders
and dandelions
handpicked
and
sandalwood
and mandrake
and random demands
the bystander
wanders
in
wonderland.
Nicole Sealey.
[I never wish to sing again as I used to . . .]:
I never wish to sing again as I used to, when two new eyes could
always stain the sea, of tangent worlds, indolent as callows, and the clock
went backward for a skip, to rise, to set.
Some will twine grass to fit in a thimble, some will carve bread to
mend a craggy wall, some in the slantest midnight cry for sleep. When
the pitch-owl swallows the moon, what welt will show it? Sighing helps
nothing, raspberries raw and green, in the form of a heart
imperfectly divided. A wave grows sharper close to the shore. Some
own words like strips of scape and summon. It is possible to suffer even
in the sun. And race the steep noon to its highest, hoary gate. Stares
drop under the sky; silence of a windslap; and a scar drifts out of air to
stand whistling:
She who listens poorly will always be calling. She who sounds silence
drowns with the dumb.
She who cuts her hands off must drink with her tongue.
Karen Volkman.