delicate as a young bird's tongue

Orchids

They lean over the path,
Adder-mouthed,
Swaying close to the face,
Coming out, soft and deceptive,
Limp and damp, delicate as a young bird's tongue,
Their fluttery fledgling lips
Move slowly,
Drawing in the warm air.

And at night,
The faint moon falling through whitewashed glass,
The heat going down
So their musky smell comes even stronger,
Drifting down from their mossy cradles:
So many devouring infants!
Soft luminescent fingers,
Lips neither dead nor alive,
Loose ghostly mouths
Breathing.

Theodore Roethke

The waitress brought a chilled fork for my lifestyle salad.

Don DeLillo, Underworld

Men emerge pale from the little printing plant at four sharp, ghosts for an instant, blinking, until the outdoor light overcomes the look of constant indoor light clinging to them. In winter, Pine Street at this hour is dark, darkness presses downearly from the mountain that hangs above the stagnant city of Brewer; but now in summer the granite curbs starred with mica and the row houses differentiated by the speckled bastard sidings and the hopeful small porches with their jigsaw brackets and gray milk-bottle boxes and the sooty ginkgo trees and the baking curbsdie cars wince beneath a brilliance like a frozen explosion. The city, attempting to revive its dying downtown, has torn away blocks of buildings to create parking lots, so that a desolate openness, weedy and rubbled, spills through the once-packed streets, exposing church facades never seen from a distance and generating new perspectives of rear entryways and half-alleys and intensifying the cruel breadth of the light. The sky is cloudless yet colorless, hovering blanched humidity, in the way of these Pennsylvania summers, good for nothing but to make green things grow. Men don't even tan; filmed by sweat, they turn yellow.

John Updike, Rabbit Redux

In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedies Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled "Bordando el Manto Terrestre," were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. Oedipa, perverse, had stood in front of the painting and cried. No one had noticed; she wore dark green bubble shades. For a moment she'd wondered if the seal around her sockets were tight enough to allow the tears simply to go on and fill up the entire lens space and never dry. She could carry the sadness of the moment with her that way forever, see the world refracted through those tears, those specific tears, as if indices as yet unfound varied in important ways from cry to cry. She had looked down at her feet and known, then, because of a painting, that what she stood on had only been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower, was only by accident known as Mexico, and so Pierce had taken her away from nothing, there'd been no escape. What did she so desire escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: that what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited on her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disk jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?

When I got back to my house, I went straight to my Greek classics. Let God's will be done, I said. I'm going to reread the Greeks. Respecting the tradition, I started with Homer, then moved on to Thales of Miletus, Xenophanes of Colophon, Alcmaeon of Croton, Zeno of Elea (wonderful), and then a pro-Allende general was killed, and Chile restored diplomatic relations with Cuba and the national census recorded a total of 8,884,746 Chileans and the first episodes of the soap opera The Right to be Born were broadcast on television, and I read Tyrtaios of Sparta and Archilochos of Paros and Solon of Athens and Hipponax of Ephesos and Stesichoros of Himnera and Sappho of Mytilene and Anakreon of Teos and Pindar of Thebes (one of my favorites), and the government nationalized the copper mines and then the nitrate and steel industries and Pablo Neruda won the Nobel Prize and Diaz Casanueva won the National Literature Prize and Fidel Castro came on a visit and many people thought he would stay and live in Chile for ever and Perez Zujovic the Christian Democrat ex-minister was killed and Lafourcade published White Dove and I gave it a good review, you might way I hailed it in glowing terms, although deep down I knew it wasn't much of a book, and the first anti-Allende march was organized, with people banging pots and pans, and I read Aeschylus and Sophocles and Euripides, all the tragedies, and Alkaios of Mytilene and Aesop and Hesiod and Herodotus (a titan among authors), and in Chile there were shortages and inflation and black marketeering and long queues for food and Farewell's estate was expropriated in the Land Reform along with many others and the Bureau of Women's Affairs was set up and Allende went to Mexico and visited the seat of the United Nations in New York and there were terrorist attacks and I read Thucydides, the long wars of Thucydides, the rivers and plains, the winds and the plateaux that traverse the time-darkened pages of Thucydides, and the men he describes, the warriors with their arms, and the civilians, harvesting grapes, or looking from a mountainside at the distant horizon, the horizon where I was just one among millions of beings still to be born, the far-off horizon Thucydides glimpsed and me there trembling indistinguishably, and I also reread Demosthenes and Menander and Aristotle and Plato (whom one cannot read too often), and there were strikes and the colonel of a tank regiment tried to mount a coup, and a cameraman recorded his own death on film, and then Allende's naval aide-de-camp was assassinated and there were riots, swearing, Chileans blaspheming, painting on walls, and then nearly half a million people marched in support of Allende, and then came the coup d'etat, the putsch, the military uprising, the bombing of La Moneda and when the bombing was finished, the president committed suicide and that put an end to it all. I sat there in silence, a finger between the pages to mark my place, and I thought: Peace at last.

Roberto Bolano, By Night in Chile

In his loneliness and fixedness he yearneth towards the journeying Moon, and the stars that still sojourn, yet still move onward; and every where the blue sky belongs to them, and is their appointed rest, and their native country and their own natural homes, which they enter unannounced, as lords that are certainly expected and yet there is a silent joy at their arrival.

Hugo van der Goes, Portinari Altarpiece

Better to become an undercover poet.

Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that Lorenzo became an artist. (What else could he do?) But it's hard to be an artist in the third world if you are poor, have no arms and are gay to boot. So, for a time, Lorenzo had to do other things. He studied and improved himself. He sang in the streets. Being a hopeless romantic, he fell in love. His disappointments (not to mention humiliations, put-downs and insults) were terrible, and one day -- to be marked retrospectively with a white stone -- he decided to kill himself. One particularly sad summer evening, as the sun sank into the Pacific Ocean, Lorenzo jumped into the sea from a rock used exclusively by suicides (every self-respecting stretch of Chilean coastline has one). He sank like a stone with his eyes open and saw the water grow darker and the bubbles streaming from his lips and then an involuntary movement of his legs sent him back up to the surface. Because of the waves he couldn't see the beach, only the rocks and the masts of pleasure craft or fishing boats. Then he went under again. This time too he kept his eyes open: he turned his head calmly (as if under anaesthetic), looking for something, anything, as long as it was beautiful, to be his last memory. But darkness enveloped whatever else might have been sinking with him into the depths and he could see nothing. Then, as the saying goes, his whole life flashed before him like a film. Some parts were in black and white, others in color. His poor mother's love, her pride, her weariness, how she hugged him at night when, in Chile's poor neighborhoods everything seemed to be hanging by a thread (black and white); the trembling, the nights when he wet his bed, the hospitals, the staring, the zoo-like staring (color); friends sharing what little they had, the consolations of music, marijuana, beauty revealed in unlikely places (black and white); love perfect and brief like a sonnet by Gongora; knowing with a fatal certainty (but raging against the knowledge) that you only live once. Suddenly drawing courage from nowhere, he decided he was not going to die. Now or never, he thought, and began to swim back up. It seemed to take forever to reach the surface and then he could hardly manage to keep himself afloat, but he did. That afternoon he learnt to swim without arms, like an eel or a snake. In the current socio-political climate, he said to himself, committing suicide is absurd and redundant. Better to become an undercover poet.

Roberto Bolano, Distant Star

I had drunk her writing. I had eaten her name.

I read the letter twice over, then, for all the good it did me, shouted, "There's no one around here like you! You're no simple soul either!" I had seen her using her Parker 51 fountain pen to take notes in class--a brown-and-red tortoiseshell pen--but I had never before seen her handwriting or how she signed her name with the nib of that pen, the narrow way she formed the "O," the strange height at which she dotted the two "i"s, the long graceful upswept tail at the end of the concluding "a." I put my mouth to the page and kissed the "O." Kissed it and kissed it. Then, impulsively, with the tip of my tongue I began to lick the ink of the signature, patiently as a cat at his milk bowl I licked away until there was no longer the "O," the "l," the "i," the "v," the second "i," the "a"--licked until the upswept tail was completely gone. I had drunk her writing. I had eaten her name. I had all I could do not to eat the whole thing.

Philip Roth, Indignation

Kung walked

And Kung said, and wrote on the bo leaves:
If a man have not order within him
He can not spread order about him;
And if a man have not order within him
His family will not act with due order;
And if the prince have not order within him
He can not put in order his dominions.
And Kung gave the words "order"
and "brotherly deference"
And said nothing of the "life after death."

Ezra Pound, Canto XIII

Half one's notions of other people were, after all, grotesque. They served private purposes of one's own.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

DFW, RIP

Dilige et quod vis fac.

Always he had tended to think rationally, as a rationalist, that life ends with the death of the human body. But at three that night, wide awake in the darkk, he understood that this is not so. It ends and it doesn't. There is some spiritual power, some mental power, that lives after the body is dead, and that clings to those who think about the dead one, and my mother has revealed hers here in Chicago. People would say this is only more subjectivity. I would have said so myself. But subjectivity is a mystery too. Do birds have subjectivity? Subjectivity is just the name for the route she takes to reach me. It's not that I want to have this contact or that she wants to have this contact, and it's not that the contact will continue forever. It is also dying like the body is dying, this remnant of her spirit is dying too, but it's not quite gone yet. It's in this room. It's beside this bed.

Philip Roth, The Anatomy Lesson

I thought of my kindly, handsome father, alone in that enormous house

He looked at me kindly. "You probably want to sleep a little, yes?"

I did, very much, and I finally went downstairs. And I thought, on the way down to my room, and on the way down into sleep, of all the people in the world dragging themselves from old property to new property, along oceans and highways and Ridge Street, and arriving, in the end, sawed into pieces. I thought of my kindly, handsome father, alone in that enormous house, and how he'd never make up with Misha, though they had both loved my mother. America was too large; America with its houses, its highways; it had broken them up, and me as well. No matter what happened with Arielle (and nothing, I may as well tell you now, happened with Arielle), I would never have Jillian back, could never haver her back, did not even want her back, which was the whole trouble--because all the people I'd loved once, or even just knew once, were scattered, never to be seen again in one place. So that all the feelings are expended, received, that one felt at the core of one's being, had turned, in the course of things, to dust.

And outside already it was growing dark.

Keith Gessen, All the Sad Young Literary Men