Sunday, February 28, 2016

Friday, February 26, 2016

A man at peace lives happily, abandoning ideas of victory and defeat.
Dhammapada  15.201.


on the frozen path
I met a fox
we walked  together
to the river's edge -
she leapt into the water
became a trout
leapt again
became a wave
and disappeared




Tuesday, February 16, 2016

the lotus sutra turns to broth

a monk
gave his bowl
to a hungry child
said take this sutra in
my begging bowl
and eat

child holds bowl
to lips
and drinks
it
in







Saturday, February 13, 2016

walking the text as the earth to water

and into the water as I write it--

3,771 refugee deaths at sea
the wine dark darker still


"Thomas sensed that one of modernity's most distinctive tensions would be between
mobility and displacement on the one hand, and dwelling and belonging on the other--
the former ubiquitous, the latter becoming lost (if it had ever been possible) and reconfigured as nostalgia."

-323.  The Old Ways. Macfarlane
..."detail too profuse to be of much interest....."

21. Yje faith To Doubt. Batchelor

Friday, February 12, 2016

“we are continually overflowing toward those who preceded us, toward our origin, and toward those who seemingly come after us. ... It is our task to imprint this temporary, perishable earth into ourselves so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence can rise again “invisibly,” inside us. We are the bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”


― Rainer Maria Rilke
"Adam Nicolson has written of the 'powerful absence[s]' ...remembered landscapes exert upon us, but they exist as powerful presences too, with which we maintain deep and abiding attachments. These, perhaps, are the landscapes in which we live the longest, warped though they are by time, and abraded... by distance."

198. Granite. The Old Ways. Macfarlane
"She understood herself to be in some way thought by place...."

193. Granite. The Old Ways. Macfarlane

Thursday, February 11, 2016

"Perhaps that is why we do not recognise the all-encompassing silence of the photograph
as silence. We can't hear its absence because we take the photograph for the thing photographed."

80. Silence, John Buguenet

The GIF seems to embody this, an eerie pseudo-acetate film strip stuck in soundless, endless repetitive motion...going nowhere again and again and again....

river shiver


z y g o t e


Monday, February 8, 2016

grey Griomabhal

this stone

to tiny thing crawling
under scud

under

new moon

look at this stone
the undone peak of it

sown edge

slipping into

black sky water



Saturday, February 6, 2016

Sea roads are dissolving paths whose passage leaves no trace beyond a wake...
They survive as a convention, tradition, as a sequence of...

88 . the Old Ways - Water -- South, McFarlane