Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Split-Toned


God snaps your picture : don't look away --
this room right now, your face tilted
exactly as it is before you can think
or control it. Go ahead, let it betray
all the secret emergencies and still hold
that partial disguise you call your character.
 
Even your lip, they say, the way it curves
or doesn't, or can't decide, will deliver
bales of evidence. The camera, wide open,
stands ready; the exposure is thirty-five years
or so -- after that you have become
whatever the veneer is, all the way through.
 
Now you want to explain. Your mother
was a certain -- how to express it? -- influence.
Yes. And your father, whatever he was,
you couldn't change that. No. And your town
of course had its limits. Go on, keep talking :
Hold it. Don't move. That's you forever.

William Stafford
An Archival Print

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Blue to Light


By-Product










Before I can discard the verse, I have to write it… I can’t discard a verse before it is written because it is the writing of the verse that produces whatever delights or interests or facets that are going to catch the light. The cutting of the gem has to be finished before you can see whether it shines...

I always used to work hard. But I had no idea what hard work was until something changed in my mind… I don’t really know what it was. Maybe some sense that this whole enterprise is limited, that there was an end in sight… That you were really truly mortal.  Leonard Cohen