chilirlw

I will arise, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a-glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shores;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
-W.B. Yeats

There is no city that does not dream
from its foundations. The lost lake
crumbling in the hands of the brickmakers,
the floor of the ravine where light lies broken
with the memory of rivers. All the winters
stored in that geologic
garden. Dinosaurs sleep in the subway
at Bloor and Shaw, a bed of bones
under the rumbling track. The storm
that lit the city with the voltage
of spring, when we were eighteen
on the clean earth. The ferry ride in the rain,
wind wet with wedding music and everything that
sings in the carbon of stone and bone
like a page of love, wind-lost from a hand, unread.
-Anne Michaels

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face and a grey dawn breaking.
I must down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.
I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And a quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick's over.
-John Masefield

THE WHALE TOOK JONAH
DOWN THE HATCH
THEN COUGHED HIM UP
BECAUSE HE SCRATCHED
BURMA-SHAVE

Jenny kiss'd me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss'd me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss'd me.
-J. H. Leigh Hunt

Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!
-Anonymous

While you're a white-hot youth, emit the rays
Which, now unmarked, shall dazzle future days.
Burn for the joy of it, and waste no juice
On hopes of prompt discovery. Produce!

Then, white with years, live wisely and survive.
Thus you may be on hand when you arrive,
And, like Antares, rosily dilate,
And for a time be gaseous and great.

- Richard Wilbur

I heard two workers say, "This chaos
Will soon be ended."

This chaos will not be ended,
The red and the blue house blended,

Not ended, never and never ended,
The weak man mended,

The man that is poor at night
Attended

Like the man that is rich and right.
The great men will not be blended...

I am the poorest of all.
I know that I can not be mended,

Out of the clouds, pomp of the air,
By which at least I am befriended.

-Wallace Stevens

Ellemenopee (chilirlw) caley dunn left you 1 Flummery and told me to tell you: Coming to your street never fails to make me smile. That's a special gift you have. Flummery is flattery with truth. (19 hr ago).

As a friend to the children
commend me the Yak.
You will find it exactly the thing:
It will carry and fetch,
you can ride on its back,
Or lead it about
with a string.
The Tartar who dwells on the plains of Thibet
(A desolate region of snow)
Has for centuries made it a nursery pet,
And surely the Tartar should know!
Then tell your papa where the Yak can be got
And if he is awfully rich
He will buy you the creature--
or else
he will not.
(I cannot be positive which.)

-Hillaire Belloc

There is no city that does not dream
from its foundations. The lost lake
crumbling in the hands of the brickmakers,
the floor of the ravine where light lies broken
with the memory of rivers. All the winters
stored in that geologic
garden. Dinosaurs sleep in the subway
at Bloor and Shaw, a bed of bones
under the rumbling track. The storm
that lit the city with the voltage
of spring, when we were eighteen
on the clean earth. The ferry ride in the rain,
wind wet with wedding music and everything that
sings in the carbon of stone and bone
like a page of love, wind-lost from a hand, unread.

-Anne Michaels

Glitchian scientists in our top secret Sandbox labs have discovered that all glitchen walk along mysterious curved lines criss-crossing the surface of Ur. Your mission is to assist with their research by marking out these trails yourself.

Find a street with an unimpeded view of the ground and drop a sequence of spices (or other small, cheap material) to mark out these mysterious paths. If your path leads somewhere interesting, leave a note explaining that anyone walking along this path is furthering the cause of glitchian science, and perhaps leave a small gift to thank them for their participation.

(Note: to stop your experimental materials from clumping either use a variety of spices or jump in the air before dropping them)

Your mission if you choose to accept it is to put multiple salmons on the floor of the Bureau of Administrative Affairs Ministry of Departments (Bureaucratic Hall). Show them we know something fishy is going on there!

File a report on this mission and get a new one at http://sandbox.verastrange.com/

Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight
I yell ok. Finish something I'm doing,
then something else, walk slowly round
the corner to my son's room.
He is standing arms outstretched
waiting for a bearhug. Grinning.

Why do I give my emotion an animal's name,
give it that dark squeeze of death?
This is the hug which collects
all his small bones and his warm neck against me.
The thin tough body under the pyjamas
locks me like a magnet of blood.

How long was he standing there
like that, before I came?
-Michael Ondaatje

I cannot fall asleep at midnight,
overhearing my neighbor singing.
I imagine her red lips moving
till dust falls from the beams.
I don't laugh when she misses a beat,
just pull my clothes on to steal her song,
but when I put on clothes, the song ends.
Only the moon in the window still shines.
- Mei Yaochen (1002-1060)
-translated by Tony Barnstone and Chou Ping

IF HARMONY
IS WHAT YOU CRAVE
THEN GET
A TUBA
BURMA-SHAVE

As a friend to the children
commend me the Yak.
You will find it exactly the thing:
It will carry and fetch,
you can ride on its back,
Or lead it about
with a string.
The Tartar who dwells on the plains of Thibet
(A desolate region of snow)
Has for centuries made it a nursery pet,
And surely the Tartar should know!
Then tell your papa where the Yak can be got
And if he is awfully rich
He will buy you the creature--
or else
he will not.
(I cannot be positive which.)

- Hillaire Belloc

Under the Mirabeau Bridge there flows the Seine
Must I recall
Our loves recall how then
After each sorrow joy came back again

Let night come on bells end the day
The days go by me still I stay

Hands joined and face to face let?s stay just so
While underneath
The bridge of our arms shall go
Weary of endless looks the river?s flow

Let night come on bells end the day
The days go by me still I stay

All love goes by as water to the sea
All love goes by
How slow life seems to me
How violent the hope of love can be

Let night come on bells end the day
The days go by me still I stay

The days the weeks pass by beyond our ken
Neither time past
Nor love comes back again
Under the Mirabeau Bridge there flows the Seine

Let night come on bells end the day
The days go by me still I stay

-Guillaume Apollinaire
-translated by Richard Wilbur

I heard two workers say, "This chaos
Will soon be ended."

This chaos will not be ended,
The red and the blue house blended,

Not ended, never and never ended,
The weak man mended,

The man that is poor at night
Attended

Like the man that is rich and right.
The great men will not be blended...

I am the poorest of all.
I know that I can not be mended,

Out of the clouds, pomp of the air,
By which at least I am befriended.

Wallace Stevens

At the border between the past and the future
No sign on a post warns you that your passport
Won't let you return to your native land
As a citizen, just as a tourist
Who won't be allowed to fraternize with the locals.

No guard steps out of a booth to explain
You can't bring gifts back, however modest,
Can't even pass a note to a few friends
That suggests what worries of theirs are misguided,
What expectations too ambitious.

Are you sure you're ready to leave,
To cross the bridge that begins
Under a clear sky and ends in fog?
But look, you've started across already
And it's one-lane wide, with no room for U-turns.

No time even to pause as drivers behind you
Lean on their horns, those who've convinced themselves
Their home awaits them on the other side.

-Carl Dennis

Look: I look back. You look with eyes
But I am eyeless.
And I can speak, having no voice. You have
A voice, but all I have is lips, and they move, soundless.

- Anonymous Greek
-translated by Burton Raffel

Who are you, shipwrecked stranger? Leontias found you,
Dead on this beach, and buried you,
Weeping for his own uncertain life, for he too skims
The waves like a gull, and never rests.

-Callimachus
- translated by Burton Raffel

Child: understand me:
Everything that decays rots from the inside out,
Rots with its own corruption.
Watch rust destroying iron,
Moths eating out woven wool,
Worms chewing through wood.
But the worst rot of all is envy,
The evil root of the faithless soul--
And envy is eating you away,
It is eating at you as I speak,
And it will go on eating.

- Menander
- translated by Burton Raffel

Western wind, when will thou blow,
The small rain down can rain?
Christ, if my love were in my arms,
And I in my bed again!

-Anonymous

My mother used to say, "Bury me with a band,"
and I'd say, "I don't think the grave will be big enough."
Instead, we buried her with creosote bushes,
and a few worldly belongings.
The creosote is for brushing her footprints away as she leaves.
It is for keeping the earth away from her sacred remains.
It is for leaving the smell of the desert with her,
to remind her of home one last time.

-Ofelia Zepeda

There once was a limerick called Steven
Whose rhyme scheme was very uneven
It didn't make sense
It wasn't funny
and who'd call a limerick Steven anyway?

-Steven Herrick

I read to my dog from a takeout menu
so he can sleep. When he tires
of that, I talk to him
about nothing, and when I run out
of things to say, I make up words
to a song with whatever
array of notes and breath streams in

the way the clean wind did
as we rode once, and
I rolled down the window a hair
and he sat up without effort, glossy nose
in the speeding weather, eyes half closed
in the light that whizzed through his fur
like the hands of a friend
who had missed him.

-Frannie Lindsay

Nothing is plumb, level or square:
the studs are bowed, the joists
are shaky by nature, no piece fits
any other piece without a gap
or pinch, and bent nails
dance all over the surfacing
like maggots. By Christ
I am no carpenter. I built
the roof for myself, the walls
for myself, the floors
for myself, and got
hung up in it myself. I
danced with a purple thumb
at this house-warming, drunk
with my prime whiskey: rage.
Oh I spat rage's nails
into the frame-up of my work:
it held. It settled plumb,
level, solid, square and true
for that great moment. Then
it screamed and went on through,
skewing as wrong the other way
God damned it. This is hell,
but I planned it, I sawed it,
I nailed it, and I
will live in it until it kills me.
I can nail my left palm
to the left-hand crosspiece but
I can't do everything myself.
I need a hand to nail the right,
a help, a love, a you, a wife.

- Alan Dugan

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,

Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.

- Edward Thomas

The red rose whispers of passion,
And the white rose breathes of love;
O, the red rose is a falcon,
And the white rose is a dove.

But I send you a cream-white rosebud
With a flush on its petal tips;
For the love that is purest and sweetest
Has a kiss of desire on the lips.

-John Boyle O'Reilly

Jenny kiss'd me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I'm weary, say I'm sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss'd me,
Say I'm growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss'd me.

J. H. Leigh Hunt

When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of out-worn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;

When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;

When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay,
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate -
That Time will come and take my Love away:

- This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.

-William Shakespeare

O, my love's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June.
O, my love's like the melodie,
That's sweetly play'd in tune.

As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in love am I,
And I will love thee still, my Dear,
Till a' the seas gang dry.

Till a' the seas gang dry, my Dear,
And the rocks melt wi' the sun!
O, I will love thee still, my Dear,
While the sands o' life shall run.

And fare thee weel, my only Love,
And fare thee weel a while!
And I will come again, my Love,
Tho' it were ten thousand mile!
-Robert Burns

To have a thing is little,
If you're not allowed to show it,
And to know a thing is nothing
Unless others know you know it.

-Lord Neaves

Small fact and fingers and farthest one from me,
a hand's width and two generations away,
in this present I am fifty-three.
You are not yet a full day.
When I am sixty-three, when you are ten,
and you are neither closer nor as far,
your arms will fill with what you know by then,
the arithmetic and love we do and are.
When I by blood and luck am eighty-six
and you are someplace else and thirty-three
believing in sex and god and politics
with children who look not at all like me,
sometime I know you will have read them this
so they will know I love them and say so
and love their mother. Child whatever is
is always or never was. Long ago,
a day I watched awhile beside your bed,
I wrote this down, a thing that might be kept
awhile, to tell you what I would have said
when you were who knows what and I was dead
which is I stood and loved you while you slept.
-Miller Williams

Evening
you gather back
all that dazzling dawn has put asunder:
you gather a lamb
gather a kid
gather a child to its mother

-Sappho translated by Anne Carson

This game has meant so much to me. I wish it had lasted longer, but I am so grateful for the time we had.

The gifted have told us for years that they want to be loved
For what they are, that they, in whatever fullness is theirs,
Are perishable in twilight, just like us. So they work all night
In rooms that are cold and webbed with the moon's light;
Sometimes, during the day, they lean on their cars,
And stare into the blistering valley, glassy and golden,
But mainly they sit, hunched in the dark, feet on the floor,
Hands on the table, shirts with a bloodstain over the heart.
-Mark Strand

My heart is broken