In the Interim

I've been off in my own world, taking a bit of blogging break. I've been periodically working on my book (!!!!) and also just taking a breather.

I've been on a poetry kick lately. Rilke. Dickinson. Oliver. One of my new favorite finds: Dean Rader (you can visit his blog here.) I learned that one of my high school friends married a writer. Then I learned he was a poet. I bought his book, Works & Days. So. Good. (Side note: he was the Winner of the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize.)

So, while I'm on my little hiatus, I give you one of my favorite Dean Rader poems:

Einstein

The universe (which others call the Library) - Borges

by Dean Rader (Works & Days)

He hated tomatoes

And was afraid

Of the noises in the

Desert at dusk.

At times, the numbers

Thumped across the brain

Like horses or bad sentences.

Just a second of peace,

He would say to himself.

A moment

To see images, music, colors.

The calculus of the visible.

_____

What does it mean to see light

And think of a poem?

To see numbers

And arrive at heaven?

To look at stars

And picture a river?

What does it mean to know time

The way one knows a language?

To say that centuries or seconds

Are the letter t in a poem of infinite metaphors?

_______

If you divide the present by the past

You arrive at perception.

If you see light as wave,

Your hear the word silence.

If you see light as particle,

You hear the word wind.

Is the opposite

Of darkness, darkness?

_______

Einstein thinks:

I know that what we are,

We have become, and what

We have become we turn

To shadow, and what the shadow

Touches, the present forgets.

Memory is the shadow of the present

Stretching backward

Forming the equation

To prove Borges was right:

God is a book.

The translator: me.

The language: desire.