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:
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.
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