Blog entries from Merry

Merry has a total of 77 entries.

  1. Merry
    From My Commonplace Book - 72
    The Apples by Yves Bonnefoy And what are we to think Of these yellow apples? Yesterday they startled us, waiting naked After the leaves had fallen. Today they enchant us, Their shoulders Underlined so modestly With a hem of snow. At university Yves Bonnefoy (French, born 1923) studied mathematics and philosophy and, later, art history. Although he has written about art and art...
    Merry, Nov 24, 2012
  2. Merry
    From My Commonplace Book - 71
    For My Daughter by Antonella Anedda I love her fierceness when she fights me, shouting "Not fair!" Her eyes slitting like shutters in cities by the sea. Her life is rich with bonfires -- seen and unseen -- fires that burn through the turning years bringing her to life again, and again, in a miracle of smoke. This heat gives her a sense of forgiveness -- or so I imagine -- she kisses...
    Merry, Nov 17, 2012
  3. Merry
    From My Commonplace Book - 70
    After Mayakovsky by Denis Johnson It’s after one. You’re probably alone. All night the moon rings like a telephone in an empty booth above our separateness. Now is the hour one answers. I am home. Hello, my heart, my God, my President, my darling: I’m alarmed by the alarm clock’s iridescent face, hung like a charm from darkness’s fat ear. This accident that was my life will have its...
    Merry, Nov 3, 2012
  4. Merry
    From My Commonplace Book - 69
    All Hallows by Louise Gluck Even now this landscape is assembling. The hills darken. The oxen sleep in their blue yoke, the fields having been picked clean, the sheaves bound evenly and piled at the roadside among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises: This is the barrenness of harvest or pestilence and the wife leaning out the window with her hand extended, as in payment, and the seeds...
    Merry, Oct 19, 2012
  5. Merry
    From My Commonplace Book - 68
    Cows in Trouble by Steve Martin These were not the average "contented" cows. They were cows born for trouble. They were not cows who could stand by and let people call them "bossy." They were cows who could not stand around all day lowing. They were cows who could be just as happy chewing someone else's cud as their own. They were renegade cows. My first experience with the renegade cows...
    Merry, Sep 9, 2012
  6. Merry
    From My Commonplace Book - 67
    Pretty by Jane Anne Phillips It was my birthday. I was half child, sensing by their feel the scenes I would remember. My mother tore lettuce with her brown hands. My brothers, hurrying up to wash, ran through the kitchen smelling of sweat and crushed grass. Outside my father stood over the grill, weight on one foot, hand on hip holding a hotpad I'd made at six. Chicken, basted red, crackled...
    Merry, Sep 2, 2012
  7. Merry
    From My Commonplace Book - 66
    Bunch Grass # 37 by Robert Sund The ranchers are selling their wheat early this year, not holding it over for a better price in the spring. Next year the government lifts restrictions on planting, and nobody is sure what will happen when wheat grows from "fencerow to fencerow." This morning another man has come out from the Grain Growers to help us out. John and I haven't time to cooper...
    Merry, Aug 18, 2012
  8. Merry
    From My Commonplace Book - 65
    Refuge Behind Refuge for Peter Huchel by Reiner Kunze Here only the wind comes uninvited through the gateway Here only god calls He has countless lines laid from heaven to earth From the roof of the empty cow-house to the roof of the empty sheep-house the jet of rain shrills from wooden gutters What are you doing, asks god Lord, I say, it's raining, what should one do And his...
    Merry, Jul 13, 2012
  9. Merry
    From My Commonplace Book - 64
    On 9 June 1904 by W. G. Sebald according to the Julian calendar, 22 June according to our own, Anton Pavolich and Olga Leonardovna reach the spa at Badenweiler. The tariff is sixteen maks for board and lodging at the Villa Friedericke but the spelt porridge and creamy cocoa bring no improvement. Suffering from emphesema he spends all day in a reclining chair in the garden marveling again...
    Merry, Jun 2, 2012
  10. Merry
    From My Commonplace Book - 63
    Lost in the Hospital by Rafael Campo It's not that I don't like the hospital. Those small bouquets of flowers, pert and brave. The smell of antiseptic cleaners. The ill, so wistful in their rooms, so true. My friend, the one who's dying, took me out To where the patients go to smoke, IV's And oxygen tanks attached to them -- A tiny patio for skeletons. We shared A cigarette, which was...
    Merry, May 19, 2012
  11. Merry
    From My Commonplace Book - 62
    Asuncia by Nin Andrews Now that you are gone, I am so lonely, even the angels love my sorrow as if it were their own. Sometimes I imagine them, reclining at beach resorts or walking the streets of their glass cities or descending in silver jets to survey the miseries of the earth they admire so. Only they can see and hear me, now that I refuse to go out, now that any illumination...
    Merry, Apr 27, 2012
  12. Merry
    From My Commonplace Book - 61 - a little prose for National Poetry Month
    The Best Gang by Roberto Bolano If I had to hold up the most heavily guarded bank in Europe and I could choose my partners in crime, I'd take a gang of five poets, no question about it. Five real poets, Apollonian or Dionysian, but always real, ready to live and die like poets. No one in the world is as brave as a poet. No one faces disaster with more dignity and understanding. They...
    Merry, Apr 14, 2012
  13. Merry
    From My Commonplace Book - 60
    The Black Heralds by Cesar Vallejo You get knocks in life, so vicious. . . . It beats me! Blows as if from God's hate; as if under their rain, the backwash of everything you've suffered stagnates in your soul. . . . It beats me! Not many; but you get them. . . . They open up dark sluices in the fiercest face and strongest back. Perhaps they're the mounts of the barbarian Attilas;...
    Merry, Apr 3, 2012
  14. Merry
    From My Commonplace Book - 59
    Romanesque Arches by Tomas Transtromer Tourists have crowded into the half-dark of the enormous Romanesque church. Vault opening behind vault and no perspective. A few candle flames flickered. An angel whose face I couldn't see embraced me and his whisper went all through my body: "Don't be afraid to be a human being, be proud! Inside you one vault after another opens endlessly....
    Merry, Mar 24, 2012
  15. Merry
    From My Commonplace Book - 58
    from Red by Rafael Alberti 1. I am morning's first color day's last. 2. I wrestle with green in fruit; I win. 3. With my brothers, I submitted to the rigors -- Giotto -- of geometric rigor. 7. I congeal when my being solidifies in black. 12. Indistinct in certain nudes, diluted by the snow. 15. Purple through glass: goblets, bottles, tumblers warm with...
    Merry, Mar 17, 2012
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