Tissue Poems Quotes

To learn by heart is to learn By hurt—grief inscribing Its wisdom in the soft tissue. Song you sing, poem you are— Finger moving, precise As a phonograph needle, Along the groove of scar.

The Encounter" All the while they were talking the new morality Her eyes explored me. And when I rose to go Her fingers were like the tissue Of a Japanese paper napkin.

Look: this is January the worst onslaught is ahead of us Don't be lured by these soft grey afternoons these sunsets cut from pink and violet tissue-paper by the thought the days are lengthening Don't let the solstice fool you: our lives will always be a stew of contradictions the worst moment of winter can come in April when the peepers are stubbornly still and our bodies plod on without conviction and our thoughts cramp down before the sheer arsenal of everything that tries us: this battering, blunt-edged life

Let go, live your life, the grave has no sunny corners

A lonely face aglow on high. You mean the moon. A flower, red, has caught his eye. A rose in bloom. He cannot touch her, though he tries. In darkness glints the tears he cries. I see mere stars; you boldly lie. Nay, poetry to draw your sigh. I am immune.

I wish I were a tree. Tall. Strong. Abiding. Rooted in the spot I stand, impervious to lures that drag the transient here and there. Possessing neither a negligent ear nor a traitorous tongue that would only soak in and breath out rabid gossip. Able to endure fickle shifts in the wind and not bend. Lazing under the fierce sun, weariless, suffering no sweat or burn. Alive, sipping water, quietly providing. How I wish I were a tree.

But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where “poem” is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality’s unavailability.

I stood like Adam in his lonely garden On that first morning, shaken out of sleep, Rubbing his eyes, listening, parting the leaves, Like tissue on some vast, incredible gift.

He was a volcano that spewed only ashes and destruction, and they despised him for that lying tongue.

How sweetly delirious are the tinkling and trilling of mirth that draw to their sounds the friendliest hearts.

The weight of my grief in the depth of sorrows rivals the bliss of our love at the height of past joys.

Rewards live at the far edge of honest sweat, heavy toil, and dogged determination.

I pondered the day away at the changing shapes of passing clouds, lazing in the shade of palm trees.

There are more books than can be read, more friends than can be made, more laughs than can be chortled, and no time to waste.

In two of your poems you called that central Passage of womanhood a wound, Instead of a curtain guarding a silken Trail of sighs. How many men, Upon regarding such beauty, helplessly Touching it, recklessly needing To enter its warmth again and again, Have assumed it embodies their own ache Of absence, the personal Gash that has punished their lives. So endowed of anatomy, any woman Who has been loved Knows that her tenderest blush Of tissue is a luxe burden of have. Although it bleeds, this is only to cleanse, To prepare yet another nesting for love. It is not a wound, friend. It is a home for you. It is a way into the world.

I found a room, both quiet and slow, a room where the walls are thick. Where pixie dust is kept in jars, and paper rockets soar to Mars, and battles leave no lasting scars as clocks forget to tick. I guard this room, both small and bare, this room in which stories live. Where Peter Pan and Alice play, and Sinbad sails at dawn of day, and wolves cry 'boy' to get their way when ogres won’t forgive. With you I’ll share my hiding place, this room under cloak and spell. We’ll snuggle up inside a nook, and read a venturous story book, that makes us question in a look what nonsense fairies tell. In fictive plots and fabled ends, Our happy-e’er-afters dwell!

Say you could view a time-lapse film of our planet: what would you see? Transparent images moving through light, “an infinite storm of beauty.” The beginning is swaddled in mists, blasted by random blinding flashes. Lava pours and cools; seas boil and flood. Clouds materialize and shift; now you can see the earth’s face through only random patches of clarity. The land shudders and splits, like pack ice rent by a widening lead. Mountains burst up, jutting and dull and soften before your eyes, clothed in forests like felt. The ice rolls up, grinding green land under water forever; the ice rolls back. Forests erupt and disappear like fairy rings. The ice rolls up-mountains are mowed into lakes, land rises wet from the sea like a surfacing whale- the ice rolls back. A blue-green streaks the highest ridges, a yellow-green spreads from the south like a wave up a strand. A red dye seems to leak from the north down the ridges and into the valleys, seeping south; a white follows the red, then yellow-green washes north, then red spreads again, then white, over and over, making patterns of color too swift and intricate to follow. Slow the film. You see dust storms, locusts, floods, in dizzying flash frames. Zero in on a well-watered shore and see smoke from fires drifting. Stone cities rise, spread, and then crumble, like patches of alpine blossoms that flourish for a day an inch above the permafrost, that iced earth no root can suck, and wither in a hour. New cities appear, and rivers sift silt onto their rooftops; more cities emerge and spread in lobes like lichen on rock. The great human figures of history, those intricate, spirited tissues that roamed the earth’s surface, are a wavering blur whose split second in the light was too brief an exposure to yield any images. The great herds of caribou pour into the valleys and trickle back, and pour, a brown fluid. Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, like a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.

Whatever you want," he said. "Will you please come here now?" I slipped a piece of protective tissue over my drawing and flipped the book closed. A piece of blue scratch paper slid out, the line I'd copied from Edward;s poetry book. "Hey. Translate for me, Monsieur Bainbridge." I set the sketchbook on my stool and joined him on the chaise. He tugged me onto his lap and read over his head. "'Qu'ieu sui avinen, leu lo sai.' 'That I am handsome, I know." "Verry funny." "Very true." He grinned. "The translation. That's what it says. Old-fashionedly." I thought of Edward's notation on the page, the reminder to read the poem to Diana in bed, and rolled my eyes. You're so vain.I bet you think this song is about you..."Boy and their egos." Alex cupped my face in his hands. "Que tu est belle, tu le sais." "Oh,I am not-" "Shh," he shushed me, and leaned in. The first bell came way too soon. I reluctantly loosened my grip on his shirt and ran my hands over my hair. He prompty thrust both hands in and messed it up again. "Stop," I scolded, but without much force. "I have physics," he told me. "We're studying weak interaction." I sandwiched his open hand between mine. "You know absolutely nothing about that." "Don't be so quick to accept the obvious," he mock-scolded me. "Weak interaction can actually change the flavor of quarks." The flavor of quirks, I thought, and vaguely remembered something about being charmed. I'd sat through a term of introductory physics before switching to basic biology. I'd forgotten most of that as soon as I'd been tested on it,too. "I gotta go." Alex pushed me to my feet and followed. "Last person to get to class always gets the first question, and I didn't do the reading." "Go," I told him. "I have history. By definition, we get to history late." "Ha-ha. I'll talk to you later." He kissed me again, then walked out, closing the door quietly behind him.

I am falling in love with you, but I can’t say a word. You don’t care for love. It has bruised you, broken you, burned you. You call it a curse. Yet, I fear I am captive of this enemy, love. You warn of its destructive power. Oh, but it warms me like none other! It engulfs me in caressing flames, and foolishly I crave more. I can’t bear to suffer the cold, so I let you feed the fire unwittingly. I am falling in love with you. I am in love with you, and it’s getting worse.

Writing a poem is like trying to halt a supertanker by holding a dandelion up to it. You can laugh at the frivolity of it. You can ridicule the person for doing such a thing. But—and I’m not saying this makes you one of them—when you laugh at poets, you laugh alongside tyrants. You are standing next to the powerful and the angry and the rich, and you might as well be a bully too, laughing at the weak person cutting snowflakes out of tissue paper. Yes, you are right. But is right everything you want to be?

Where does our laughter travel to? Does it search out monkeys in the zoo? Or settle on the heart like dew? Or cling to lip-glossed smiles on me and you? Does it hang around throughout the day? Or spread its wings and fly away? Or gather-in like puffy clouds of gray? Perhaps it hooks a rainbow’s end And melts to make the colors blend. Or paints a happy face upon a friend. Does it turn to stardust when it’s late? Or in a windstorm, circulate? Or does it simply fade and dissipate? What is our laughter’s merrymaking fate?

A thousand times over with you, I yearned to linger in a perfect moment and stop the passing of time. A thousand times over with you, I caught your tender smile and tucked it carefully away in my heart for safekeeping. A thousand times over with you, I took in your sunny gaze and hoarded its light for the wintry season. A thousand times over with you, I heard your laughter and sat silent as it vibrated like music in my soul. A thousand times over with you, I saw your eyes twinkle like stars, and I made a wish for forever. A thousand times over with you, I noted wisdom in your years, and I filed away your thoughtful words. A thousand times over with you, I felt the warmth of your hand in mine and squeezed tight, reluctant to let go. A thousand times over with you, I pondered how quickly mortality ushers us from sunrise to sunset, and I dreaded the night. A thousand times over with you, I embraced the promise of immortality, dreaming of a day when perfect moments linger pleasantly on and on and on a thousand times over with you.

How does a tiny heart harbor so many clashing sentiments? One moment it is devoted. The next, purely disdaining. Weeping at tremendous heartache and then laughing, lighthearted, through the same tears. How can a heart rage so fierce as to boil blood while it turns to ice? How is this done? To love, hate, esteem, deride, rejoice, deplore, favor, resent— all of these and more swirling inside. This sensitive heart, so full and resilient, buoys up to the point of bursting and then deflates on a dime. It is a slave to whims and whispers. How is it that the human heart beats so wild and untamed?

I want to hear her laugh. To watch sunbeams awaken her visage and shine through her eyes. To see the gray clouds of regret that hang heavy over her head rain away to nothing. I want to hear her sunny voice dance on the breeze, as light and free as glossy bubbles, floating up…up…up to pop like hiccups. I want to know the type and form of key I must cut to unshackle even a portion of her joy. If I could pluck the winning feather; if my smile could convince; if I could stroke her vocal chords like harp strings and make each treble note ascend to euphoria. Oh, to hear the giggled melody she would release into a world craving the balm of mirth! I ache to experience that. I am desperate for it. I live for the day I hear her laugh.

She might come in to bride-bed: and he laughed, As one that wist not well of wise love's craft, And bade all bridal things be as she would. Yet of his gentleness he gat not good; For clothed and covered with the nuptial dark Soft like a bride came Brangwain to King Mark, And to the queen came Tristram; and the night Fled, and ere danger of detective light From the king sleeping Brangwain slid away, And where had lain her handmaid Iseult lay. And the king waking saw beside his head That face yet passion-coloured, amorous red From lips not his, and all that strange hair shed Across the tissued pillows, fold on fold, Innumerable, incomparable, all gold, To fire men's eyes with wonder, and with love Men's hearts; so shone its flowering crown above The brows enwound with that imperial wreath, And framed with fragrant radiance round the face beneath. And the king marvelled, seeing with sudden start Her very glory, and said out of his heart; "What have I done of good for God to bless That all this he should give me, tress on tress, All this great wealth and wondrous? Was it this That in mine arms I had all night to kiss, And mix with me this beauty? this that seems More fair than heaven doth in some tired saint's dreams, Being part of that same heaven? yea, more, for he, Though loved of God so, yet but seems to see, But to me sinful such great grace is given That in mine hands I hold this part of heaven, Not to mine eyes lent merely. Doth God make Such things so godlike for man's mortal sake? Have I not sinned, that in this fleshly life Have made of her a mere man's very wife?

Between Myself and Death To Jimmy Blanton's Music: Sophisticated Lady, Body and Soul A fervor parches you sometimes, And you hunch over it, silent, Cruel, and timid; and sometimes You are frightened with wantonness, And give me your desperation. Mostly we lurk in our coverts, Protecting our spleens, pretending That our bandages are our wounds. But sometimes the wheel of change stops; Illusion vanishes in peace; And suddenly pride lights your flesh— Lucid as diamond, wise as pearl— And your face, remote, absolute, Perfect and final like a beast's. It is wonderful to watch you, A living woman in a room Full of frantic, sterile people, And think of your arching buttocks Under your velvet evening dress, And the beautiful fire spreading From your sex, burning flesh and bone, The unbelievably complex Tissues of your brain all alive Under your coiling, splendid hair. * * * I like to think of you naked. I put your naked body Between myself alone and death. If I go into my brain And set fire to your sweet nipples, To the tendons beneath your knees, I Can see far before me. It is empty there where I look, But at least it is lighted. I know how your shoulders glisten, How your face sinks into trance, And your eves like a sleepwalker's, And your lips of a woman Cruel to herself. I like to Think of you clothed, your body Shut to the world and self contained, Its wonderful arrogance That makes all women envy you. I can remember every dress, Each more proud then a naked nun. When I go to sleep my eves Close in a mesh of memory. Its cloud of intimate odor Dreams instead of myself.

Some people on bus seats shake at the shoulders, Stoned Elvises trying to dance after the gig. Some walk into the rain and look like they’re smiling, Running mascara writes sad bitter letters on their faces. Some drive their cars into lay-bys or park edges And cradle the steering-wheel looking like headless drivers. Some sink their open mouths into feather pillows And tremble on the bed like beached dolphins. Some people are bent as question marks when they weep And some are straight as exclamation marks. Some are soaking in emotional dew when they wake, Salt street maps etched into their faces. Some find rooms and fall to the floor as if praying to Allah. Noiseless Faces contorted in that silent scream that seems like laughter. Why is there not a tissue-giver? A man who looks for tears, Who makes the finest silk tissues and offers them for free? It seems to me that around each corner, beneath each stone, Are humans quietly looking for a place to cry on their own.

three tiers to the heart: physical, ethereal, Eternal with each one being more spiritual and subtle the physical heart a little brain with over 40,000 neurons it sends and receives by electromagnetic field operations it's got its own nervous system that senses and remembers making decisions and giving directions to other centers emitting enfolded energetic organizational patterns information, that is—communicative interactions detected outside the body by magnetometers and other people for heart coherence listen to Pärt's “Spiegel im Spiegel” valid are chakras and acupuncture meridians meditate on the heart chakra to see what this means energy meridians are strings of polarized crystalline water bioelectric signals transmitted in connective tissue matter information is sent along these lengths of collagen proteins molecules of structured water allowing the transfer of protons crystal water wires inside protein pathways with acupuncture points being junctures in the maze the protons, then, are what have been referred to as “chi” a current flowing, much like electrical circuitry

Vest" I put on again the vest of many pockets. It is easy to forget which holds the reading glasses, which the small pen, which the house keys, the compass and whistle, the passport. To forget at last for weeks even the pocket holding the day of digging a place for my sister's ashes, the one holding the day where someone will soon enough put my own. To misplace the pocket of touching the walls at Auschwitz would seem impossible. It is not. To misplace, for a decade, the pocket of tears. I rummage and rummage— transfers for Munich, for Melbourne, to Oslo. A receipt for a Singapore kopi. A device holding music: Bach, Garcia, Richter, Porter, Pärt. A woman long dead now gave me, when I told her I could not sing, a kazoo. Now in a pocket. Somewhere, a pocket holding a Steinway. Somewhere, a pocket holding a packet of salt. Borgesian vest, Oxford English Dictionary vest with a magnifying glass tucked inside one snapped-closed pocket, Wikipedia vest, Rosetta vest, Enigma vest of decoding, how is it one person can carry your weight for a lifetime, one person slip into your open arms for a lifetime? Who was given the world, and hunted for tissues, for ChapStick.

Nude Descending a Soapbox It was hard to take her seriously. The issues were real I know But so was the show of thigh the smooth swagger of hips the ripple of tender tissue as it flexed and unflexed before the listening eye. She had a point to make strong arguments too but she had curves that flashed into the afternoon light and a bend in her back that took three beats out of the heart's every four. She aroused with her conviction entertained with her wit and reasoned soundly but as the nude stepped down from her soapbox the utterance of her flesh the parlance of her posture the two pronouncements of her breasts spoke with a diction that was far more convincing than any jargon rhetorical. In the end it was the appeal of the succulent spaces that shaped her ankles that lasted and left one believing that no lifetime would be wasted in pursuit of her out-takes on a quest for the mysteries of and beyond her flesh. Sometimes the only available hold is language. The body begs translation of what words approximate because the meaning of things said and unsaid like the line of her neck is exactly what renders one satisfied and speechless.

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings and some are treasured for their markings-- they cause the eyes to melt or the body to shriek without pain. I have never seen one fly, but sometimes they perch on the hand. Mist is when the sky is tired of flight and rests its soft machine on the ground: then the world is dim and bookish like engravings under tissue paper. Rain is when the earth is television. It has the properites of making colours darker. Model T is a room with the lock inside -- a key is turned to free the world for movement, so quick there is a film to watch for anything missed. But time is tied to the wrist or kept in a box, ticking with impatience. In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, that snores when you pick it up. If the ghost cries, they carry it to their lips and soothe it to sleep with sounds. And yet, they wake it up deliberately, by tickling with a finger. Only the young are allowed to suffer openly. Adults go to a punishment room with water but nothing to eat. They lock the door and suffer the noises alone. No one is exempt and everyone's pain has a different smell. At night, when all the colours die, they hide in pairs and read about themselves -- in colour, with their eyelids shut.

Yonder loosestrife, gusts carry into sea. Totemic wing. Ghost wafts above water, unravels the seismic splay of muscle tissue in the flow. Waves lap into relentless roars. Ghost in a landscape of rain carves bone beyond aviary. Water curls form a heaviness in the body. North-coast. Clef wave with ghost made of fig leaves. A storm groans with compost hands to return cyan-blue to the sea. The listless downpour submerges ghost but ghost rises to the surface with gills. Water is a memory trail of floodlines.

WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR PAST Serve it with lemons and curdled milk with shortbread biscuits make the day gray spots of rain. Make a quilt out of the villains crochet the heroes together in a hat Wear the hat. Use the quilt as a picnic blanket. Bring your friends. Watch the squirrels be tiny monkeys dare-deviling the trees. Exclaim things! Each lemon, sup of tea, cookie is a bite into the future / will digest, exit, and swim. Digest. Exit. Swim. Drink the curdled milk and get sick watch your friends clean up hold your hair back / hat on hand you a tissue. When you wash the vomit out of the villainous quilt each time it gets weaker Picnic often.

If you were not so gentle, If you were hard to please, If you were never patient And always ill at ease, If you were far from humble, If you could not forgive, If all you did was grumble And curse the life you live, If you were irreligious, If you were not composed, If you were quite ignoble, If you had not proposed, If you were daft as killdeer, If you were less than kind, If you were proud and pushy, I’d pay you little mind. And never would I ever Call you Valentine. But you are kind and gentle, So patiently at ease. You’re gracious, sweet, and humble. Not ever hard to please. You evince faith and service; They dictate how you live. Good will along with mercy Allow you to forgive. Despite the trials and heartaches, You count your blessings all. Despite the miles between us, Persistently you call. The gestures of affection. The compliments so kind. The selfless acts of service Endear you in my mind. And that, my dear, is why I Call you Valentine.

Because there is a growing belief among the community of thinking beings that by 2050 men and women will be marrying human like robots. At that point, how Craig Raine will describe his experiences will be fascinating to know. And in my imagination I have already travelled with the Green Man into the future called 2075 and witnessed How humans will experience love in 2075. Because this science fiction novel navigates through the possibility of men and women falling in love with machines, without knowing they are robots imitating human emotions. Will you still dare to fall in love in 2075 or will you strive to tell the difference between a human lover and a robotic lover? Now it is your turn to join the Green Man on this exciting journey into 2075, where he will reveal to you what the world would look like in 2075, and take you on an excitingly epic journey with the protagonist, Saabir, who criss crosses the highways and all by ways of emotional trajectory in the midst of synthetic emotions and feelings that engulf him. To know more, travel with the Green Man via the science fiction titled, They Loved in 2075. With this anticipation I shall dream of you tonight and hope that you will be able to unlock the alien imagination within you, to realise the part of you that is from Heaven. If you have any doubts, here is the poem by ​​Craig Raine to make you a dreamer who while asleep is always awake in his/her subconscious state too. Because he/she has learned the art of having a rendezvous with the light that radiates through the universe, to eventually settle in a dreamer's eyes who dares to dream beyond the ordinary and the 3 dimensional reality. "A Martian Sends A Postcard Home” Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings and some are treasured for their markings-- they cause the eyes to melt or the body to shriek without pain. I have never seen one fly, but sometimes they perch on the hand. Mist is when the sky is tired of flight and rests its soft machine on the ground: then the world is dim and bookish like engravings under tissue paper Rain is when the earth is television. It has the properites of making colours darker. Model T is a room with the lock inside -- a key is turned to free the world for movement, so quick there is a film to watch for anything missed. But time is tied to the wrist or kept in a box, ticking with impatience. In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps, that snores when you pick it up. If the ghost cries, they carry it to their lips and soothe it to sleep with sounds. And yet, they wake it up deliberately, by tickling with a finger. Only the young are allowed to suffer openly. Adults go to a punishment room with water but nothing to eat. They lock the door and suffer the noises alone. No one is exempt and everyone's pain has a different smell. At night, when all the colours die, they hide in pairs and read about themselves -- in colour, with their eyelids shut. Dedicated to you, the Green Man and Saabir who hails from 2075 and dares to love a real woman in 2075 because he loves her a lot!

It is true that there are kinds of imagery which do not involve visualisation. We speak, for example, of aural or tactile imagery. Yet the word remains more deceptive than illuminating. For some eighteenth-century critics, imagery referred to the power of poetry to make us 'see' objects, to feel as if we were in their actual presence; but this implied, oddly, that the function of poetic language was to efface itself before what it represented. Language makes things vividly present to us, but to do so adequately it must cease to interpose its own ungainly bulk between us and them. So poetic language attains its pitch of perfection when it ceases to be language at all. At its peak, it transcends itself. Images, on this theory, are representations so lucid that they cease to be representations at all, and instead merge with the real thing. Which means, logically speaking, that we are no longer dealing with poetry at all, which is nothing if not a verbal phenomenon. F. R. Leavis writes of the kind of verse which 'has such life and body that we hardly seem to be reading arrangements of words . . . The total effect is as if words as words withdrew themselves from the focus of our attention and we were directly aware of a tissue of feelings and perceptions.

1. After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being—a Starman Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see. And what would we do, you and I, if we could know for sure That someone was there squinting through the dust, Saying nothing is lost, that everything lives on waiting only To be wanted back badly enough? Would you go then, Even for a few nights, into that other life where you And that first she loved, blind to the future once, and happy? Would I put on my coat and return to the kitchen where my Mother and father sit waiting, dinner keeping warm on the stove? Bowie will never die. Nothing will come for him in his sleep Or charging through his veins. And he’ll never grow old, Just like the woman you lost, who will always be dark-haired And flush-faced, running toward an electronic screen That clocks the minutes, the miles left to go. Just like the life In which I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands Even if it burns. 2. He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That’s Bowie For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play Within a play, he’s trademarked twice. The hours Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out, Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens. But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin. Time never stops, but does it end? And how many lives Before take-off, before we find ourselves Beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold? The future isn’t what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky Like migratory souls. 3. Bowie is among us. Right here In New York City. In a baseball cap And expensive jeans. Ducking into A deli. Flashing all those teeth At the doorman on his way back up. Or he’s hailing a taxi on Lafayette As the sky clouds over at dusk. He’s in no rush. Doesn’t feel The way you’d think he feels. Doesn’t strut or gloat. Tells jokes. I’ve lived here all these years And never seen him. Like not knowing A comet from a shooting star. But I’ll bet he burns bright, Dragging a tail of white-hot matter The way some of us track tissue Back from the toilet stall. He’s got The whole world under his foot, And we are small alongside, Though there are occasions When a man his size can meet Your eyes for just a blip of time And send a thought like SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE SHINE Straight to your mind. Bowie, I want to believe you. Want to feel Your will like the wind before rain. The kind everything simply obeys, Swept up in that hypnotic dance As if something with the power to do so Had looked its way and said: Go ahead.

all of [her] is brushed with light, so much glare she seems to singe the very tissue of remembrance. — C.K. Williams, from “Combat,” Poems 1963-1983 (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1988)

Exalt Mountain was one of China’s five sacred peaks, and in its popular sense, Exalt-Mountain Ancestor refers to the mountain as a deity. But given the cosmological ways Tu Fu describes Exalt Mountain, it’s clear he sees something quite different. That mountain cosmology begins here in this poem with Changemaker, which also sounds like a kind of deity. But it is in fact Tao, that generative existence-tissue that is the maker of change. In gazing at the mountain, Tu Fu is gazing at a dramatic manifestation of the wild Taoist Cosmos; he sees Exalt Mountain as a center-point where space stretches endlessly away north and south, where the divine beauty of all existence is condensed into a single dramatic sight by Changemaker Tao. But changemaker, the Tao, is not separate from the mountains. Instead the mountain is an intensification or distillation of Tao.

I rode home from rehearsal that day on the 101 Freeway, and my sense of loss about John and the loneliness that I was feeling triggered memories of my time with Ione and how I’d had this beautiful angel of a girl who was willing to give me all of her love, and instead of embracing that, I was downtown with fucking gangsters shooting speedballs under a bridge. I felt I had thrown away so much in my life, but I also felt an unspoken bond between me and my city. I’d spent so much time wandering the streets of L.A. and hiking through the Hollywood Hills that I sensed there was a nonhuman entity, maybe the spirit of the hills and the city, who had me in her sights and was looking after me. Even if I was a loner in my own band, at least I still felt the presence of the city I lived in. I started freestyling some poetry in my car and putting the words to a melody and sang all the way down the freeway. When I got home, I got out my notebook and wrote the whole thing down in a song structure, even though it was meant to be a poem to deal with my own anguish. “Under the Bridge” Sometimes I feel like I don’t have a partner Sometimes I feel like my only friend Is the city I live in, the city of angels Lonely as I am, together we cry. I drive on her streets ’cause she’s my companion I walk through her hills ’cause she knows who I am She sees my good deeds and she kisses me windy I never worry, now that is a lie. I don’t ever want to feel like I did that day Take me to the place I love, take me all the way It’s hard to believe that there’s nobody out there It’s hard to believe that I’m all alone At least I have her love, the city she loves me Lonely as I am, together we cry. I don’t ever want to feel like I did that day Take me to the place I love, take me all the way Under the bridge downtown Is where I drew some blood Under the bridge downtown I could not get enough Under the bridge downtown Forgot about my love Under the bridge downtown I gave my life away

I’ve found that the best way to live one’s life Is above the fog of negative thought, With gossiping lips outside of earshot, Keeping harsh criticism far less rife. I’ve found that the best way to avoid strife Is by sharing with others who have not, Seeing the good, speaking kindness a lot, Burying hatchets as well as sharp knives. Every compassionate deed we have sown Lifts a heavy burden from a brother. Each positive thought and comment we own Extends joy and love to one another. Life was not meant to be traveled alone. It is where we learn we need each other.