Winter Spring

A script of trees before the hill
Spells cold, with laden serifs; all the walls
Are battlemented still;
But winter spring is winnowing the air
Of chill, and crawls
Wet-sparkling on the gutters;
Everywhere
Walls wince, and there's the steal of waters.

Now all this proud royaume
Is Veniced. Through the drift's mined dome
One sees the rowdy rusted grass,
And we're amazed as windows stricken bright.
This too-soon spring will pass
Perhaps tonight,
And doubtless it is dangerous to love
This somersault of seasons;
But I am weary of
The winter way of loving things for reasons.

- Richard Wilbur

(Via Minz. But did we ever love things for reasons?)

Pt 2

This is the best expression of different perspectives I've heard:

Imagine if you were an oyster. The public would see you as an infrangible nut, a kind of sea-raid shelter, but you would feel yourself all mother-of-pearly inwardness and vulnerability.

From an incredible Paris Review interview with Seamus Heaney, the kind of interview that makes you not just want to read the author's works (that's not so unusual), but to read other poems, all poems; to pay attention to poems, to hear the joy and the exhilaration and the seriousness and the sense of big voltage under the words.

In memoriam Seamus Heaney

The Singer's House

When they said Carrickfergus I could hear
the frosty echo of saltminers' picks.
I imagined it, chambered and glinting,
a township built of light.

What do we say any more
to conjure the salt of our earth?
So much comes and is gone
that should be crystal and kept,

and amicable weathers
that bring up the grain of things,
their tang of season and store,
are all the packing we'll get.

So I say to myself Gweebarra
and its music hits off the place
like water hitting off granite.
I see the glittering sound

framed in your windows,
knives and forks set on oilcloth,
and the seals' heads, suddenly outlined,
scanning everything.

People here used to believe
that drowned souls lived in the seals.
At spring tides they might change shape.
They loved music and swam in for a singer

who might stand at the end of summer
in the mouth of a whitewashed turf-shed,
his shoulder to the jamb, his song
a rowboat far out in evening.

When I came here first you were always singing,
a hint of the clip of the pick
in your winnowing climb and attack.
Raise it again, man. We still believe what we hear.

Litany in which certain things are crossed out

(Clever and poignant and true, but far too hard to format for the internet.)

Tiny Blast

Looking for a new poet/poem I found this:

And now that you're here be brave.
Be everyway alive.

- from Peter Gizzi, "Tiny Blast"

Learned Hand's vision of heaven

Ronald Dworkin quoting Gerald Gunther's biography of Learned Hand in his (Dworkin's) introduction/summary of "Justice for Hedgehogs":

[H]e would say that in the morning there would be a baseball game, with the score 4-1 in favor of the opposing team in the bottom of the ninth. Hand's team then loads the bases, and it is Hand's turn at bat; he promptly hits a home run, clearing the bases and winning the game. In the afternoon, there is a football game between the evenly matched teams, tied in a scoreless match. With a minute left to play, Hand catches a punt, weaves his way down the sidelines, and scores the winning touchdown. The highlight of the day is an evening banquet, with civilization's greatest minds - Socrates, Descartes, Benjamin Franklin, and Voltaire - among the guests. The designated speaker for the evening is Voltaire. After a few words from him, the audience shouts, "Shut up Voltaire, and sit down. WE WANT HAND!"

Neighbourly books

Interviewer:  How do you organize your library?

Calasso:  A proper answer would imply writing an autobiography. It reminds me of a delightful work by a seventeenth-century French scholar, Gabriel Naudé, Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque. For me there are several criteria—practical, aesthetic, capricious. The essential thing is to obey what Aby Warburg called the “law of the good neighbor.” When looking for a book, you may discover that you were in fact looking for the book next to it. It’s the principle on which the marvelous Warburg Library in London is based. And of course the positions of books change in the course of time. They become like a geologic system of layers. In my case, alas, the books are in different places—around twenty thousand in the basement of the publishing house, and more yet in another apartment.

From the Paris Review interview with Roberto Calasso. I want to go to the Warburg Library.