I know a lot of fancy dancers.
People who can guide you on the floor.
They move so smooth but have no answers
when you ask; what you come here for?



from  "Hard Headed Woman" by Cat Stevens







From a little distance then the finished building gave purpose
with hard grandeur in its loom and weight, its grace of plain
angular shadow, and the wide sunlight on its unbroken faces, 
where the shadows of the vigas bladed down the walls making a 
sundial that told not hours but centuries.  The Whole mission 
with church, convento, cloister and walled burial field seemed 
like a shoulder of earth emerging out of the blind ground as a 
work of living sculpture.  To know the true beauty of those structures 
it was necessary first of all to love and to believe in their 
propose.


from the "Great River, The Rio Grande in North American History"

Paul Horgan

( Born 1 August 1903, Buffalo, New York - Died 8 March 1995 )








When you're shut up with a man for ten days in a railway carriage you can hardly 
fail to learn most of what there is to know about him, and for ten days (for eleven
to be exact) Ashenden spent twenty-four hours a day with Mr. Harrington. It is true 
that they went into the dining-room three times a day for their meals, but they sat 
opposite to one another; it is true that the train stopped for an hour morning and 
afternoon so that they were able to have a tramp up and down the platform, but 
they walked side by side.  Ashenden made acquaintance with some of his fellow-travellers 
and sometimes they spoke French or German Mr. Harington would watch them with 
acidulous disapproval and if they spoke English he would never let them get a word in.  
For Mr. Harrington was a talker.  He talked as though it were a natural function of the 
human being, automatically as men breathe or digest their food; he talked not because 
he had something to say, but because he could not help himself, in a high-pitched, 
nasal voice, without inflection, at one dead level of tone.  He talked with a precision, 
using a copious vocabulary and forming his sentences with deliberation; he never 
used a short word when a longer one would do; he never paused.  He went on and on.  
It was not a torrent, for there was nothing impetuous about it, it was like a stream of 
lava pouring irresistibly down the side of a volcano.  It flowed with a quiet and steady 
force that overwhelmed everything that was in its path.




from "Ashenden or the British Agent"

W. Somerset Maugham

( Born 25 January 1874, Paris, France - Died 16 December 1965, Nice, France )







	Powerless
	to 
	produce 
	summer

	I
	    trudge
		    into 
			the winter headwind




	Beneath the moon
	
	breast 
	drunk
	on 
	honey 
	milk
	
	you
		sleep
                                    a whisper of a girl

	


_Marisa Brewster McLeod







Hello darkness, my old friend 
I've come to talk with you again 
Because a vision softly creeping 
Left its seeds while I was sleeping 
And the vision 
That was planted in my brain 
Still remains 
Within the sound of silence 

In restless dreams I walked alone 
Narrow streets of cobblestone 
'Neath the halo of a street lamp 
I turn my collar to the cold and damp 
When my eyes 
Were stabbed by the flash of a neon light 
That split the night 
And touched the sound of silence 

And in the naked light I saw 
Ten thousand people maybe more 
People talking without speaking 
People hearing without listening 
People writing songs 
That voices never shared 
No one dared 
Disturb the sound of silence 

Fools, said I, you do not know 
Silence like a cancer grows 
Hear my words that I might teach you 
Take my arms that I might reach you" 
But my words 
Like silent raindrops fell 
And echoed 
In the wells 
Of silence 

And the people bowed and prayed 
To the neon god they made 
And the sign flashed out its warning 
In the words that it was forming 
And the sign said 
"The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls 
And tenement halls" 
And whispered 
In the sound 
Of silence 





_Paul Simon







X is very useful
if your name is 
Nixie Knox.

It also 
comes in handy
spelling ax
and extra fox.




from ABC
_Dr. Seuss






The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner


From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from the dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Randall Jarrell





	"Three members had just been killed, including Esperanza's brother, but seventeen 
were still alive.  She and I knew every one those seventeen, by name.  Can you understand 
that this made us more useful alive than dead?  For us to go after Ismene is what they wanted."

	"So they didn't kill her, they just held her?  Like . . . . I don't know what. 
A worm on a goddamn hook?"

	"A god damn hook."  He was looking away from me again. "Sometimes, after a while, 
usually . . . these children are adopted.  By military or government couples who cannot 
have children."

	I felt numb, as if I had taken some drug.  "And you picked the lives of those seventeen 
people over getting your daughter back?" I said. "Or at least a chance at getting her back?"

	"What would you do, Taylor"

	"I don't know.  I hate to say it, but I really don't know. I can't even begin to think
about a world where people have to make choices like that."

	"You live in that world," he said quietly . . . 
	




from The Bean Trees
Barbara Kingsolver








                        Acquainted With the Night

		I have been one acquainted with the night. 
		I have walked out in rain--and back in rain. 
		I have outwalked the furthest city light. 

		I have looked down the saddest city lane. 
		I have passed by the watchman on his beat 
		And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain. 

		I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet 
		When far away an interrupted cry 
		Came over houses from another street, 

		But not to call me back or say good-by; 
		And further still at an unearthly height 
		One luminary clock against the sky 

		Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right. 
		I have been one acquainted with the night. 




 _ Robert Frost







It is necessary to leave the impersonal  highway, to step inside
the rusty gate and close it behind.  One is now inside the orange grove,
out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another.
And after long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that
mystic loveliness of childhood again.

Here is home.




_Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
Cross Creek, Florida 1942



 
The City of Invention



Writers are privileged visitors here.  The have a house or two of their own in the City, 
after all. Perhaps even well-thought of, and nicely maintained: or perhaps never much 
reckoned and falling into disrepair.  But to have a house of any kind, even to have brought 
it only to planning stage, and have given up in despair, is to realize more fully the wonder
of the City, and to know how its houses are built: to know also that though one brick may look 
much like another, and all builders to about their work in much the same way, some buildings 
will be good, some bad.  And a very few, sometimes the least suspected, will last, and not 
crumble with the decades.

Writers, builders, good or bad, recognizing these things, are usually polite to one another, 
and a great deal kinder than the people who visit, as outsiders.  Builders vary in intellect, 
aspiration, talent and efficiency; they build well or badly in different suburbs of the City.  
Some build because they need to, have to, live to, or believe they are appointed to, others 
to prove a point or to change the world.  But to build at all requires courage, persistence, 
faith and surplus of animation.  A writer's all, Alice is not taken up by the real world.  
There is something left over: enough for them to build these alternative, finite realities.



from: "Letters to Alice on first reading Jane Austen"
_Fay Weldon








Goodby Truck Stop Girls

	I

	There was one not far form New Albany
	name Velma
	who could do the dirty boogie on one foot
	all the way to the floor and up again
	if you would feed the jukebox
  	and her pocket.

	And there were others
	named Mavis and Erlene and Wilma
	and Inez and Bettyanne
	and Lottie Sue and Sarah Vee
	and they could do boogie and jitterbug
	and wait tables at the same time
	and take care of themselves
	no matter what anybody said.

	and the ones who didn't marry some old boy
	and have babies
	to bring back and show off
	to the cooks and cashiers and other girls
	got older and meaner
	and started using coarse words
	when we would feed the juke
	and warned the younger girls about us
	and then went on to do whatever they do
	always in another town.

	II

	But something happened:
	the juke music changed
	and good old boys became cowboys
	and the truck stop girls put on tight jeans
	and cowboy boots
	and talked about snorting toot
	and asked the truck cowboys for bennies
	and yellowjackets and stuff we never heard of
	and broke out in a bunch of names
	like Debbie and Lynn and Tammie
	and Dawn and Renae
	and Tanya and Crystal
	and squealed into CB radios
	for cowboys to stop in
	and would hardly wait on anybody
	and would never dance to the juke
	no matter how many quarters we pumped.



from: "Life After Mississippi"
_ James A. Autry







 	You darkness, that I come from,
	I love you more than all the fires
	that fence in the world,
	for the fire makes a circle of light for everyone,
	and then no one outside learns of you. 
	But the darkness pulls in everything:
	shapes and fires, animals and myself,
	how easily it gathers them!
	powers and people - 

	and it is possible a great energy
	is moving near me.


	I have faith in nights.






	How shall I hold my soul, that it may not
	be touching yours? How shall I lift it then
	above you to where other things are waiting?
	Ah, gladly would I lodge it, all forgot,
	with some lost thing the dark is isolating
	on some remote and silent spot that, when
	your depths vibrate, is not itself vibrating.

	You and me all that lights upon us, though
	brings us together like a fiddle bow
	drawing one voice from two strings it glides along.
	Across what instruments have we been spanned?
	And what violinist holds us in his hand?
	O sweetest song.



How should we be able to forget about those ancient myths that 
are at the beginning of all peoples, the myths about dragons that 
at the last moment turn into princesses; perhaps all the dragons 
of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once 
beautiful and brave. Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest 
being something helpless that wants help from us.

So you must not be frightened...if a sadness rises up before you 
larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness, like light and 
cloud shadow, passes over your hands and over all that you do. You 
must think that something is taking place in you, that life has not 
forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.




This is the creature that has never been.
They never knew it, and yet, none the less,
they loved the way it moved, its suppleness,
its neck, its very gaze, mild and serene.

Not there, because they loved it, it behaved
as though it were. They always left some space.
And in that clear unpeopled space they saved
it lightly reared its head, with scarce a trace

of not being there. They fed it, not with corn
but only with the possibility
of being. And that was able to confer
such strength, its brow put forth a horn. One horn.
Whitely it stole up to a maid -- to be
within the silver mirror and in her.




_Rainer Maria Rilke





	somewhere i have never traveled,gladly beyond
	any experience,your eyes have their silence:
	in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
	or which i cannot touch because they are too near

	your slightest look easily will unclose me
	though i have closed myself as fingers,
	you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
	(touching skillfully,mysteriously)her first rose

	or if your wish be to close me,i and
	my life will shut very beautifully,suddenly,
	as when the heart of this flower imagines
	the snow carefully everywhere descending;

	nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals 
	the power of your intense fragility:whose texture 
	compels me with the color of its countries,
	rendering death and forever with each breathing

	(i do not know what it is about you that closes
	and opens;only something in me understands
	the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
	nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands




_e.e. cummings




	Somebody with a flair for small cynicism once said, 'We live and do not learn.'  but 
I have learned some things.
	
	I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and 
where all your yesterdays are buried deep - leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the 
fastest way you can.  Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better 
hour because it is dead.  Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives 
in a cloud, formidable from a distance.  The cloud clears as you enter it.  I have learned this, 
but like everyone, I learned it late.



	A man of importance had been shot at a place I could not pronounce 
in Swahili or in English, and, because of this shooting, whole countries were at war.  
It seemed a laborious method of retribution, but that was the way it was being done.




 
from: "West With the Night"  
_Byrle Markham






Why does American business insist on "growth" when it is
demonstrably using up the three basics of life on our planet land,
water and unpolluted air?




Meanwhile bureaucracy, safely repeating today what it did yesterday, rolls on 
as ineluctably as some vast computer, which, once penetrated by 
error, duplicates it forever.





from: "The March of Folly" 
_Barbara Tuchman






From the summer of my twelfth year I carry a series of images more vivid and lasting than any 
others of my boyhood and indelible beyond all attempts the years make to erase or fade them...

A young Sioux woman lies on a bed in our house.  She is feverish, delirious, and coughing so	
hard I am afraid she will die.

My father kneels on the kitchen floor, begging my mother to help him.  
It's a summer night and the room is brightly lit.  Insects cluster around the light fixtures, 
and the pleading quality in my father's voice reminds me of those insects - high-pitched, 
insistent, frantic.  It is a sound I have never heard coming from him.

My mother stands in our kitchen on a hot, windy day.  The windows are open, and Mother's 
lace curtains blow into the room.  Mother holds my father's Ithaca twelve-gauge shotgun, and 
since she is a small, slender woman, she has trouble finding the balance point of its heavy 
length.  Nevertheless, she has watched my father and other men often enough to know where 
the shells go, and she loads them until the gun will hold no more.  Loading the gun is the 
difficult part. Once the shells are in, any fool can figure out how to fire it.  
Which she intends to do.




from: "Montana 1948"   
_Larry Watson






One afternoon, I am complaining about the confusion of my age, what is expected of me versus 
what I want for myself.

"Have I told you about the tension of opposites?" he says.

"Life is a series of pulls back and forth.  You want to do one thing, but you are bound to do 
something else.  Something hurts you, yet you know it shouldn't.  You take certain things for 
granted, even when you know you should never take anything for granted.

"A tension of opposite, like a pull on a rubber band.  And most of us
live somewhere in the middle."

Sounds like a wrestling match, I say.
	
"A wrestling match." he laughs. " yes, you could describe
life that way."

So which side wins, I ask?
	
"Which side wins?"

He smiles at me, the crinkled eyes, the crooked teeth.
	
"Love wins.  Love always wins."



from: "Tuesdays With Morrie" 
_Mitch Albon