robx75 - Tumblr blog

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“Alone I stand in the autumn cold On the tip of Orange Island, The Hsiang flowing northward; I see a thousand hills crimsoned through By their serried woods deep-dyed, And a hundred barges vying Over crystal blue waters. Eagles cleave the air, Fish glide in the limpid deep; Under freezing skies a million creatures contend in freedom. Brooding over this immensity, I ask, on this boundless land Who rules over man's destiny? I was here with a throng of companions, Vivid yet those crowded months and years. Young we were, schoolmates, At life's full flowering; Filled with student enthusiasm Boldly we cast all restraints aside. Pointing to our mountains and rivers, Setting people afire with our words, We counted the mighty no more than muck. Remember still How, venturing midstream, we struck the waters And waves stayed the speeding boats!” - Mao Zedong, “Changsha” (at Onalaska, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/CqGKpDMOkVr/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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“In the half-light, I am most at home, my shadow as company. When I feel hot, I push a button to make it stop. I mean this stain on my mind I can’t get out. How human I seem. Like modern man, I traffic in extinction. I have a gift. Like an animal, I sustain. A flock of birds when touched, I scatter. I won’t approach until the back is turned. My heart betrays. I confess: I am afraid. How selfish of me. When there’s no one here, I halve the distance between our bodies infinitesimally. In this long passageway, I pose against the wallpaper, dig my heels in, catch the light. In my vision, the back door opens on a garden that is always in bloom. The dogs are chained so they can’t attack like I know they want to. In the next yard over, honeybees swarm and their sound is huge.” - Camille Rankine, “The Current Isolationism” (at Rochester, Minnesota) https://www.instagram.com/p/CqCJRvxuzK5/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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“You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.” - Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese” (at Onalaska, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp8D2cJppuD/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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“I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat. The convenience of the high trees! The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray Are of advantage to me; And the earth's face upward for my inspection. My feet are locked upon the rough bark. It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly - I kill where I please because it is all mine. There is no sophistry in my body: My manners are tearing off heads - The allotment of death. For the one path of my flight is direct Through the bones of the living. No arguments assert my right: The sun is behind me. Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. I am going to keep things like this.” -Ted Hughes, “Hawk Roosting” (at Onalaska, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp0s_TXPv6D/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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“Winter solitude-- in a world of one color the sound of wind.” - Matsuo Bashō, “Winter Solitude” (at Onalaska, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/CpYnvjkvpIz/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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“It you would see him, Wait on desolate crags Where the near clouds are cold. Wait, and over the third peak At dawn you will see a greater Than yourself. Your own Remembered shadow, cast On stone by a far moon (All night your dark companion And your comforter), will loom Bleak in your mind under The shadow of great wings reeling And tumbling down the sky. Tumbling and screaming down that bold Steep sky, past you and past Your shadow, down and down- The mighty bird will dim All wingless images in your eyes, And drown all lesser cries Your ears have known.” - James Daly, “The Eagle” (at Onalaska, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/Co5br1EPVFJ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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“Dead bark makes the best mask. It hangs in the wind changing its faces of pain for you until you merge with the roar and go deep through the three holes to another form of life so slow like sleep it's taken ten years just to push a log through orange gills. Others have landed like pale spaceships, cones of white meat stepping up the sides of trees or brown heads nodding you on from the underside of death. You listen hard for the thin highway you left. It says dead. So you roll the boulder over you and sink in the slow growth of mushrooms. - Jack Myers, “The Invention of Mushrooms” (at Onalaska, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cov-w29ubFZ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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“It starts in sadness and bewilderment, The self-reflexive iconography Of late adolescence, and a moment When the world dissolves into a fable Of an alternative geography Beyond the threshold of the visible. And the heart is a kind of mute witness, Abandoning everything for the sake Of an unimaginable goodness Making its way across the crowded stage Of what might have been, leaving in its wake The anxiety of an empty page.” — From “The Proximate Shore” by John Koethe (at Onalaska, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/CosphRTPVpV/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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“The American eagle is not aware he is the American eagle. He is never tempted to look modest. When orators advertise the American eagle’s virtues, the American eagle is not listening. This is his virtue. He is somewhere else, he is mountains away but even if he were near he would never make an audience. The American eagle never says he will serve if drafted, will dutifully serve etc. He is not at our service. If we have honored him we have honored one who unequivocally honors himself by overlooking us. He does not know the meaning of magnificent. Perhaps we do not altogether either who cannot touch him.” - Robert Francis, “Eagle Plain” https://www.instagram.com/p/CopvkRzJ0j6/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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“On the lake warm steam rises from the melting ice. It is no longer winter. It is no longer possible to walk slowly out, stepping over whorls of frozen life, to the middle. The truth is, mourning doves call to each other at night. The truth is, there are no more ghosts. The lighted window throws awkward shadows into the damp air to prevent us from falling as we walk by, falling backward into the particular holes opening everywhere around us. The truth is, we're afraid of triangular light, afraid of each other, afraid of the O's of breath we give birth to, even afraid of the steam rising above the lake, above the pines, up to the simple air which takes it all in. And later, when we drink cold water, it will be as if a hand, rising from the depths of that lake, had taken hold of our throats and started, gently, to squeeze.” - Julia Mishkin, “Ice Water” (at Onalaska, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cok3fKyv3jo/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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“To ache with unrest, Stale-hearted, bored, Oppressed by life, by the futile motions of people- Their footless eagerness, their strife, And their pale conversations- This mood of death. But that other thing called death, Which crumbles us up into good rich soil, And sprouts grass over the place Or weeds- What kind adjustment That trues one nicely to the universe, And bestows the good gift: the immortal insignificance Of a leaf, or a grass blade, Or one of the small stars!” - Viola I. Paradise, “Death” (at Onalaska, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/CoXj-67OxsH/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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“From plane of light to plane, wings dipping through Geometries and orchids that the sunset builds, Out of the peak's black angularity of shadow, riding The last tumultuous avalanche of Light above pines and the guttural gorge, The hawk comes. His wing Scythes down another day, his motion Is that of the honed steel-edge, we hear The crashless fall of stalks of Time. The head of each stalk is heavy with the gold of our error. Look! Look! he is climbing the last light Who knows neither Time nor error, and under Whose eye, unforgiving, the world, unforgiven, swings Into shadow. Long now, The last thrush is still, the last bat Now cruises in his sharp hieroglyphics. His wisdom Is ancient, too, and immense. The star Is steady, like Plato, over the mountain. If there were no wind we might, we think, hear The earth grind on its axis, or history Drip in darkness like a leaking pipe in the cellar.” - Robert Penn Warren, “The Evening Hawk” (at Onalaska, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/CoSqBdtvd1q/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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“An unsettled mood enshrouds me as evening falls, While my carriage ascends the plateau height. Though boundlessly breathtaking is the setting sun, It is but a herald of the coming twilight.” - Li Shangyin, “Ascending the Field of Le'you Yuan” (at Onalaska, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cn2crv5v0Jg/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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“I can't stand this much open feeling, this joy. All about me, the flat chill of winter, and the white sky, and snow in the mind, the geometries of trees without their leaves and the last leaves packed down like dark sod. Thoughts go out from here over great distances. They cross long blue-black fields asleep for winter. They hurry through small towns without traffic. They travel roads that go straight for miles but they do not reach the places of destruction. Thoughts cannot live where the summer was barren, where the great issues are food, shelter, living. I leave my own house, cold and happy, and walk alone from one end of town to the other. The stores are taking in goods from distant factories.” - Marvin Bell, “Landscape with Open Spaces” (at Onalaska, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/Cnz8TRLP4DZ/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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“Birds seen in water, multiplying white Of wing and breast!--but whiter is the wing Above the water; and beyond our sight White birds, and these themselves the shadowing! Now I have seen the ultimate goddess-face, The hush in which all motion is at rest: Infinite time, infinity of space Are lost like motes upon her quiet breast. O found to me at last! Oh, I am blind, Blinded with vision! Songs unheard before Shall be my songs. What songs are these? I find Nothing to say of beauty, nothing more To say of truth, when shadow-winged birds, Flying in water, are beyond my words.” - Helen L. Rummons, “Flight” https://www.instagram.com/p/CnxTElHvbAY/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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“SKIRTING the river road, (my forenoon walk, my rest,) Skyward in air a sudden muffled sound, the dalliance of the eagles, The rushing amorous contact high in space together, The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel, Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling, In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling, Till o'er the river pois'd, the twain yet one, a moment's lull, A motionless still balance in the air, then parting, talons loosing, Upward again on slow-firm pinions slanting, their separate diverse flight, She hers, he his, pursuing.” - Walt Whitman, “The Dalliance of the Eagles” (at Onalaska, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/CnsXjKBPKQ5/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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“He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring'd with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.” - Tennyson, “The Eagle” (at Onalaska, Wisconsin) https://www.instagram.com/p/CnkSXUCvyc0/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=