fall!

Danse Russe

BY WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

If I when my wife is sleeping

and the baby and Kathleen

are sleeping

and the sun is a flame-white disc

in silken mists

above shining trees,—

if I in my north room

dance naked, grotesquely

before my mirror

waving my shirt round my head

and singing softly to myself:

“I am lonely, lonely.

I was born to be lonely,

I am best so!”

If I admire my arms, my face,

my shoulders, flanks, buttocks

against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not

the happy genius of my household?

mirrored evening

I'm reading Mary Ruefle's Madness, Rack and Honey. She 
has said she gave these lectures in order to learn about poetry.
I met her once. She was sweet, smart and kind of spacey in a good
way. The essays are like that too. The first one is a long
investigation on poetry and the moon. At the end she quotes
Maurice Blanchot on light, which is something I spend a lot
of time thinking about.

Repose in light can be--tends to be--peace through light,
light that appeases and gives peace; but repose in light
is also repose--deprivation of all external help and impetus--
so that nothing comes to disturb, or to pacify, the pure
movement of the light...Repose in light: is it sweet
appeasement through light? Is it the difficult deprivation
of oneself and of all of one's own movement, a position
in the light without repose? Here two infinitely different
experiences are separated by almost nothing.

Yesterday on the evening of the fall equinox the light on the lake
was there and not there and it was difficult to know where to look.

O-Dark Thirty

I have a poem up at O-Dark Thirty.

Libra Horoscope for week of September 6, 2012

"Disappointments should be cremated, not embalmed," said the aphorist Henry S. Haskins. That's good advice for you right now, Libra. It's an auspicious moment for you to set fire to your defeats, letdowns, and discouragements -- and let them burn into tiny piles of ashes. I mean all of them, stretching back for years, not simply the recent ones. There's no need to treat them like precious treasures you have an obligation to lug with you into the future. The time is right for you to deepen your mastery of the art of liberation.