Friday, February 27, 2015

What the fuck happened to our trailer park?




eating pizza at Blondie's was a big reason to walk down telegraph.  They sold (maybe still do) a lot of slices.  Good pizza.

So, beyond that Telegraph: it had some good coffee shops, populated by students much like myself.  (I didn't start drinking coffee until age 25, but that's another story.)  So, yeah, great bookstore, Cody's books, sold new books, and then the next door shop, Moe's, had five floors of books.  Then there were Shakespeare's, one other cool one, then Shambhala books.    Not that that means much.  Then there was your classic head shop, AnnaPurna.  Couple record stores, ....lots of food.  Yeah, sounds pretty good.  Well, it was easy living because I lived in a dorm and just had to go to class and try to learn stuff, much of which was interesting.  I got my grade ten.
The other thing about Berkeley and Oakland is that, when I was there most, 89-91, walking up Telegraph from Oakland...or is it Shattuck?...was quite a walk, and you'd just be walking gradually uphill .....
nice walk.  the air's worse and the sun is brighter, so it is a trade off.  between Oregon, I mean.


Wednesday, February 25, 2015

poem nineteen, sonnets to orpheus


Though the world change as fast
as cloud-shapes manifold,
all things perfected at last
fall back to the very old.

Past flux and vicissitude,
more freely and higher,
still endures your prelude,
god with the lyre.

We do not understand
grief, nor love's phases,
and what death keeps concealed

is not unveiled.
Only song through the land
hallows and praises
-Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

Sunday, February 15, 2015

Beginning My Studies



BEGINNING my studies the first step pleas'd me so much,

The mere fact consciousness, these forms, the power of motion

The least insect or animal, the senses, eyesight, love,

The first step I saw awed me and pleas'd me so much,

I have hardly gone and hardly wish'd to go any farther,


But stop and loiter all the time..

-whitman

Friday, February 13, 2015

steeply sloping hour



My life is not this steeply sloping hour,
in which you see me hurrying.
Much stands behind me; I stand before it like a tree;
I am only one of my many voices,
and at that, the one that will be still the soonest.

I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death's note wants to climb over,
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
               And the song goes on, beautiful.

-Rilke


Wednesday, February 11, 2015

Expostulation and reply

Why, william, on that old grey stone,
thus for the length of half a day,
why, william, sit you thus alone,
and dream your time away?

"Where are your books?..that light bequeathed
To beings else forlorn and blind.
Up! and drink the spirit breathed
from dead men to their kind.

You look round on your Mother Earth,
as if she for no purpose bore you,
as if you were her first born birth
and none had lived before you!

One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake
when life was sweet, i knew not why,
to me my good friend Matthew spake,
and thus I made reply,

The eye-it cannot choose but see;
we cannot bid the ear be still,
our bodies feel, where'er they be,
against or with our will.

Nor less I deem that there are Powers
which of themselves our minds impress;
that we can feed this mind of ours
in a wise passiveness.

Think you, 'mid all the mighty sum
of things for ever speaking,
that nothing of itself will come,
but we must still be seeking?

-Then ask not wherefore, here, alone
conversing as I may,
I sit upon this old grey stone,
and dream my time away.
--wordsworth