Thirty spokes converge on a hub
but it’s the emptiness
that makes a wheel work
pots are fashioned from clay
but it’s the hollow
that makes a pot work
windows and doors are carved for a house
but it’s the spaces
that make a house work
existence makes a thing useful
but nonexistence makes it work.
— Lao-tzu from ‘Taoteching: With Selected Commentaries from the Past 2,000 Years’, tr. from Chinese by Red Pine
I hear you call, pine tree, I hear you upon the hill, by
the silent pond
where the lotus flowers bloom, I hear you call, pine tree.
What is it you call, pine tree, when the rain falls,
when the winds
blow, and when the stars appear, what is it you call, pine
tree?
I hear you call, pine tree, but I am blind, and do not
know how to
reach you, pine tree. Who will take me to you, pine tree?
-- 'I Hear You Call, Pine Tree' by Yone Noguchi
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches Tigers
In red weather.
-- 'Disillusionment of Ten O'clock' by Wallace Stevens
I watched the turquoise pastel
melt between your fingerpads;
how later you flayed
the waxen surface back
to the sunflower patch
of a forethought, your
instrument an upturned
brush, flaked to the grain -
the fusty sugar paper buckled.
You upended everything,
always careless of things:
finest sables splayed
under their own weight,
weeks forgotten - to emerge
gunged, from the silted
floor of a chemical jamjar.
I tidied, like a verger
or prefect, purging
with the stream from the oil-
fingered tap. Stop,
you said, printing
my elbow with a rusty index,
pointing past an ancient
meal's craquelured dish
to the oyster-crust
at the edge of an unscraped palette -
chewy rainbow, blistered jewels.
-- 'A Painting' by Sarah Howe #VerseThursday#TodaysPoem#poetry@poetry
"The colours of their middle-age
are a midsummer tease, matching
hues, bluing into blue into bluish-
white in the distance. So here we are
too, a gallery of gazes
looking on these affairs—easy
chairs on the veranda."
"now trace a breath-map in the air. how invisible?
is a rose a turning cylinder of senses? how unspeakable
is this the ghost of the heart, the actual
the inmost deceleration of its thought? how unspeakable
is everything still speeding around us?"
How many scams must we endure?
These broken pipe-dreams of the rich,
of the breathless entrepreneur,
among their piles of cash they hitch
the risks to us through means obscure.