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Pastimes : A Poetry Corner -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: poet who wrote (238)	6/1/1999 12:48:00 PM
From: Robert Douglas Hickey	Respond to of 1582

Voyeur Up on the eleventh floor in an airy urban aerie seeing everything, through a telescope neighbourly nudity, sex, kinks and quirks what resonates most: someone sitting home alone watching TV. Robert Douglas Hickey

To: poet who wrote (238)	6/10/1999 2:27:00 AM
From: poet	Respond to of 1582

TO THE GERMAN LANGUAGE My identity is in the Spanish language, the bronze words of Francisco de Quevedo, but in the long, slow progress of the night, different, more intimate musics move me. Some have been handed down to me by blood-- voices of Shakespeare, language of the Scriptures-- others by chance, which has been generous; but you, gentle language of Germany, I chose you, and I sought you out alone. By way of grammar books and patient study, through the thick undergrowth of the declensions, the dictionary, which never puts its thumb on the precise nuance, I kept moving closer. My nights were full of overtones of Virgil, I once said; but I could as well have named Hoelderlin, Angelus Silesius. Heine lent me his lofty nightingales; Goethe, the good fortune of late love, at the same time both greedy and indulgent; Keller, the rose which one hand leaves behind in the closed fist of a dead man who adored it, who will never know if it is white or red. German language, you are your masterpiece: love interwound in all your compound voices and open vowels, sounds which accommodate the studious hexameters of Greek and undercurrents of jungles and nights. Once, I had you. Now, at the far extreme of weary years, I feel you have become as out of reach as algebra and the moon. --Jorge Luis Borges (tr. Alastair Reid)

To: poet who wrote (238)	6/24/1999 4:46:00 AM
From: poet	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1582

MAY 24, 1980 I have braved, for want of wild beasts, steel cages, carved my term and nickname on bunks and rafters, lived by the sea, flashed aces in an oasis, dined with the-devil-knows-whom, in tails, on truffles. From the height of a glacier I beheld half a world, the earthly width. Twice have drowned, thrice let knives rake my nitty-gritty. Quit the country the bore and nursed me. Those who forgot me would make a city. I have waded the steppes that saw yelling Huns in saddles, worn the clothes nowadays back in fashion in every quarter, planted rye, tarred the roofs of pigsties and stables, guzzled everything save dry water. I've admitted the sentries' third eye into my wet and foul dreams. Munched the bread of exile; it's stale and warty. Granted my lungs all sounds except the howl; switched to a whisper. Now I am forty. What should I say about my life? That it's long and abhors transparence. Broken eggs make me grieve; the omelette, though, makes me vomit. Yet until brown clay has been rammed down my larynx, only gratitude will be gushing from it. --Joseph Brodsky