The Seam | Lisa Robertson

4:16 in the afternoon in the summer of my 52nd year
I’m lying on the bed in the heat wondering about geometry
and the deafening, uninterrupted volume of desire
bellows, roars mournfully, laments
like a starling that has flown into glass.
These are two things that I want to remember permanently:
The dog straining diagonally after the hare at dusk last night
And the glittering disco sky.
I am no longer afraid of being misunderstood when I state
the old men’s febrile gadgetry—
I don’t buy it.
What suits me better is to stargaze or to lie in stylish baths.
Now it’s time to return to the sex of my thinking.
How long do I get?
A fly moves across the pages of an open book
The pages are quivering
I want stimulants, relaxants, hallucinogens
—I’m not good at order.

from Ulysses, “Oxen of the Sun” (Episode 14) | James Joyce

This tenebrosity of the interior, he proceeded to say, hath not been illumined by the wit of the septuagint nor so much as mentioned for the Orient from on high which brake hell’s gates visited a darkness that was foraneous. Assuefaction minorates atrocities (as Tully saith of his darling Stoics) and Hamlet his father showeth the prince no blister of combustion. The adiaphane in the noon of life is an Egypt’s plague which in the nights of prenativity and postmortemity is their most proper ubi and quomodo. And as the ends and ultimates of all things accords in some mean and measure with their inceptions and originals, that same multiplicit concordance which leads forth growth from birth accomplishing by a retrogressive metamorphosis that minishing and ablation towards the final which is agreeable unto nature so is it with our subsolar being.

On the Pulse of Morning | Maya Angelou

written for and read by Angelou on the first inauguration of President Bill Clinton, January 20, 1993

from The Cure at Troy: A Version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes | Seamus Heaney

Adapted verses of Sophcles’ 409 AD play, Philoctetes, written by Heaney in tribute to Nelson Mandela in 1991.

Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.

The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.

History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.

from The Peregrine | JA Baker

November 4^th

For two hours a falcon peregrine hovered in the gale, leaning into it with heavy flailing wings, moving slowly round the creeks and saltings. She seldom rested, and the wind was too strong for soaring. She followed the sea wall, flying forward for thirty yards, then hovering. Once, she hovered for a long time, and sank to sixty feet; hovered, and sank to thirty feet; hovered, and dropped till only a foot above the long grass on the top of the wall. There she stayed, hovering steadily, for two minutes. She had to fly strongly forward to keep in the same place.