Boat and Yellow Hills: Selden Connor Gile (Oakland Museum)
Melodious liquid warble in the plum
Tree tells the sinking year how to feel
Its recession into grief as if a thorn
Poked a nester in an old wounded heart
Of stone from which slowly drips recognition
All breathing passion far above
These days atonal as white noise
Through bare branches cotton clouds drift by
Last yellowed leaves catch lone rays of sun
Going down into the motherless ocean
A light plane buzzes off toward brown hills
As shade drops over the next urban plot
To prepare the air for what the dead don’t know
How swiftly we are coming to join them
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2 comments:
Lovely.
How swiftly we are coming to join them
...ain't that the truth? Remember Woody Allen's crack?
'I don't want to be immortal by being remembered: I want to be immortal by not dying.'
Thanks very much, Mish.
I am reminded of another quote:
“I long ago came to the conclusion that all life is 6 to 5 against.”
--Damon Runyon
(I recall discussing that Runyon quote once with Daniel Ellsberg -- who, some years earlier, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, had been recruited from the Rand Corporation by the Pentagon to assist in calculating probable Soviet responses in various war-of-the-worlds scenarios of that moment; Ellsberg said that he had used the Runyon line as epigraph to his Harvard Ph.D. thesis on game theory.)
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