whet appetite

reposted with no permissions whatsoever, but with full credit, words i have loved of late.
via bc pires, from ian mcdonald's sunday stabroek column; by czeslaw milosz:

A Confession

My Lord, I loved strawberry jam
And the dark sweetness of a woman’s body.
Also well-chilled vodka, herring in olive oil,
Scents, of cinnamon, of cloves.
So what kind of prophet am I? Why should the spirit
Have visited such a man? Many others
Were justly called, and trustworthy.
Who would have trusted me? For they saw
How I empty glasses, throw myself on food,
And glance greedily at the waitress’s neck.
Flawed and aware of it. Desiring greatness,
Able to recognize greatness wherever it is,
And yet not quite, only in part, clairvoyant,
I knew what was left for smaller men like me:
A feast of brief hopes, a rally of the proud,
A tournament of hunchbacks, literature.

and via tongues of the ocean; by nicholas laughlin:

Here is the Poem

Before this was a phrase it was a pebble,
something slippery, something with little teeth,
the bitter of green, the smell of something red,
it makes you sneeze, it hums like falling asleep.

Before this was a poem it was a question,
or maybe the desire of a question,
or maybe the desire for something to happen,
the string that tautens when love is about to happen,
the question that taunts when the tongue encounters a pebble,
the name of the taste of something that smells like red.

A poem, like love, is always about to happen,
unless it’s already happened. The thing about poems:
poems are impossible, like the colour blue,
and undeniable. The thing about blue:
blue is a mirror, and has nothing to do with poems.
Why does a poem want to be a poem?
The colour blue doesn’t want to be a poem,
but sometimes the poem wants to be heartless as blue,

the poem wants to be slick and snug as a pebble,
sharp as small teeth, bitter as tea, and sudden
as love (or a sneeze). And no one knows more than a poem,
and that is where all desires and questions start.
The poem says: here is a pebble, here is blue,
damn your metaphysics, here are you.

walk good.