sitting in quietude

Winter has a message of its own

When the cold is like a flower-

Flowers have their fragrance, winter has its handful of memories.

The shadow of withered branch, like lean blue smoke,

Paints a stroke across the afternoon window.

In the cold the sunlight grows pale and slanted.

It is just like this.

I sip the tea quietly

As if waiting for a guest to speak.

Li Jinfa

easy

Easy is what we must be — 

holding and taking, holding and letting go.

Hofmannsthal

without the body

Otherwise, it would not matter

that my fingertips

start just under your ear

and move with impossible

luxury, almost undetectable touch,

down the side of the breathing

throat, over the collarbone

and the supreme smooth paleness

of the shoulder,

down the inside of your arm,

finding the slight blue veins

of the wrist, and lingering

long in the palm.

Without the body,

why would i want

the gesture to consume a thousand years?

Without the body, where

would memory knot

us to the world?

from Sense (James Owens)

in this almost

Oblique life? 

I am well aware that there is a slight detachment between things, they almost collide, there is a detachment among the beings that lose one other amongst words that almost don’t say anything more. 

But we almost understand one other in this light discord, in this almost that is the only way to stand full life, since a sudden face-to-face encounter with it would frighten us, scare off its delicate spider’s web threads.

(Clarice Lispector)

the act of surrender

but if i hope to understand in order to accept things— the act of surrender will never happen

(Clarice Lispector)

.