Now

by Greg Watson

I told you once when we were young that
we would someday meet again.
Now, the years flown past, the letters
unwritten, I am not so certain.

It is autumn. There are toothaches hidden
in this wind, there are those determined
to bring forth winter at any cost.
I am resigned to dark blonde shadows

at stoplights, lost in the roadmaps of leaves
which point in every direction at once.
But I am wearing the shirt you stitched
two separate lifetimes ago. It is old

and falling to ash, yet every button blooms
the flowers of your design. I think of this
and I am happy, to have kissed
your mouth with the force of language,

to have spoken your name at all.

***

On the way home today
xiaoshuo unexpectedly inspired me by telling me one story she read (she just narrates it in a casual way that not even I, with my keyboard (more time to think), can. so ask her if you're curious)
that keeps her cheerful and upbeat,
entertaining herself when there's no entertainment to be found (in the form of yours truly)
and it has lifted some load off me
and made me sort of determined to let her vibrancy rub off me

"As the bee plays a vital role in pollination, its extinction would severely disrupt the food chain."

***

If I have children one day,
I'll incorporate philosophy (and ideas abt religion too), literature (and not be bored by classics like me - living vicariously) and all areas of knowledge (preferably many languages too) into the process of bringing up these children.
Of course, I'll force all that on myself just to be fair.

***

The working explanation, though by no means the definitive one, is that everything we know -- the whole cosmic fabric ranging from your coffee cup to the sun to entire clusters of galaxies -- is only about 1 percent of what's actually out there. Another 3 percent or so is hot interstellar gas we can see because it radiates X-rays and radio waves. Then things start getting weird. An invisible substance called dark matter, possibly phenomena such as giant black holes and unseen particles, is thought to compose 22 percent of the cosmos. Everything else, almost three-quarters of the total, is dark energy, a force that is apparently driving the universe apart.

The reaction among cosmologists was something like Keanu Reeves's in "The Matrix": Whoa!

"Your whole life as an astronomer, you learn that the universe is expanding, but it should be slowing down," said Tod R. Lauer, an associate astronomer at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory who is investigating dark energy. "But we find out it's speeding up. That's the most incredible shock we've had in cosmology in the last 40 years."

- washington post

My head feels weak
and suddenly
it's clear to see
it's not them but me,
who has lost my self-identity.
As I hide behind
these books I read,
while scribbling
my poetry,
like art could save a wretch like me,
with some ideal ideology
that no one could hope to achieve.
And I am never real;
it is just a sketch in me.
And everything I made is trite
and cheap
and a waste
of paint,
of tape,
of time. - Waste of paint, Bright eyes

We were standing
On the hood of your car
Singing out loud when the sun came up
- A lifetime, Better than Ezra

No that isn't the best line in the song (which is touching) but it's a graphic suggestion and i can only imagine.

只好在图书馆找回一点浪漫 - 寂寞考, 卢广仲

从不曾挥霍 好想要挥霍 - 好想要挥霍, 卢广仲

Now there is almost a feeling like as that growth should be delivered to us. And I think that from the way you state it is that it's a recognition. That there is this dialectic there, that around us the forces are not kind in terms of either recognizing, awakening, or encouraging beauty, but that actually, they should be the impetus and spark to do it. Now how do we do it?

One way, and I think this is a really lovely way, and I think it's an interesting question to ask one self too, you know? And the question is when is the last time that you had a great conversation, a conversation which wasn't just two intersecting monologues, which is what passes for conversation a lot in this culture. But when had you last a great conversation, in which you over heard yourself saying things that you never knew you knew. That you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you thought you had lost and a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the two of you on to a different plane. And then fourthly, a conversation that continued to sing in your mind for weeks afterwards, you know? And I've — I've had some of them recently, and it's just absolutely amazing, like, as we would say at home, they are food and drink for the soul, you know?

- excerpt of transcipt of a radio interview with Irish poet and philosopher John O'Donohue