Janice George's Blog

Soldier of the heart.
Pointman for an army of flowers.

Agent of sacrifice.
Judas Now

And Judas Forgiven -
Forever forgiven.

You heard us knocking at the door
And you answered,

And therein lies your grief.

Two poets, from different ends of the earth, empty -- and fill -- the same cup...

1.

Inside this clay jug there are canyons and pine mountains,
and the maker of canyons and pine mountains!
All seven oceans are inside and hundreds of millions of stars.
The acid that tests gold is there, and the one who judges jewels.
And the music from the strings that no one touches,
and the source of all water.

If you want the truth, I will tell you the truth:
Friend, listen: the God whom I love is inside.
Why should we two ever want to part?

Just as the leaf of the water rhubarb lives floating on the water,
we live as the great one and the little one.

As the owl opens his eyes all night to the moon,
we live as the great one and the little one.

This love between us goes back to the first humans:
it cannot be annihilated.

Here is Kabir's idea: as the river gives itself into the ocean, what is inside me moves inside you.
-- Kabir

2.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
-- T.S. Eliot

I have a tendency to write down quotes or word definitions or fragments of revelations wherever I am on whatever is handy at the time... so sales slips, backs of bills, grocery lists, to do lists, etc can also have something like "ephapax = once-and-for-all" scribbled in between potatoes and corn tortillas.

Here's what I recently found in my eBay notebook, where I try to keep some accounting of my buying and selling:

We can't cure society's ills
But we can sure sell happy pills
We'll chemically elevate your mood
and genetically engineer your food
We're World Control Corp...

I'm pretty sure that's a quote from a Roseanne Barr stand-up routine several years ago.

Yesterday I decided to clean out the library slash computer room that has become the treadmill slash everything else space (tho' 'space' is a euphemism right now). It will take me too long to clean this room because I sort while I clean, and I read while I sort, so basically I'm just sitting on the floor reliving my past piece by tiny piece.

Which is how I found one of my favorite poems acting as a bookmark in an Art News magazine. I scribbled this poem down on green spiral notepaper over 30 years ago. It's not even the whole poem, so there must be a page missing.

It's a poem called Wind Songs by Alvin Greenberg. I don't know anything else Greenberg has done, and when I Google him, I see that he has written several small books of poetry, stories, and musings, but does not seem to be too widely known. He currently lives in Idaho. There's not even a Wiki page on him. And yet, this scrap of a poem is one of the most beautiful things I've ever read, and it clutches at me with a feeling like I'd just met myself coming around the corner.

Here is the fragment of the poem Wind Songs by Alvin Greenberg...
4.

is it, the wind asks, possible
to replace the wind?

no, it isn't possible to replace the wind.

there is no 'other wind'
there is only 'wind' and 'not wind'

and warm in the house where i live
not wind blows. this

wind irreplaceably hears

5.

if one live, in the midst of the wind...

if, in the midst of the wind
one gathers others about oneself,
not to expose them to the wind,
not to protect them from the wind,
but to live with one, in the midst of the wind...

if, when the door is closed against the wind
and the windows locked
and the music turned up high
so that no sound enters from outside,
one still knows one lives in the midst of the wind...

if, in the midst of the wind, one...

6.

why, you ask, is the great, now golden maple
so still? the lake unbroken by a single ripple?

i confess: i have swallowed the wind.

in order to dine in a necessary calm,
without the napkins sailing from our laps,
the children whipped from their chairs, the salad
torn leaf by leaf from the battered salad bowl,

i have swallowed the wind.

in order to keep the necessary world
from blowing away, i have swallowed the wind.

i have swallowed the wind, in order to keep
the wind within me. i have. i have
swallowed the wind. in order to keep