Michael Wong > Recent Status Updates

“…with effort he looked up: raising
to himself
all that inhered in the book’s depths,
with eyes which, instead of taking,
bumped
givingly into the full-finished world:
the way quiet children, who have played
alone,
suddenly experience what’s at hand;
but his features, which were in order,
remained forever recomposed.” p. 226

“Who knows him, this youth who’s let his
face sink down
from his own existence to a second one…

Even his mother would not be sure
it’s he who sits there reading something…
how can we know how much of him was
lost…” p. 226

“Don't be downcast, soon the night will come,
When we can see the cool moon laughing in secret
Over the faint countryside, And we rest, hand in hand.
Don't be downcast, the time will soon come When we can have rest. Our small crosses will stand On the bright edge of the road together, And rain fall, and snow fall, And the winds come and go.” P. 31

“You are knocking through the years,
through the steamy showers, saying,
"Hurry dear, please come out."
The sun bursts its pod.
I will hide under my knees.
I will roll up my shadow.
Coming, Coming...”

“Because the nonfigurative picture doesn't contain any less overall information as an identifiable depiction…the information in it is more densely compacted” p. 53

abstract painting as a JPG/GIF?

““The person who writes a poem/resembles a little the person who plays piano/Before his brain chooses the key/a hand is already moving/The hand is leading him/The hand is captured by sound and cannot escape from it/That's why the hand is struggling to that degree/The sound guides the hand/as the hand tries to escape from the sound it drags him along to where” p. 144

In Praise of the Eye

...If it does not die
there will be no resurrection
for the things that were seen by your eyes
there will be no revival for your eyes
that were penetrated by those things

p. 143

“Perhaps a great poem/might be faster than the speed of light/Because of that human beings/invade the present from the future/and the past from the present” p.136