New Stuff for Nad

Advent

I want to say "the end
of days." Like the shut

door is enough to talk about. Like
your mouth made no sound

when it opened. Like we push
old salt to the back of the cupboard

to make room for new salt. The end
of days, or the slow sweat

those days brought. Last night
I set a bowl of milk on the porch

of your old house, where you or anybody
might step in it by accident. Come back.

Leo's Kite

Josh, Robing

Peter and Cubby

Joanna

The Magic of Nature

Someone Else's Christmas

From another preloaded thrift store camera:

Carl Phillips, from the 2nd stanza of "On Restraint"

There are horses in the distance, so say so.

There are horses in the distance,
not running, smoke-still.

Not running yet: the idea of To run.

Not running but getting ready to run.

There are no horses in the distance, but
say so.

There is smoke,

or a fog that, from this distance,
is any number of horses, not running.

Carl Phillips, Regalia Figure

We were mistaken, I think.

I think the soul wants
no mate
except body, what it has

already, I think
the body is not
a cage,

no,

but the neccessary foil
against which the soul
proves it was always

true, what they said: to stand
unsuffering
in the presence of another's
agony is its own
perhaps difficult but
irrefutable pleasure.

That I might not have
thought so, without
you, I understand now.

Likewise, about the body
wanting most
only another body, the flesh
from within
lit as if with an instinct for,

endlessly, more
of itself, for a joint suffering which,

if it too is a kind of pleasure,

if also the only one the body is
likely in this lifetime to

come into, how refuse?

Possibly-- probably-- there
was not ever a choice
anyway.

The revised version of
effortless.

The twice-plowed-
back-into-itself
field, the light
upon it,

the animal lives
inside the field, inside the light--

I am learning to pity
less what
lacks will entirely.

There are things worse than being
like that. -- And yet,
to let go of it, ambition,
seems as impossible, as
impossible--

How extend forgiveness
insincerely? Meeting you,

I knew you utterly.
I saw, utterly,

this life.
I'd put it on.
I'd wear it like

--a crown, for
how it flashes.

Gerhard Richter, Betty, 1988

Oil on canvas

Milk and Lasers

From the film roll that was left inside a thrift store camera.

Gerhard Richter's Overpainted Photographs