(from As You Like It, spoken by Jaques)
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms; And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
Far from the sea far from the sea of Breton fishermen the white clouds scudding over Lowell and the white birches the bare white birches along the blear night roads
Let the musicians begin, Let every instrument awaken and instruct us In love’s willing river and love’s dear discipline: We wait, silent, in consent and in the penance Of patience, awaiting the serene exaltation Which is the liberation and conclusion of expiation.
Now may the chief musician say: “Lust and emulation have dwelt amoung us
I The evening comes, the fields are still. The tinkle of the thirsty rill, Unheard all day, ascends again; Deserted is the half-mown plain, Silent the swaths! the ringing wain, The mower's cry, the dog's alarms, All housed within the sleeping farms! The business of the day is done, The last-left haymaker is gone. And from the thyme upon the height, And from the elder-blossom white And pale dog-roses in the hedge, And from the mint-plant in the sedge, In puffs of balm the night-air blows
Distance brings proportion. From here the populated tiers as much as players seem part of the show: a constructed stage beast, three folds of Dante’s rose, or a Chinese military hat cunningly chased with bodies. “Falling from his chariot, a drunk man is unhurt because his soul is intact. Not knowing his fall,
In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots I have never seen a postwar Philco with the automatic eye nor heard Ravel's "Bolero" the way I did in 1945 in that tiny living room on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
Driving westward near Niagara, that transfiguring of the waters, I was torn—as moon from orbit by a warping of gravitation— From coercion of the freeway to the cataract’s prodigality, Had to stand there, breathe its rapture, inebriety of the precipice . . .
Fingers clamped to iron railings in a tremor of earth’s vibration, I look upstream: foam and boulders wail with a biblical desolation, Tree roots, broken oar, a pier end, wrack of the continent dissolving . . .
O what a physical effect it has on me To dive forever into the light blue sea Of your acquaintance! Ah, but dearest friends, Like forms, are finished, as life has ends! Still, It is beautiful, when October Is over, and February is over,
Sprinting across the freeway just ahead of them having set his left foot down directly onto the pavement from the ledge of the cement divide and edging his other leg forward deliberately—caught the way sports pages show an athlete with muscles condensed in the effort of crossing through a particular space—and then she sees the cars coming towards him giving off that early morning shine across their hoods almost colorless but precipitous in the four-lane parallel rush of metal and cannot tell if any driver straining into the distance further ahead has seen him or possibly has caught that glint off the long black flashlight he appears to carry with its up-beam turned on full and faintly visible due to the angle of early sun falling over the midwestern plains fanning out in every direction away from the sudden view of the airport hub’s acclaimed architectural design.
She sees the brief alignment of his body methodically finding its way across the freeway lanes blue baseball cap fit snugly over his head to just above the hairline where now dusky skin of his neck breaks into the picture. He’s made it halfway,
Plurality is all. I walk among the restaurants, the theatres, the grocery stores; I ride the cars and hear of Mrs. Bedford’s teeth and Albuquerque, strikes unsettled, someone’s simply marvelous date, news of the German Jews, the baseball scores, storetalk and whoretalk, talk of wars. I turn the pages of a thousand books to read the names of Buddha, Malthus, Walker Evans, Stendhal, André Gide,
For I can snore like a bullhorn or play loud music or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman and Fergus will only sink deeper into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash, but let there be that heavy breathing or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house and he will wrench himself awake
When I see birches bend to left and right Across the lines of straighter darker trees, I like to think some boy’s been swinging them. But swinging doesn’t bend them down to stay As ice-storms do. Often you must have seen them Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning After a rain. They click upon themselves As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
Swing by starwhite bones and Lights tick in the middle. Blue and white steel Black and white People hurrying along the wall. ”Here you are, bury my dead bones.“
He smelled bad and was red-eyed with the miseries of being scared while sleepless when he said this: “I want a private woman, peace and quiet, and some green stuff in my pocket. Fuck the rest.” Pity the underwear and socks, long burnt, of an accomplished murderer, oh God, of germans and replacements, who refused three stripes to keep his B.A.R.,
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