Monday, 6 April 2020

Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight - Galway Kinnell

If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a café at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where wine takes the shapes of upward opening glasses,

and if you commit then, as we did, the error
of thinking,
one day all this will only be memory,

learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come—to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
that tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

Invictus - William Ernest Henley

  Out of the night that covers me,       Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be       For my unconquerable soul. I...