De Amerikaanse dichter, librettist en essayist Scott Cairns werd geboren op 19 november 1954 in Tacoma, Washington. Zie ook alle tags voor Scott Cairns op dit blog.

 

Adventures in New Testament Greek: Nous

You could almost think the word synonymous
with mind, given our so far narrow
history, and the excessive esteem

in which we have been led to hold what is,
in this case, our rightly designated
nervous systems. Little wonder then

that some presume the mind itself both part
and parcel of the person, the very seat
of soul and, lately, crucible for a host

of chemical incentives—combinations
of which can pretty much answer for most
of our habits and for our affections.

When even the handy lexicon cannot
quite place the nous as anything beyond
one rustic ancestor of reason, you might

be satisfied to trouble the odd term
no further—and so would fail to find
your way to it, most fruitful faculty

untried. Dormant in its roaring cave,
the heart’s intellective aptitude grows dim,
unless you find a way to wake it. So,

let’s try something, even now. Even as
you tend these lines, attend for a moment
to your breath as you draw it in: regard

the breath’s cool descent, a stream from mouth
to throat to the furnace of the heart.
Observe that queer, cool confluence of breath

and blood, and do your thinking there.

 

Draw Near

προσέλθετε

For near is where you’ll meet what you have wandered
far to find. And near is where you’ll very likely see
how far the near obtains. In the dark katholikon
the lighted candles lent their gold to give the eye
a more than common sense of what lay flickering
just beyond the ken, and lent the mind a likely
swoon just shy of apprehension. It was then
that time’s neat artifice fell in and made for us
a figure for when time would slip free altogether.
I have no sense of what this means to you, so little
sense of what to make of it myself, save one lit glimpse
of how we live and move, a more expansive sense in Whom.

 

 
Scott Cairns (Tacoma, 19 november 1954)

Lees verder “Scott Cairns, Sharon Olds, Mark Harris, Karel van den Oever, Christoph Wilhelm Aigner” →

De Amerikaanse dichter, librettist en essayist Scott Cairns werd geboren op 19 november 1954 in Tacoma, Washington. Zie ook alle tags voor Scott Cairns op dit blog.

 

Another Road Home
After Stevens

It was when he said expansively There is
no such thing as the truth that his thick thumbs
thickened and his lips, purple as grapes,
further purpled. When I also spun such
spinning facilities as these, my own
vines ripened with what I hoped might prove

more promising fruit. Yios mou, set the large
man’s handsome books aside and sit with me
on the airy balcony beside our kind
and loving Father Iakovos. Truth may
prove to be no such a thing as matter
for our mulling; still, this evening spread out

before our mountain, above our mountain tea
suggests in its late, cypress-scented air
a pressing density, a wine-like, whelming
cup, ksinómavro—deep and dark, substantial.
And the road? Meandering, manifestly
inconclusive, and for that reason not
so likely to ferment blithe disregard.

 

Early Frost

This morning the world’s white face reminds us
that life intends to become serious again.
And the same loud birds that all summer long
annoyed us with their high attitudes and chatter
silently line the gibbet of the fence a little stunned,
chastened enough.

They look as if they’re waiting for things
to grow worse, but are watching the house,
as if somewhere in their dim memories
they recall something about this abandoned garden
that could save them.

The neighbor’s dog has also learned to wake
without exaggeration. And the neighbor himself
has made it to his car with less noise, starting
the small engine with a kind of reverence. At the window
his wife witnesses this bleak tableau, blinking
her eyes, silent.

I fill the feeders to the top and cart them
to the tree, hurrying back inside
to leave the morning to these ridiculous
birds, who, reminded, find the rough shelters,
bow, and then feed.

 

 
Scott Cairns (Tacoma, 19 november 1954)

Lees verder “Scott Cairns, Sharon Olds, Mark Harris, Karel van den Oever, Christoph Wilhelm Aigner” →