Patience

I read about a man who acquired musical ability through being struck by lightening. If I acquired patience in this way would it be a mild derangement? Patience is to be acquired patiently.

Bathroom Curtains

a poem by Richard Wilbur:
(I am afraid
that I can't get the spacing right.)

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World

The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.

Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;

Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks

From all that is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
``Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.''

Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,

``Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.''

Just Listen to Your Body

The experts of athletics and dietetics have told me that it is important that I listen to my body. I have heeded their advice, and I have heard some very strange things.

Rat and Friend

The Couplet

Oh, who can tell the artifices
by which it found my orifices?

More on Hunger

'The relation of hunger to food is far less complete, to be sure, but just as real as is the act of eating,'



Simone Weil writes of her refraining from partaking in the sacraments. She continues, 'It is perhaps not inconceivable that in a being with certain natural propensities, a particular temperament, a given past, a certain vocation, and so on, the desire for and deprivation of the sacraments might constitute a contact more pure than actual participation.'