zee avi

kind of in love
(also, sorry for being so dead online--i just moved and my internet is not hooked up yet! i will be back very shortly xo)

The Greatest Thing in the World

I'm supposed to be studying course material for the class I'll be teaching in less than a month, which means of course that I'm reading through a book by Henry Drummond, an influential Scottish writer and lecturer who lived during the late nineteenth century and wrote mostly about his two passions in life: science and religion. The title chapter of his book is a meditation on Love and since reading it I keep thinking about this:

"Religion is not a strange or added thing, but the inspiration of the secular life, the breathing of an eternal spirit through this temporal world. [Love], in short, is not a thing at all, but the giving of a further finish to the multitudinous words and acts which make up the sum of every common day."

If you have some free time, check out the full lecture here.

Inadvertent Elegies

is the name of Sarah Jenkins' chapbook, which I "won" a copy of here and which I recently read through and of course loved. I hope she doesn't mind if I share a few lines here because they are beautiful and full of heart (as is the poet), which I've been told is "the crucial bone for a writer." So:

First and Last Looks

In the beginnig was light / emanating from the first / opened eye; the implications / I let you enumerate as we exchange first and last / looks. Look / I don't know / what I see / until I see you. / I don't want to see / until I see / you. The eye emenates all / opening a thin lid / sudden expected sight. The eye emenates / all things, bright and dark, all / people, places, things. That first flame of being, beginning / kindled under streetlights / along horizons.

Emanate: give birth / give light. I give you / you give me / illumination. / We belong on the horizons, / our eyes lighting the skyline. / We belong looking at each other / for the first time, quick / glancing-- / the next word blows, but I see / white light separated: / red, orange, yellow, / orange, yellow.

[Walt Whitman Blesses the Grass]

Walt Whitman blesses the grass growing from our beautiful bodies--excellent argument, until I find you / at the base of a desert mountain, the red earth eating your bones.

Did you read Whitman? Did you imagine your body joining the mothers and sons and old men waiting? I imagine your soul triumphant, but your body--

I hate this desert, the land flat and empty, every thing dead. / If I were Whitman, I would recite your name over and over, / in perfect syllables, but I cannot translate it to sun and dust and / there are no seasons here.

I imagine you in the heat, how it makes every thing quiet.