The smoke that thunders

Plateau forests
Of ponderosa pine and Douglas-fir,

Cypresses that creep
Far into the water.

Under the sun that never sets
Below the smoke that thunders.

Taken from Rough Guide’s Ultimate Travel Adventures, published September 2008. The descriptions refer to the Grand Canyon, the Atchafalaya Basin and the Arctic Victoria Falls. Submitted by Harriet.

But Not All of the Time

Any case
in which people pursue
a single great experience or accomplishment
that occurs infrequently
or perhaps not at all –

a Holy grail,
an impossible dream,
a brilliant model,
a great white whale –

is a case of
a positively skewed distribution
in which they may be
predicted to be

unhappy
most of the time.

From the book Social Comparison Processes: Theoretical and Empirical Perspectives (1977) edited by J.M. Suls and R. L. Miller. In the chapter “Pleasure and Pain of Social Comparison,” pp. 149-186. Submitted by Kate L.

Saying true things

I’m in love with you
and I’m not in the business
of denying myself
the simple pleasure of
saying
true
things
I’m in love with you
and I know that
love is just a shout
into the void
and that
oblivion is inevitable
and that
we’re all doomed
and that
there will come a day when
all our labor has been
returned
to
dust
and I know the sun
will swallow the only earth
we’ll ever have
and
I’m in love with you.

From The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (Dutton Books, 2012). Submitted by Megan.

A piece of tree bark

Half way through the night,
as recurring twinges of cramp keep me
padding off to the
bathroom.
I experience a quite
irrational fear of
being in the same room as a piece of
tree-bark.

Taken from Pole to Pole: with Michael Palin, first published in 1992. Submitted by Lauren.

Plowing at high knottage

Plowing at high knottage
through time itself
kinetic
even in stasis

Plowing temporally ahead

With time coming off him
like water in sprays and wakes.

From endnote 57 in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, (Little, Brown and Company, 1996). First published on Zach Higgins Is A Designer. Submitted by Zach Higgins.

Soon enough came fearfulness

Once she was born
I was never not afraid:

afraid of swimming pools,
high-tension wires,
lye under the sink,
aspirin in the medicine cabinet…

rattlesnakes, riptides, landslides,
strangers who appeared at the door,
unexplained fevers, elevators without
operators and empty hotel corridors.

(London Review of Books quoting Joan Didion’s Blue Nights. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar)

Beneath Us

In a way it is even humiliating
to watch coal-miners working. It raises in you
a momentary doubt about your own status
as an ‘intellectual’ and a superior
person generally. For it is brought home to
you, at least while you are watching, that it is only
because miners sweat their guts out that superior
persons can remain superior. You and I
and the editor of the Times Literary
Sup., and the Nancy poets and the Archbishop
of Canterbury and Comerade X, author
of Marxism for Infants–all of us really
owe the comparative decency of our lives
to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes,
with their throats full of coal dust, driving their shovels
forward with arms and belly muscles of steel.

From George Orwell’s 1937 book ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’ as cited on Fors Clavigera. Submitted by Marika Rose.

Full of dead men’s bones

All your talk
about freedom and democracy
is sheer claptrap,
parrot phrases,
fashionable twaddle,
or hypocrisy.
It is just a painted signboard.

And you yourselves are
whited sepulchres. You
are mean-spirited boors,
and your education, culture,
and enlightenment are
only a species of
thoroughgoing prostitution.

A quotation from Lenin’s Collected Works, found at Stalin’s Moustache. Submitted by Marika Rose.

Elysium

James Ensor, in a letter to his friend,
Jules Dujardin, mused:
To live in a big bathing hut
whose interior is clad
in mother-of-pearl shells,
and to sleep there
cradled by the sound of the sea
and an indolent
blonde beautiful girl
with salty flesh.

Taken from the book Ensor, by Ulrike Becks-Malorny, published in 2000. Submitted by Robert.

Names Dropped

A! Tis some stale thorn.
I ache rich ballads, M!
I’m stagy when neer.
Live merman: hell.
Awful killin’ Erma!
Makz ‘n nice compote

Anagrams of eminent authors by Edmund Wilson in 1953, taken from Futility Closet. Submitted by Marika Rose.