Are not clouds sketches for a sculpture
that will never emerge from stone

The neck of a cat visits you at night
Are the stars still spies loyal to no one

All that is left are these jackals
wandering across a glittering field

Our shadows have floated into the sky
leaving out other shadows behind

No need to inquire where or how
Someday you too may need this garden

 Cornel West’s “Dr. King Weeps from his Grave” from the NYTimes (Aug. 25, 2011)

New York Times article

Rooftop roosters announce a new regime
Even at night, guided by the moon,

the sky can never find a cloud that fits
but, for the painter, each cloud is snug

Still, it is the sheet of paper that I want
and the inks that can keep these lovers safe

in the small garden where even the birds
have stopped to look at their reflections

Time Quietly peers in each window
but only the children find it funny

The second necklace we wear is the horizon
circling our waists and throats as the flowers
splash the sky with twilight and constellations
map out the mishaps settling above the city

Abracadabras and horoscopes are impatient
with sleep and calligraphy

Grant me a sheet of paper that will not turn to ash
and this hand will write down afternoon's clouds
while you are hidden in my eyes, it is enough
this sheet of paper where I have hidden you
in these days of smoke and candle flames

Grant me time to pause and inquire of the clouds
if they have concealed you in their tears
behind a red sky in which the moon briefly flies

Grant me a sheet of paper that we might
live near the heat we once made when our hands
pelted the sky with ink and paint

Margins of thought curled like eyelashes
ask them if they remember us now
that our names are forgotten

On the tips of ten thousand grasses,
each and every dewdrop contains the light of the moon
Since the beginning of time,
not a single droplet has been forgotten
Although this is so,
some may realize it, and some may not

“Pine Tree Tops”

in the blue night
frost haze, the sky glows
with the moon
pine tree tops
bend snow-blue, fade
into sky, frost, starlight
the creak of boots.
rabbit tracks, deer tracks
What do we know.

Photographer

by W.S. Merwin (From The Shadow of Sirius)

Later in the day
after he had died and the long box
full of shadow had turned the corner
and perhaps he no longer was watching
what the light was doing
as its white blaze climbed higher
bleaching the street and drying the depths
to a blank surface

when they started to excavate the burrow
under the roof where he had garnered his life
and to drag it all out into the raw moment
and carry it down the stairs
armload by armload to the waiting dumpcart
nests of bedding clothes from their own days
shards of the kitchen there were a few bundled papers
and stacks of glass plates heavy and sliding
easily broken before they could be got down
to the tumbril and mule
pieces grinding underfoot
all over the floor and down the stairs
as they would remember

fortunately someone who understood
what was on the panes bought everything in the studio
almost no letters were there but on the glass
they turned up face after face
of the light before anyone had beheld it
there were its cobbled lanes leading far into themselves
apple trees flowering in another century
lilies open in sunlight against former house walls
worn flights of stone stairs before the war
in days not seen except by the bent figure
invisible under the hood
who had just disappeared

The Fierce Imagination of Murakami, an article written by Sam Anderson for the NYTimes Magazine, appeared today (and this Sunday’s magazine) in anticipation of the English translation of his latest, and to date longest (932 pages) work 1Q84. In the article, Murakami reaffirms my belief that good work and thought comes from slowing down:

“Concentration is one of the happiest things in my life,” he said. “If you cannot concentrate, you are not so happy. I’m not a fast thinker, but once I am interested in something, I am doing it for many years. I don’t get bored. I’m kind of a big kettle. It takes time to get boiled, but then I’m always hot.”

For me, the reason his work is so wonderful is in the seemlessness in which it travels between two supposed worlds (a kind reality and a kind of dream – neither of which is totally one or the other):

Murakami often hears from readers who have “discovered” his inventions in the real world: a restaurant or a shop that he thought he made up, they report, actually exists in Tokyo. In Sapporo, there are now apparently multiple Dolphin Hotels — an establishment Murakami invented in “A Wild Sheep Chase.” After publishing “1Q84,” Murakami received a letter from a family with the surname “Aomame,” a name so improbable (remember: “green peas”) he thought he invented it. He sent them a signed copy of the book. The kicker is that all of this — fiction leaking into reality, reality leaking into fiction — is what most of Murakami’s fiction (including, especially, “1Q84”) is all about. He is always shuttling us back and forth between worlds.

Sam Anderson’s article is a wonderfully written foray into the world of Murakami, definitely worth the read. And it’ll have to do, until I get my hands on 1Q84.

Murakami’s Tokyo (Sam Anderson’s multimedia companion piece to the article)