Ten Thousand Places

Sometimes I just want to share a favorite poem. These mean so much to me, and I am half joyful, half jealous that they can mean something to someone else, too. But if I can be the one to introduce you to it, then I am two thirds joyful. If I had understood my stats lecture this week I could tell you the probability of those two events, but instead I give you the wistful pleading of Yeats.

Aedh Wishes for the Clothes of Heaven

Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

The Convert by G. K. Chesterton

After one moment when I bowed my head
And the whole world turned over and came upright,
And I came out where the old road shone white,
I walked the ways and heard what all men said,
Forests of tongues, like autumn leaves unshed,
Being not unlovable but strange and light;
Old riddles and new creeds, not in despite
But softly, as men smile about the dead.

The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live.

I just discovered a new favorite poem, One Art by Elizabeth Bishop.  It has a deep meaning to me that is probably not the exact meaning the author meant for the poem.  Here it is to mean something to you, if you like.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Auralia’s Colors, by Jeffery Overstreet.  It is wonderful so far, and the author is alive and still writing, which is my favorite kind.  Send him vitamens here.  Or just buy his book and he can buy his own vitamens, live long and keep writing books for me to read.

Culture Makers, by Andy Crouch.  Get in on the discussion here.

Nature’s Witness: How Evolution Can Inspire Faith, by Daniel Harrell.  Read it, and/or come to my church where he is the associate pastor and listen to him preach.

I have recently been exploring the wide world of podcasts and audio books, and recommend very highly PRI: Selected Shorts, available on itunes, The Writer’s Almanac and The NewYorker Fiction podcast, also on itunes.  All of those are free.  There are also collections of old Selected Shorts episodes which are really fun to listen to.  The art of reading stories has suffered, I think, in our age of multimedia, but these readers do the great old stories justice.  My favorites so far are D.H. Lawrence’s The Rocking Horse read by John Shea, “There must be more money; there must be more money,” and Edith Wharton’s Roman Fever read by Maria Tucci.  They are on itunes or here.