charles

Be Drunk You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."--Charles Baudelaire, translated by Louis SimpsonHe Wishes For The Cloths Of HeavenHad 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.--William Butler YeatsI saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,/ All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,/ Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous of dark green,/ And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,/ But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there/ without its friend near, for I knew I could not,/ And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it and/ twined around it a little moss,/ And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,/ It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,/ (For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)/ Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;/ For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana/ solitary in a wide in a wide flat space,/ Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,/ I know very well I could not.--Walt Whitmansomewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond/ any experience,your eyes have their silence:/ in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,/ or which i cannot touch because they are too nearyour slightest look will easily unclose me/ though i have closed myself as fingers,/ you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens/ (touching skilfully,mysteriously)her first roseor if your wish be to close me, i and/ my life will shut very beautifully ,suddenly,/ as when the heart of this flower imagines/ the snow carefully everywhere descending;/ nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals/ the power of your intense fragility:whose texture/ compels me with the color of its countries,/ rendering death and forever with each breathing(i do not know what it is about you that closes/ and opens;only something in me understands/ the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)/ nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands --e.e. cummings