Morning Thoughts From W.S. and L.C.

To toss these out, for those of you reading this in some version of Sunday Morning:

Les Plus Belles Pages

The milkman came in the moonlight and the moonlight
Was less than moonlight. Nothing exists by itself.
The moonlight seemed to.
                            Two people, three horses, and an ox
And the sun, the waves together in the sea.

The moonlight and Aquinas seemed to. He spoke,
Kept speaking, of God. I changed the word to man.
The automaton, in logic self-contained,
Existed by itself. Or did the saint survive?
Did several spirits assume a single shape?

Theology after breakfast sticks to the eye.

--- Wallace Stevens

from The Favourite Game:

      Children show scars like medals. Lovers use them as secrets to reveal. A scar is what happens when the word is made flesh.
      It is easy to display a wound, the proud scars of combat. It is hard to show a pimple.

--- Leonard Cohen

Also from LC:

      In dreams the truth is learned that all good works are done in the absence of a caress.


Something for your coffee and your oranges and your discarded peignoirs and pyjama bottoms. I love that line, though: "theology after breakfast sticks to the eye." One could likely write a dissertation on that if one were sufficiently ingenious (and versed in exegesis). I, alas, am not; but it stirs the mind (and the proverbial fish-hook stuck in our water-breathing eye).

      And, yes, I will expose all of you patient enough to read me here to the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Call it a mission. And this time, it's personal. ;-)