"Your voice, your eyes," Paul Eluard

Anna Karina, from Godard's Alphaville

Your voice, your eyes
your hands, your lips
Our silences, our words
Light that goes
light that returns
A single smile between us both
In quest of knowledge
I watched night create day
while we seemed unchanged
beloved of all, beloved of one alone
your mouth silently promised to be happy
Away, away, says hate
never, never, says love
A caress leads us from our childhood
Increasingly I see the human form
as a lover’s dialogue
The heart has but one mouth
Everything ordered by chance
All words without aforethought
Sentiments adrift
Men roam the city
A glance, a word
Because I love you
Everything moves
To live, only advance!
Aim straight for those you love
I went towards you, endlessly towards the light
If you smile, it is to enfold me all the better
The rays of your arms pierce the mist

For a link to Anna Karina's reading of Eluard, click here.

"To You," Kennth Koch.

Today's poem can be found at the Poetry Foundation.

Action List: 3 May 2011

Robert Desnos

After discussing the Anthology Project, we will not have as much time as we usually do today for our blogging, so here is a simplified action list:

1. Compose one log to catch us up on what you have been reading lately.

Choose one of the following:

a. Read as much as you can of "Behind the Hunt for Bin Laden," the background on how they developed the intelligence to find the world's most wanted man, on the New York Times and make a brief response post (what surprises or interests you the most).

b. Read this article on what it means to be a "wired family," and write a post in response--how much does your family resemble the families described here?

"I said it to you," Paul Eluard

I said it to you for the clouds
I said it to you for the tree of the sea
For each wave for the birds in the leaves
For the pebbles of sound
For familiar hands

For the eye that becomes landscape or face
And sleep returns it the heaven of its colour
For all that night drank
For the network of roads
For the open window for a bare forehead
I said it to you for your thoughts for your words

Every caress every trust survives.

"Golden Retrievals," Mark Doty

Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention

seconds at a time. Catch? I don’t think so.

Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’s—oh

joy—actually scared. Sniff the wind, then

I’m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue

of any thrillingly dead thing. And you?

Either you’re sunk in the past, half our walk,

thinking of what you never can bring back,

or else you’re off in some fog concerning

—tomorrow, is that what you call it? My work:

to unsnare time’s warp (and woof!), retrieving,

my haze-headed friend, you. This shining bark,

a Zen master’s bronzy gong, calls you here,

entirely, now: bow-wow, bow-wow, bow-wow.

"Dog's Death," John Updike

She must have been kicked unseen or brushed by a car.
Too young to know much, she was beginning to learn
To use the newspapers spread on the kitchen floor
And to win, wetting there, the words, “Good dog! Good dog!”

We thought her shy malaise was a shot reaction.
The autopsy disclosed a rupture in her liver.
As we teased her with play, blood was filling her skin
And her heart was learning to lie down forever.

Monday morning, as the children were noisily fed
And sent to school, she crawled beneath the youngest’s bed.
We found her twisted and limp but still alive.
In the car to the vet’s, on my lap, she tried

To bite my hand and died. I stroked her warm fur
And my wife called in a voice imperious with tears.
Though surrounded by love that would have upheld her,
Nevertheless she sank and, stiffening, disappeared.

Back home, we found that in the night her frame,
Drawing near to dissolution, had endured the shame
Of diarrhea and had dragged across the floor
To a newspaper carelessly left there. Good dog.

Action List: 27 April 2011

We'll have a "Bloggies" day today; browse the blogs of our classmates and nominate your favorite blog in a reply to this post. Then, make a post on your own blog about it that links to a couple of your favorite posts there--personal, logs, videos, whatever--and then discuss why you like what they are doing with their little piece of the internet. The top three winners will get to skip tomorrow's vocab test!

After that, take some time to log your recent reading, make a personal post, comment on some poems, and do some silent reading, if you're up for that kind of thing.