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3 weeks ago | 
3quarksdaily.com | Jim Culleny
DefinitionsBehind the black outline of a split-trunked tree, a gray sky meets a gray sea. It is as if heaven and sea were one in a gray ease. Is there no demarcation, then, between heaven and sea, no place where one is one and the other, the other? Ah, but the bright sun rises with all its knowing, draws a line, says, "This is the sea, that heaven," and we look about a world thinking this is me, that is everything elsebut remembering that moment before the sun rose. ................
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3 weeks ago | 
3quarksdaily.com | Jim Culleny
Under a Single TentWhen you do things from your soul you feel a river moving in you, a joy. When actions come from another section, the feeling disappears. Don't let others lead you. They may be blind, or worse, vultures. Reach for the rope of God. And what is that? Putting aside self-will. Because of willfulness people sit in jail. From willfulness, the trapped bird's wings are tied. From willfulness, the fish sizzles in the skillet. The anger of police is willfulness.
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3 weeks ago | 
3quarksdaily.com | Jim Culleny
By Jim Culleny The PersonalI who have loved the personal have fallen a bit out of love with the personal. slippers. My mind was empty as a ballroom and I was not compelled to dance. Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
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3 weeks ago | 
3quarksdaily.com | Jim Culleny
........................................Names Lost in the Count............................................................... The world speaks in digits now. Death now serves as ornament for the news headlines. Human flesh, scratched to cold numbers. Corpses now subjected to fatuous calculations. The children of the olive groveseach body folded into a figureeach name a footnote in an endless spreadsheet that tires a human eye.
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3 weeks ago | 
3quarksdaily.com | Jim Culleny
What happens, happens before & after, every time, without fail, always- yet, is singular, is a one-note affair in a symphony of nows each moment of which then becomes before & after, simultaneously. If this seems confusing, blame time, or life, or God which, in particular, has been a widespread explanation of the fact-of-being during millennia of befores & afters since thebeginning-was-the-word, and the word was, .............................. Now and always is.
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3 weeks ago | 
3quarksdaily.com | Jim Culleny
You Shall Not See MeOnly union with you gives joy. The rest is tearing down one building to put up another. .................. But don't break with forms!Boats cannot move without water. We are misquoted texts made right when you say, us. We are sheep in a tightening wolf-circle: You come like a shepherd and ask, .................."So how are you?" I start crying. This means something to anyone in a body, but what means something to you? You can't be spoken though you listen to all sound.
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4 weeks ago | 
3quarksdaily.com | Jim Culleny
ResemblancesOn top of those low mountains the surprising snow lingers. Here in the valley beside the small stream, a snow of almond blossoms. A congruence, then, between high and low, or is it only the eye playing its old game of this is like that? How much we've learned from these resemblances, the white horses of the waves, the white spume of their manes flying behind their fierce, measured charge to the shore.
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1 month ago | 
3quarksdaily.com | Jim Culleny
This Minute, This LifeHowever hard I try to forget what I've learned to not know what I know to not see, not believesudden doors open anyway to moments of clarity to lost treasure found and fingers of light pointing this leaf, this word, this minute, this life. by Johanna Jordan from Small Poems, 2006Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
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1 month ago | 
3quarksdaily.com | Jim Culleny
The First Words(from the Romanian of Marin Sorescu)The first words got polluted Like river water in the morning Flowing with the dirt Of blurbs and the front pages. My only drink is meaning from the deep brain, What the birds and the grass and the stones drink. Let everything flow Up to the four elements, Up to water and earth and fire and air. by Seamus Heaney from The Spirit Level Farrar Straus Giroux, NY, 1996Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
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1 month ago | 
3quarksdaily.com | Jim Culleny
Diasporican RechristeningWe work. We are sometimes on time. We are sometimes late. We are sometimes coming up with the excuses for why we can't make it even as we know we have to. Some of us are trying to be American and some of us are trying to be boricua and some of us are trying. We are relearning Spanish or we are practicing Spanglish or we are remembering that language is just another tool of empire. We are dreaming of the archipelago and we are not.
