"Neil" - Henri Cole

My mother never forgave my father for sleeping
with Neil. You don’t need a wife, she screamed;
You already have one. She sounded like a whipping woman
but she was wounded. For years, she shut herself
in their bedroom and slept. Once, her baking was so fine
that the silverfish in our house were morbidly obese.
To think of my parents now costs me such an effort. 
My heart thumps as if I might faint or die. 
I hope they are resting. They were not so strong,
pulling on each other’s hair when the devil seized them—
Mother, barefoot in her nightgown, and Father, in his
leather slippers and black-watch robe—
like erect white stems blurred silvery gray by pollen.
I feel so much admiration for them. 

- Henri Cole

Robinson Jeffers - "People and a Heron"

People and a Heron
by Robinson Jeffers

A desert of weed and water-darkened stone under my western
            windows
The ebb lasted all afternoon,
And many pieces of humanity, men, women, and children,
            gathering shellfish,
Swarmed with voices of gulls the sea-breach.
At twilight they went off together, the verge was left vacant,
            an evening heron
Bent broad wings over the black ebb,
And left me wondering why a lone bird was dearer to me than
            many people.
Well: rare is dear: but also I suppose
Well reconciled with the world but not with our own natures
            we grudge to see them
Reflected on the world for a mirror.

On "lightness", from Italo Calvino's "Six Memos for the Next Millenium"

“There remains one thread, the one I first started to unwind: that of literature as an existential function, the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living…

I am accustomed to consider literature a search for knowledge. In order to move onto existential ground, I have to think of literature as extended to anthropology and ethnology and mythology. Faced with the precarious existence of tribal life—drought, sickness, evil influences—the shaman responded by ridding his body of weight and flying to another world, another level of perception, where he could find the strength to change the face of reality. In centuries and civilizations closer to us, in villages where the women bore most of the weight of a constricted life, witches flew by night on broomsticks or even on lighter vehicles such as ears of wheat or pieces of straw. Before being codified by the Inquisition, these visions were part of the folk imagination, or we might even say of lived experience. I find it a steady feature in anthropology, this link between the levitation desired and the privation actually suffered. It is this anthropological device that literature perpetuates.”

- Italo Calvino