Dan Flavin - "(quietly, to the memory of Mia Visser)", 1977

“Titles play an important part: by the mention of the name of a person to whom the work is dedicated after the neutral Untitled, that work acquires an individual note and meaning. Sometimes this is private, but it can also related to a well-known person. The title The Nominal Three (to William of Ockham) of 1963 is of particular significance. Ockham (d. 1349), an excommunicated Franciscan, made a distinction between faith and knowledge and held that reality consists only of individual things, an important idea to Flavin.”

- From the Kroller-Muller Museum Catalogue

Philip Larkin - "Church Going"

Once I am sure there’s nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence,

Move forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof looks almost new –
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don’t.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce
‘Here endeth’ much more loudly than I’d meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not worth stopping for.

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we avoid them as unlucky places?

Or, after dark, will dubious women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead one?
Power of some sort or other will go on
In games, in riddles, seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

A shape less recognisable each week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last, the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he be my representative,

Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation – marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these – for which was built
This special shell? For, though I’ve no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.

W.H. Auden - "The Traveller"

No window in his suburb lights that bedroom where
A little fever heard large afternoons at play:
His meadows multiply; that mill, though, is not there
Which went on grinding at the back of love all day.

Nor all his weeping ways through weary wastes have found
The castle where his Greater Hallows are interned;
For broken bridges halt him, and dark thickets round
Some ruin where an evil heritage was burned.

Could he forget a child’s ambition to be old
And institutions where it learned to wash and lie,
He’d tell the truth for which he thinks himself too young,

That everywhere on the horizon of his sigh
Is now, as always, only waiting to be told
To be his father’s house and speak his mother tongue.

Dostoyevsky on Love

“O brothers, love is an instructress, but one must know how to acquire her, for she is acquired with effort, purchased dearly, by long labour and over a long season, for it is not simply for a casual moment that one must love, but for the whole of the appointed season.”

- The Elder Zosima, in “The Brothers Karamazov”

Jameson Fitzpatrick - "The Tribute"

I was thinking of a daughter, there
in the crush of a summer
what can save her from. You know the one:

that thick season from which she’ll feel everything
that follows, follows. She isn’t wrong

to get in the car with the older boy;
in a sense she must,
because she wants to. Headlong dive into the backseat.

Headstrong is the word

her father uses before disappearing
back to his office. For him, the one suffices.

Not me: voluble as our girl, as I ever was

though I have made a study of restraint,
and practiced plenty,
posed at the closed piano when no one’s home.

Some nights when she’s returned to me, I for a second
think: Changeling!

Of course it’s her; it’s only that
as her resemblance to me—to a version
I can remember and recognize as self—grows

it gets harder to see her
grow, at once, ever more distinct from me.
Further and clearer.

Even as she repeats my errors:
the selection of boy, my old white jacket with the fringe.
And wears her seatbelt

always, because her mother made her.

It’s not for her I wait up.
In fact, she never comes.

Still someone has to fill the loud freedom
that someone who must have been me
must have chosen.

Ellery Akers - "My Sister Blazed Through Her Life"

When she was young, she had a small part in a play, but everyone looked at her. Dull her down, the director said, throw an old coat over her. They did, but everyone still looked at her.

When a man on the street whistled and said, Oh, baby, she stopped and gave a speech: This man is impugning my dignity as a woman. A crowd gathered, and the whistler slunk away.

Once, racing to an audition, she got held up at gunpoint, but she said, I’m sorry, I don’t have time to be mugged, and the man lowered his gun and laughed and let her go.

- Ellery Akers, first published in The Sun