evening at the Ryans'

dipping my toes in the vast sea of B&W

Collins/Jimenez

"The First Night" - Billy Collins (from Ballistics)

The worst thing about death must be
the first night.
—Juan Ramón Jiménez

Before I opened you, Jiménez,
it never occurred to me that day and night
would continue to circle each other in the ring of death,

but now you have me wondering
if there will also be a sun and a moon
and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set

then repair, each soul alone,
to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.
Or will the first night be the only night,

a darkness for which we have no other name?
How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,
How impossible to write it down.

This is where language will stop,
the horse we have ridden all our lives
rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff.

The word that was in the beginning
and the word that was made flesh—
those and all the other words will cease.

Even now, reading you on this trellised porch,
how can I describe a sun that will shine after death?
But it is enough to frighten me

into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon,
to sunlight bright on water
or fragmented in a grove of trees,

and to look more closely here at these small leaves,
these sentinel thorns,
whose employment it is to guard the rose.




"If one day I throw myself into this well, it will not be to kill
myself, believe me, but to pluck the stars more quickly."

- Jimenez, Platero y Yo

Worth going deaf for?

Yesterday, my fabulous brother took me to a concert as a belated birthday gift. We got to see the Arkells:


Mother Mother, from right here in Vancouver:


and the main attraction, the Sam Roberts band, whose videos, sadly, cannot be embedded, but you can still watch them. And should.