I suppose what one reads, relates to one's dreams

On holiday weekends, at the

least, I don't doubt, it is 

so. It's funny, though. One

may be willing to entertain

a Jackson Pollock - please,

don't be more hip, just now

-- and yet venture very lit-

tle from Austen, in the com-

mitment of literary senses.

Of all the channels of dif-
fusion of the self, poetry
is the most interminably re-
constituted. It doesn't dry,
as poets do, but waits.

   How marvelous to have done it and then left
   It in the lost property office of the loving mind,
   The secret whisper those who listen find.
   You show us all the way the great ones went,
   In silences becalmed, so well they knew
   That even to die is somehow to invent.

  

I want nothing more than to speak simply, to be granted that grace.
Because we've loaded even our song with so much more music that it's slowly sinking
and we've decorated our art so much that it's been eaten away by gold
and it's time to say our few words because tomorrow our soul sets sail.

Lawrence Durrell
Selected Poems
  Seferis
Peter Porter, editor
op. cit.

George Seferis
An Old Man on the River Bank
Edmund Keeley and
  Philip Sherrard, translation
The Greek Poets
  Homer to the Present
op. cit.