carpe diem ii

through a (bottom of a gin) glass brightly

December 12, 2014

What? How? and one more

The thing to do is try for that sweet skin
One gets by staying deep inside a thing.
The image that I have is that of fruit—
The stone within the plum or some such pith
As keeps the slender sphere both firm and sound.

- Jean Garrigue: “Catch What You Can.”

“Seize the day, man.”

      Wine, women, and song.  Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. Yeah.

     Is that the point? There’s seize the day. Then, there’s seize the day for what? and how? Do we take hold, or are we taken hold of? Do we reach out with relish to taste and touch - exhilarated, delighted, inspired? Or is drink, drug, and fornication a way to forget, not to capture the time but to lose ourselves? Do we dance in open-eyed joy? Or do we spin ourselves about until we become dizzy, dazed, and lose consciousness? 

     I hope, in the next three or four posts, to look into several carpe diem poems, familiar and less so, some fitting the genre neatly, others more raggedly – those two questions in mind: “Seize the day” for what? and how?

     Add maybe, for whom? Are we the only ones that matter? 

m