The Book of my Enemy Has Been Remaindered

[tuppeny.livejournal.com]

The book of my enemy has been remaindered

And I am pleased.

In vast quantities it has been remaindered

Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized

And sits in piles in a police warehouse,

My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles

In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.

Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles

One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,

Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews

Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book –

For behold, here is that book

Among these ranks and banks of duds,

These ponderous and seeminly irreducible cairns

Of complete stiffs.  

( The book of my enemy has been remaindered... )

ETA: Clive James isn't a tag yet, and I couldn't add it as one... help?

The Minister of Culture Gets His Wish BY MARK STRAND

[mirmusing.livejournal.com]

The Minister of Culture goes home after a grueling day at the office. He lies on his bed and tries to think of nothing, but nothing hap-pens or, more precisely, does not happen. Nothing is elsewhere doing what nothing does, which is to expand the dark. But the minister is patient, and slowly things slip away—the walls of his house, the park across the street, his friends in the next town. He believes that nothing has finally come to him and, in its absent way, is saying, “Darling, you know how much I have always wanted to please you, and now I have come. And what is more, I have come to stay.”

Love After Love - Derek Walcott

[mirmusing.livejournal.com]

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.