"Approved by Barack Obama. Paid for by Obama for America."

Barack Obama doesn't need any more people to endorse him, especially a non-American, but I have to say, this 30-minute infomercial is amazing--well-delivered as always and frankly quite unimpeachable:

living, in a way

One of the few things that still hold meaning for me now are words--words, the stuff of argument, the little gleaming beads we try to string together to weave unbroken strands of meaning in our lives, those tiny carriages linked witlessly together in trains of thought, trundling aimlessly in no direction--words, falling silently and implacably into place, one after another, in the deliberate, hopeful fashion of the hopelessly lost.

Nowadays everybody I come across seems to be familiar in some indefinable way; a stereotype, a half-forgotten habit, a recognisable tilt of the shoulders, ripple of hair. When memories walk past me laughing and smiling and joking to themselves on the streets, and I turn back to stare in disbelief, time and distance and age and circumstance contrive to halt me from across an insuperable inch of pavement. My only recourse is to sit down sometimes, usually at night, stringing together mismatched words that bounce and skitter in the shadows across my page.

The Seven Sorrows

by Ted Hughes
___________

The first sorrow of autumn
Is the slow goodbye
Of the garden who stands so long in the evening-
A brown poppy head,
The stalk of a lily,
And still cannot go.

The second sorrow
Is the empty feet
Of a pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers.
The woodland of gold
Is folded in feathers
With its head in a bag.

And the third sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers
The minutes of evening,
The golden and holy
Ground of the picture.

The fourth sorrow
Is the pond gone black
Ruined and sunken the city of water-
The beetle's palace,
The catacombs
Of the dragonfly.

And the fifth sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp.
One day it's gone.
It has only left litter-
Firewood, tentpoles.

And the sixth sorrow
Is the fox's sorrow
The joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds,
The hooves that pound
Till earth closes her ear
To the fox's prayer.

And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window
As the year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.

If You Forget Me

by Pablo Neruda
_____________

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips
to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.
_________________

Neruda: "Love is brief: forgetting lasts so long."