Jackson's Actions

All human actions have one or more of these seven causes: chance, nature, compulsion, habit, reason, passion, and desire. --Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC) <

A good friend of mine, a fine poet and writer(and former staffer on Ink Pot and author of "Condo" 2006 Lit Pot Press, Inc.), Jim Boring, on reading the Rilke post below, offered his own which I think is superior to both Gass and Arndt.



The Death of the Poet (transmuted by Jim Boring)

Pillow-propped he lay aslant and stared
with pale disinterest down the dull duvet
as the world and all his knowledge of it
flowed away from sense and senses
to some undifferentiated time.

Those who knew him did not know
how he was one with all that flowed;
each valley and each meadowed place,
the waters that had held his face

reflected in the vast expanse
that wooed him then and seeks him still
and here repines in longing yet to die
but dying now as tenderly
as quietly as fallen fruit.

##

Let's hear it for keeping the poetry in poetry. I wonder if Rilke is listening.
I bet he would approve!