Sunday, 9/9/12

Rarely has dying sounded so joyous.

Glen David Andrews, “I’ll Fly Away”
Live, New Orleans (Zion Hill Baptist Church), 2008

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lagniappe

reading table

[P]eople exist for us only in the idea that we have of them.

—Marcel Proust, The Fugitive (translated from French by Peter Collier)

*****

Each year on this auspicious day, alone and foreign
here in a foreign place, my thoughts of you sharpen;

far away, I can almost see you reaching the summit,
dogwood berries woven into sashes, short one person.

—Wang Wei (701-61), “9/9, Thinking of My Brothers East of the Mountains” (trans. from Chinese by David Hinton)