One grain of sand is not a heap of sand.
If one grain is no heap, two cannot be.
If two are not a heap, neither are three.
So keep adding grains from your open hand–

One million’s no heap if built up from one.
But if you could find such a thing as a heap,
You’d do no harm by taking part to keep.
A heap’s still a heap when one grain is gone.

Now say that this pile of sand’s in a glass,
With a neck that allows the grains to slide through,
One or two at a time–now and then, a few–
Til the sand’s at the base and no more will pass.

Instant by instant, time, like sand, creeps.
A life is just a heap of time, and so,
Though each day must fall, the life cannot go.
(Unless we believe that there really are heaps.)

Out of the bathroom window in the middle of the night, a scene from an expressionist painting. The moon, too large, glares through black tree limbs. Snow forms a smooth shape, a pearly pool, amid the trunks. Houses stand at crazy angles.

Two people walk through the cold naked grove;
The moon goes with them, they gaze at it.
The moon slips over tall oak trees;
No cloud obscures the heaven’s light
Into which the black spikes reach.

(From Richard Dehmel, Zwei Menschen, 1903)

A woman is running, screaming up Winter Hill in Somerville toward a gas station, where a knot of people stands. One of them is a police officer. Her dog lies on his side as if asleep.

False spring on Brattle Street: grand Victorian houses, an anthology of architectural styles. Joggers, toddlers in strollers, buds on the manicured foliage.

On a beach near Gloucester, the vacation houses have a slum-like look. They are small and boarded-up for winter; the streets are deserted in the cold sea air. There’s a game of horse-shoe on the sand, and dogs run joyfully in the surf.

For I will consider my dog Barkley.
For he has no inkling of things metaphysical.
For he never meets a creature who is not his friend.
For if he worships, it is done his way.
For first he sniffs incessantly in circles.
For secondly he tugs the leash.
For thirdly he tastes whatever he finds.
For fourthly he chews and recalls.
For fifthly he sits on a lap and sleeps.
For he is an enthusiast.
For he knows not jealousy nor suspicion.
For embarrassment troubles him not.
For when anyone lies on the ground, he rushes to resuscitate.
For, tho he is brave, shadows and mean dogs frighten him.
For sad sounds disturb him.
For he can flatten himself like a gerbil to pass under gates.
For, tho he cannot fly, he is an excellent gamboler.
For he can detect tiny scraps of food.
For he is much more waggery than gravity.

Cuttings

Sticks-in-a-drowse over sugary loam,
Their intricate stem-fur dries;
But still the delicate slips keep coaxing up water;
The small cells bulge;

One nub of growth
Nudges a sand-crumb loose,
Pokes through a musty sheath
Its pale tendrilous horn.

Theodore Roethke, “The Lost Son and Other Poems” (1948)

An aphorism is a “cutting,” because the Greek verb aphorizdo is to “cut.” So a book of aphorisms is a selection of short pieces cut and pasted together. Wittgenstein was in the habit of writing short passages, cutting them out with scissors, and throwing them in a box. The results were published as a book entitled “Cuttings” (Zettel) which might be considered an unpretentious word for “aphorisms.” That form had attained high esteem but also some pomposity with Schlegel, Kleist, Karl Kraus, Walter Benjamin, and other German authors.

Blog posts are also “cuttings” in this sense. I think many people who write or read blogs would be embarrassed to call them “aphorisms,” but they hope that the juxtaposition of short snippets of text will be generative, like sticks in wet soil. Good blogs are contributions to something more ambitious and more coherent. Our quick and scattered thoughts have the potential to come together in linear form. Which brings up another meaning of a “cutting”–a piece of a plant that could begin to grow. Theodore Roethke explores that meaning in remarkable pendant poems from 1948.

Cuttings (later)

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet.
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?

I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones I feel it, —
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.

Theodore Roethke, “The Lost Son and Other Poems” (1948)

In both poems, especially the latter, the verbs are hard to distinguish from the nouns. In “Cuttings (later)”, the words “urge,” “wrestle,” and “cut” are used as nouns. That first sentence has no verb at all. In line three, “strained” is a verb, but it first struck me as an adjective. Plants, of course, are objects; we think of action taking place in the animal kingdom, which is also the realm of suffering. But vegetable cuttings are acting when they begin to sprout–they need verbs. Roethke’s language represents the pain of moving into action, of nouns taking on verbs. The verse shifts from objective description (about the plants) to Roethke’s own response. The two poems are themselves cuttings, separated from each other in the original volume, removed from any lengthy narrative or argument, but straining to grow and to inspire growth.

Focus first on the black trunks, then the snow
that beats the ripples, then the wind-whipped flag,
the high school’s streaked cement and darkened glass,
like the building I would have trudged up to
twenty-five winters past. He tugs to move,
snuffling his first snow; everything’s a first
for him–hunched ducks on logs, the distant train.
In my ears, Albinoni’s oboes step
lightly, unruffled by the imminent
coda, and take the repeat serenely,
even though poor old Tomasso’s been dead
(of diabetes) more than two hundred
sodden Venetian winters. The coda comes,
the dog pulls me homeward, and where we’d stood,
the patient snow melts back into the waves.