The Daily Glance
Devin Johnston's Sources explores Greek and Latin roots for literature, at times even expanding/adding onto a translation, such as in "After Sappho." Still, what interests me the most in the book is the way in which things, birds, people, feelings, seem to come in and out of the poems, as if moving across one's experience, as if the controlling thinker behind this book is Heraclitus, whom Johnston quotes in the beginning. Johnston's"Clouds" provides a nice summation of this theme, for in it the speaker notes the clouds crossing above head and where they have come from and where they are going. The clouds become a metaphor of things that cross through life, of the change in our situations--the possibility and randomness of change.
One could fall asleep and float
a hundred miles off course,
or rob a restaurant in broad daylight,
or weep openly on the air.
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