May 2013
5 posts
1 tag
Never tame your words, teach them to sit, clip their chin hairs. Or cup your hands beneath their lolly tongues, catch their drool. You must be a madman held in cloth skin, ballerinas dancing in your mouth. When the hounds wail inside your body no one must hear them.
John Rybicki, “Animal Sounds Off Pavement”
April 2013
12 posts
“Let us make a compact, here, at Ilusha’s stone, that we will never forget Ilusha and one another. And whatever happens later in life, even if we don’t meet for twenty years, let us always remember how we buried the poor boy at whom we once threw stones…Afterwards we all grew so fond of him…Perhaps we may grow wicked later on, may be unable to refrain from evil, may laugh at men’s tears… But...
“I draw circles around me and holy boundaries” – Nietzsche
I chose this man, consciously, deliberately. I thought on his desire for three days and then said yes. In return, it was summer. We lay on the grass in the dark and he placed his hand on my stomach while the others sang quietly. It was prodigious to know his eagerness. It made me smile calmly. That was the merging of opposite powers. He...
I want everything. Everything is a naked thought that strikes…
Do you know that in the deepest part of the sea everything goes transparent? asks my husband’s friend Corrado and I say Do you know how afraid I am?…
I came out of the clinic, a clinic for people who want everything, everything I see everything I taste everything I touch everyday even the ashtrays and at the clinic I had only one...
What is beautiful alters, has undertow. Otherwise I have no tactics to begin with. Femininity is a sickness. I open my eyes out of this fever and see the meaning of my life clearly. A thing like a hill. I proclaim myself whole and without blessing, or need to be blessed. I belong to no one. I do not move. Am not required to move. I lie naked on a sheet. and the indifferent sun warms me. I was bred...
1 tag
LONGING
Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.
“I drink to our ruined house,
to the dolor of my life,
to our loneliness...”
– Anna Akhmatova, The Last Toast, trans. Kunitz
What things are steadfast? Not the birds. Not the bride and groom who hurry in their brevity to reach one another. The stars do not blow away as we do. The heavenly things ignite and freeze. But not as my hair falls before you. Fragile and momentary, we continue. Fearing madness in all things huge and their requiring. Managing as thin light on water. Managing only greetings and farewells. We love...
1 tag
It was like being alive twice.
The queen lay in the hollow of a wooden cow so my father would mount her, his white hide glistening like a raw moon. To love is to look up, up, up. She named me Asterius, the starry one. When the king heard my birth cry, he raised black curtains to every window in Crete. He began to build. My father was led away by a rope around his neck. My mother gave me the apple of her breast, and I bit...
“Let Birds” Linda Gregg
Eight deer on the slope in the summer morning mist. The night sky blue. Me like a mare let out to pasture. The Tao does not console me. I was given the Way in the milk of childhood. Breathing it waking and sleeping. But now there is no amazing smell of sperm on my thighs, no spreading it on my stomach to show pleasure. I will never give up longing. I will...
March 2013
22 posts
“This is how
I want to die:
into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up...”
– Anne Sexton, from “The Starry Night”
2 tags
paul simon - graceland
WatchFrom AV Club’s “State Songs”, Balmorhea covers Robert Earl Keen live at the Waco Mammoth Site. If you don’t watch this you are an idiot.
When Anne Carson was a child, she read Lives of the Saints and adored it so much she tried to eat its pages. The Canadian classicist and poet has never lost this desire to merge with the text; if anything, she’s created forms that allow her to eat as many pages as she possibly can.
Parul Sehgal
whether you save me whether you savage me want...
WatchJason Molina
Once or twice in his life, a man is peeled like apples.
What’s left is a voice that splits his being
down to the center. We see: obscenity, fright, mud
but there is joy of shape, there is always more than one silence.
— between here and Nevski Prospect, the years, birdlike, stretch, —
Pray for this man who lived on bread and tomatoes
while dogs recited his poetry in each street.
...
I was born in the city named after Odysseus and I praise no nation
but the provinces of human longing: to the rhythm of snow
an immigrant’s clumsy phrase falls into speech.
But you asked for a story with a happy ending. Your loneliness
played its lyre. I sat on the floor, watching your lips.
Love, a one legged bird I bought for forty cents as a child, and released;
is coming back, my...
1 tag
[Pope Francis’ sister] María Elena said after she learned her brother had ended up second last time around, “I prayed he wouldn’t be chosen.”
“By the grace of God, I had the opportunity to travel and meet Pope John Paul II. When it was my turn to kneel and kiss his ring, I lifted my head to look at him and found a gaze so full of love and so full of loneliness, the...
Man can never know the loneliness a woman knows. Man lies in the woman’s womb only to gather strength, he nourishes himself from this fusion, and then he rises and goes into the world, into his work, into battle, into art. He is not lonely. He is busy. The memory of the swim in amniotic fluid gives him energy, completion. Woman may be busy too, but she feels empty. Sensuality for her is not only a...
2 tags
1 tag
1. VENT I can feel the Christ inside me with his side cut open so he can breathe like a fish like someone who has been choking on a small bone, maybe a tiny part of another animal’s vertebrae, when a friend grabs him from behind, forces him to lunge, the bone flying out into the restaurant’s candlelight. And I feel like I am inhaling for the first time all day, a wind from some mountain or the...
WatchMarina Abramovic and Ulay started an intense love story in the 70s, performing art out of the van they lived in. When they felt the relationship had run its course, they decided to walk the Great Wall of China, each from one end, meeting for one last big hug in the middle and never seeing each other again. At her 2010 MoMa retrospective Marina performed ‘The Artist Is Present’ as part of the show,...
been in the storm so long - mary pickney
February 2013
12 posts
He ripped the red hair band from her head and ravished her with such force that her silver earrings came unclipped from her ears. He moved down to kiss her neck, and Plath bit him “long and hard” on the cheek; when the couple emerged from the room, blood was pouring down his face.
February 25, 1956, Plath upon meeting Hughes
2 tags
God’s lioness
Your staying dry is like the cat’s pathetic preference for hunting dead birds: completely
consistent with your tame spiritual themes, autumn, loss, darkness, etc.
We can all write about suffering with our eyes closed. You should show people more of yourself; show them your clandestine passion for red meat.
Louise Glück
Wild
Things are wild here Everywhere are the green Snakes, bobcats, and foxes The purple flowers look wild I am wild My husband keeps me in his room so as not to upset the neighbors The wildest thing about me is my arrogance Which turns to anger Over language People put so much stock in wild language I wander, an animal Over hills The civilized path, the orange sun Do I dare mention God in this...
twenty-seven miles of barbed wire tied to a human skull who do you love who do you love
But why the memory of the wounds and the death? Surely Christ rose with healed hands and feet… But no—always the memory of the wounds, always the smell of grave clothes? A small thing was Resurrection, compared with the Cross and the death, in this cycle…
So the children lived the year of Christianity, the epic of the soul of mankind. Year by year the inner, unknown drama went on in them, their...
“`Have you made your peace with your God?’
`I never quarreled with my God.’...”
– Last words of Henry David Thoreau, speaking with his aunt on his deathbed. 