May 2011
27 posts
Vito’s Ordination Song (Demo) - Sufjan...
April 2011
31 posts
A Second Time James Galvin
It was the year I cut logs for the new house and roads, roads like veins that let the timber bleed. You wore a different shawl each day. It was the year I shot the white mare, and her filly, equally white, refused to follow the herd to winter pasture. It was the year you left me the first time, before the aspen turned. Then it was the winter the sky couldn’t get...
“I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for an echo, and if an echo...”
– Richard Wright (via thesemightysecrets)
“I remembered you with my soul clenched
in that sadness of mine that you know.”
– Pablo Neruda
“On Sunday
Went down to the river.
Heard a plane but didn’t see it.
An...”
– Keetje Kuipers (via thesemightysecrets)
“The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a nightmare, that make us...”
– Franz Kafka
White Crane Dean Young
I don’t need to know any more about death from the Japanese beetles infesting the roses and plum no matter what my neighbor sprays in orange rubber gloves. You can almost watch them writhe and wither, pale and fall like party napkins blown from a table just as light fades, and the friends as often happens when light fades, talk of something painful, glacial,...
Notes for the First Line of a Spanish Poem James Galvin
We remember so little, We are certain of nothing. We long to perish into the absolute. Where is a mountain To spread its snowfields for us like a shawl? You might begin, The men who come to see me are not exactly lovers. Or, Seen at a distance the gazelle is blue. That’s just your way of cheering me up. You might begin, The quality of the...
The Last Man’s Club James Galvin
My grandfather was always sad. Sadly, as a boy, he paddled his canoe along the beautiful Hudson River, which was only then beginning to die. During the first war he was very sad in France because he knew he was having the time of his life. When it was over everyone in America felt like a hero — imagine. Once a year on Armistice Day, he met...
I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life. Leo Tolstoy, from “Family Happiness”
“When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears....”
– Albert Camus
XII The river is moving. The blackbird must be flying.
XIII It was evening all afternoon. It was snowing And it was going to snow. The blackbird sat In the cedar-limbs.
Wallace Stevens
Washing the Elephant Barbara Ras
Isn’t it always the heart that wants to wash the elephant, begging the body to do it with soap and water, a ladder, hands, in tree shade big enough for the vast savannas of your sadness, the strangler fig of your guilt, the cratered full moon’s light fuelling the windy spooling memory of elephant? What if Father Quinn had said, “Of course you’ll recognize your...
Haikus by Jack Kerouac
Thunder in the mountains - the iron Of my mother’s love In my medicine cabinet, the winter fly has died of old age. Those birds sitting out there on the fence - They’re all going to die. Useless, useless, the heavy rain Driving into the sea. The moon, the falling star - Look elsewhere Arms folded to the moon, Among the cows. Birds singing in the dark - Rainy dawn. Elephants...
Case of You - James Blake (covering Joni Mitchell)
Beggar’s Song Gregory Orr
Here’s a seed. Food for a week. Cow skull in the pasture; back room where the brain was: spacious hut for me. Small then, and smaller. My desire’s to stay alive and be no larger than a sliver lodged in my own heart. And if the heart’s a rock I’ll whack it with this tin cup and eat the sparks, always screaming, always screaming for more.
