July 2011
41 posts
Cortège Carl Phillips
Do not imagine you can abdicate -Auden
Prologue If the sea could dream, and if the sea were dreaming now, the dream would be the usual one: Of the Flesh. The letter written in the dream would go something like: Forgive me—love, Blue. * I. The Viewing (A Chorus) O what, then, did he look like? ...
Rio Grande - Songs & Sounds of the Sea, 1978
Leave Her, Johnny, Leave Her - Songs & Sounds...
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“The poet is someone who feasts at the same table as other people.—But at a...”
– Anne Carson (via thesemightysecrets)
Sharon Van Etten - Love More
thanks, kari
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sunlight is coming through the window of the bus onto the lap of an old woman sleeping. holding a half eaten orange. her journal is open, and the light is exposing the opening lines,
July 21, 2011 Just for today, I will be happy.
There are many themes for the journalist of verse, yet for the poet…there is no choice… there is the single infinitely variable Theme…. the single poetic theme of Life and Death… the question of what survives of the beloved.
Jack Gilbert
A Form of Women I have come far enough from where I was not before to have seen the things looking in at me from through the open door and have walked tonight by myself to see the moonlight and see it as trees and shapes more fearful because I feared what I did not know but have wanted to know. My face is my own, I thought. But you have seen it turn into a thousand years. I watched...
“Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even...”
– Starlings in Winter by Mary Oliver (via the-final-sentence)
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“Are you Mr. William Stafford?” “Yes, but….” Well, it was yesterday. Sunlight used to follow my hand. And that’s when the strange siren-like sound flooded over the horizon and rushed through the streets of our town. That’s when sunlight came from behind a rock and began to follow my hand. “It’s for the best,” my mother...
“I’ve been ignored by prettier women than you, but none who carried the...”
– Jeffrey McDaniel, Letter To The Woman Who Stopped Writing Me Back (via the-final-sentence)
The Invention of Birds John Lindgren 1 When the gods finished one world And man another, only the birds remained To reconcile the difference.
2 When the sea forged the moon On midnight’s black anvil, that coin To tempt heaven with its brilliance, The sparks...
tender is the night, fitzgerald
“The truth was that for some months he had been going through that partitioning of things of youth wherein it is decided whether or not to die for what one no longer believes. In the dead white hours in Zurich staring into a stranger’s pantry across the upshine of a street-lamp, he used to think that he wanted to be good, he wanted to be kind, he wanted to be brave and wise, but it was all...
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I think the greatest flaw in human intellect is our tendency to not assume everyone else is just like us.
“In what language does rain fall over tormented cities?”
– Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions, trans. William O’Daly (via risky wiver)
Elegy José Gorostiza
Alone, with harsh marine aloneness, he went down a pathway to the moon, my gilded protectress, snuffing out her lamps like a star’s eyelash in the mist.
Sorrow was bleeding my thoughts, and I held my lament between my lips like a black rose.
The blue caryatids of melancholy spilled their fragile little baskets, and dream grieved with the moon of languid yellow...
And the skylight is like skin for a drum I’ll never mend, and all the rain falls down, amen, on the works of last year’s man. I met a lady, she was playing with her soldiers in the dark. Oh, one by one she had to tell them that her name was Joan of Arc. I was in that army, yes, I stayed a little while; I want to thank you, Joan of Arc, for treating me so well. And though I...
“Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us...”
– E. M. Cioran (via anticipatedstranger)
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turn it on. turn it up. turn me goddamn loose.
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"My pain comes from the north wind and from the...
A man often follows or flies on an ascending arc, headed toward brilliance, inner power, authority, leadership in community, and that arc is very beautiful. But many ancient stories declare that in the midst of a man’s beautiful ascending arc, the time will come naturally when he will find himself falling; he will find himself on the road of ashes, and discover at night that he is holding the...
“The dream is too often about myself. To correct this; and to forget one’s own...”
– Virginia Woolf, from a diary entry dated 22 December 1927 (via proustitute)
