January 2012
30 posts
But this blank desertion of his own mind that threw him into despair. Perhaps he was mad. In the seventh grade he had done a science project on this worry. It was the year he began to wonder about the noises colors make. Roses came roaring across the garden at him. He lay on his bed at night listening to the silver light of starts crashing against the window screen. Most of those he interviewed...
2 tags
Vocalis, Rachmaninov (solo) - Tölzer Knabenchor...
wasted under the stars the slow summer light the endless fuck-up & you never again you lovely you summer you everything that is now never again whatever that may be the rage I loved me under the stars then & now endless wasting away me haze wandering around endless … … haze it was endless too much time & you lied to me & I said...
First the snow for days. Blankout. Frost heaves. I shovel away your tracks. I expect you. I think one night you’re holding my feet at the edge of the bed, you’re downstairs reading The Hour We Knew Nothing of Each Other. I smell you in the sheets. Wind blows the door open. Even the single bluebird is looking for you. For 40 nights I dream you leave again with no warning. I memorize...
(xvii) All this ends but until then: burning of fire, & then afterward. The stars are close; we try to hold. Such distance between the fallen! (xviii) Burning of fire, & then afterward. You pointed. (xix) Grasses silently fold, a sickness, unchecked, reaching. Like this. Wooden arms of trees long since emptied. (xx) This ends in darkness, & all the stars...
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if not, winter ]no pain ]
]I bid you sing of Gongyla, Abanthis, taking up your lyre as (now again) longing floats around you,
you beauty. For her dress when you saw it stirred you. And I rejoice. In fact she herself once blamed me Kyprogeneia
because I prayed this word: I want
24A
] ]you will remember ]for we in our youth did these things
yes many...
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love. Rainer Maria Rilke
from “are you looking for the self help section?” Today, some of us are strewn among rows of shelves in uncomfortable silence, ashamed of our coffee and tea’s inadequacy, embarrassed by the employees’ enthusiasms, and we are forced, each of us, to look up from the book we pretend to read to watch the slow drift, the bright erasure, and walk around in it, as if in seeing past the dull...
Prof. W. explained to me that there are weightless things. Gravitation for one. It is not material, yet it exists, we feel its pull. So the dead may likewise still exist. Through what they have left behind, through memory, their influence, and so on. This is no comfort, though, when you howl, yearning for familiar hands, the chest, the one dear body.
Anna Kamienska, from “In That Great...
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“I saw lovers in a window whisper, “want me like time. want me like time.”
– Iron & Wine, “Walking Far From Home” (via lifeframebyframe)
As a spring makes its way to the light, to air. Its toil, its drudgery, its dark transit, like despair. That’s how the poet works for words. Through muscles, movements. That’s how J.* wrote poems. He paced, he muttered, he waved his arms as though gathering and grasping words.
* * *
I wasn’t looking for God at all. I sought my Dead One. I’ll never cease repeating this, amazed.
...
Communion with the dead gives a foretaste of God. But why do we put God in the land of the dead? Why do we make Him our Hades?
Anna Kamienska, from “Industrious Amazement: A Notebook”
“their heart grew cold
they let their wings down”
– Sappho, fragment translated by Anne Carson in If Not, Winter (via proustitute)
How cruel the earth, the willows shimmering, The birches bending and sighing. How cruel, how profoundly tender.
Louise Glück
Leonard Cohen - Going Home
ahuntersheart:
“Seed” by Anne Marie Macari After the wave there’s the tide-pool in the ribbed cup. Now I own what you left me and I’m salt-rimmed, stained, lit by small hands trying to feel their way inside, floating on the black ocean beneath pelvic blood-stars. Because I’m trying not to lose any, I sleep against you to be the child on your back, to be the fur on your skin, the eyes of...
The moment Echo saw Narcissus She was in love. She followed him Like a starving wolf Following a stag too strong to be tackled. And like a cat in winter at a fire She could not edge close enough To what singed her, and would burn her. She almost burst With longing to call out to him and somehow Let him know what she felt. But she had to wait For some other to speak So she could snatch their last...
4 tags
Her heart broke up in her body. She stood there Like a beast at the altar, head hanging.
Midnight. Mankind sprawled In sleep without care. But Myrrha writhed in her sheets. To cool the fiery gnawings throughout her body She drew deep gasping breaths. They made the flames worse. Half of her prayed wildly— In despair under the crushing Impossibility— and half of her coolly Plotted how...
Someone tell him he should sleep now. God, that old furnace, keeps talking with his mouth of teeth, a beard stained at feasts, and his breath of gasoline, airplane, human ash. His love for me feels like fire, feels like doves, feels like river-water. At this hour, what is dead is helpless, kind and helpless. While the Lord lives. Someone tell the Lord to leave me alone. I’ve had enough of his love...
Bruce Springsteen - Highway 29
“You can’t see.” The landlady continued to chew very slowly. “Do you think, Mr. Motes,” she said hoarsely, “that when you’re dead, you’re blind?” “I hope so,” he said after a minute. “Why?” she asked, staring at him. After a while he said, “If there’s no bottom in your eyes, they hold more.” The...
