April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.
(T.S.Eliot)
I wanted to speak at length about
the happiness of my body and the
delight of my mind for it was
April, night, a
full moon and—
but something in myself or maybe
from somewhere other said: not too
many words, please, in the
muddy shallows the
frogs are singing.
(Mary Oliver)
No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again.
(Seamus Heaney)
Maybe I thought that for one night
I could wear your beauty through closeness
and for a few hours believe myself
splendidly arrayed.
Sonnet L’Abbé
And though the memory of Amina standing in the dark by the courtyard door was still warm in his hands, he could already feel it cooling into something more quiescent, a fond treasure to be unwrapped at a quiet moment.
(Abdulrazak Gurnah)
You exhale a fist of memory.
I love you like weathering wood
in a room of empty pianos.
When you return to something you love,
it’s already beyond repair.
You wear it broken.
once. what does it matter
when or who, i knew
of love.
i fixed my body
under his and went
to sleep in love
all trace of me
was wiped away
(Sonia Sanchez)
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
heart writes a different letter
of winter to its cold.
Icicles on sheet
metal, bucket frozen in the well.
Once there was no language
for the weather, just The sky is low and birdless;
or The sky is a box of wings.
Summer days II (by Dara Scully)
I begin with my core belief—and the foundation of almost all wisdom traditions—that there is nothing you can buy, achieve, own, or rent that can fill up that hunger inside for a sense of fulfillment and wonder. But the good news is that creative expression, whether that means writing, dancing, bird-watching, or cooking, can give a person almost everything that he or she has been searching for: enlivenment, peace, meaning, and the incalculable wealth of time spent quietly in beauty.
She is gone again and I will not bear
it, I will drag my grief through a winter
of my own making, refuse
any meadow that recycles itself into
hope. Shit on the cicadas, dry meteor
flash, finicky butterflies. I will wail and thrash
until the whole goddamned golden panorama freezes
over. Then I will sit down to wait for her. Yes.
(Rita Dove)
I cannot express in the language of the logical entailment my love for you, the
second person plural
on the perennial verge of existence, like color almost becoming surface
I reach for a verb that isn’t there but experience its shape, then back-form a
phantom subject
with whom I identify, walking through the park at night
There is nothing more beautiful than a vulnerable grid
glowing in late empire, which is how I think of you
(Ben Lerner)
