Life Frame by Frame

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 and wait for her. Yes.

(Rita Dove)

There’s life as we know it
and there is death, lots of it. 
In between though, to the air at times,
a sense of possibility, it’s effect
delusional so that often
we cannot help it, this feeling inside us
so close to an almost
uncontainable joy.
Moments when we’re as blameless
as we are invincible

(carl phillips)

dreamsnpoets:

look for a word, a phrase, a turned-over thought to put in my trinket-box. Recollections and one smooth stone mingle in brewed disconnects.

Here is the calculus of desire—-
I have studied its insides

like I have studied the language
of the sky. Sometimes before a storm,

I feel the wash of power when I face
the growing clouds, as if I have called

them all into being—-the first flicker
of rain, an affirmation of my stomach’s

command. It is the same with lust—-
the way I plant seeds around me,

my arms, an arc of firm brown limbs
scattering the hint of possibility.

(kwame dawes)

It’s not winter. The light
is. The light is
winter light,
and you’re alone.
At last you get up:
and suddenly notice you’re holding
your body without the heart
to curse its lonely life, it’s suffering
from cold and from the winter
light that fills the room
like fear. And all at once you hug it tight,
the way you might hug
somebody you hate,
if he came to you in tears.

(franz wright)

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through the nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

(pablo neruda)

i sank into the sea

wrapped in piano strings

few words could open me

you knew them all