January 2012
5 posts
5 tags
A Walk
My eyes already touch the sunny hill. going far beyond the road I have begun, So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp; it has an inner light, even from a distance—
and changes us, even if we do not reach it, into something else, which, hardly sensing it, we already are; a gesture waves us on answering our own wave… but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
(Rilke; Trans. Robert...
6 tags
from "Problems with the Dictionary"
Shouldn’t the distance between impossible and improbable be widened? Might miracle
deserve its own appendix: the ease with which night becomes winter? There must be a word for it,
a term unique and apropos to star-pocked sky and village roads blanketed by snow,
a good-natured—but stone drunk—schoolteacher leaving a warm bar. It is improbable she will drive.
She does.
(Luke...
4 tags
from "Tonight I Can Write"
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
(Pablo Neruda)
5 tags
from "Words of Love"
When I point out to you that
the flat face of the lake’s water in stillness is made suddenly more striking for how a wind
just now, coming, spoils it, I have in mind only how even a least
disturbance, strangely heightening a thing’s beauty, can at last
define it.
(Carl Phillips)
“I confess, I do not believe in time.”
– Vladimir Nabokov (Thank you, heartmindspirit & atlelier)
December 2011
1 post
4 tags
“As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.”
– Thom Gunn, from “The Man with Night Sweats” (via proustitute)
November 2011
5 posts
5 tags
from "kwa mama zetu waliotuzaa"
and i. what dreams had i suspended above our short order lives when death covered you with bells. call her back for me bells. call back this memory still fresh with cactus pain.
(Sonia Sanchez)
4 tags
“May these small tokens prove that I tried
my best, though human cruelty made no...”
– (via leda-swanson)
4 tags
from [my riches I have squandered. spread with...
each dull morning the mirror imagines me a future: older misshapen forest: stinging adder and sprawling spider
the way to haven seems interminable. I creak and shuffle listen, you wilderness: make plain and let me pass
(D.A. Powell)
5 tags
Bedtime
We are a meadow where the bees hum, mind and body are almost one
as the fire snaps in the stove and out eyes close,
and mouth to mouth, the covers pulled over our shoulders,
we drowse as the horses drowse afield, in accord; though the fall cold
surrounds our warm bed, and though by day we are singular and often lonely.
(Denise Levertov)
5 tags
from "Elegance"
I thought I had hold of something elegant, a luminescent glow on the lake, a flicker’s flash of headdress high on the tree.
I thought I heard a conversation from over water, someone saying laissez faire, or Toulouse Lautrec, but it was only guys fishing, a mishearing that came to me like a ray of light through stained glass, a shimmer like a fine line of Milton’s, or a landscape...
October 2011
7 posts
4 tags
I read in the papers the other day that what America needs at this time is somehow to bring back the extended family. And I saw in my mind’s eye future African Peace Corps Volunteers coming to help you set up the system.
-Chinua Achebe, “An Image of Africa”
3 tags
from "The Women Gather"
the women gather with cloth and ointment their busy hands bowing to laws that decree willows shall stand swaying but unbroken against even the determined wind of death
(Nikki Giovanni)
3 tags
from "Rain"
I hurry home as though someone is there waiting for me. The night collapses into your skin. I am the rain.
(Kazim Ali)
3 tags
Just when you feel you have things in focus, a swift tilt of the head or an inadvertant dip in the gaze alters your perspective and places the world at a different, disorienting distance.
(Janice Radway)
4 tags
from "Modern Love"
Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul When hot for certainties in this our life!—
(George Meredith)
6 tags
Luck
Sometimes a crumb falls From the tables of joy, Sometimes a bone Is flung.
To some people Love is given, To others Only heaven.
(Langston Hughes)
3 tags
From "In Eden"
You lie in our bed as if an orchard were over us.
You are what’s fallen from those fatal boughs.
(David Ferry)
September 2011
7 posts
3 tags
At the end of any stretch there lies another. Here’s to the stretch. Here’s to the end. Here’s to whatever time it takes to have the heart it takes once more to get there.
(William Kloefkorn)
4 tags
Piano
Her wattled fingers can’t stroke the keys with much grace or assurance anymore, and the tempo is always rubato, halting, but still that sound—-notes quivering and clear in their singularity, filing down the hallway—- aches with pure intention, the melody somehow prettier as a remnant than whatever it used to be.
(David Howell)
4 tags
from "Vectors 3.0"
95.
The Mystery we’re absorbed in takes precedence over all the mysteries that won’t be solved when the hour ends, a protective parenthesis within the larger stories of Love and Work, which are inside the story of Life, which is inside Big Bang. Actually, scale is irrelevant: it’s just as likely we’d use cosmology to distract us from a bad day at the office....
3 tags
It is sad to be able only to mouth other poets. I want someone to mouth me.
(Sylvia Plath)
6 tags
from "This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison"
and sometimes ‘Tis well to be bereft of promis’d good, That we might lift the soul, and contemplate With lively joy the joys we cannot share.
(Coleridge)
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from "7"
The rest of the time you can count your coins as if some fate were written in them not as an unseen decree or a decree in the unseen but as the story you continually tell about yourself which changes at each street corner each kiss but always ends with the same five words: that’s the way it goes.
(Niels Frank - Trans. by Roger Greenwald)
5 tags
from "Modern Love"
Into which state enters Love, the crowning sun: Beneath whose light the shadow loses form. We are the lords of life, and life is warm.
(George Meredith)
August 2011
1 post
3 tags
One agony of the imagination is that it returns us again and again to the recognition that there is no earthly paradise, though we’re sickeningly equipped to imagine one.
-W.S.Di Piero
July 2011
1 post
4 tags
Mozart in E-flat Major
I turn around I feel Monday’s well-shaven face lightly caress my left shoulder
most cherished part most crucial here and now
(Hsia Yü; Translated by Karen An-Hweu Lee)
June 2011
2 posts
3 tags
You’ve got sharp and sparkling pleasure.
...
5 tags
from "IMATAYM"
Look at us glowing over the internet. I know you were here & I take comfort in knowing you’re still curious about my rotten charm
(Justin Sirois)
May 2011
1 post
5 tags
“I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the...”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
April 2011
9 posts
3 tags
from "Vectors 3.0"
63.
The patterned shirt, the speckled wall-to-wall don’t show dirt. Sometimes, truth be damned, we need relief from seeing. Our response to a problem is bigger than the problem.
(James Richardson)
4 tags
from "Vectors 3.0"
46.
How badly I’d like to believe that my cherished moderation and heavily defended calm could rule the world. But as things are, somebody has to feel too much, somebody has to speak too loud, somebody has to be completely unreasonable.
(James Richardson)
7 tags
from "Vectors 3.0"
43.
I often find myself intoning Clarke’s Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, or anyway half of it, since everyone’s heard it already and interrupts. Actually the technology doesn’t have to be very advanced. I drive a car and grasp the basics of internal combustion engines but I still treat mine as halfway between pet and malevolent deity,...
6 tags
from "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"
It shocked him to find in the outer world a trace of what he had deemed till then a brutish and individual malady of his own mind.
(James Joyce)
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from "Special Victims Unit"
And for him, gloomy, overwhelmed with himself, her brightness was more beautiful than beauty and he basked in it. But when his turn came to shine back it seemed her feelings were a storm of flowers he could not gather, and the story gets ordinary: he is angry at his heart and hurts her.
(James Richardson)
4 tags
from "At Dusk"
It’s dusk, and all the pieces of the dark Loosen the shape of each particular.
(Kim Bridgford)
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from "Ovid in America"
My love, What may never not be strange? What, This morning, will wake & make me new?
(averill curdy)
4 tags
Sometimes a fever gathered within him and led him to rove alone in the evening along the quiet avenue. The peace of the gardens and the kindly lights in the windows poured a tender influence into his restless heart. The noise of the children at play annoyed him and their silly voices made him feel, even more keenly than he had felt at Clongowes, that he was different from others. He did not want...
2 tags
“Be joyful, though you have considered all the facts.”
– Wendell Berry
March 2011
6 posts
4 tags
from "Tick Tick Tick"
It is so contemporary of us to feel the sky pressing Down. Copernicus was an impossible dullard and Darwin Didn’t even grind up the finch beaks before he smoked Them. It is far too easy to get stuck, circling the roundabout, Thinking about the reality show you wish you’d starred in.
(Alex Lemon)
4 tags
When I read that God or the Holy Spirit wants such and such, I shut the book. The author decidedly knows too much.
(anna kamienska)
via gunnarkauth: Burlington: Phanton Vibration
6 tags
from "the sea"
on the feast of St. John’s we made a bonfire on the beach and the flames almost knew that they were uniting us with something.
(Alvaro Garcia ; Trans. Chris Michalski)
4 tags
from "Mennonites"
We hoe thistles along fence rows for fear we may not be perfect as our Heavenly Father. We clean up his disasters. No one has to call; we just show up in the wake of tornadoes with hammers, after floods with buckets. Like Jesus, the servant, we wash each other’s feet twice a year and eat the Lord’s Supper, afraid of sins hidden so deep in our organs they could damn us unawares
(julia...
5 tags
from "Freindschaft"
As I grow up, the great-aunts click their tongues. They are looking for signs of their lives in my limbs
(julia kasdorf)
February 2011
4 posts
4 tags
“Pietak thanked God for every poem. He scribbled his thanks on the margins of his...”
– Anna Kamienska
6 tags
“We will live longer than I will.
We will be better than I was.”
– Lykke Li - Love Out of Lust
6 tags
from "Vesta's Father"
I say there is no shame in lying among Lutherans where folks are allowed to put flowers on graves, his plot in plain view of those mountains that rise dark and silent as old Mennonites standing in pews—- black-stockinged women on one side, black-suited men on the other—- those mountains so high they slow the sunrise and hurry the night.
(julia kasdorf)
5 tags
from "Kansas"
Like the radio towers looming above us,
we flashed a bright warning, red and careless, then stoic, inscrutable as the term that we drove all the way across Kansas
to find, whether it be love or weakness. We just wanted something obvious and firm as the radio towers that rose above us.
(matthew roth)
January 2011
2 posts
4 tags
from "Lighthead's Guide to the Galaxy"
He says “discrete” and means the street just out of sight. Not what you see, but what you perceive: that’s poetry. Not the noise, but its rhythm; an arrangement of derangements; I’ll eat you to live: that’s poetry.
(terrance hayes)