May 2012
2 posts
4 tags
3 tags
from IMATAYM
when the metaphor fails us we just talk directly at the thing—like your body is a temple, but it’s squishy & I love to put my face in it.
(Justin Sirois)
April 2012
5 posts
6 tags
from "The Waste Land"
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)
5 tags
April
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)
3 tags
from "Act of Union"
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)
3 tags
from "Offering"
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
3 tags
from "Paradise"
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)
March 2012
3 posts
4 tags
“It’s dark.
You exhale a fist of memory.
I love you like weathering wood
in a...”
– James L. White, from “Lying in Sadness” in The Salt Ecstasies (via proustitute)
3 tags
from "Ballad"
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)
5 tags
“(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of...”
– “The Uses of Sorrow” from Thirst, by Mary Oliver (via atomiclanterns)
February 2012
5 posts
6 tags
“Every
heart writes a different letter
of winter to its cold.
Icicles on sheet...”
– Allison Titus, from “Inclement” (via atomiclanterns)
5 tags
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:...
5 tags
from "Demeter, Waiting"
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)
5 tags
from "Rotation"
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...
January 2012
7 posts
5 tags
“I wish that I had spoken only of it all.”
– Gertrude Stein, from “Stanzas in Meditation” (via proustitute)
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)
5 tags
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,...