“Lead me, guide me to the light of your paper. Keep me in your arc of acuity. And when the ream is spent. Write a poem on my back. I’ll never wash it off.”
—
C.D. Wright
(via beinlovewithyourlife)
July 2011
133 posts
“Human heart—that tender engine. Love revs it. Loss stalls it. What can make it go again? The poem, the poem.”
—
David Orr
(via beinlovewithyourlife)
“One curious property of the cuttlefish is that, once dead, its body begins to glow. This mild phosphorescence reaches its greatest intensity a few days after death, then ebbs away as the body decays. You can read by this light.”
-Srikanth Reddy, from “Corruption” —
-Srikanth Reddy, from “Corruption” —
The bird has a sarynx, not a larynx.
Air a bitter switch that strikes the back,
I have no boat,
no crescent of lakewater lapping the lakehouse.
I have no lakehouse, what world is this.
I feel close to nature with ice water in my chest, fear’s wet nest.
I’ll etch on glass—
shallow mark, sharp tool.
Draw an arrow between want and lack, make a map of lack
and I’ve both killed a day and drawn a body.
In the dream of the white dog, a puncture wound;
slowly I made the ladymost sutures.
-Kerri Webster, “Ladymost”
“And it’s strange and awful how many people there are who can do what they want only off a roof, or through a rope, or under water, or after the shot is silent.”
-Djuna Barnes, “Nightwood” — (via aperfectcommotion)
-Djuna Barnes, “Nightwood” — (via aperfectcommotion)
“What are you, Love, when you are not a fire?”
—Jee Leong Koh
“So imagine a fire going — wood snapping the way it does when it’s a little green — the wind rattling the windows behind the curtains — and one of those Chopin melodies that feel like sorrow and ecstasy all mixed together pouring from the keys — and you have my idea of happiness. Or just reading, reading and lamplight, the sound of pages turning.
And so you dare to be happy.
You do that thing.
You dare.” —Steven Millhauser (via crashinglybeautiful)
And so you dare to be happy.
You do that thing.
You dare.” —Steven Millhauser (via crashinglybeautiful)
“Take heart and sing of love’s recourse: the river
is running from the river and still is the river.
A kiss in my bedroom and a kiss at the door.
The only French I speak: be swallowed by the river.
The cloudy pigeon, mutant dove, aches through the air,
nowhere safe to land, save the branches of the river.
You could not touch the other bank and so you thought,
a lake! It was never a lake. It was a river.
In the dark, flesh locates flesh with unerring instinct,
and fills in what it traced, the breathing map, the river.
Dragging for weeks his body for more than a body,
I hauled up a word—need, or was it, feet—from the river.
Someone advised Jee once to write what makes him sad.
She saw his whole life standing waistdeep in the river.”
-Jee Leong Koh, “A Lover’s Recourse (After Roland Barthes)” —
is running from the river and still is the river.
A kiss in my bedroom and a kiss at the door.
The only French I speak: be swallowed by the river.
The cloudy pigeon, mutant dove, aches through the air,
nowhere safe to land, save the branches of the river.
You could not touch the other bank and so you thought,
a lake! It was never a lake. It was a river.
In the dark, flesh locates flesh with unerring instinct,
and fills in what it traced, the breathing map, the river.
Dragging for weeks his body for more than a body,
I hauled up a word—need, or was it, feet—from the river.
Someone advised Jee once to write what makes him sad.
She saw his whole life standing waistdeep in the river.”
-Jee Leong Koh, “A Lover’s Recourse (After Roland Barthes)” —
“Proust had awoken one day in the spring of 1922—at four o’clock in the afternoon—and said to his housekeeper, ‘Something wonderful happened last night, Céleste.’ Usually when he awoke, he would remain silent, but that afternoon he looked up at her and announced: ‘My dear Céleste, I have to tell you about it, it’s great news. Last night, I wrote the word fin. Now I can die.’
Lorenza Foschini, Proust’s Overcoat, trans. Eric Karpeles” — (via proustitute)
Lorenza Foschini, Proust’s Overcoat, trans. Eric Karpeles” — (via proustitute)
I only wish to love you
A storm fills the valley
A fish the river
I have made you the size of my solitude
The whole world to hide in
Days and nights to understand
To see no more in your eyes
Than what I think of you
And a world in your image
And days and nights ruled by your eyelids.
-Paul Éluard, (trans. by A. S. Kline)
“I Only Wish To Love You”
“We’ll dive into the earth together
And if one day a wild flower finds
Water and springs up from that piece of earth,
its stem will have two blossoms for sure
One will be you, the other me” —
And if one day a wild flower finds
Water and springs up from that piece of earth,
its stem will have two blossoms for sure
One will be you, the other me” —
Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963)
via ginger-ninja (via frenchtwist)
“I love her and that’s the beginning of everything.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (via trua)
“and what do we remember
eyes but not the seeing
often we did not know
that we were happy
even when we were not
how could we have known that
at no distance”
-W. S. Merwin, from “Traces” —
eyes but not the seeing
often we did not know
that we were happy
even when we were not
how could we have known that
at no distance”
-W. S. Merwin, from “Traces” —
It was when my little brother, who was two and a half years younger than I, died at eighteen months. My mother some days later found his footprints in the yard and tried to build something over it to keep the wind from blowing it away. That’s the most powerful image I’ve ever known.
-A. R. Ammons
“To stop the riot of color, to hasten the quiet paucity of rhythm,
to sleep when it is time.”
-Barbara Guest, From “Freed Color” —
-Barbara Guest, From “Freed Color” —
“
At least I have the flowers of myself,
and my thoughts, no god
can take that;
I have the fervour of myself for a presence
and my own spirit for light;
and my spirit with its loss
knows this;
though small against the black,
small against the formless rocks,
hell must break before I am lost;
before I am lost,
hell must open like a red rose
for the dead to pass.”
