... i want the spring
Thursday, January 26, 2012
those who love.
Those who love the most,
Do not talk of their love,
Francesca, Guinevere,
Deirdre, Iseult, Heloise,
In the fragrant gardens of heaven
Are silent, or speak if at all
Of fragile, inconsequent things.
And a woman I used to know
Who loved one man from her youth,
Against the strength of the fates
Fighting in somber pride,
Never spoke of this thing,
But hearing his name by chance,
A light would pass over her face.
Sara Teasdale
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
from it and was anew at that time
What if I was
sleeping as you came
and I pushed and the birds
appeared. How they were strong
on the line
was salivating it appealed to me.
I thought of dusk.
However high
I appear to ride and moreover
the way the flakes rise
disarms me. As I stood
in a field it rose to yield me. All
the beliefs. You
on the road with the moon
by your side. The moon—how beautiful things had turned out.
How do we understand something? We understand something by approaching it. How do we approach something? We approach it from any direction. We approach it using our eyes, our ears, our noses, our intellects, our imaginations. We approach it with silence. We approach it with childhood. We use pain or embarrassment. We use history. We take a safe route or a dangerous one. We discover our approach and we follow it.
-Matthew Goulish
-Matthew Goulish
Saturday, January 14, 2012
Friday, January 13, 2012
lemuels blessing
You that know the way,
Spirit
I Bless your ears which are like cypresses on a mountain
With their roots in wisdom. Let me approach.
I bless your paws and their twenty nails which tell their own prayer
And are like dice in command of their own combinations.
Let me not be lost.
I bless your eyes for which I know no comparison.
Run with me like the horizon, for without you
I am nothing but a dog lost and hungry,
Ill-natured, untrustworthy, useless.
My bones together bless you like an orchestra of flutes.
Divert the weapons of the settlements and lead their dogs a dance.
Where a dog is shameless and wears servility
In his tail like a banner,
Let me wear the opprobrium of possessed and possessors
As a thick tail properly used
To warm my worst and my best parts. My tail and my laugh bless you.
Lead me past the error at the fork of hesitation.
Deliver me.
From the ruth of the lair, which clings to me in the morning,
Painful when I move, like a trap;
Even debris has its favorite positions but they are not yours;
From the ruth of kindness, with its licked hands;
I have sniffed baited fingers and followed
Toward necessities which were not my own: it would me
An habitué of back steps, faithful custodian of fat sheep;
From the ruth of prepared comforts, with its
Habitual dishes sporting my name and its collars and leashes of vanity;
From the ruth of approval, with its nets, kennels and taxidermists;
It would use my guts for its own rackets and instruments, to play
its own games and music;
Teach me to recognize its platforms, which are constructed like scaffolds;
From the ruth of known paths, which would use my feet, tail
and ears as curios,
My head as a nest for tame ants,
My fate as a warning.
I have hidden at wrong times for wrong reasons.
I have been brought to bay. More than once.
Another time, if I need it.
Create a little wind like a cold finger between my shoulders, then
Let my nails pour out a torrent of aces like grain from a threshing machine;
Let fatigue, weather, habitation, the old bones, finally,
Be nothing to me,
Let all lights but yours be nothing to me.
Let the memory of tongues not unnerve me so that I stumble or quake.
But lead me at times beside the still waters;
There when I crouch to drink let me catch a glimpse of your image
Before it is obscured with my own
Preserve my eyes, which are irreplaceable.
Preserve my heart, veins, bones,
Against the slow death building in them like hornets until the place
is entirely theirs.
Preserve my tongue and I will bless you again and again.
Let my ignorance and my failings
Remain far behind me like tracks made in a wet season,
At the end of which I have vanished,
So that those who track me for their own twisted ends
May be rewarded only with ignorance and failings.
But let me leave my cry stretched out behind me like a road
On which I have followed you.
And sustain me for my time in the desert
On what is essential to me.
LEMUELS BLESSING // MERWIN
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
the way back
but i am not lost
anymore than leaves are lost
or buried vases
i would only give you second thoughts.
i know you must call me traitor
because i have wasted my blood
in aimless love
and you are right
blood like that
never won an inch of star
you know how to call me
although such a noise now
would only confuse the air
neither of us can forget
the steps we danced
the words you stretched
to call me out of dust
yes i long for you
not as a leaf for weather
or vase for hands
but with a narrow human longing
that makes a man refuse
and fields but his own.
i wait for you at an
unexpected place in your journey
like the rusted key
or the feather you do not pick up
until the way back
after it is clear
the remote and painful destination
changed nothing in your life.
anymore than leaves are lost
or buried vases
i would only give you second thoughts.
i know you must call me traitor
because i have wasted my blood
in aimless love
and you are right
blood like that
never won an inch of star
you know how to call me
although such a noise now
would only confuse the air
neither of us can forget
the steps we danced
the words you stretched
to call me out of dust
yes i long for you
not as a leaf for weather
or vase for hands
but with a narrow human longing
that makes a man refuse
and fields but his own.
i wait for you at an
unexpected place in your journey
like the rusted key
or the feather you do not pick up
until the way back
after it is clear
the remote and painful destination
changed nothing in your life.
THE WAY BACK // LEONARD COHEN
Friday, December 16, 2011
Monday, November 14, 2011
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
10.19.2011
i still draw a circle with a ball point pen above my thumb joint to remember
whatever things i will surely forget, and
by days end it will be a pool for lost ideas,
a worked hand with a faded childs circle
GOODNIGHT // LI-YOUNG LEE
Goodnight
Li-Young Lee
You’ve stopped whispering
and are asleep. I go on listening
to apples drop in the grass
beyond the window. Earlier we tried to guess
each fall’s moment, but neither kept up
that little game of hope
or fear for long. Now your weight
against me is like … I was about to say
like no other, unmistakably
human, my son’s. But, truth is, you’re simply
heft. Burden like, say, grain,
your body brings my body pain,
your shoulders, knees, elbows, hands,
lumpy like sacked fruit, and
whatever concord is
actual between us is
not easily meant,
but is so only by our diligence.
I recall a far
season of flowers
when, for love, I crept to the edge of a roof to reach
a petal-decked branch.
It snapped, I
dropped, screaming down sky
and flowering. My father yelled
my name, ran out to find me sprawled,
dazed, gripping his crushed gift, thrust
at him in my bloody fist.
He plunges below us now, as we
fall soundless toward him, our bodies
crowded on your narrow bed,
my arm and leg gone numb, your torso wedged
between the wall and me.
You sleep uncomfortably,
though comforted by my
presence, for which you cry
some nights, and which you, such nights, endure.
Where did you, so young, learn
such sacrifice? Now
I no longer hear the apples fall. But how
they go! Incessantly, though
with no noise, no
blunt announcements of their gravity.
See!
There is no bottom to the night, no end
to our descent.
We suffer each other to have each other a while.
dear one absent thsi long while // lisa olstein
It has been so wet stones glaze in moss;
everything blooms coldly.
I expect you. I thought one night it was you
at the base of the drive, you at the foot of the stairs,
you in a shiver of light, but each time
leaves in wind revealed themselves,
the retreating shadow of a fox, daybreak.
We expect you, cat and I, bluebirds and I, the stove.
In May we dreamed of wreaths burning on bonfires
over which young men and women leapt.
June efforts quietly.
I’ve planted vegetables along each garden wall
so even if spring continues to disappoint
we can say at least the lettuce loved the rain.
I have new gloves and a new hoe.
I practice eulogies. He was a hawk
with white feathered legs. She had the quiet ribs
of a salamander crossing the old pony post road.
Yours is the name the leaves chatter
at the edge of the unrabbited woods.
THE FIRST DREAM // BILLY COLLINS
The wind is ghosting around the house tonight and as I lean against the door of sleep I begin to think about the first person to dream, how quiet he must have seemed the next morning as the others stood around the fire draped in the skins of animals talking to each other only in vowels, for this was long before the invention of consonants. He might have gone off by himself to sit on a rock and look into the mist of a lake as he tried to tell himself what had happened, how he had gone somewhere without going, how he had put his arms around the neck of a beast that the others could touch only after they had killed it with stones, how he felt its breath on his bare neck. Then again, the first dream could have come to a woman, though she would behave, I suppose, much the same way, moving off by herself to be alone near water, except that the curve of her young shoulders and the tilt of her downcast head would make her appear to be terribly alone, and if you were there to notice this, you might have gone down as the first person to ever fall in love with the sadness of another.
THE FIRST DREAM
BILLY COLLINS
Wednesday, October 5, 2011
10/5
A leaf fluttered in through the window this morning, as if supported by the rays of the sun, a bird settled on the fire escape, joy in the task of coffee, joy accompanied me as I walked.
anais nin
Sunday, October 2, 2011
Monday, September 19, 2011
love poem # 3
love poem #3
1 i will put a bee under your bed
2 every day for a year
3 so you do not perceive the increase
4 of bees under your bed
5 and become unconsciously accustomed to their activity
6 which at its culmination a. (364 bees)
7 will be substantial
8 you will lay down over a large, undulating field 9 of meticulous noise a. their dark purr will comfort you b. you will require their delicate sludge to sleep
10 until i sneak a. secretly
11 into your bed
12 and take away the bees
13 then you will sense a disturbance in your slumber a. the solitude of the night will pierce your mind like a piercing mind-knife of solitude
14 and you will cry and sweat
15 and produce other sad fluids in the night
16 and roam the earth in distress
17 until, a. one day
18 we finally meet
19 and i say
20 i am the man you’ve been searching for
21 all your life
22 and you say who the hell do you think you are a. you are distressed, i forgive you
23 and i say
24 i’m the man
25 with all the bees under his bed
James Schiller
Wednesday, September 7, 2011
From this angle you’ve a rooster on your shoulder
A blue, cotton-polyester-blend sea, cocksure
At necktide, and my chest is a rookery
I’m all aflutter over your ears I’m sure are windows to something
Dark and beyond comprehending
I stub my toe. I bleed for months
It can get so foggy in our bathroom. Sometimes
I think we must be very old souls, or else very young ones
You were very young when you planted that sapling in my ribcage
Now its roots are so well-integrated
They’re indistinguishable from my nervous system
And I drink with my feet, now
Wish desperately that you would hang a tire swing from my arm
And in my left buttcheek carve the initials
Of some young, beautiful-in-love people inside a heart
So that I could not verify but have to trust you that they were there
Across plus signs from one another
From this angle your forehead is large and reflective
And your body looks so far away
Which makes me think that we are very very medium-aged
Souls, or very tall children, or else ghosts
Of very tall children
CAMERA LUCIDA Joshua Diamond
Saturday, September 3, 2011
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
PHRASES.
love
s
*
once the world has been reduced to a single dark wood for our four astonished eyes, and a beach for two loyal children, and to a musical house for our clear sympathy... ill find you.
when theres nothing on earth but a single old man, calm and handsome, surrounded by unheard-of luxury... ill kneel down and worship you.
when ive realized all your memories, when i am she who knows how to garrotte you... ill smother you.
when were very strong, whose backing down? very merry, who collapsed in ridicule? when were very nasty, what would they do with us?
adorn yourselves, dance, laugh... ill never be able to throw love out the window.
my friend, beggar girl, monstrous child, how little it all matters to you, these unhappy woman and these machination and my embarrassment.
fasten yourself to us with your impossible voices, your voice! sole flatterer of this vile despair.
RIMBAUD
TO A REASON
a tap of your finger on the drum releases all sounds and initiates the new harmony.
a step of yours is the conscription of the new men and their matching orders.
you look away: the new love!
you book back: the new love!
change our fates, shoot down the plagues, beginning with time, the children sing to you.
build wherever you can the substance of our fortunes and our wishes, they beg you.
arriving from always, you'll go away everywhere.
RIMBAUD
FRAGMENTS OF FOLIO 12.
an overcast morning in july. a taste of ashes floating in the air, a smell of wood sweating in the fireplace, flowing steeping, walks spoiled, fine drizzle of the canals in the fields, why then no toys and incense yet?
i stretched ropes from steeple to steeple, garlands from window to window, gold chains from star to star, and i dance.
the high pool is always steaming. what witch will rise up on the white sunset? what purple foliage will descend?
while public funds flow into fraternal holidays, a cloak of pink fire strikes the clouds.
stirring up a pleasant taste of india ink, a black powder rains gently down on my sleepless night. i lower the gaslight, i throw myself onto the bed, and turning toward the dark, i see you, my daughters! my queens!
RIMBAUD
YOUTH // SUNDAY
once we put our calculations aside the inevietable descet of the sky and visiting memories and the seance of rhythms occupy the home, the head and the world of the mind.
stung by the carbonic plague a horse is off and running on suburban turf, bordering cultivated fields and tree farms. somewhere in the world a distraught woman in a melodrama sighs over unlikely desertions. desperation does yearn for the storm, drunkenness and wounds. children choke back curses along the riverbanks. lets resume studying amid the clamor of the devouring task that is once more forming and rising up among the masses.
RIMBAUD
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