July 2012
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“There’s a song I remember from before I was born, and it goes like a mouth that’s never been kissed, a big blue bowl with a marble in it that keeps rolling with no place to stop,
—Jan Richman, from “Parting the Waters” in Because the Brain Can Be Talked into Anything (Louisiana State University Press, 1995), winner of the 1994 Walt Whitman Award.
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“Now and then, I remember you in times
Unbelievable. And in places not made for...”
– Yehuda Amichai, from “Little Ruth” (translated by Benjamin Harshav and Barbara Harshav)
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“Secrets have such power in a soul like mine. Or let me put it this way: they are not even secrets. They are simply tales which have not been told. The teller needs the tale.”
—Michael Burkard, from My Secret Boat: A Notebook of Prose and Poems (W.W. Norton & Co., 1990)
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“Everything is more beautiful
because we’re doomed.
You will never be lovelier...”
– The Iliad, attributed to Homer (via oofpoetry)
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“My whole life feels like a story. As if it is written by someone who is able to live only vicariously. I know the charge, the withdrawal, the utter inability to just be. If shoulders bruised from looking over one’s own, mine would have a continual bruise.”
—Michael Burkard, from My Secret Boat: A Notebook of Prose and Poems (W.W. Norton & Co., 1990)
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“Imagine is a verb and imagination a noun, but imagining is not an action, and...”
– Michael Lipsey (via stoicmike)
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“I look at my past life as at a field lit up by the sun when it breaks through the clouds, and I note with metaphysical astonishment how my most deliberate acts, my clearest ideas, and my most logical intentions were after all no more than congenital drunkenness, inherent madness, and huge ignorance. I didn’t even act anything out. I was the role that got acted. At most, I was the...
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“And as we stray further from love
we multiply the words,
words and sentences...”
– Yehuda Amichai, from “Quick and Bitter” (translated by Assia Gutmann)
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fluttering-slips:
Motel Once I conjugated every animal to sorrow. Every sorrow into a small small factory, manufacturer of salt, camping gear, fur coats and poorly upholstered furniture. Even now it seems like every version of melancholy rescues a nocturne for the pallid sky. A type of permanent dusk. Fold down the bedsheet. The room has earned its sadness. Nondescript despite how we have...
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“The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into...”
– William H. Gass, from A Temple of Texts (via wordpainting)
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elysskama:
I want to talk to you without language. I want to tell you things secret to your ears. Even if I said them among strangers, Nobody understands except you.
- Rumi, Crazy As We Are, Selected Rubias from Divan-i Kebir
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“True creativity is being able to make interesting art from your mother lode of...”
– Michael Lipsey (via stoicmike)
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Any fool can get into an ocean But it takes a Goddess To get out of one. What’s true of oceans is true, of course, Of labyrinths and poems. When you start swimming Through riptide of rhythms and the metaphor’s seaweed You need to be a good swimmer or a born Goddess To get back out of them
—Jack Spicer, opening lines to “Any fool can get into an ocean …”...
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July
Tonight the fireflies light their brief candles in all the trees
of summer— color of moonflakes, color of fluorescent lace
where the ocean drags its torn hem over the dark sand.
—Linda Pastan, from “The Months,” which first appeared in Poetry (October 1999)
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“The Poet is a kinsman in the clouds Who scoffs at archers, loves a stormy day; But on the ground, among the hooting crowds, He cannot walk, his wings are in the way.”
—Charles Baudelaire, from The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal) (Oxford University Press, 2008)
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elysskama:
“Really, I think one’s art goes only as far and as deep as [one’s] love goes”
―Andrew Wyeth, from Andrew Wyeth: Autobiography
(via journalofanobody)
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chasingtailfeathers:
journalofanobody:
“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”
―Czesław Miłosz
“Calvin says somewhere that each of us is an actor on a stage and God is the audience. That metaphor has always interested me, because it makes us artists of our...
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journalofanobody:
“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death—the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”
―Czesław Miłosz
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Snøløsning
A word for the moment when trees and dry-stone walls emerge from their huddle of snow
like new-formed beasts, still dark from the womb that shaped them;
for the morning when you walk the road to town and each white neighbor steps out from his lair
of tea and spirits, lingonberry jam, fish sealed in jars, old letters, old desires,
and stands in his shirt sleeves, waiting for the...
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stoicmike:
“To an awakened mind the best place is here and the best time is now.”
—Michael Lipsey
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“Let my heart have its say and my mind stand idly by,
For my mind is proud and...”
– Sara Teasdale, from “What Do I Care”
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“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only...”
– C. S. Lewis (via mycolorbook)
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Acts of Love
If endear is earned and is meant to identify two halves
then it composes one meaning
which means a token
a knot a note
a noting in the head of how it feels
to have your heart be the dear one
—Pam Rehm, from Small Works (Flood Editions, 2005)
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fluttering-slips:
Kiss My Knuckles While I Hold Your Soul I write beauty like light in glass, fleeting and unique. I want to catch your tears and put a stop to the sadness that threatens to envelope us and propel us into obscurity. So kiss my knuckles while I hold your soul and let us see what comfort we can give our aching hearts. I told the world to cry diamonds because that’s how much pain is...
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Without her, evening like a budding yew Would soon be brilliant, as it was, before The harridan self and ever-maladive fate Went crying their desolate syllables, before Their voice and the voice of the tortured wind were one, Each voice within the other, seeming one, Crying against a need that pressed like cold, Deadly and deep. It would become a yew Grown great and grave beyond imagined...
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journalofanobody:
““Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what’s known as infinity.”
―Jean Cocteau
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“My own eyes are not enough for me; I will see through those of others.”
—C. S. Lewis
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“I think selfishness in most artists masquerades as a discipline.”
—Norman Dubie, from The Clouds of Magellan, a Santa Fe Literary Center Book (Recursos Press, 1991)
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For an Absence
When I cannot be with you I will send my love (so much is allowed to human lovers) to watch over you in the dark— a winged small presence who never sleeps, however long the night. Perhaps it cannot protect or help, I do not know, but it watches always, and so you will sleep within my love within the room within the dark. And when, restless, you wake and see the...
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Or, if I sleep, I must choose between two dreams.
In one of them, my hands move calmly Over a woman’s waist, or lift In speech the way birds rise or settle Over a marsh, over nesting places.
In the other dream. There are no nesting places. The birds are white, and scavenging. They lift negligently over the town in wind, They dip and rise As if there had never been a heaven.
...
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Let me be plain with you, dear reader. I am an old-fashioned man. I like the world of nature despite its mortal dangers. I like the domestic world of humans, so long as it pays its debts to the natural world, and keeps its bounds. I like the promise of Heaven. My purpose is a language that can pay just thanks and honor for those gifts, a tongue set free from fashionable lies.
...
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merlinaminervamerlot:
“I didn’t want to kiss you goodbye — that was the trouble — I wanted to kiss you goodnight. And there’s a lot of difference.”
—Ernest Hemingway (via kaegogi)
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merlinaminervamerlot:
“Greedy for life, we forget in body and soul our hopes for the future until reality teaches us that tomorrow is not what we had dreamed, and we discover nostalgia.”
—Gabriel Garcia Marquez, from “Memories of my Melancholy Whores” (via quote-book)
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“Sitting over words
very late I have heard a kind of whispered sighing
not far...”
– W. S. Merwin, “Utterance” (via litverve)
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If, as he says, the flaw in the weft of the soul
is how it tends, forever, toward nothingness,
then might we not imagine it as grace itself,
the way it teeters, this side of extinction,
locked with a flesh that is possibly not, after all,
as loathsome as he thought, but just as much
illumined, steady, pitched just at the point
where everything might stop, and nothing happens;
...
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“What a great poem teaches you, and it’s not intellectual at all, is the...”
– W. S. Merwin, Los Angeles Times (via litverve)
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fluttering-slips:
Who will winter my immortality
Who will winter my immortality with me? Who will thaw with me? Come what may, I shall never trade the earthly love for the subterranean. I still have time to turn into flowers, clay, white-eyed memory… But while we are mortal, my love, to you nothing will be denied.
Vera Pavlova
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“Someday, somewhere—anywhere, unfailingly, you’ll find yourself, and that,...”
– Pablo Neruda (via man-of-prose)
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“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in...”
– Marcel Proust (via man-of-prose)
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elysskama:
“But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene...
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“I hear the wind blow,
And I feel that it was worth being born just to hear the...”
– Fernando Pessoa, from “Uncollected Poems” (translated by Richard Zenith)
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“The brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory...”
– Milan Kundera, from The Unbelievable Lightness of Being, trans. Michael Henry Heim (via growing-orbits) 