May 2012
5 posts
“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don’t know how to replenish...”
– Anais Nin (via whatokay)
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THE LAYERS | Stanley Kunitz
I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on...
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ON THE MONA LISA | Anne Carson
Every day he poured his question into her, as you pour water from one vessel into another, and it poured back. Don’t tell me he was painting his mother, lust, et cetera. There is a moment when the water is not in one vessel nor in the other - what a thirst it was, and he supposed that when the canvas became completely empty he would stop. But women are strong. She knew vessels, she knew water, she...
“Look, the world is everywhere: satellites, end tables, the pink and white...”
– Terrance Hayes (via empty-the-moon)
I've been thinking about turquoise / I was...
There’s some tunnel I just exited from, some deep dark corridor or underwater lake I just surfaced from, I guess like SM says, surfacing, surfacing. The albino fish with no eyes and the horse paintings and the bones of the ancient cave bears crushed under our feet. I’m out and I can breathe again, the vice is gone from my chest, from my rib case, there’s some easing and slowing...
April 2012
25 posts
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CIRCLE OF SALT | Laura Kochman
If I had no head. If no one raced ahead of me. If I could complete the task, finish the thought. If I had a horse to take me there. If my feet were not fastened to the ground. If I received instruction, or a letter, or an empty envelope. If imprinted. If I could make myself a mirror. If I could make a mirror an ocean. If I could make an ocean a forest. If I could find the pass, the pasture. If a...
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BIG ADVENTURE II | Caroline Cabrera
Well, things are not very good around here anymore. No clothes to wear. No raisins for the oatmeal. I think it’s time we revved our engines if only to make sure they still turn over. I knitted a trampoline that will send us over the perimeter wall. I am almost sure we can clear it and you won’t be splat like a pancake. We will need a lot of hidden compartments in our sneaking gear, if only...
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BIG ADVENTURE I | Caroline Cabrera
There were so many giants and tigers and scary and exciting things before that I am pretty tired now. I almost don’t have the heart to tell you my overalls fell off somewhere back there and I’ve been running through the swamp in my underclothes. Nothing turned out as I had planned it in my Big Adventure Notebook even though I dragged around a basket of provisions in a little red wagon....
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WISTFUL SOUNDS LIKE A BRAND OF FRESHENER | Bob...
I will go to Belfast, Maine, and read my poetry to crabs.
I'll stand on a platform of some kind in the company of wind
and look at pennants waving and think of the claws
of crabs waving in the wind of the Atlantic and be sad.
It's not that I don't have enough sadness, but I'm always looking
for better, more aquatic or tastier sadness, for the kind
of light that comes when the sky tilts its head at...
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CATCH A BODY | Ilse Bendorf
Salinger, I’m sorry, but “Don’t ever tell anybody anything” is a string of words I would like to wrap up in canvas and sink to the bottom of the Hudson, or extract by laser from the ribcage of all of us who ever believed it, who felt afraid to miss someone, to be the last one standing. “Tell everyone everything” is not exactly right, but I do believe that if your mother looks radiant in violet you...
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BUSH | Josephine Jackson
It is the sound of lions lapping. They drink themselves from the gold shapes that waver and grow shallower. Blue peels itself in the water- hole; it is the sun coming. Crouched, the lions meet their matches at the surface. The foxy jackals are far off but the vultures cloud the flat treetop; the drum of the zebra’s body is lined with red sunrise. The jackals and culture are waiting for what...
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Like the ants that have nothing to do but dig all day, I have nothing to do but do what I want and be kind and remain nevertheless uninfluenced by imaginary judgments and pray for the light, sitting in my buddha-arbor, therefore, in that wall of flowers pink and red and ivory white, among aviaries of magic transcendent birds recognizing my awakening mind with sweet weird cries , in the ethereal...
lamentation
finally today the sun was out and I DID things instead of sitting around wringing my hands with endless time but no ability to DO THINGS. but shortly got overwhelmed by how much there was to do and how I wasn’t working TOWARD anything, really, have nothing to be excited about— no creative projects, athletic goals, big plans, school prospects. I got rejected by NCNM and the first few...
Re-Perceive Vanilla
Vanilla is made from the fruit of an orchid; it is the second most expensive spice after saffron; and the Totonac people, subjugated by the Aztecs, paid tribute in vanilla beans. For a long time, it was impossible to grow the vanilla orchid outside of Mexico and Central America because only the abeja de monte, or mountain bee, indigenous to those areas, could pollinate the flower. It is the most...
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THE SMALLEST | James Schuyler
It is in front of the tree.
The houses around the windows are lit
by it, it turns off and goes upon
knees and wherever the bone is almost next
to the skin. It has been defamed.
It will become undernourished.
It is not without end. It is not.
It is not what you can let happen,
or cause to happen, or has anything
at all to do with happening.
It happens as it exists without effect.
It is the pure in...
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FOR THE DEAD | Adrienne Rich
I dreamed I called you on the telephone
to say: Be kinder to yourself
but you were sick and would not answer
The waste of my love goes on this way
trying to save you from yourself
I have always wondered about the left-over
energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill
long after the rains have stopped
or the fire you want to go to bed from
but cannot leave, burning-down but not...
March 2012
4 posts
“Every time I read an article about conservatives being “pro- life” I am reminded...”
– The ‘Safe, Legal, Rare’ Illusion - NYTimes.com
YES.
(via golden-notebook)
Might be a rerun on my blog, and if it is, it’s worth repeating.
(via timekiller-s)
This is such an important point.
(via rightsandwrongs)
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UNTITLED | Margaret Atwood
You want to go back to where the sky was inside us animals ran through us, our hands blessed and killed according to our wisdom, death made real blood come out But face it, we have been improved, our heads float several inches above our necks moored to us by rubber tubes and filled with clever bubbles, our bodies are populated with billions of soft pink numbers multiplying and analyzing...
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Goldfish Are Ordinary | Stacie Cassarino
At the pet store on Court Street, I search for the perfect fish. The black moor, the blue damsel, cichlids and neons. Something to distract your sadness, something you don’t need to love you back. Maybe a goldfish, the flaring tail, orange, red-capped, pearled body, the darting translucence? Goldfish are ordinary, the boy selling fish says to me. I turn back to the tank, all of this grace and...
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SUMMER SOLSTICE | Stacie Cassarino
I wanted to see where beauty comes from without you in the world, hauling my heart across sixty acres of northeast meadow, my pockets filling with flowers. Then I remembered, it’s you I miss in the brightness and body of every living name: rattlebox, yarrow, wild vetch. You are the green wonder of June, root and quasar, the thirst for salt. When I finally understand that people fail at love, what...
February 2012
7 posts
LEVIATHAN | George Oppen
Truth also is the pursuit of it: Like happiness, and it will not stand. Even the verse begins to eat away In the acid. Pursuit, pursuit; A wind moves a little, Moving in a circle, very cold. How shall we say? In ordinary discourse— We must talk now. I am no longer sure of the words, The clockwork of the world. What is inexplicable Is the ‘preponderance of objects.’ The sky lights Daily with that...
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RECIPE FOR AMNESIA | Nin Andrews
Of every priest, guru, nun and rishi, of every therapist, lama, swami, and saint. Of every drug addict and several strangers on the street, I’ve asked for teachings on forgetfulness, transmissions, rituals for purification, drugs and whiskey, any form of magic for erasing your voice from my mind, your image from my days and nights, your scent of salt and lemons and warm summer rain like a...
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adara sánchez anguiano
adara sánchez anguiano, horses in the sky
January 2012
19 posts
ENDANGERED SPECIES | Bob Hicok
Very busy sensing there’s nothing down the train tracks except remembering there are only five remaining speakers of Mohave. There might be a loose and rusted spike, a smashed bottle of Bud is likely if I walk long enough into picturing a basketball team of old men and women in a gym in Oklahoma bouncing an orange ball against a team made up of how the rest of the world can’t...
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ANTILAMENTATION | Dorianne Laux
Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read to the end just to find out who killed the cook. Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark, in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication. Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot, the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones that crimped your toes, don’t...
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THIS SLOW RISE | Monica Berlin
What does any of this matter on nights so hot we can’t sleep, somewhere else the rivers spilling banks, pouring in, and somewhere else still, drought spreading out the once rich land into a layer of silt. What does it matter these nights, our backyards of trains, our turning to dust, even as we’re more saturated than we’ve ever been? We’re tracing routes of the maps...