Poetbabble

danielholter:

“In quick time his interest flipped neatly from hard structures to the soft parts supported by them. His growing obsession with the one boneless extension of his own anatomy was matched only by his new appreciation for the soft, fleshy mysteries guarded by the girls around him. Yet when, at fifteen, an impostor in his own life, he found himself buried to the third knuckle in a sighing schoolmate, he was disappointed by the lack of features there. Nothing but warm, giving folds and a roof like his mouth’s palate. He withdrew his hand and rubbed a callus over her prominent hipbone. She sighed again, as loud. She sighed wherever he touched her.”

—

Pierce, in his excellent short story “Bones.” (via mills)

So damn good. The kind of writing that makes you want to write more, better. Leave it to the Welshman.

Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning,
Every poem an epitaph. And any action
Is a step to the block, to the fire, down the sea’s throat
Or to an illegible stone: and that is where we start.

- T.S. Eliot, from Little Gidding (No.4 of the Four Quartets)

Breathless anticipation for some -thing/one/where that relies on delay and cannot be instantly gratified, but is certain to be immensely pleausrable.

Her body from a bone and her soul out of nothing.

Morning swallows the dream, only the vague notion of a shoulder, a remnant of tenderness, the shadowplay of words - that intimate close up without sound - remains.

A certain kind of light begins attaching to the trees; the lake behind the cabin recedes. (Is it a lake? Is it a cabin?) You search wildly for signs as they disappear. (Trees like monuments. Mountains. Alaska? Washington? Norway?)

You strain to hear the life you leave behind every night. You want to pin it all down. Waking up is the first desperate gasp for air after being dragged to sea by the rip current. You kick into the day, towards the diffused light. You listen so hard that when you finally rise into the world, everything aches just a little.

Outside, a grey bayou under a grey sky. The grey egret swoops through sticky pines into grey sawgrass.

A strange number appears on your phone more than once, but leaves no message in its wake. You wonder if the dream has finally decided to just come get you. After all, we are what we do.

Do I dare disturb the universe?

The clock accuses, and you are guilty. Your face belies the distraction of the dream. But there is no other way.  You wear it on your sleeve, strapped to your thigh, tucked in your boot.

One of my most joyful relationships was with a woman with whom I shared no language. She spoke only Amharic.

What a lovely experience to have. I communicate well both verbally and physically, but I’m most comfortable expressing through language. For that reason, I often choose to simply shut up. :)

I’m not being flip, though, and there is nothing wrong with words (I make my living and my life with them, after all!) But intentional silence is one of the most gratifying experiences for me. It forces me into my other senses, and sharpens my brain. It also challenges my emotional reactions and need to “have voice”. Silence allows me to listen better. And ultimately, it lets me love and live more thoughtfully.

I would love to try intentional silence with a partner/spouse/lover, etc. I could see choosing silence for a weekend or even a week, if the world was willing. I imagine that going about a few days and simply being quiet with each other would be a profoundly intense experience. 

Funny, how much we all have to say to each other, but I’ve yet to find someone who’s willing to just shut up with me.

When I choose not to speak, the animal is loosed. Words are only narrow discipline, an obvious division of girl and beast. But I like both skins.

That was the way all the Aubigneys fell in love, as if struck by pistol shot…The passion that awoke in him that day, when he saw her at the gate, swept along like an avalanche, or like a prairie fire, or like anything that drives headlong over all obstacles.

- Kate Chopin, from Desiree’s Baby

fictionz:

It may come from dreams. The good dreams, the distantly warm and affectionate dreams. It may come from the kind of dreams that make waking up alone, cold, and in the dark an unacceptable reality. Yet the alternative—a warm body invited into bed for the sake of a warm body—is worse. It is weakness. It is a betrayal of the notion that someone is worthy of this place beside me. Someone’s arm is better laid across my chest. Someone is most beautiful lying naked on her side with me behind her, enveloped, warmer than any dream and certain in her belief that we are deserving of each other.

Going out to meet a friend for a glass of wine. This is good to keep in mind.

Professor C,

Since you mentioned Manga in class, I decided to make my post today about it, sharing some of my favourites. Enjoy!

PS: There is NO tentacle rape in any of them, just so you know.

An Old Story

It’s hard being in love
with fireflies. I have to do
all the pots and pans.
When asked to parties
they always wear the same
color dress. I work days,
they punch in at dusk.
With the radio and a beer
I sit up doing bills,
jealous of men who’ve fallen
for the homebody stars.
When things are bad
they shake their asses
all over town, when good
my lips glow.

- Bob Hicok

                   Come here shark. Come
here barracuda. Love the sweet artifacts
of this body. Carry me in the world-class
rattle of a wave. I want the big bite, one
restless, tooth-filled mouth to take me down.

— Ada Limón, from ‘Drowning In Paradise’

Here, when I say I never want to be without you,
somewhere else I am saying
I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you
in each of the places we meet,

in all of the lives we are, it’s with hands that are dying
and resurrected.
When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life,
in each place and forever.

- Bob Hicok, excerpted from Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem

The urge to delete/omit/discard everything takes over.

The urge to simply step off the cliff and disappear into the ravine.
The urge to swerve hard right. To bite. To bite back.

In the worst hour of the worst season
     of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking – they were both walking – north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
     He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
     Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
     There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
     Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

-Eavan Boland, from Against Love Poetry

I find it odd that it was taboo for him to be gay, but society found it perfectly normal for grown men to be writing poems. I don’t get it.

- Regarding Walt Whitman

Sleep-swept, that slick ticket glossing my pocket, gold-red hair fanning out on a white sheet, a morning story of midnight longing and thighsoft glory, a restless breeze in tall, sticky pines.

Sleepwalker, you leave signs. 

Whomever you are, know this: I wake to your hands, your mouth at dawn. And I know you. Too-soon gone. The memory of something that has not yet been. 

Sleepwalker, I let you in and let you out. 

Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured? - Frederich Nietzsche

-

All night dreams of Bosnia. Ruins and music. The boldness of the brink. I woke around 4am, my eyes burning sockets in my skull. The horrific beauty of risk, the arbitrary danger of snipers. In the dark safety of my bed, I saw those families, those lovers running to be together. Running through riddled streets to crumbling buildings, crawling around corners, ducking behind burnt out cars while bullets chipped the asphalt rubble at their feet. Groceries in hand, book bags cinched tightly, running through crosswalks and intersections, across parking lots and wide open fields, surrounded on all sides by abandoned buildings, towers of dark windows, a million small spaces with perfect aim.

-

Then, only a child, I yelled at their tiny flickering images to take cover. I couldn’t understand why so many people would run across an open square, beset by monsters, trapped like animals. Why don’t they just wait? Why don’t they just signal each other instead of sprinting through the fire?

Of course, now I know; now, their awesome, pitiful, untouched bodies racing through space seem to me an Olympic beauty; their fierce daring, the choice that is not a choice.

-

I turned back to sleep in the warm bed, threading my legs through the blankets, my arms pulling a pillow against my body, my heart keeping silent track of all those runners, waiting its turn.

Most hearts say, I want, I want,
I want, I want. My heart
is more duplicitous,
though no twin as I once thought.
It says, I want, I don’t want, I
want, and then a pause.
It forces me to listen.

-Margaret Atwood

There are people who do not see a broken playground swing
as a symbol of ruined childhood

and there are people who don’t interpret the behavior
of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process.

There are people who don’t walk past an empty swimming pool
and think about past pleasures unrecoverable

and then stand there blocking the sidewalk for other pedestrians.
I have read about a town somewhere in California where human beings

do not send their sinuous feeder roots
deep into the potting soil of others’ emotional lives

as if they were greedy six-year-olds
sucking the last half-inch of milkshake up through a noisy straw;

and other persons in the Midwest who can kiss without
debating the imperialist baggage of heterosexuality.

Do you see that creamy, lemon-yellow moon?
There are some people, unlike me and you, 

who do not yearn after fame or love or quantities of money as
unattainable as that moon;
thus, they do not later
have to waste more time
defaming the object of their former ardor.

Or consequently run and crucify themselves
in some solitary midnight Starbucks Golgotha.

I have news for you—
there are people who get up in the morning and cross a room

and open a window to let the sweet breeze in
and let it touch them all over their faces and bodies.

— tony hoagland

not as a woman who brews tea and kneels
on rice but one who swims with narcolepsy,

who cinches all the alleys into darkness
and fells trees, who forces a bit into the mouth

of aurora borealis until the moon parades
its wounds in color, until her limbs go numb

scene by scene, by sleight of hand, by flip
turning in a lukewarm pool between what walls

we build, between what shocks we tuck in
tight, between what we somersault and dredge

from our eyes at the temperature of sleep
without drowning, without burning

our temples, without righting the lies we tell
our minds to make us fade, to make us stay

still and take it, to make us love paralysis
to such a point we jump in water, legless.

“The next time I see you it would be nice if you are naked and halfway through a bottle of decent red wine.”

Dear A,

The manuscript is finished, sealed and sent. Am I bereft? I think so. The inbetween is a longlong night at sea.  Looking to you. 

With affection,

-HSD

_________

Dear H,

The manuscript is in progress. Am I adrift? I think so. Horizon as far as you can see. In any case, certainly rocks instead of lighthouse. Regarding the sea: Try not to worry. It carves the earth, yes. But its shape, too, is determined by the shore that it meets.

Soon,

A-