May 2012
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Dust
Someone spoke to me last night told me the truth. Just a few words,but I recognized it. I knew I should make myself get up, write it down, but it was late, and I was exhausted from working all day in the garden, moving rocks. Now, I remember only the flavor — not like food, sweet or sharp. More like fine powder, like dust. And I was elevated or frightened, but simple rapt, aware....
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[[MORE]]Not that I’m panicking or anything but I’m pretty sure I’m ruining my academic career left right and centre today. Can this week just be over please?
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Insurgent is out you guys
and it is amazeballs. I can’t even with this series.
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April 2012
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(#29) Delayed Reactions
After the hammer slams down on your thumb or the hurtful word penetrates, a stunned moment follows. You’re like a soldier who feels no pain until he sees the wound. Happiness, too, is sometimes slow to register. It was years after the rain had sent me and the girl huddled close to me dashing for cover that I suddenly felt the drops.
—Sherman Pearl
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(#28) Poem Written in a Copy of Beowulf
At various times I have asked myself what reasons moved me to study while my night came down, without particular hope of satisfaction, the language of the blunt-tongued Anglo-Saxons. Used up by the years my memory loses its grip on words that I have vainly repeated and repeated. My life in the same way weaves and unweaves its weary history. Then I tell myself: it must be that the soul has some...
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(#26)
Something About the Wind
There’s something about the wind coming off the ocean, the waves washing the rocks
that makes a person who is quickly annoyed by cigarette smoke and men putting nails into roofs
forgetful and unconcerned.
If you are easily disturbed you need to get an ocean.
—Sidney Hall Jr
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“Happiness is a risk. If you’re not a little scared, then you’re not doing it...”
– The Peach Keeper by Sarah Addison Allen
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(#25) XVII (From Twenty-One Love Poems)
No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone. The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, they happen in our lives like car crashes, books that change us, neighborhoods we move into and come to love. Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story, women at least should know the difference between love and death. No prison cup, no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder should have caught some ghost...
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(#24) Morning Song
This morning begins almost purely, coffee enveloped in cream, those clouds that bloom up like madness in a cup, and I take the first swallow before the color changes, taste the bitterness and the faint sweet behind it, steam rubbing my nose, an animal nuzzle, and the sharp, nearly painful heat at the back of my tongue, the liquid unraveling down the raw tunnel of my throat.
And I feel my body...
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(#23) How Do You Know?
How do you know if it’s love? she asks,
and I think if you have to ask, it’s not,
but I know this won’t help. I want to say
you’re too young to worry about it,
as if she has questions about Medicare
or social security, but this won’t help either.
“You’ll just know” is a lie, and one truth,
“when you still want to be with them
the next morning” would involve too
many follow-up questions. The...
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(#22) an entomologist's last love letter
so i have a new plan i’m gonna leave you now i’m gonna spend the rest of my life committing petty injustices i hope you do the same i will jay walk at every opportunity i will steal things i could easily afford i will be rude to strangers i hope you do the same i hope reincarnation is real i hope our petty crimes are enough to cause us to be reborn as lesser creatures i hope we are...
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A Brief for the Defense (#21)
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the...
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poem #20: I Imagine The Gods
I imagine the gods saying, We will make it up to you. We will give you three wishes, they say. Let me see the squirrels again, I tell them. Let me eat some of the great hog stuffed and roasted on its giant spit and put out, steaming, into the winter of my neighborhood when I was usually too broke to afford even the hundred grams I ate so happily walking up the cobbles, past the Street of the...
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(#19)
Written in Pencil in the Sealed Railway-Car Dan Pagis here in this carload i am eve with abel my son if you see my other son cain son of man tell him that i
==
translated from the Hebrew by Stephen Mitchell
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aesl:
Richard Siken reads Litany in Which...
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Poem #16
Mayakovsky
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.
The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.
It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am...
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(#15) To Small Acts of Tenderness
motherground:
I tell myself that I’ve begun to heal, That this aging body is more flexible, That these pains I live with have receded As this river has receded in recent days: My heavy green canoe Now rests half its length From the water’s edge.
My world is full of dirt, roots, mosquitoes, And the rattling wind in the aspens: “The North,” it says, “is the place of wisdom.”
Here, on this...
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(#14) The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart
growing-orbits:
by Jack Gilbert
How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient...
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#13
If a Boy Must Wonder
If a boy must wonder,
let him recall
not the lightening grace of falcons,
the dizzying aeronautics, Darwin’s finch,
the voyage of ancients
who saw farther, whose charts and sails
and bubbly telescopic minds
brought ashore hope
to lift
a charioting god to the moon
but how
even a rogue dream of stars
once birthed the possibility of light.
—Leon Yuchin Lau
Watcharavenclawsuperwholockian:
emotionaljourney:
allthewaytonight:
Harry Potter in 99 Seconds.
ALWAYS REBLOG
AMAZING!
Duty Calls, Guys;)
This will never not be amazing!
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#12
An Ancient Gesture
I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron:
Penelope did this too.
And more than once: you can’t keep weaving all day
And undoing it all through the night;
Your arms get tired, and the back of your neck gets tight;
And along towards morning, when you think it will never be light,
And your husband has been gone, and you don’t know where, for...
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and #11
finally caught up :) Only one poem a day after this, phew!
In the City of Light
The last thing my father did for me Was map a way: he died, & so Made death possible. If he could do it, I Will also, someday, be so honored. Once, At night, I walked through the lit streets Of New York, from the Gramercy Park Hotel Up Lexington & at that hour, alone, I stopped hearing traffic,...
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#10
How to Build an Owl
1. Decide you must.
2. Develop deep respect
for feather, bone, claw.
3. Place your trembling thumb
where the heart will be:
for one hundred hours watch
so you will know
where to put the first feather.
4. Stay awake forever.
When the bird takes shape
gently pry open its beak
and whisper into it: mouse.
5. Let...
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Poem # 9
A Psychological Tip
Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind,
and you’re hampered by not having any,
the best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,
is simply by spinning a penny.
No — not so that chance shall decide the affair
while you’re passively standing there moping;
but the moment the penny is up in the air,
you suddenly know what you’re hoping.
—Piet Hein
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