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mid-20s / ⚢ / an anthology of love; a cemetery of it

[luthienne]

Wouldn’t you, if you could? Step out of your own story, to lean against a doorway of the Five & Dime, sipping your coffee, your life, somewhere far behind you, all its heat and toil nothing but a tale, resting in the hands of a stranger, the sidewalk ahead wet and glistening.

Danusha Laméris, from The Moons of August; “Fictional Characters”

[soracities]

Sujata Bhatt, from “Parvati”, Collected Poems

[Text ID: “If this myth is alive for me then why isn’t it for you? How does a myth stay alive? How many people does one need in order to keep a myth alive?”]

[apoemaday]

Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

by Rainer Maria Rilke tr. Joanna Macy

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you. Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength. Move back and forth into the change. What is it like, such intensity of pain? If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night, be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses, the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you, say to the silent earth: I flow. To the rushing water, speak: I am.

[loveridden1999]

"it is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world."

[mihai-florescu]

Languages tend to peak at their word for butterfly. Never seen 2 that are the same, either. Papillon. Mariposa. Borboleta. Fluture. Vlinder. Schmetterling. Pillangó. Babochka. Farfalla. Sommerfugl. Perhonen. Farasha. Titali. Chōchō. Nabi. Húdié. Buom buom. Great job guys, i really mean it.

[holespoles]

Postcard of a girl being chased by a flock of geese. Painting by Narumi Ichijo, 1907 or earlier.

ガチョウの群れに追いかけられる女の子の絵葉書。 画 一条成美、明治40年(1907)以前

[flowerytale]

J. L. Carr, from A Month in the Country

[literarymagpie]

I used to post Jorge Louis Borges's extremely short story "The Plot" (links to a translation of the story as posted on the blog "Biblioklept") as my FB status every year for the Ides of March. So now I'm sharing it here. Sprinkle a little Borges on your celebration, as a treat!

[swimmergirl]

[existential-celestial]

“I must have two sides, two mouths, two minds, two lives: one that worries about the future while the other sleepwalks through the fire.”

— David Hernandez, closing lines to “Water Soluble Dreams,” Memorius (no. 26, June 2016).

[1five1two]

'Dance Curves: On the Dances of Palucca'. Wassily Kandinsky. 1926.

[662607015]

having a freeze response to stress is so funny in the context of normal adult stressors. millions of years of evolution are trying to tell me that the email will not find me if i stay very still and do nothing

[662607015]

oh one source of bad information by robert bly we're really in it now

[yellow-cat]

(voice of a person spiralling) its embarrassing but i still havent figured out if its ok for me to be alive

[duino-elegies]

This letter to the “wunderbare Marina” has already been posted here with an English translation, but the picture is so beautiful…

[existential-celestial]

Hotel Hof-Ragaz, Ragaz (Suisse) July 28, 1926 You wonderful Marina, As in your first letter, I admire in each of the ones that have followed your habit of precise seeking and finding, your inde- fatigable journey to what you mean, and, always, your being right. You are right, Marina (isn’t that a rare thing with a woman, such a being-in-the-right in the most valid, the most carefree sense?). This having a right not to anything, hardly coming from anywhere; but from such pure self-sufficiency, out of the fullness and completeness of it all, you are right, and hence have forever a right to the infinite. Every time I write to you, I’d like to write like you, to speak my self in Marinian, by your equable, and withal so feeling, means. Your utterance, Marina, is like a star’s reflection when it appears in the water, and is disturbed by the water, by the life of the water, by its fluid night; interrupted, canceled, and again admitted, and then deeper in the element, as if already familiar with this mirror world and, after each waning, back again and more deeply immersed! (You great star!) Do you know of the young Tycho Brahe’s- trip home, made at a time when he wasn’t really allowed to practice astronomy yet, but was on vacation at an uncle’s estate … and there it turned out that he already knew the sky so exactly, so much by heart (pense: il savait Ie del par coeur.) that a simple turning-up of his eye, more resting than searching, bestowed upon him the new star, in the constellation of the Lyre: his first discovery in starry nature. (And is it not, or am I mistaken, this very star, Alpha in Lyre, “visible de toute la Provence et des terres méditierranées,’ which now seems destined to be named after the poet Mistral) Would that not be enough, by the way, to make us feel close to this era - that this is possible again, the poet flung beneath the stars: Tu dlias a ta fille un jour, en t'anetant a Maillane: void “Mistral,” comme il est beau ce soir.’ [You’ll tell your daughter one day as you stop at Maillane: look, there is “Mistral,” how beautiful it is tonight!] At last a “fame” beyond being on a street sign!) But you, Marina, I did not find by my free-ranging eye; Boris placed the telescope in front of my sky for me…. First, spaces rushed past my up-gazing eye and then, suddenly, you stood there in the middle of the field, pure and strong, where the rays of your first letter gathered you up for me. The most recent of your letters has now been with me since July 9: how often I meant to write! But my life is so curiously heavy in me that I often cannot stir it from its place; gravity seems to be forming a new relationship to it - not since childhood have I been in such an immovable state of soul; but back then, the world was under the pull of gravity and would press on one who himself was like a wing wrenched off somewhere, from which feather upon little feather escaped into limbo; now I myself am that mass, and the world is like a sleep all around me, and summer is so curiously absent-minded, as though it was not thinking of its own affairs…. As you see, I am again away from Muzot: to see, here at Ragaz, my oldest friends and the only ones whom I considered still linked to me from Austrian times (how much longer? for their age overtakes me by a great span…). And with them came, unexpectedly, a Russian woman friend of theirs; a Russian - think how this struck home with me! Now they are all gone, but I’m staying on a little for the sake of the beautiful aquamarine-clear medicinal springs. And you?

— Rainer Maria Rilke (b. 4 Dec 1875), in his letter to Marina Tsvetaeva, featured in Letters: Summer 1926, Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, Rainer Maria Rilke

[luthienne]

Reginald Dwayne Betts, from Felon: Poems; “House of Unending”

[elizabethanism]

Poem by the 12thc warrior poet Xin Qiji 辛棄疾, who was sidelined during peacetime, demoted, drifting through a decade of minor posts in remote lands.

Poetry, then, as that which is left unsaid.

“My, what a cool and lovely autumn.”

[spookfished]

this poem was translated by eileen chengyin chow, or @chowleen on twitter and tumblr! im not sure why the translators attribution was specifically cut out here:

[sunotes]

[havingapoemwithyou]

I THINK LOVE IS SOMETHING THAT HAPPENS TO OTHER PEOPLE by Michael Gray Bulla