Bryant Loney @bryantloney - Tumblr Blog

COCO-DE-MER by Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill (Translated by Paul Muldoon) It's rumoured that on the island there's a particular tree that drops these enormous coconuts known as "coco-de-mer" in the sea. Some of these trees are male and some female: they live quite apart from each other in their separate coconut-groves. On one night in the year, however, they shake the mud off their roots and veer towards each other for a bit of how's-your-father. Limb upon flailing limb: branches and roots enmeshed; anyone who witnesses this tree-tryst will at once turn into a heap of mush or a pillar of salt. I myself and my companion were coming home late at night: we heard such a commotion behind us that we immediately faced into the ditch and didn't dare look back or light a match or move a muscle as the trees went jumbering past with their judders and jolts and jostles.

LOVE SPELL by Elise Paschen If he should eat, keep him from eating. If he should look, stop him from looking. If he should sleep, make him unable to sleep with any other. And do not enter through his eyes or through his nails, or even through his navel, but through his breath, burning his lungs, his chest, his heart, his liver, his bones and his marrow. As you burn in this fire, so burn the brain of the one I love. Turn his intestines inside out, suck out his blood drop by drop, until he comes to me. Match palm to palm and fasten mouth to mouth. Press elbow to elbow. Keep thigh close to thigh. Fit dark to dark. Join him to me. Now. Always.

ON THE GIFT OF THE BIRDS OF AMERICA BY JOHN JAMES AUDUBON by Eavan Boland What you have given me is, of course, elegy: the red-shouldered hawk in among these scattered partridges, flustered at such a descent, and the broad-winged one poised on the branch of a pignut, and the pine siskin and the wren are an inference we follow in the plummet of the tern which appears to be, from this angle anyway, impossible fragile and if we imagine the franchise of light these camphor-coloured wings opened out once with and are at such a loss for now, then surely this is the nature and effect of elegy: the celebration of an element which absence has revealed: it is our earthliness we love as we look at them, which we fear to lose, which we need this re-phrasing of the air, of the ocean to remind of us: that evening, late in May, the Clare hills were ghostly with hawthorn. Two swans flew over us. I can still hear the musical insistence of their wings as they came in past the treetops, near the lake; and we looked up, rooted to the spot.

CRICKET CRICKET by James Tate

When I am alone on a summer night, and there is a cricket in the house, I always feel that things could be worse. Maybe it is raining, and then thunder and lightning are shaking the house. The power goes out, and I must grope around in the darkness for a candle. At last the candle is found, but where are the matches? I always keep them in that drawer. I knock over a vase, but it doesn't break. Afraid of what I might break, I return to my chair and sit there in the darkness. The lightning is striking all around the house. Then I remember the cricket, and I listen for its chirping. Soon, the storm passes, and the lights come back on. An eerie silence fills my home. I am worried that the cricket may have been struck by some lightning of its own.

THE WINDOWS by Carol Ann Duffy How do you earn a life going on behind yellow windows, writing at night the Latin names of plants for a garden, opening the front door to a wet dog? Those who love forgive you, clearly, with steaming casseroles and red wine. It's the same film down all the suburban streets, It's A Wonderful Life. How do you learn it? What you hear—the doorbell's familiar chime. What do you touch—the clean, warm towels. What you see what you smell what you taste all tangible to the stranger passing your gate. There you are again, in a room where those early hyacinths surely sweeten the air, and the right words wait in the dictionaries, on the tip of the tongue you touch in a kiss, drawing your crimson curtains now against dark hours. And again, in a kitchen, the window ajar, sometimes the sound of your radio or the scent of your food, and a cat in your arms, a child in your arms, a lover. Such vivid flowers.

YOU MIGHT END UP IN THE STORY

I’ve never known how to explain what writing means to me without sounding dramatic or cliché. Sometimes I try metaphors—“It’s a mirror I trust more than my own reflection”—but even then, it feels like I’m inviting misunderstanding.

Some friendships faded when it became clear I preferred a quiet room and a half-finished sentence to group dinners. Others, often with writers, needed no explanation. We could work in silence, occasionally asking, “What makes a character unforgettable?” and it would feel like the most intimate exchange all month.

There’s comfort in being around other creatives. They understand why you cancel plans without a real excuse or drift mid-conversation because you’re mentally rewriting a scene. They get why you spent five hours on one paragraph and still hate it.

But most people aren’t writers, and loving one can feel like translating a language that only exists in your head. I’ve dated people who were supportive but confused—or who over-analyzed every line, assuming it was about them. Others didn’t read my work at all, which always hurts more.

Writing can make you hard to be close to, and not because you don’t care but because you do care—so much!—about capturing life that you sometimes forget to participate. You observe. You mine your memories, conversations, heartbreaks, and reshape them into stories. It’s beautiful, but it complicates intimacy. You’re always holding something back, and not out of malice but of necessity.

I’ve had people ask if I ever feel guilty about writing someone into my work. The answer is yes, of course. And never. I never write to expose someone. But I do write to understand them. Sometimes that understanding doesn’t come until long after they’ve left my life. Sometimes it comes too late to matter.

There’s risk in being close to a writer. You might become material. But the truth is that everyone we love, or fail to love, shapes the writing. Not just those who hurt us but those who listened. The ones who let us be silent and obsessive because they sensed something inside was trying to be created.

I don’t believe creative types are more complicated than anyone else. But I do believe our relationships are shaped by a need that never really goes away—the need to make sense of the world through art. And anyone who’s ever truly been close to a writer knows: you’re not just loving a person; you’re loving a mind in motion. A mind always working, always searching, always just a little bit somewhere else.

And yet the best aren’t threatened by that. They pull up a chair and wait for you to come back.

WINTER PAGES by Andrew D. Scrimgeour So much can be heard in the stillness of the snow-swept slopes of an open book A train laboring its way across the Siberian hinterland as trees hold out napkins of snow to Zhivago and his fellow passengers The wind lashing the Overlook Hotel high in the Colorado Rockies as a limping man chases small foot- prints in the drifting snow Carols warming the Christmas Eve night in Godric’s Hollow as Harry and Hermione brush snow off tombstones in the church yard Where a spring thaw may be just a page-turn away