DARKLING, I LISTEN @darkling--i-listen - Tumblr Blog

"If See No End In Is" ; Frank Bidart

What none knows is when, not if. Now that your life nears its end when you turn back what you see is ruin. You think, It is a prison. No, it is a vast resonating chamber in which each thing you say or do is new, but the same. What none knows is how to change. Each plateau you reach, if single, limited, only itself, in- cludes traces of all the others, so that in the end limitation frees you, there is no end, if you once see what is there to see. You cannot see what is there to see — not when she whose love you failed is standing next to you. Then, as if refusing the know- ledge that life unseparated from her is death, as if again scorning your refusals, she turns away. The end achieved by the unappeased is burial within. Familiar spirit, within whose care I grew, within whose disappointment I twist, may we at last see by what necessity the double-bind is in the end the figure for human life, why what we love is precluded always by something else we love, as if each no we speak is yes, each yes no. The prospect is mixed but elsewhere the forecast is no better. The eyrie where you perch in exhaustion has food and is out of the wind, if cold. You feel old, young, old, young: you scan the sea for movement, though the promise of sex or food is the prospect that bewildered you to this end. Something in you believes that it is not the end. When you wake, sixth grade will start. The finite you know you fear is infinite: even at eleven, what you love is what you should not love, which endless bullies in- tuit unerringly. The future will be different: you cannot see the end. What none knows is when, not if. This sestina was originally featured in Poetry magazine in October, 2007.

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"Sleep Cycle" ; Dean Young

We cannot push ourselves away from this quiet, even in our sprees of inattention, the departing passengers stubbing out their smokes, arrivees in tears, lots of cellophane, the rumpus over parking. Wind scrapes leaves across the road, first flashes of snow, it is dark then it’s really dark. Forgive me for not writing for so long, I’ve been right beside you, one of the vaguer divinities blocking your way with its need to confess all its botched attempts at love, what started the whole mess. I love this place, its absurd use of balustrade, the chairs that dig into the spine, motorcyclists propping their drunk girlfriends in the sun, men playing timed chess with themselves, the guarantees and warnings that entice us to the brink of what they warn about. But we can do no more than pass through these rooms and their sudden chills where once a plea was entered almost unintentionally that seemed at last to reveal ourselves to ourselves, immaculate, bereft, deserving to be found.

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aseaofquotes

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Submitted by monte-fiore.

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"anyone lived in a pretty how town" ; e.e. cummings

#e.e. cummings #modernism #modernist poet #anyone lived in a pretty how town #poet #poem #poetry

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"VI. TO CLEAN YOUR HOOVES HERE IS A DANCE IN HONOR OF THE GRAPE WHICH THROUGHOUT HISTORY HAS BEEN A SYMBOL OF REVELRY AND JOY NOT TO SAY ANALOGY FOR THE BRIDE AS UNCUT BLOSSOM" ; Anne Carson

Smell I will never forget. Out behind the vineyard. Stone place maye a shed or an icehouse no longer in use. October, a little cold. Hay on the floor. We had gone to his grandfather's farm to help crush the grapes for wine. You cannot imagine the feeling if you have never done it -- like hard bulbs of wet red satin exploding under your feet, between your toes and up your legs arms face splashing everywhere -- It goes right through your clothes you know he said as we slogged up and down in the vat. When you take them off you'll have juice all over. His eyes moved onto me then he said Let's check. Naked in the stone place it was true, sticky stains, skin, I lay on the hay and he licked. Licked it off. Ran out and got more dregs in his hands and smeared it on my knees neck belly licking. Plucking. Diving. Tongue is the smell of October to me. I remember it as swimming in a fast river for I kept moving and it was hard to move while all around me was moving too, that smell of turned earth and cold plants and night coming on and the old vat steaming slightly in the dusk out there and him, raw juice on him. Stamens on him and as Kafka said in the end my swimming was of no use to me you know I cannot swim after all. Well it so happens more than 90% of all cultivated grapes are varieties of Vitis vinifera the Old World or European grape, while native American grapes derive from certain wild species of Vitis and differ in their "foxy" odor as well as the fact that their skins slip so liquidly from the pulp. An ideal wine grape is one that is easily crushed. Such things I learned from the grandfather when we sat in the kitchen late at night cracking chestnuts. Also that I should under no circumstances marry his grandson whom he called tragikos a country word meaning either tragic or goat. from The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos

"Because I’ll Never Swim in Every Ocean" ; Catherine Pierce

Want is ten thousand blue feathers falling all around me, and me unable to stomach that I might catch five but never ten thousand. So I drop my hands to my sides and wait to be buried. I open a book and the words spring and taunt. Flashes—motel, lapidary, piranha—of every story, every poem I’ll never know well enough to conjure in sleep. What’s the point of words if I can’t own them all? I toss book after book into my imaginary trashcan fire. Or I think I’ll learn piano. At the first lesson, we’re clapping whole and half notes and this is childish, I’m better than this. I’d like to leave playing Ravel. I’d like to give a concerto on Saturday. So I quit. I have standards. Then on Saturday, I have a beer, watch a telethon. Or we watch a documentary on Antarctica. The interviewees are from Belarus, Lima, Berlin. Everyone speaks English. Everyone names a philosopher, an ethos. One man carries a raft on his back at all times. I went to Nebraska once and swore it was a great adventure. It was. I think of how I’ll never go to Antarctica, mainly because I don’t much want to. But I should want to. I should be the girl with a raft on her back. When I think of all the mountains and monuments and skyscapes I haven’t seen, all the trains I should take, all the camels and mopeds and ferries I should ride, all the scorching hikes I should nearly die on, I press my body down, down into the vast green couch. If I step out the door, the infinity of what I’ve missed will zorro me across the face with a big L for Lazy. Sometimes I watch finches at the feeder, their wings small suns, and have to grab the sill to steady myself. Metaphorically, of course. I’m no loon. Look—even my awestruck is half-assed. But I’m so tired of the small steps— the pentatonic scale, the frequent flyer hoarding, the one exquisite sentence in a forest of exquisite sentences. There is a globe welling up inside of me. Mountain ranges ridging my skin, oceans filling my mouth. If I stay still long enough, I could become my own world.

29 ways to stay creative and fight writer's block! :)

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There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Ernest Hemingway (via writersbloqinc)

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brokenly

darkling--i-listen

-François Rabelais

#François Rabelais #Renaissance #writer #doctor #humanist #french #monk #greek scholar #literature #last words #french lit #I go to seek a great perhaps

"Poem Without Forgiveness" ; Dean Young

The husband wants to be taken back into the family after behaving terribly, but nothing can be taken back, not the leaves by the trees, the rain by the clouds. You want to take back the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel remains in the wound, some mud. Night after night Tybalt’s stabbed so the lovers are ground in mechanical aftermath. Think of the gunk that never comes off the roasting pan, the goofs of a diamond cutter. But wasn’t it electricity’s blunder into inert clay that started this whole mess, the I- echo in the head, a marriage begun with a fender bender, a sneeze, a mutation, a raid, an irrevocable fuckup. So in the meantime: epoxy, the dog barking at who knows what, signals mixed up like a dumped-out tray of printer’s type. Some piece of you stays in me and I’ll never give it back. The heart hoards its thorns just as the rose profligates. Just because you’ve had enough doesn’t mean you wanted too much. Published by The Paris Review: Winter 2006, No. 179

"This Is Not An Elegy" ; Catherine Pierce

At sixteen, I was illegal and brilliant, my fingernails chewed to half-moons. I took off my clothes in a late March field. I had secret car wrecks, secret hysteria. I opened my mouth to swallow stars. In backseats I learned the alchemy of guilt, lust, and distance. I was unformed and total. I swore like a sailor. But slowly the cops stopped coming around. The heat lifted its palms. The radio lost some teeth. Now I see the landscape behind me as through a Claude glass— tinted deeper, framed just so, bits of gilt edging the best parts. I see my unlined face, a thousand film stars behind the eyes. I was every murderess, every whip- thin alcoholic, every heroine with the silver tongue. Always young Paul Newman’s best girl. Always a lightning sky behind each kiss. Some days I watch myself in the third person, speak to her in the second. I say: I will meet you in sleep. I will know you by your stillness and your shaking. By your second-hand gown. By your bruises left by mouths since forgotten. This is not an elegy because I cannot bear for it to be. It is only a tree branch against the window. It is only a cherry tomato slowly reddening in the garden. I will put it in my mouth. It will be sweet, and you will swallow.

"I Wait In The White Rain" ; Charles Bukowski

I wait in the white rain for knives like your tongue I see the spiral clowns fountain up with myths untrue, I wrestle spasms in the dark on dark stairways while dollar crazy landladies are threaded with the hot needles of sperm, come these morning drunks brushing away sunlight from eyes like a web, come darling, come gloria patri, come luck, come anything, this is the hot way— points sticking in like armadillos in the rear of a Benedictine mind, and snow snow snow snow snow shovel all the snow upon me I can hold, gingerbread mouth, duck-like dick, raisins for buttons, thread for heart-strings, damned waves of blood caught in them like a minnow in the Tide of Everywhere I wait in the white rain for knives like your tongue and the trucks go by with bankrupt faces the steam of their essence like foul sweat stale stink death in my socks all the drums of hell cannot awaken a rhythm within me I am gone like an old pale goldfish dead and stiff as aunt Helen looking flat-eyed into the center of my brain and flushed away like any other waste of man, the man-turd, the breath of life, and why we don’t go mad as roaches, why not more suicides I’ll never know as I wait in the white rain for knives like your tongue, I am done, quite; like any ford that cuts off a river I am done forever and only, this christ-awful waiting on the end of a stale movie, everyone screaming for beauty and victory like children for candy, my hands open unamazed hand unamazed mind unamazed doorsill send your flowers to Shakey Joe or Butternaut Carlyle who might trade them to useful purpose before everything, everyone is dead