limits to saying @ecstasis - Tumblr Blog

At Thomas Merton’s Grave

We can never be with loss too long. Behind the warped door that sticks, the wood thrush calls to the monks, pausing upon the stone crucifix, singing: “I am marvelous alone!” Thrash, thrash goes the hayfield: rows of marrow and bone undone. The horizon’s flashing fastens tight, sealing the blue hills with vermilion. Moss dyes a squirrel’s skull green. The cemetery expands its borders— little milky crosses grow like teeth. How kind time is, altering space so nothing stays wrong; and light, more new light, always arrives.

Spencer Reece

#spencer reece

The Nails

I gave you sorrow to hang on your wall Like a calendar in one color. I wear a torn place on my sleeve. It isn’t as simple as that.

Between no place of mine and no place of yours You’d have thought I’d know the way by now Just from thinking it over. Oh I know I’ve no excuse to be stuck here turning Like a mirror on a string, Except it’s hardly credible how It all keeps changing. Loss has a wider choice of directions Than the other thing.

As if I had a system I shuffle among the lies Turning them over, if only I could be sure what I’d lost. I uncover my footprints, I Poke them till the eyes open. They don’t recall what it looked like. When was I using it last? Was it like a ring or a light Or the autumn pond Which chokes and glitters but Grows colder? It could be all in the mind. Anyway Nothing seems to bring it back to me.

And I’ve been to see Your hands as trees borne away on a flood, The same film over and over, And an old one at that, shattering its account To the last of the digits, and nothing And the blank end.

The lightning has shown me the scars of the future.

I’ve had a long look at someone Alone like a key in a lock Without what it takes to turn.

It isn’t as simple as that.

Winter will think back to your lit harvest For which there is no help, and the seed Of eloquence will open its wings When you are gone. But at this moment When the nails are kissing the fingers good-bye And my only Chance is bleeding from me, When my one chance is bleeding, For speaking either truth or comfort I have no more tongue than a wound.

W.S. Merwin

#w. s. merwin

The day flies off without me

The planes bound for all points everywhere etch lines on my office window. From the top floor London recedes in all directions, and beyond: the world with its teeming hearts.

I am still, you move, I am a point of reference on a map; I am at zero meridian as you consume the longitudes. The pact we made to read our farewells exactly at two in the afternoon with you in the air holds me like a heavy winter coat.

Your unopened letter is in my pocket, beating.

John Stammers

#john stammers

I Want You to See

I want you to see the hole in my shirt where your heart went through like a Colt 45, and opened a dream at the back of the neck. Here, let me unbutton it for you. Notice the ribs, those sweet things you loved, notice the insides, the parchment lampshades, the books, the furniture. Notice yourself sitting, holding my hand on a winter night, notice the look in my eyes, now close it all up and walk away.

Stumble, pretend you're dead. Just for me, pretend you can be hurt by something so simple as a failed emotion. Pretend you have seen loss. For god's sake what was I holding when you said good morning.

Pier Giorgio Di Cicco

#pier giorgio di cicco

My Therapist Asks About My Mother And I Cannot Answer

She dug the ruts in the dirt road I must drive, past the rusted sign nailed to a post that’s read KEEP OUT for generations. The road peters out into a pasture rickracked with Queen Anne’s lace, ragweed, poison oak, barbed wire and dandelions in full yellow flower. I go ahead on foot. I pick the best bouquet I can. I pick my way across the field. I spot her standing by a sugar maple. She waves at me. She’s brought a blanket.

Lori Zimmermann in Broad!

#lori zimmermann

The Untrustworthy Speaker

Don’t listen to me; my heart’s been broken. I don’t see anything objectively. I know myself; I’ve learned to hear like a psychiatrist. When I speak passionately, that’s when I’m least to be trusted. It’s very sad, really: all my life, I’ve been praised for my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight. In the end, they’re wasted— I never see myself, standing on the front steps, holding my sister’s hand. That’s why I can’t account for the bruises on her arm, where the sleeve ends. In my own mind, I’m invisible: that’s why I’m dangerous. People like me, who seem selfless, we’re the cripples, the liars; we’re the ones who should be factored out in the interest of truth. When I’m quiet, that’s when the truth emerges. A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers. Underneath, a little gray house, the azaleas red and bright pink. If you want the truth, you have to close yourself to the older daughter, block her out: when a living thing is hurt like that, in its deepest workings, all function is altered. That’s why I’m not to be trusted. Because a wound to the heart is also a wound to the mind. Louise Glück

#Louise Glück

Antiope Bound, Unbound

"Antiope was long held prisoner, but one day her chains fell off of their own accord." --New Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology Handprints on my skin. I've forgotten how to pray. Count the feathers of a bird, count the ways you know to cry. The men they say are gods are old drunk fools. Mother appears to me in a scrim of yellow cotton. I see she has the body of a goddess, curved and wide, as father stands back, admiring her. I am naked, she says. There is nothing they can take from me now. I wake again bound, knees and elbows the tipped hinge of hips; what looks like collapse is a tightening coil, muscle on bone angled like wood for fire. But in a wind of dust and camphor a voice blows through me. Torn words, then words of bright green flame, sun's copper burning and these chains: a memory of sons, my body broken, a yellow dress. I empty my silence even of rage. They say I escaped as if by miracle, but I will tell you the miracle: I cut my throat open. I set myself free. Donna Frazier

#Donna Frazier

What It's Called

Skocjan, Slovenia It's called the Shepherd of the Snakes, this black butterfly with white spots. It's called Heart in a Sling, this small, heavy flower reaching down towards the earth. I learned this the other day from a man whose name dissolved into this limestone earth. Learned, later, that I have been living directly over the fault line of Mala Dolina, the little sinkhole, directly over the Reka river that appears and disappears like a snake in the grass. Eventually, everything we see commits a kind of suicide. Eventually, every star becomes a heap of cinders floating aimlessly. It's nearly 6 PM and I can hear the horses calling from somewhere beyond the rock wall. You can smell the rain in the air before it starts to rain, but there's nothing about the soul's weather we can know until later. It's called the soul's scar tissue, this distance from the dead. It's called the borja, the wind that tears across the stone roofs of this village at a hundred miles an hour. Beneath me, a people whose names have been lost for thousands of years took refuge by climbing into the caves hidden in these cliffs. The floors there are made of fallen roofs and hopes, broken histories. It means we are always walking above ourselves down there. It means we are walking above time. Above me now Jupiter and Venus echo each other from two corners of the sky. Beneath them the village graveyard holds the man who mapped the caves. The dead keep dying within us. It's like a drowned man's watch that still keeps time. The early bats are tying the air, the heart, into knots. They fly on the wings of grief. The late butterfly follows them over the edge of the cliff where the earth becomes the air we turn into. It's called mirror vision when we see what isn't here. The kind of faith that fails at unexpected moments the way a climber reaches for a hold that will never in his life, be there. It's called despair when we open the door of a heart that no longer exists. Jim Simmerman, 1954-2006 Richard Jackson

#Richard Jackson

Shipwreck

i. Arrival is another optical illusion of departure— to reach the bottom, the body is called upon to leave first: the surface, a self, the neck of a broken bottle that hangs by a string. Prior to drowning, people shout in unison with their faith—little fetish objects around their throat— but do not stop the ship from sinking. ii. Even water has a pulse. It slows down in the absence of living, and competes with movements that have to do with survival. The body swells, like a blister. Its mouth—drunk and half-open—as if forestalled from calling a name. iii. Arms transmute to hair, the hair to clothes, the clothes to skin—which in their turn outlive the flesh. Once the wristwatch is filled with water, it begins to let go of time. iv. For those who exist underwater, salt finds its way into the body and loses its identity as taste. Appetite covers great distances: the attraction of the dead lies on what they fill eventually. When the migratory fish leave, they are carrying away millimetres of face in their bellies. The eyes—full of drink and blindness—jut out as if in pain or a question mark after How did it come to this. In the end, not even the swollen tongue can fit itself back into the scheme of a mouth. To be part of the ocean is an experience in being. v. Once physical things have lost their function, they acquire a sorrow that belongs only to others. How soft, unborn the fingernails look now. And they say the last drink becomes a kind of love that remains independent of the body. Arlene Ang

#Arlene Ang

Inner Flamingo

At night my body discovers her secret geometries— inner-flamingo knee hitch, inner-flamenco arm arch, Hermes’ diagonal of flight across the mattress. The sleeping body is selfish. The sleeping body cannot lie. Once there was the man from whom I always woke huddled at the bed’s edge. Then there was a man who laid his lust as a doorknocker at the small of my back. The first time I laid down with you—sweat-stuck, each onioned in the skin of the other—I assumed the unconscious hours would peel us free. Yet when sun cracked its eye over the horizon, we were as we’d been. And the pink of me cocked her head, listening. Sandra Beasley

#Sandra Beasley

Tinder in a Time of Burning

I’m eight at the beginning, and it’s always the beginning: somewhere, silos daisy-ringed with guards. One night, my father comes home with the father from the next farm down the road, and they sit. Dark cups and the other man’s smoke. Shoulders like the haunches of huge, white bulls. My mother’s fears: government men and babies gone breech; the pigs my father lets roam in the woods, so in official records there are no pigs; the joy in his voice as he calls them home is a flare gun, is a circus cannon. The men fear someday knowing the sound of women dying. They hunch across our lazy susan, voices a hum of tones I’d hear behind my parent’s bedroom door: a low, old language, and the next day, changed. My mother with her face a blaze of morning. My father, quiet: the world. The world, devoured. Aubrey Ryan

#Aubrey Ryan

from Afterword

a great ease like death, poetry, both— that place where the two make between them a dove’s tail, how each necessarily means both the occasion for remember and the time finally for it, I’ve lived that life, each singing. It’s a dream, as I mentioned, therefore from the dream—waking: Carl Phillips

#Carl Phillips

I Could Not Tell

I could not tell I had jumped off that bus, that bus in motion, with my child in my arms, because I did not know it. I believed my own story: I had fallen, or the bus had started up when I had one foot in the air. I would not remember the tightening of my jaw, the irk that I’d missed my stop, the step out into the air, the clear child gazing about her in the air as I plunged to one knee on the street, scraped it, twisted it, the bus skidding to a stop, the driver jumping out, my daughter laughing Do it again. I have never done it again, I have been very careful. I have kept an eye on that nice young mother who lightly leapt off the moving vehicle onto the stopped street, her life in her hands, her life’s life in her hands. Sharon Olds

#Sharon Olds

Had I Been the Virgin Mary I Would Have Said No

A difficult problem in anatomy: how to attach wings to the shoulder blades of humans and make them look workable either the wings or the humans; carrying a tin trumpet and accompanied by a minstrel band that used to tour the South in the days before the germ theory had been discovered Gabriel shuffles in to make this one-time limited offer in an early illumination Mary is assumed into heaven by the agency of a sky-blue openwork elevator cage it does take careful thought; what is it about gods that insists on making more gods out of human beings crucifying them as one pits a peach, to release the seed? what is it about the human imagination that insists on being used by anybody in a beat-up 1936 Chevy with bruised fenders selling Old Doctor Barmecide's indigestion powders or demands the harsh ruffle of painfully-extended wings pulling the back muscles out of true, demands grace, as if without the mysterious secret ingredient Mary was not yet Mary, only an opportunity? William Dickey

#William Dickey

Dear Lacuna, Dear Lard

I’m here, one fat cherry blossom blooming like a clod, one sad groat glazing, a needle puling thread, so what, so sue me. These days what else to do but leer at any boy with just the right hairline. Hey! I say, That’s one tasty piece of nature. Tart Darkling, if I could I’d gin, I’d bargain, I’d take a little troll this moolit night, let you radish me awhile, let you gag and confound me. How much I’ve struggled with despicing you, always; your false poppets, relentless distances. Yet plea-bargaining and lack of conversation continue to make me your faithful indefile. I’m lonely. I’ve turned all rage to rag, all pratfalls fast to fatfalls for you, My Farmer in the Dwell. So struggle, strife, so strew me, to bell with these clucking mediocrities, these anxieties over such beings thirty, still smitten with this heaven never meant for, never heard from. You’ve said we’re each pockmarked like a golf course with what can’t be said of us, bred in us, isn’t our tasty piece of nature. But I tell you I’ve stars, I’ve true blue depths, have learned to use the loo, the crew, the whole slough of pill-popping devices without you, your intelligent and pitiless graze. Everyone knows love is just a euphemism for you’ve failed me anyway. So screw me. Bartering Yam, regardless of want I’m nothing without scope, hope, nothing without your possibility. So let’s laugh like the thieves we are together, the sieves: you, my janus gate, my Sigmund Fraud, my crawling, crack-crazed street sprawled out, revisible, spell-bound. Hello, joy. I’m thirsty. I’m Pasty Rectum. In your absence I’ve learned to fill myself with starts. Here’s my paters. Here’s my blue. I just wanted to write again and say how much I’ve failed you. Paisley Rekdal

#Paisley Rekdal

Grief

Somewhere in the Sargasso Sea the water disappears into itself, hauling an ocean in. Vortex, how you repeat a single gesture, come round to find only yourself, a cup full of questions, perhaps some curl of wisdom, a bit of flung salt. You hold an absence at your center, as if it were a life. Richard Brostoff

#Richard Brostoff

mesogeios

Music Is Only In The Piano When It’s Played

ecstasis

We are not one with this world. We are not the complexity our body is, nor the summer air idling in the big maple without purpose. We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves as it passes through. We are not the wood any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage between the two. We are certainly not the lake nor the fish in it, but the something that is pleased by them. We are the stillness when a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices of insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists only in the singing, and is not the singer. God does not live among the church bells, but is briefly resident there. We are occasional like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold on to the enterprise under way in our chest. Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat and giant sky, the sea stretching away. He continues past the nunnery to the old villa where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place, which is the difference between silence and windlessness.

Jack Gilbert

#jack gilbert

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

limits to saying