things i save

[saying]

[ever-real]

“Sex without love” by Sharon Olds

How do they do it, the ones who make love

without love? Beautiful as dancers,

gliding over each other like ice-skaters

over the ice, fingers hooked

inside each other's bodies, faces

red as steak, wine, wet as the

children at birth whose mothers are going to

give them away. How do they come to the

come to the come to the God come to the

still waters, and not love

the one who came there with them, light

rising slowly as steam off their joined

skin? These are the true religious,

the purists, the pros, the ones who will not

accept a false Messiah, love the

priest instead of the God. They do not

mistake the lover for their own pleasure,

they are like great runners: they know they are alone

with the road surface, the cold, the wind,

the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-

vascular health--just factors, like the partner

in the bed, and not the truth, which is the

single body alone in the universe

against its own best time.

[ever-real]

“Splittings” by Adrienne Rich

1.

My body opens over San Francisco like the day –

light raining down each pore crying the change of light

I am not with her I have been waking off and on

the presence of the past destructive

to living here and now Yet if I could instruct

myself, if we could learn to learn from pain

even as it grasps us if the mind, the mind that lives

in this body could refuse to let itself be crushed

in that grasp it would loosen Pain would have to stand

off from me and listen its dark breath still on me

but the mind could begin to speak to pain

and pain would have to answer:

We are older now

we have met before these are my hands before your eyes

my figure blotting out all that is not mine

I am the pain of division creator of divisions

it is I who blot your lover from you

and not the time-zones or the miles

It is not separation calls me forth but I

who am separation And remember

I have no existence apart from you

2.

I believe I am choosing something now

not to suffer uselessly yet still to feel

Does the infant memorize the body of the mother

and create her in absence? or simply cry

primordial loneliness? does the bed of the stream

once diverted mourning remember the wetness?

But we, we live so much in these

configurations of the past I choose

to separate her from my past we have not shared

I choose not to suffer uselessly

to detect primordial pain as it stalks toward me

flashing its bleak torch in my eyes blotting out

her particular being the details of her love

I will not be divided from her or from myself

by myths of separation

while her mind and body in Manhattan are more with me

than the smell of eucalyptus coolly burning on these hills

3.

The world tells me I am its creature

I am raked by eyes brushed by hands

I want to crawl into her for refuge lay my head

in the space between her breast and shoulder

abnegating power for love

as women have done or hiding

from power in her love like a man

I refuse these givens the splitting

between love and action I am choosing

not to suffer uselessly and not to use her

I choose to love this time for once

with all my intelligence.

[poem-locker]

Lucie Brock-Broido, “After the Grand Perhaps”

  After vespers, after the first snow has fallen to its squalls, after New Wave, after the anorexics have curled into their geometric forms, after the man with the apparition in his one bad eye has done red things behind the curtain of the lid & sleeps, after the fallout shelter in the elementary school has been packed with tins & other tangibles, after the barn boys have woken, startled by foxes & fire, warm in their hay, every part of them blithe & smooth & touchable, after the little vandals have tilted toward the impossible seduction to smash glass in the dark, getting away with the most lethal pieces, leaving the shards which travel most easily through flesh as message on the bathroom floor, the parking lots, the irresistible debris of the neighbor’s yard where he’s been constructing all winter long.   After the pain has become an old known friend, repeating itself, you can hold on to it.   The power of fright, I think, is as much as magnetic heat or gravity.   After what is boundless: wind chimes, fertile patches of the land, the ochre symmetry of fields in fall, the end of breath, the beginning of shadow, the shadow of heat as it moves the way the night heads west, I take this road to arrive at its end where the toll taker passes the night, reading.   I feel the cupped heat of his left hand as he inherits change; on the road that is not his road anymore I belong to whatever it is which will happen to me.   When I left this city I gave back the metallic waking in the night, the signals of barges moving coal up a slow river north, the movement of trains, each whistle like a woodwind song of another age passing, each ambulance would split a night in two, lying in bed as a little girl, a fear of being taken with the sirens as they lit the neighborhood in neon, quick as the fire as it takes fire & our house goes up in night.   After what is arbitrary: the hand grazing something too sharp or fine, the word spoken out of sleep, the buckling of the knees to cold, the melting of the parts to want, the design of the moon to cast unfriendly light, the dazed shadow of the self as it follows the self, the toll taker’s sorrow that we couldn’t have been more intimate.   Which leads me back to the land, the old wolves which used to roam on it, the one light left on the small far hill where someone must be living still.   After life there must be life.

[shapeofwe-blog]

“Where in this city, screens flicker

with pornography, with science-fiction vampires, 

victimized hirelings bending to the lash, 

we also have to walk…if simply as we walk

through the rain soaked garbage, the tabloid cruelties

of our own neighborhoods. 

We need to grasp our lives inseparable

from those rancid dreams, that blurt of metal, those disgraces,

and the red begonia perilously flashing

from a tenement still six stories high,

or the long-legged young girls playing ball in the junior high school playground. 

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees, sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,

dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding, 

our animal passion rooted in the city.

From Adrienne Rich’s “The Dream of a Common Language, pg. 25

[emopanther1]

“I’m never gonna wait that extra twenty minutes to text you back, and I’m never gonna play hard to get when I know your life has been hard enough already. When we all know everyone’s life has been hard enough already it’s hard to watch the game we make of love, like everyone’s playing checkers with their scars, saying checkmate whenever they get out without a broken heart. Just to be clear I don’t want to get out without a broken heart. I intend to leave this life so shattered there’s gonna have to be a thousand separate heavens for all of my flying parts.”

— Andrea Gibson

[graveyarddirt]

Temptation

A poem for Brigid on Imbolc:

Call yourself alive? Look, I promise you that for the first time you’ll feel your pores opening like fish mouths, and you’ll actually be able to hear your blood surging through all those lanes, and you’ll feel light gliding across the cornea like the train of a dress. For the first time you’ll be aware of gravity like the thorn in your heel, and you’ll shoulder baldes will ache for the want of wings. Call yourself alive? I promise you you’ll be deafened by dust falling on furniture, you’ll feel your eyebrows turning into two gashes, and every memory you have – will begin at Genesis.

Temptation, by Nina Cassian (Translated by: Brenda Walker & Andrea Deletant)

[mykectown]

[poem-locker]

Lauren K. Alleyne, "It is not impossible to survive— "

You have mastered solitude, struggled to unpack the thick realities of time and matter. Love has flattened you. Measured, you have faced your least loveliness.

How fragile God’s graffiti, the text of us scrawled wild, twisted into this renegade, complex sentence of living! How the making betrays and becomes us!

Look at the tree revise its body daily, spectacularly rendered through the small violence of loss. If nothing else, learn this: You are not broken, but rearranged.

[austinkleon]

My father was a very disciplined and punctual man; it was a prerequisite for his creativity. There was a time for everything: for work, for talk, for solitude, for rest. No matter what time you get out of bed, go for a walk and then work, he’d say, because the demons hate it when you get out of bed, demons hate fresh air. So when I make up excuses not to work, I hear his voice in my head: Get up, get out, go to your work.

Linn Ullmann on her father, Ingmar Bergman (via)

[serious]

[shannonwest]

Zoe Leonard, “I Want A Dyke For President”