gutwrenching

[gut-wrenching]

He had hardly ever been in there, since his first summer, when he had walked around noiselessly, with his hands behind his back, an intruder in the temple of marital love; his own love fantasies had taken envious possession of it, like squatters, in the married couple’s absence.

Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

[gut-wrenching]

Everyone’s getting older. When I crossed that line in my mind where I knew I was with the person that I wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. You know that’s hopefully after many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose.

Joanna Newsom, in interview

[gut-wrenching]

In the contest of “Imagination vs. Reality,” I am drawn to “versus.”

Dodie Bellamy, ‘Incarnation’

[gut-wrenching]

Why did I write? what sin to me unknown dipped me in ink, my parents’, or my own? As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came. I left no calling for this idle trade, No duty broke, no father disobeyed. The Muse but served to ease some friend, not wife, To help me through this long disease, my life.

Alexander Pope, ‘Epistle to Dr Arubthnot’

[gut-wrenching]

Walking Like A Robin

take 3 or 4 steps then stop look taste smell touch & hear is there anything to eat? oh look, there’s some caviar it must be my birthday, thanks i must be very old, like seventy i guess I’m falling apart, i’ll just sew myself back together but will it last? please take a piece of me back home, each piece is anti-war and don’t pay your rent. in fact, remember: property is robbery, give everybody everything. other birds walk this way too.

Bernadette Mayer

[gut-wrenching]

Silly me. I thought love was real & the body imaginary.

Ocean Vuong, 'Eurydice'

[gut-wrenching]

Who, if cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies? and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure, and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies

[gut-wrenching]

Patient Zero Rides the Medium of Flight, 1978

The work of a flight attendant is volume, get the orders taken, get the food out there, don’t spend too long on any one question.

Sometimes there are people in your section who have never flown before,

they ask you which cities are underneath them.

You see an aristocratic thrill cross their faces,

like the people who first started to fly over the middle states, above the fields and sparse water, later and later each day, until the light grew low and dangerous.

Soon, on the contours of San Francisco, the hidden levels of Manhattan, men will be rising into their rooms for days at a time.

The doctors will start to piece your history together on the table in front of them,

they will stare at the new implications of flight.

Gaetan, when they tell you to stop having sex, they mean, The world is different now it could be different for years and years.

You won’t ask them if they’re happy in their work.

Or what else you should live for, suddenly, dying, after ten years just beautiful and wanted.

Joel Zizik

[gut-wrenching]

A Geat woman too sang out in grief; with hair bound up, she unburdened herself of her worst feats, a wild litany of nightmare and lament; her nation invaded, enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles, slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.

Beowulf, tr. Seamus Heaney

[gut-wrenching]

Scimitar curve of the coast, the bright lights of Hotel Helios at night blue on the Tigullian, houses in Liguria, how above the café awnings, a palimpsest of colors – apricot and ochre, the huddled Italian pines, red roofs with curved repetitive tiles, the church of Santa Margherita a Montici where Galileo went for comfort.

These things I store against the dying of friends, blackouts, my own death parched and miniscule, the heart beating out its own defiance.

I want to sing, Where e’re you walk, my voice rising, cool games shall fan the glade. I want to sing, I attempt from love’s sickness to fly in vain. I want to sing, Blow, blow, thy winter wind. I want to sing, Lullay, lullay, the faulcon hath bourne my love away.

Edith Jenkins

[gut-wrenching]

I refuse to remember the dead. And the dead are bored with the whole thing. But you – you go ahead, go on, go on back down into the graveyard, lie down where you think their faces are; talk back to your own bad dreams.

Anne Sexton, 'A Curse Against Elegies'

[gut-wrenching]

The stream and the broken pottery; what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself, - life hurry past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars. In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a vessel of one’s throat and nostrils and held it on one’s breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals.

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

[gut-wrenching]

1 There is a gold light in certain old paintings That represents a diffusion of sunlight. It is like happiness, when we are happy. It comes from everywhere and from nowhere at all And the poor soldiers sprawled at the feet Share in its charity equally with the cross.

2 Orpheus hesitated beside the black river. With so much to look forward to he looked back. We think he sang then, but the song is lost. At least he had seen once more the beloved back. I say the song went this way: O prolong Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong.

3 The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work. One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good. The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar. Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good. And all that we suffered through having existed Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.

Donald Justice

[gut-wrenching]

Aubade Beginning in Handcuffs

After sam sax

Sometimes I pronounce aubade: obeyed for the way this particular desire stumbles the tongue. Hunger’s vocabulary is a fickle

thing. How many lovers have said that they adore me, but meant instead they saw in me a door? A thing to be entered. Language

shifts an image like the light. To lash can mean both beat & bind. I’m lashed against the bed by dawn’s red blaze. The whole room welted

tidy by the sky between the blinds. To cuff can also mean to hold or harm, each word doubled – body & a body’s shadow. I want

& all at once I flicker beneath you. I beg you to bruise me & so exchange faggot for fruit. O, how gentle lust alters a body, conjugates

Prey into prayer. The history of handcuffs is old as myth if memory serves. The legend goes, Greek hero invented them to steal

prophecy from the mouth of a shapeshifter god & the story gathered blood from there. The root of the word religion is a Latin verb

meaning to bind. As in, the worshipper is bound to their god. Two hands paired in steel or prayer. When I say obey, I mean we have chosen

the softer side of every verb, dulled the sharp edge of a memory, sea glass against the tongue. For the first time, when the handcuffs’ steel

lips unkiss my wrists as morning stains every surface a fading bruise, I am already free as the first breath after confession.

Torrin A. Greathouse

[gut-wrenching]

On the evenings when my parents held parties, the drawing-room mirrors multiplied to infinity the scintillations of a crystal chandelier. Mama would take her seat the grand piano to accompany a lady dressed in a cloud of tulle who played the violin and a cousin who performed on the cello. I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of black-currant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth. I was never attracted to paradises flowing with milk and honey, but I envied Hansel and Gretel their gingerbread house: if only the universe we inhabit were completely edible, I used to think, what power we would have over it! When I was grown up I wanted to crunch flowering almond trees, and take bites out of the rainbow nougat of the sunset. Against the night sky of New York, the neon signs appeared to me like giant sweetmeats and made me feel frustrated.

Simone De Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, tr. James Kirkup

[gut-wrenching]

Revolutionary Letter #12

the vortex of creation is the vortex of destruction the vortex of artistic creation is the vortex of self destruction the vortex of political creation is the vortex of flesh destruction flesh is in the fire, it curls and terribly warps fat is in the fire, it drips and sizzling sings bones are in the fire they crack tellingly in subtle hieroglyphs of oracle charcoal signed the smell of your burning hair for every revolutionary must at last will his own destruction rooted as he is in the past he sets out to destroy

Diane di Prima

[gut-wrenching]

Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form; Then, have I reason to be fond of grief? Fare you well: had you such a loss as I, I could not give better comfort than you do. I will not keep this form upon my head, When there is such disorder in my wit. O Lord! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son! My life, my joy, my food, my all the world! My widow-comfort, and my sorrows’ cure!

William Shakespeare, King John