Kosan

Curating

[zegalba]

Virgin Mary tears

[listentothestories]

Girl reading under a tree, circa 1920.

[april-is]

April 23, 2007: Meanwhile, Richard Siken

Meanwhile Richard Siken

Driving, dogs barking, how you get used to it, how you make                                                                                       the new street yours. Trees outside the window and a big band sound that makes you feel like                           everything’s okay,        a feeling that lasts for one song maybe,                                                              the parentheses all clicking shut behind you.                      The way we move through time and space, or only time. The way it’s night for many miles, and then suddenly                                                                     it’s not, it’s breakfast       and you’re standing in the shower for over an hour,                                                holding the bar of soap up to the light. I will keep watch.  I will water the yard.               Knot the tie and go to work.  Unknot the tie and go to sleep.                                                              I sleep.  I dream.  I make up things       that I would never say.  I say them very quietly.                                                   The trees in wind, the streetlights on,                     the click and flash of cigarettes being smoked on the lawn, and just a little kiss before we say goodnight.              It spins like a wheel inside you: green yellow, green blue,                                                                          green beautiful green.        It’s simple: it isn’t over, it’s just begun.  It’s green.  It’s still green.

== More like this: Litany in Which Certain Things are Crossed Out, Richard Siken Saying Your Names, Richard Siken

A year ago: Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, Amiri Baraka Two years ago: Holy Sonnet XIV, John Donne

[kosans]

, or only time.

I say them very queitly. 

,

green beautiful green.

[24hoursinthelifeofawoman]

[24hoursinthelifeofawoman]

[kosans]

fav

[kosans]

thought process

[kosans]

I love this video

[kosans]

I’M DYING

[learnarthistory]

[kosans]

Anna Akhmatova by Amedeo Modigliani (1911)

[kosans]

Sonnet #18

Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature's changing course, untrimm'd; But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st; Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st; So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

[kosans]

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.   His house is in the village though;   He will not see me stopping here   To watch his woods fill up with snow.   My little horse must think it queer   To stop without a farmhouse near   Between the woods and frozen lake   The darkest evening of the year.   He gives his harness bells a shake   To ask if there is some mistake.   The only other sound’s the sweep   Of easy wind and downy flake.   The woods are lovely, dark and deep,   But I have promises to keep,   And miles to go before I sleep,   And miles to go before I sleep.

[kosans]

Variation on the Word Sleep

by Margaret Atwood

I would like to watch you sleeping. I would like to watch you, sleeping. I would like to sleep with you, to enter your sleep as its smooth dark wave slides over my head

and walk with you through that lucent wavering forest of bluegreen leaves with its watery sun and three moons towards the cave where you must descend, towards your worst fear

I would like to give you the silver branch, the small white flower, the one word that will protect you from the grief at the center of your dream, from the grief at the center. I would like to follow you up the long stairway again & become the boat that would row you back carefully, a flame in two cupped hands to where your body lies beside me, and you enter it as easily as breathing in

I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary

[kosans]

Why I Am Not A Painter

by Frank O'Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet. Why? I think I would rather be a painter, but I am not. Well, for instance, Mike Goldberg is starting a painting. I drop in. "Sit down and have a drink" he says. I drink; we drink. I look up. "You have SARDINES in it." "Yes, it needed something there." "Oh." I go and the days go by and I drop in again. The painting is going on, and I go, and the days go by. I drop in. The painting is finished. "Where's SARDINES?" All that's left is just letters, "It was too much," Mike says. But me? One day I am thinking of a color: orange. I write a line about orange. Pretty soon it is a whole page of words, not lines. Then another page. There should be so much more, not of orange, of words, of how terrible orange is and life. Days go by. It is even in prose, I am a real poet. My poem is finished and I haven't mentioned orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES. 

[kosans]

Deus ex machine

[kosans]

Phantasmagorical

[kosans]

If I Were Another

by Mahmoud Darwish

If I were another on the road, I would not have looked back, I would have said what one traveler said to another: Stranger! awaken the guitar more! Delay our tomorrow so our road may extend and space may widen for us, and we may get rescued from our story together: you are so much yourself ... and I am so much other than myself right here before you! If I were another I would have belonged to the road, neither you nor I would return. Awaken the guitar and we might sense the unknown and the route that tempts the traveler to test gravity. I am only my steps, and you are both my compass and my chasm. If I were another on the road, I would have hidden my emotions in the suitcase, so my poem would be of water, diaphanous, white, abstract, and lightweight ... stronger than memory, and weaker than dewdrops, and I would have said: My identity is this expanse! If I were another on the road, I would have said to the guitar: Teach me an extra string! Because the house is farther, and the road to it prettier— that’s what my new song would say. Whenever the road lengthens the meaning renews, and I become two on this road: I ... and another!

[kosans]

Silence

by Thomas Hood

There is a silence where hath been no sound,   There is a silence where no sound may be,   In the cold grave—under the deep deep sea, Or in the wide desert where no life is found, Which hath been mute, and still must sleep profound;   No voice is hush’d—no life treads silently,   But clouds and cloudy shadows wander free, That never spoke, over the idle ground: But in green ruins, in the desolate walls   Of antique palaces, where Man hath been, Though the dun fox, or wild hyena, calls,   And owls, that flit continually between, Shriek to the echo, and the low winds moan, There the true Silence is, self-conscious and alone.