l.a.whitehead

"she has taken back into her flesh, and made light, the dark seed of her pain." --wendell berry

[adrasteiax]

“The melancholy river bears us on. When the moon comes through the trailing willow boughs, I see you face, I hear your voice and the bird singing as we pass the osier bed. What are you whispering? Sorrow, sorrow. Joy, joy. Woven together, like reeds in moonlight.”

— Virginia Woolf, from The String Quartet in “Monday Or Tuesday: Eight Stories”

[soracities]

The humiliation I go through when I think of my past can only be described as grace. We are created by being destroyed.

Franz Wright, from ‘Letter’ (via soracities)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Universe, vast universe, my heart is vaster.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade, from Multitudinous Heart: Poems; “Seven-Sided Poem.” (via violentwavesofemotion)

[lawhitehead]

Names

It matters what you call a thing. It has been three years and sometimes Love still gets jammed up into my throat, resting there, tightly coiled, like some small animal waiting for you to return home again, unwilling to accept your passing, perhaps unable to comprehend what death really means in the end.

But is that really the word for it?  I look into the dark blue eyes of my eight-month-old child. Daughter, I call her. My lovely one. Love walks in her like summer wheat fields. Like the smell of wet earth and the sound of the river swelling up over the edge of the bank. Like her golden hair. My husband’s laughter.

What word do I give you, then? Your calloused hands and ordinary face. The pain you carried in your small mouth. Though the heart moves from time to time, when I call out it does not answer me. At times it slinks into the corner (is it slinks?) and rests there.  I think it knows you aren’t returning. What is it that it lingers for there in the darkness?

What is the name for that silent vessel inside the body? Those inanimate paperweights of memory surrounded by so much life? I try to study it, losing track at times of where it is crouching, swept up inside the tall grass and heavy trees. Cold sheets and the body of my husband pressed tightly around mine. Lover, I call him.

It matters what you call a thing. It has been three years and sometimes Love still gets stuck there, heavy. But that is not the name for it. For her navy eyes or his giant heart or your heavy one. I’m sorry I could not lift you. Macushla, I will call you. Pulse of my heart. Like orange rust forever settled in the iron. The weight of your hand on my shoulder that will never quite leave me.

--l.a.w.

[lawhitehead]

Collateral
I’m ready for things to change. For the world 
to be more beautiful. You are gone, and I want it 
to mean something, for the world to take on 
your loss in the form of love, less violence, more hands willing to be held inside the darkness. 
I want them to recognize the absence that lies here, frozen, like some small animal waiting inside 
the body until you are ready to come home again. 
But you are not returning. Your tall frame absent
from every street, each corner of time as it 
passes again and again. I’m tired of the forgetting, 
the moving on. The succession of moments that 
have left you behind in summer, holding you 
prisoner there in the dry street and the hot sun. 
You liked winter, the feel of cold rock against your calloused hands. Early mornings on top of a 
mountain when the wind cut your face and 
you could breathe the smell of absence. 
No human invention. I’m not ready for things
to change. For the world to be more beautiful without you. 
–l.a.w.

[lawhitehead]

Clearing

What we once were grows into the home where we are. The flowers go, peaches overripen, And in the final swelter, as a million days before, the trees and plants prepare their metamorphosis unto a temporary sleep, out of time’s grief, the ancient bounty of the fall. Their burden is transformation. In the intimacy of the forest histories are forever mending in the quiet gleam, the saintly lucence of the magnolia blossoms shifting in the cold air like delicate stars, quiet prayers of old white linen. Nature lives upon its bounty and prospers. Not one thing is forsaken. All that is taken, though in anguish, rises again through the heavy darkness. Hope tethers us to its stations, with its light that sings hymns inside the branches, that calls out to our bones to confirm the life that only ever lives by dying. Children play by the moon that constantly grows and expires, the lost lighted by the Star which in daytime hides behind a thick grey cloudline. The buds lie quietly beneath the soil, the world again lighted with ambers, reds and golds. The vine parts from the branches in the silence, lying patiently at the edge of sleep. Quietly we are hoisted out of despair, miles deep beneath the feasting canopy, back into the land we have called home.

–l.a.w

[lawhitehead]

Finish it. #finish #bukowski

[lawhitehead]

What is the word for that still thing I have hunted inside them for so long? #poetry #poem #jackgilbert #happeningapartfromwhatshappeningaroundit #somethingwedonthaveanamefor

[lawhitehead]

every day Love says this to me. every day I still find myself wildly excited and grateful and deeply humbled by the fact that it is true. I cannot wait for more unending days, both here and beyond. #love #marriage #grace #heaven

[lawhitehead]

Meteors

There is a type of meteor that lives inside the body, brilliant and shining beneath the flesh and blood, incessantly trying to move out of that darkness, to get to the other side of things.

Like the one in your eyes at times, when it was just the two of us sitting on the pavement, watching the rain fall and not fall and fall again. No sound except the starting and stopping, your shuffling hands.

I think of your shifting body as your jeep flipped over and over across the highway, for a moment flying across the sky until it stopped. Not falling and falling again, suddenly forever apart from me.

There is type of meteor that lives inside the body, restless, feral, beneath the thousand nerves and electrical impulses. Unable to move out of that moment, to get past the end of things.

–l.a.w.

[lawhitehead]

"Things like to get lost and be found again by others. Only human beings love to find themselves." #poetry #humans #poemsofjerusalem #yehudaamichai

[lawhitehead]

when you do nice things to me//all heavy industry shuts down. #poetry #wordsmatter #yehudaamichai #poemsofjerusalem #songsforawoman

[lawhitehead]

she was never crazy. she just didn't let her heart settle in a cage. #rmdrake #wild #feral (at Chattanooga, TN)

[lawhitehead]

“I am constantly trying to communicate something incommunicable, to explain something inexplicable, to tell about something I only feel in my bones and which can only be experienced in those bones.” #letters #bones #franzkafka

[lawhitehead]

#poetry #carlsandburg #isang

[lawhitehead]

An Ending

On this still day the sun swallowed everything in Knoxville while I walked, losing track of the hour, recounting all of the men I have ever loved. Conspicuously in love with everything. And yet still hunting down the moon, its fluid closing and opening in succession. Its slow revealing. That is to say I am not returning. To let you know I am closing doors and windows, boarding all of it up. Following the peonies dropping blossoms in the yard, littering the green weeds with ants and seeds. Beginning to flower by ending.

–l.a.w.

[lawhitehead]

--j.g. #jackgilbert #harmandboon #grief