monedas para caronte

[gurhl]

right under this

arch of bone

theres a little tiny daydream

singing to me from the backseat.

with my back against

the golden concrete,

the under-colour of my eyelids

turns the sun into this

sleepy glowing cinema

where:

i’m two-step waltzing with you

by the tangerine lampstand

which makes the room sweet.

when we’re tired,

i’m kissing you ear to ear

and i turn that lampstand off.

by now — though — the sun is shining

from the 

inside

and it’s in this way that we keep

the light in

[exit152]

no more dead dog poems

i heard the sky spitting down rain. i drove my car all night. the heart remembers things that the body doesn’t want.  in an apocalypse it will be me and my bike.  in the next world it will be me and this steel frame.  i can reach for a million things in the dark and none of them  will ever feel like you. i just noticed,

everything goes. everything tries hard and then slinks off under the porch to die. i’m sounder. i’m old yeller. jack in little house on the prairie. you put me out of my misery, and i’m loyal through every awful second.

[shinji--moon-deactivated2017123]

Impossible to imagine. Buffaloes — a dream of them: coats thick with rain, bodies like continents. A whole world thundering through Indian laburnum. Think of beginnings: amusement parks at dawn, pianos, bedrooms, gods. Think of all the invisible insurrections it takes to wake a city from slumber. In these woods, a single man will do, armed with a stick and a paltry collection of stones. When I see buffaloes run I think of love — how it is held in the meaty, muscled pink of the tongue; how quickly it is beaten from us — all that brute resolve disappearing in the undergrowth.

Tishani Doshi, “Buffaloes” (via commovente)

[mixtapes]

Legends (for Eavan Frances)

Tryers of firesides,  Twilights. There are no tears in these.

Instead, they begin the world again, Making the mountain ridges blue and the rivers clear and the hero fearless - 

and the outcome always undecided so the next teller can say begin and again and astonish children

Our children are our legends. You are mine. You have my name. My hair was once like yours.

And the world is less bitter to me because you will re-tell the story.

-Eavan Boland

[endless-unfolding]

…how to explain that sometimes I can hear the river in those first days of April, making its way through the dusk, having learned to speak the way I once spoke, saying as if I didn’t love you, as if I wouldn’t have died for you.

Eavan Boland, from “The Room in Which My First Child Slept,” Poetry (October 2006)

[hush-syrup]

i am not afraid of whalesong or whitenoise. they will autopsy me and find me a daughter to tempests, no blood, lips like wet snails smashed in the plumdark well of waves where wishes go to bide their time, rapt and terrible.

From Mare Crisium by Sarah Catherine  (via shobijinsandy)

[lifeinpoetry]

o my people

         how long will we

reach for god

         instead of something sharper?

— Danez Smith, from “say it with your whole black mouth,” published in Poem-a-Day

[backshelfpoet]

No flinching then at fate. No wedding guests. No wake. No keen. No panegyric. I close my eye on the sun. I turn my back on the light.

The Burial At Thebes, Seamus Heaney (via backshelfpoet)

[honeychurch]

Call me rough, ill-tempered, slovenly— I tell you, every tenderness I have ever known has been nothing but thwarted violence, an ache so permanent and deep, the lightest touch awakens it … It is impossible to care enough. I have returned with a second Symphony and 15 Piano Variations which I’ve named Prometheus, after the rogue Titan, the half-a-god who knew the worst sin is to take what cannot be given back. I smile and bow, and the world is loud. And though I dare not lean in to shout Can’t you see that I’m deaf? — I also cannot stop listening.

from “Ludwig Van Beethoven’s Return to Vienna,” Rita Dove, 1952 (via honeychurch)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

“I recognize the wrists of distant angels.”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Book of Images; “The Silence,”

[sad7jr-deactivated20190922]

Narciso, Narciso. Las astas del ciervo asesinado son peces, son llamas, son flautas, son dedos mordisqueados. Narciso, Narciso. Los cabellos guiando florentinos reptan perfiles, labios sus rutas, llamas tristes las olas mordiendo sus caderas. Pez del frío verde el aire sin estrías, racimo de palomas ocultas en la garganta muerta: hija de la flecha y de los cisnes. Garza divaga, concha en la ola, nube en el desgaire, espuma colgada de los ojos, gota marmórea y dulce plinto no ofrecido.

José Lezama Lima, Muerte de Narciso (Fragmento)  (via sadjr)

[lifeinpoetry]

I announced you—wish, sequin, ampersand—all things arched and hopeful, and light became sound, became a yes bloomed in the lungs.

Nico Amador, from “A Brief History of Morning,” Flower Wars (via lifeinpoetry)

[ladylyrica-deactivated20181205]

Dark hills at evening in the west, where sunset hovers like a sound of golden horns that sang to rest old bones of warriors underground, far now from all the bannered ways where flash the legions of the sun, you fade - as if the last of days were fading, and all wars were done.

Edwin Arlington Robinson: “The Dark Hills”

anakinskywalkersblog featheredthings akitla dyingsighs weweregamblingtowin medovukha myo-da-soocha padmaynaberrie

(via ladylyrica)

[lifeinpoetry]

you wear your names the same way a deer wears a bullet in his neck, bleeding gently on a winter ground.

M.S. Swain, from “something took aim,” published in Thread (via lifeinpoetry)

[wintertangerine]

When you kissed me a stove flicked on, generators began to hum. We left each other like altars in a bombing run. In this room where you are not, night lowers itself all around me. I stare at my fingers - little archaeologists clutching brilliant shovels. They leap from my hands & begin to dig.

from Dear Sal, Jeremy Radin (via wintertangerine)

[literarymiscellany]

Mild merciful amnesia through which I’ve moved as through a blue atmosphere of almost and was, how is it now, like ruins unearthed by ruin, my childhood should rise? Lord, suffer me to sing these wounds by which I am made and marred, savor this creature whose aloneness you ease and are.

Christian Wiman, “Lord is Not a Word” from Every Riven Thing. (via atreides)

[elisabethhewer]

persephone writes her memoirs