[derangedrhythms]

Lucie Brock-Broido, Trouble In Mind; Periodic Table of Ethereal Elements

[numinous-blue]

You bury your father in the morning.

In the night, bless your newborn daughter.

The dark before and the dark beyond may be near dearest ends of the same taut dark.

And you - the spark,

then the light no longer.

[centipomp]

Letter to Nora 3 Dec. 1909, James Joyce

[petaltexturedskies]

But I do feel strange—almost unearthly. I’ll never get used to being alive. It's a mystery. Always startled to find I've survived.

John Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters

[riverbird]

"Even now, when the plot  calls for me to turn to stone,  the sun intervenes. Some mornings  in summer I step outside  and the sky opens  and pours itself into me  as if I were a saint  about to die. But the plot  calls for me to live,  be ordinary, say nothing  to anyone. Inside the house  the mirrors burn when I pass." Lisel Mueller, There Are Mornings

[numinous-blue]

Slowly she knelt with arms outstretched,

bowed with palms upturned.

She wept on the dirt where we buried our bird.

[wovi]

[riverbird]

“It is late, but the darkness breaks open. Mercy grows in you. The green fires of night burn through the same air that lifted birds. And this is how a whole life unfolds—in minutes too painful and rich for you to bear them. Copper roofs holding sun, the smell of thyme, cements laced with rain. You were a child and then a storm. You were a garden. Even as you die you will not cease to dream.” Joanna Klink, in "The Nightfields"

[numinous-blue]

I press fast-forward to watch your battered hands turn magenta in real time.

“I’m for real this time, mother fucker!”

You shout and hiss and spit through the bars.

I lock the heavy door behind me.

I go out to sell light on the roads but no one is buying.

Another condescending glance.

Another careless whisper.

Another snake oil recession in city park.

I break yellow leaves on my walk home.

I know this has always been my body,

but I don’t know why it stopped singing.

I want brief embrace. I want swift maroon.

Don’t wait around for the bloom.

This body was a boy’s body, was a bag’s body.

Unlocking the door, I look forward to hearing you move.

When your callous scuffs the stone I imagine you in dancing shoes

but the daydream caves to your hunger, your rage.

You slept in the center of the room while I built the

house you grew up in.

Or I tried to.

I didn’t know about the fire.

Your memory the dagger, your future the wound.

I go out to sell light on the roads but no one is buying.

There’s a boy on a bench drawing smoke plumes.

He kicks his feet, he hums a tune.

He turns to me and asks, “What’s the opposite of a bloom?”

I know you will come for your share.

My body is a bag and your bag fits a body.

I’ve decided to give up fighting.

My heart is run through.

I unlock the cage.

The screeching gate.

Silent as stone.

No longer you move.

[thirdity]

“Intimacy cannot be expressed discursively. The swelling to the bursting point, the malice that breaks out with clenched teeth and weeps; the sinking feeling that doesn’t know where it comes from or what it’s about; the fear that sings its head off in the dark; the white-eyed pallor, the sweet sadness, the rage and the vomiting…are so many evasions. What is intimate, in the strong sense, is what has the passion of an absence of individuality, the imperceptible sonority of a river, the empty limpidity of the sky.”

— Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion

[asparagusfingers]

Abandoned house in the country ~ southern americana

[numinous-blue]

There are nights when the earth’s shell shifts suddenly

and bitterness rises like a mountain in me.

I want to ask “Where have you been?”

but the stone has its peak in my throat again.

Your eyes age backwards as you struggle against the jaws of the river.

Currents crash against your frame and you ask why I’m leaving but it’s you this time.

This time you’re not a life.

You are at the mercy of virtueless water.

You are twice the age you were when the fountain unraveled and by each floundered hour the skin does tear.

The fish are ravenous.

I want to seal their mouths and poison myself with the pleasure of their slow starvation.

I too am virtueless with this mountain in me.

There are nights when the mountain shatters this indifferent sky and the stars coalesce into a shining blade.

I confess contempt for the empty space carved to hold your shape.

But for the shrivel of years, my grief is the same:

Currents keep you.

You are not in the box.

[undinesea]

Photos by Cristina / Luna_Atlantis

[brightdeadthing]

Come. And Be My Baby, Maya Angelou

[duxuebing]

Photography by Xuebing Du

[numinous-blue]

Petals __________________________________________ She opens slowly, french doors after storm unmoored. When my lips meet the mouth of the river, her petals are heavy with rain.

[julesofnature]

A Blessing For One Who Is Exhausted When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic, Time takes on the strain until it breaks; Then all the unattended stress falls in On the mind like an endless, increasing weight, The light in the mind becomes dim. Things you could take in your stride before Now become laborsome events of will. Weariness invades your spirit. Gravity begins falling inside you, Dragging down every bone. The tide you never valued has gone out. And you are marooned on unsure ground. Something within you has closed down; And you cannot push yourself back to life. You have been forced to enter empty time. The desire that drove you has relinquished. There is nothing else to do now but rest And patiently learn to receive the self You have forsaken for the race of days. At first your thinking will darken And sadness take over like listless weather. The flow of unwept tears will frighten you. You have traveled too fast over false ground; Now your soul has come to take you back. Take refuge in your senses, open up To all the small miracles you rushed through. Become inclined to watch the way of rain When it falls slow and free. Imitate the habit of twilight, Taking time to open the well of color That fostered the brightness of day. Draw alongside the silence of stone Until its calmness can claim you. Be excessively gentle with yourself. Stay clear of those vexed in spirit. Learn to linger around someone of ease Who feels they have all the time in the world. Gradually, you will return to yourself, Having learned a new respect for your heart And the joy that dwells far within slow time. -John O'Donohue, from 'To Bless the Space Between Us'

[numinous-blue]

Prophet of the Autumn Curtain

Your heart was run through with silver, undone and rebloomed swooning gossamer after baby blue. The empty cradle the deluge swept bereft and left  you choking on ivy like a home forgotten to eons, kept only by zephyr breaths caressing fields of flowered rest.

We dreamt a full measure of peace within the breadth your wingspan weaved. We drank the blood of angels until dreaming red rivers found the riverbed barren.

The prophet of the autumn curtain keeps windswept the white lace before the window bathing golden upon your birdcage where the sanguine stillness stares out vacant at our freshly-tilled fields, dirt spilled in endless rows over wild clover like wakes of frozen griefwaves.

~

I understand loss now. I carry oblivion in my own heart.

I wanted a eulogy for the mountain’s range of roadkill unsung into rest. I wanted a god blameless as carrion. I wanted my wasteland and my garden equally adored. I wanted just one more golden hour without the darkness cast  by the vulture’s wings like the shadows on the sunless side of your arms-wide french doors.

                                                                                                  ~