treading lightly

[literatuer]

I practice praying while he snores in my ear.

His sighs are my cheat code. God must have

a soft spot for me. I’m not dead yet. I perfect

my amen to close out future prayers. I nudge

him to roll on his side & soften his breathing.

He reaches out to hold me without opening

an eye. Thank you God, amen I whisper. How

can I claim God doesn’t listen to sinners?

How else could I get such a blessing?

— Raych Jackson in Even the Saints Audition

[simena]

Betsy Westendorp

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“From the earliest times, poetry has existed in order to retrieve, to find again, and to release. In the poet who writes poems, in the reader who lives it again, in the ideas, the wit, the images, the doctrines, the exhortations, the laments and the cries of joys; the lost forest struggles to be born again inside the word. The life of urge and instinct, that rages and coos, kicks and frolics, as it chooses only without choosing—this life is the life the poem grows from, and leans toward.”

— Donald Hall, from his essay “Gootfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird: The Psychic Origins of Poetic Form,” Claims for Poetry, ed. Donald Hall (University of Michigan Press, 1991); Requiescat in pace, Donald Hall, September 20, 1928 – June 23, 2018

[bibliofumes]

“They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life…but there’s still one more tier to all this; there is always that one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable… This is because the individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real— but you create the context. And context is everything. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they’re often just the person you happen to meet the first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.”

— Chuck Klosterman, Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story (via thelovejournals)

[paper-fairy]

“If you are in the garden, I will dress myself in leaves. If you are in the sea I will slide into that smooth blue nest, I will talk fish, I will adore salt.”

— Mary Oliver, from section 7 of “Rhapsody,” in The Leaf and The Cloud: A Poem (Da Capo Press, 2000)

[literatuer]

Alternate Endings

There are times when they gather at the edge of your life, Shadows slipping over the far hills, daffodils blooming too early, the dark matter of the universe that threads its way through the few thousand blackbirds that have invaded the trees out back. Every ending

sloughs off our dreams like snakeskin. This is the kind of black ice the mind skids across. The candlelight burning down into the sand. The night leaving its ashes in our eyes.

There are times when your voice turns over in my sleep. It is no longer blind. The sky is no longer deaf.

There are times when it seems the stars practice all night just to become fireflies, when it seems there is no end to what our hearts scribble on corridor walls. Only when we look at each other do we cease to be ourselves. Only at a certain height does the smoke blend into air. There are times when your words seem welded to that sky.

There are times when love is so complicated it circles like chimney swifts unable to decide where to land. There are endings so sad their shadows scuff the dirt. Their sky is as inconsolable as the two year old, Zahra, torn from her mother and beaten to death in the Sudan.

There are endings so sad I want the morning light to scourge the fields. Endings that are only what the river dreams when it dries up. Endings that are constant echoes.

There are times when I think we are satellites collecting dust from one of the earlier births of the universe Don’t give up.

Each ending is an hourglass filled with doors. There are times when I feel you might be searching for me, when I can read what is written on the far sides of stars. I’m nearly out of time. My heart is a dragonfly. I’ll have to settle for this, standing under a waterfall of words you never said. There are times like this when no ending appears, times when I am so inconsolably happy.

Richard Jackson

[dearorpheus]

I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal On turf banks under blankets, with our faces Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle, Pallid as the dripping sapling birches. Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate. Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found. Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out Like breathing effigies on a raised ground. And in that dream I dreamt — how like you this? Our first night years ago in that hotel When you came with your deliberate kiss To raise us towards the lovely and painful Covenants of flesh; our seperateness; The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.

X, from Glanmore Sonnets, by Seamus Heaney

[mythologyofthepoetandthemuse]

Circe, the Enchantress by Edmund Dulac, 1915.

[lionofchaeronea]

Circe Invidiosa, John William Waterhouse, 1892

[via-appia]

Circe, 1889

Wright Barker (1864 - 1941)

[arjuna-vallabha]

Circe by Beatrice Offor

[femminabalba]

The Young Martyr by Paul Delaroche (detail)

[literatuer]

“It appears that it was all a misunderstanding. What was only a trial run was taken seriously. The rivers will return to their beginnings. The wind will cease in its turning about. Trees instead of budding will tend to their roots. Old men will chase a ball, a glance in the mirror– They are children again. The dead will wake up, not comprehending. Till everything that happened has unhappened. What a relief! Breathe freely, you who have suffered much.”

— Czeslaw Milosz, “This World,” Facing the River

[merulae]

“Want everything. If you break break going out not in.”

— Michael Ondaatje, from “To a Sad Daughter” 

[merulae]

“Maybe the ocean is nothing except the sound of being born. You must remember, don’t you? The cold air hitting your skin? The hands you fell into?”

— Ben Purkert, from “News” in The New Yorker

[literatuer]

“I am always moving toward you. On my bad days, I say to myself: “then you.” Sure, this now. But then you.”

— from “Laugh Lines” in The Dogs I Have Kissed by Trista Mateer

[nemophilies-deactivated20190428]

“When you ask your lover what he is thinking, aren’t you really asking Do I occur to you? do I take place? Sometimes to walk toward anyone is the wilderness.”

— Christina Davis from Border Patrol