this one wild and precious life

[proustitute]

Listen to the nothing. Be the blank.

Edmond Jabès, from The Book of Margins, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (via proustitute)

[8tracks]

[thisonewildandpreciouslife]

My morning ritual.

[apoetreflects]

The first dead leaves lie like sea urchins                                                     browned on the asphalt erie. It’s got to be October, Slayer of living things, refrigerator of memory. Next to the wilted lettuce, next to the Simone Weil, Our lives are shoved in,                                        barely visible, but still unspoiled.

Charles Wright, opening lines to “October, Mon Amour," Caribou: Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2014)

[apoetreflects]

Is there a happiness later on that is neither fierce nor reasonable? A time when the heart is fresh again, and a time after that when the heart is ripe?

Jack Gilbert, from “Beyond Beginnings,” The Great Fires: Poems 1982-1992 (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)

[varietyart-deactivated20190117]

[contemporary-art-blog]

Jim Lambie, ‘Answer Machine’, Sadie Coles HQ, London

[metaphorformetaphor]

I see myself as some lost swimmer of the night who must discover where he goes by going. […] I swim from maybe to the merely real and make them one with words. —Samuel Hazo, from “Lost Swimmer,” And the Time Is: Poems, 1958-2013 (Syracuse University Press, 2014)

[marionblank-blog]

© Marion Blank, Campagne, 2014

[thisonewildandpreciouslife]

i love the shadows of trees - they make my heart leap 

[justlittlethings]

[thisonewildandpreciouslife]

“The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.”

Abraham Maslow

[thisonewildandpreciouslife]

Spoon's latest - delish

[barnsburntdownnow]

But mostly I just stand in the dark field, in the middle of the world, breathing

Mary Oliver, from ”What Is There Beyond Knowing,” New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (Beacon Press, 2005)

[thisonewildandpreciouslife]

Tarp - by Rick Barot

I have seen the black sheets laid out like carpets

under the trees, catching the rain

of  olives as they fell. Also the cerulean brightness of   the one covering the bad roof

of  a neighbor’s shed, the color the only color inside the winter’s weeks. Another one

took the shape of   the pile of   bricks underneath. Another flew off the back of a truck,

black as a piano if a piano could rise into the air. I have seen the ones under bridges,

the forms they make of sleep. I could go on this way until the end of the page, even though

what I have in my mind isn’t the thing itself, but the category of   belief that sees the thing

as a shelter for what is beneath it. There is no shelter. You cannot put a tarp over

a wave. You cannot put a tarp over a war. You cannot put a tarp over the broken

oil well miles under the ocean. There is no tarp for that raging figure in the mind

that sits in a corner and shreds receipts and newspapers. There is no tarp for dread,

whose only recourse is language so approximate it hardly means what it means:

He is not here. She is sick. She cannot remember her name. He is old. He is ashamed.

Hear him read his poem at: www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/245802

[thisonewildandpreciouslife]

Thornbury pier

this is where i spent my summer and finally learnt to swim real distances - when the water is clear you can see the bottom and the sunlight slants illuminating all the life there is 

[andreiguruianu-deactivated20160]

We are all looking for the stamp that will carry us from here. It will be weighed down with the glue of a tongue that cannot speak its own history. It will be in the color and shape of innocent forms, of preutterance. It will not weigh anything. In its arms it can hold the wheat and the chaff, the freshly cut sunlight we stole and wrapped in a fold of air.

[dear-photograph]

Dear Photograph, It was 70 years ago when my mother dipped her toes in Lake Cavloc, Switzerland along side her father and sister. Beauty was all around them and so were the echoes of youth. My mother’s view has changed now that she lives in a nursing home. Wouldn’t it have been something if the waters they had danced in had washed the fountain of youth over them… Peter

[apoetreflects]

My thoughts for [her] glow like quarry light.

Variation on a line from “Sunday” by Michael McGriff, from Home Burial (Copper Canyon Press, 2012)