This Recording @thisrecording - Tumblr Blog

The dew had not yet dried on the white-ribbed awnings and the nodding palanquins of umbrella yams. The dark grove had not heat but early mornings of perpetual freshness. Goats forage the new wreaths. Everything that echoed repeated its outline. Sometimes she dozed in flight, closings the seeds of her stare, then ruddering straight. Then, one dawn the day-star rose slowly from the wrong place and it frightened her because all the breakers were blowing from the east. She saw the horned island. – derek walcott

Sometimes the ghost arrives before the body is gone and the breath which will one day white, there will be walls or illness may be the cause and cause the ghost to crawl up inside, a bright illness, when the eyes go, and the ghost crawls around looking like you. And we talk quietly, and she says things I remember you saying, but at the time they were out of context and made no sense. Now I look around the room that fits. And I walk across the room with my eyes closed. – cole swensen

Grand and Broadway flooded with rain or turquoise light. Are the cracks moving? Is the earth rising? This has happened before: list the years. No one can avoid distractions. I love you, you are deer, we don’t hear images from you anymore. Little thin branches are clearer than the air. Mist is always in the distance. I looked at the tree with the sun in it. I looked across the road into the meadow. Some memories qualify. I’m walking north to find a hotel to spend a night closer to the ruins. Love anger. – bernadette mayer

Snow light growing the shadows of sycamores. The feathers you know warm with your own body. You laugh at the cafe where we meet and tell me when we give our coats back. I make angels in the air. The bare pine seller stands; the wit of another woman’s neck lingering in the lining. I hope you’ll forgive me for wanting to verse your instrument. – rachel eliza griffiths

One after another, the shadowy, houselike trees were observed, avoided, and passed. Far overhead the little patch of glowing sky was still always visible; otherwise he had no clue to the time of day. The tree trunks were like round towers, and so wide were the intervals that they resembled natural amphitheatres. When, presently, the twilight seemed to thin, he guessed that the open world was not far away. He could not make out the colour of the bark. He thought it more than likely that he would never be able to face the sun and go on living. Still, some modification might happen to him that would make it possible. – david lindsay

Just today I saw a jet stream and knew it was your yellow tail. There was a lonely summer where I took the string and unraveled the magic circle. No, it was winter. The girl said her poem was called Winter. If I could have wrapped you in purple robes for the rest of my life, I would have. They took the red string which bound me to you. They sank it in the center of the ocean. – dorothea lasky

We raced back across the fastest, brightest, autumn sea. Sights were inaccurate: one long ribbon beach a mirage, seducing us from the north. A curving bay shaped like a siren’s mouth. A few pulled back in time, but never whole. All elements reversing to the immaculate. The breeze turned sweet and whistled us awake. Only the land we stood on, testing our own reflection. The cat was making love again. – carolyn kizer

Tuesday, the sky still spits its fancywork. Wherever the chickadees swim to is secret. You occur to me as that cough in the chimney, that phlegm-fall while the wood fire steams, hard put to keep itself from going out. Late afternoon. In a lull I go out to look the woods over. Last night at that sneakstorm time (God sleeping, me working out among the rerun dreams), two white-throated sparrows woke me. After the emptying out, under the latticework of old trees, the ribs of all my dears. Leave people out of this. – maxine kumin

A grave, grained sky, the strands rising a little from left to right. The odd instress of this, the moon leaning on her side, as if fallen back to the cheerful light floor within the ring. A brindled heaven, the darker cloud, a broad careless inscape flowing throughout. At the beginning of November they were felling some of the ashes in our grove. – gerard manley hopkins

From a torn page a cabriolet approaches over the crest of a hill, first the nodding, straining head of the horse, then the blind lamps, peering. The ladies within the insect eagerly look from side to side awaiting the vista. Where is the hill? A cloud of mist becomes rain, cloak, skin. Snow drains the light from day but then, stains the sky yellow to glow at midnight. Hot-pepper sting of impatient love. – denise levertov

Let me tell you one of our secrets. A person here is irritated against you for reasons which I do not know. This attitude does not make sense and is almost like a disease. I really do not know how you have managed to wound him so deeply. He is full of spite towards you. You know that he has no real bitterness in his heart. Why is he annoyed, why is he set against you? I shall never know. I don't want him to think he is the master here. He would be all the more touchy in the future, and even if he won this victory he would be furious at it, for he knows neither what he wants nor what he does not want. You have never been anything but perfect for all of us. – george sand

Moving the pea fence to another row. Aromatic poppets, pried from the black gold of old soil, dingier than cauliflower or pearls. We eat them braised with a little brown sugar. I see the common coarse-grained stones have not given up their good seats in the wall, though the deckle-edged daffodils came and went while I motored my rented bed up and down. The greening margin on the road is shaggy and unshorn. An indigo bunting: bring your electric blue to my sphere. – maxine kumin

Disappear through a single door, unrecognized in the morning in the park, where we sit behind the early paper and periodically declare I can't believe in the Middle Ages, they drew the news on cemetery walls. This too, they say, is paradise because the sky touches the ground whenever the former has a hole in it called a hand, espalliered mansions and guests in the millions. The first public gardens in history were called oubliettes. As soon as you entered, you were indistinguishable from the animals. – cole swensen

Do I still remind you of a locust clinging to a branch? The world spins nightly towards its brightness. Only the evening is outside us now, propagating honeysuckle. I give you an idea of the damages. When their eyes poured over your long body of poetry I was also there. We have done these things to each other without the benefit of a mirror. Cut below the silver skin of the surface. Later, beneath the blueness of trees, the future falls out of place. Something always happens. – c.d. wright

Daily, out of that unfamiliar, entracingly perpendicular terrain, some new, and on minute inspection, marvelous thing would be opening – yet another savory permutation of selene or salvia, of scabious, of rockrose, of evening primrose, of bellflower such as the one I'd never laid eyes on the like of: spurred, spirily airy, a sort of stemborne baldachin, a lone, poised, hovering rarity. Within a week it had grown so familiar I forgot it, had not thought of it until the moment a volume of the encyclopedia, pulled down for some purpose, fell open at random. Named and depicted, astonishing in memory as old love reopened, still quivering. – amy clampitt

In place of the angel, take me to a grove of pepper trees; they lighten my head. Trees emit their odors, a natural oxygen tent. Have you noticed the air is heavy in trees that shed their leaves without hesitance, and flow with sap, and are closest to the angel's skin? – michael s. harper

The day left off with a kind of sitting "bang." Goldenrod in small sea-like air, specific and unbroken. I cannot describe salt. In a parallel universe does anything intersect the confused blossoming blueness of a wall that is not sea, not goldenrod, but the paper fastening of you, standing against it? I favor concrete between our rage and its mirage. Its broken line. Catch the flying saucer but spit out its metal mystery. Adore the big green nothing of the past, the rationing of calm late in the century, like the arches of a brick heart, letting go. – elizabeth willis

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

This Recording