mostly poetry, some prose

lit blog of idionkisson

[extollingtheeveryday]

Tomas Tranströmer // "Breathing Space, July"

[whisperthatruns]

The Immortals

When I was old I became close to my death. He slept next to me snoring like a freight train, his bony elbows digging into my ribs; once he left a filament of saliva on my wrist. We ate together, equally voracious: he snatched a strand of clam linguine from my open mouth. Evenings we walked side by side in Flatbush lost in our symptoms, reciting them like prayers, my kneecap my shoulder the small of my back, each determined to be the one who suffers. Still we were not immune to a crocus pushing up through a sidewalk crack—in fact that beauty seared us like flame; a child’s voice thrilled us singing the alphabet forwards and backwards. We both felt like exiles among those tenements, both of us had stopped calling friends, we wrote only the briefest of notes to our remaining families— we’d each entered silence. Still, when he was gone to the bathroom or to the lobby to pick up mail I felt a surge of panic: Am I immortal? Will I have to live forever, alone in this vast city?

D. Nurkse (New York Review of Books, 6/25/26)

[whisperthatruns]

i take my glasses off

it is the hard edge of things i am avoiding the separations so that i can take my glasses off and then i cannot tell which are the leaves and which the angels like blake like that man who lived with the lepers not noticing what was sin and what was grace visioning visions vision i take my glasses off so i can see

Lucille Clifton, At the Gate: Uncollected Poems, 1987–2010 (text from Academy of American Poets)

[peachpulpeuse]

From his earliest years Cincinnatus, by some strange and happy chance comprehending his danger, carefully managed to conceal a certain peculiarity. He was impervious to the rays of others, and therefore produced when off his guard a bizarre impression, as of a lone dark obstacle in this world of souls transparent to one another; he learned however to feign translucence, employing a complex system of optical illusions, as it were—but he had only to forget himself, to allow a momentary lapse in self control, in the manipulation of cunningly illuminated facets and angles at which he turned his soul, and immediately there was alarm. In the midst of the excitement of a game his coevals would suddenly forsake him, as if they had sensed that his lucid gaze and the azure of his temples were but a crafty deception and that actually Cincinnatus was opaque. Sometimes, in the midst of a sudden silence, the teacher, in chagrined perplexity, would gather up all the reserves of skin around his eyes, gaze at him for a long while, and finally say: "What is wrong with you, Cincinnatus?" Then Cincinnatus would take hold of himself, and, clutching his own self to his breast, would remove that self to a safe place.

Vladimir Nabokov, from Invitation to a Beheading

[chthonic-cassandra]

I missed him a lot, but I never said so out loud. Secretly, I called him my Persephone. How can I get you out of hell? I can't, I am one of the mistresses of hell, but hell has its corners, and we can rule there, rule and disobey.

Mariana Enriquez, Our Share of Night (trans Megan McDowell)

[a-quiet-green-agreement]

"…the labyrinth plays tricks on the mind. It makes people forget things. If you're not careful it can unpick your entire personality."

– Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

[chthonic-cassandra]

For me, the other place is a neighboring country. As in fantasy literature, it's a world that touches ours, is superimposed onto it, a kind of fourth dimension. Once you're cast into it, you can never get out; just one looming shadow and you're dragged back there, it's beyond you to resist. [...] We can learn how to live with the knowledge that that world is always there, that it will always be there, just out of sight. It is a world in which victim and abuser are reunited. I think they are the same, or almost the same shadows. It's a world where it's impossible to be ignorant of evil. It's everywhere, altering the color and flavor of everything. Ignoring or forgetting it is not an option, for the more you run from it, the quicker it catches you up. But it is possible to stand back from the brink. That is the challenge: how to remain on the threshold of this world, how to keep going like tightrope walkers along the wire, facing the future. Wavering, unsteady, but not falling. Not falling. Not falling.

Neige Sinno, Sad Tiger (trans. Natasha Lehrer)

[derangedrhythms]

I have always wondered whether everyone’s interior life is as exhaustingly complicated as mine, if everyone is placed, like a white mouse, in the middle of their labyrinthine mind, through which they have to find a path, just one, the true one, while all the others lead to traps with no escape.

Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid, tr. Sean Cotter

[a-quiet-green-agreement]

The room was burdened with the feelings evoked by night, when fears seep through decrepit walls and unhappiness turns sweet, when the soul proudly beats its wings over sleeping humanity.

– Dino Buzzati, The Stronghold

[whisperthatruns]

tr. Lawrence Venuti

[korrioak]

Dionysus approaches Ariadne for day 4 of mythtober

[whisperthatruns]

At dawn, the sea of honey spoke: Open your eyes to wave on wave of honey. Open your eyes to the poem.

When you fast, drink the sound of water. The sound does its work—

the sound of water lapping the shore, the sound of water gurgling among rocks.

Deep listening does its work. A babbling brook for thirsty seekers, it gives you life.

Touched by the water of life, a bald head sprouts locks of perfumed hair. Mixed with this water, wine clears the drunkard's head. Be patient, you'll see.

You've emerged from me, says the water, you'll return.

Rumi (1207–1273), tr. Haleh Liza Gafori, Water (New York Review Books, 2025)

[whisperthatruns]

At sunset we pray. The path of the senses closes. The path to the unseeable opens.

Like a shepherd tending a flock, the angel of sleep urges souls through placeless meadows, gardens, cities.

Sleep wipes the slate clean. Thousands of new faces and forms appear. The wide-eyed soul watches in awe,

and perhaps it always dwells there, where no memory persists, where the bodiless body never tires.

The heart that trembles here under the weight of possessions— under the weight of their absence—

soars weightless there.

Rumi (1207–1273), tr. Haleh Liza Gafori, Water (New York Review Books, 2025)

[whisperthatruns]

My heart regrets every ode I write— I've said too much, I know—

and then again the falcon dives down, seizes my heart, urges me on.

Rumi (1207–1273), tr. Haleh Liza Gafori, from "I'll never tire of you", Water (New York Review Books, 2025)

[whisperthatruns]

Last night, in one great wave, the water of life crashed in the courtyard of my house. The flood swept my harvest away.

Smoke rose from my heart. My grain and hay burned to ash.

I'm not grieving. Why should I grieve? The halo around the moon is enough for me and I can't eat sorrow.

Rumi (1207–1273), tr. Haleh Liza Gafori, from "I'll never tire of you", Water (New York Review Books, 2025)

[whisperthatruns]

Awe? I knew nothing of awe. And the awestruck— those free from the gnawing need to know the unknowable— they didn't impress me.

Sit down with me. You're a smart one. Consider what I was and what I no longer am.

I wanted to be a kingpin, top dog, bigger than big.

Like smoke, I climbed greedily, going nowhere— a crooked plume, wayward, drifting over parched land, thirsty for meaning.

I didn't know when Love hunts you down, when you fall prey to Love, you only rise higher.

Continuing my futile climb, I fell. I fell, like a gem, out of a pile of dirt— not a hoarder of treasure.

Treasure.

Rumi (1207–1273), tr. Haleh Liza Gafori, from "I wasn't always this Love-drunk", Water (New York Review Books, 2025)

[whisperthatruns]

The garden's scent is a messenger, arriving again and again, inviting us in.

Hidden exchanges, hidden cycles stir life underground. What stirs the life in you? The garden asks.

The garden thrives. Invites us to do the same.

Saplings break through darkness— ladders set against the sky. Mysteries ascend.

Lips of lilies open— secrets whispered to the cypress. Good news of spring blasts from the mouths of tulips, among redbuds and willows, nightingales perched like guards over open coffers of nectar.

Leaves are tongues. The fruit, a heart. When the heart opens, we know the tongue's worth.

Rumi (1207–1273), tr. Haleh Liza Gafori, Water (New York Review Books, 2025)

[whisperthatruns]

Bathed in night and beaming, an unexpected guest entered our house.

Who is it? asked my heart. The moon, said my soul.

Madmen that we were, we left to scour the streets in search of its bright face.

I'm right here, the moon said. Inside!

We wandered farther and farther. Deaf to its calls, calling out in vain.

A drunk nightingale sings in our garden. A drunk nightingale laments in our garden. Who? Who? we call out like mourning doves, hearing only our own one-note song.

At midnight, a crowd hunts for a thief and a thief in the crowd shouts, Yes, there's a thief among us! It's him. It's her. It's me.

His voice, a lost thread in a tangle of voices.

When you're searching for something, search for the thief within— master of distraction,

he pockets the moon and the nightingale.

Search for the Beloved, closer to you than you.

Melt like snow. Silent as a lily, the soul's tongue springs from Love's soil.

Rumi (1207–1273), tr. Haleh Liza Gafori, Water (New York Review Books, 2025)