when feeling is first

we belong where love finds us – anne michaels

[wildlyconstant]

"Is the soul solid, like iron? Or is it tender and breakable, like the wings of a moth in the beak of the owl?"

— Mary Oliver, from 'Some questions you might ask', in House of Light

[wildlyconstant]

We raise you towards the dark. May you make of it something else.

John Glenday, closing lines from ‘Lucie’

[wildlyconstant]

                       Light carved out of the darkness a muscled trunk, each clenched limb and the difficult tips of a plain mesquite taking shape over the hard ground where they found him, his eyes wide and his whole body hungering upward, as if he could hear and bear the bird singing unseen deep in those leaves.

Christian Wiman, from 'The Last Hour'

[wildlyconstant]

the depths I know not how far they go                                        and how deep they'd pull me in--                                                            but I know they will--                                                                   they always do

[wildlyconstant]

sweet metal sweet

it's one of those nights filled with love. or is it desire. the cusp. hong kong orchids growing tree bark towards fireflies. lights blinking inside. almost complete. breathing. singing. sinking. treeing. reaching towards flint hills in kansas, desire for what i don't know. desire for something i don't know. desire for the beauty of things to end, and something else to blink. something else to sway like paper bougainvillea. not quite red, and already gone. spring gone that fast. bottlebrush fallen. tecate can riddled with fingerprints, in the middle of the street like a burnt firework. everything i felt when i first arrived gone. different sulfur rising from a bucket of water. hotter than beach glass. singed and shining.

Emmy Pérez

[weissewiese-deactivated20181206]

After the world has ended

[wildlyconstant]

Spring and its thorns,  its wild geese, with rough voices  calling from the sky.  Your body banks against mine.  We have no skeletons. We are filled with air.  We give names to things —  this is the door, the bed. This is my lover,  his throat, his hand on my hip.  The grass is an ocean. Evenings after supper  we almost drown in it. Always, the body  saves us, the body and its need for air.  This is what moves us, this is the light  uncoiling like a braid.  See how we breathe in  without trying.

Shivani Mehta

thank you, weissewiese

[wildlyconstant]

Listen, whatever it is you try to do with your life, nothing will ever dazzle you like the dreams of your body, its spirit longing to fly while the dead-weight bones toss their dark mane and hurry back into the fields of glittering fire where everything, even the great whale, throbs with song.

Mary Oliver, from 'Humpbacks', in American Primitive

[wildlyconstant]

When I listen to music gardens open out around me, and the melody becomes a flower I hear with my eyes. Sound has an image, and this image has a sound, which slowly gathers momentum like waves, more far-reaching than a literary metaphor. Carnations leave their flower beds and are distributed on the tables of high-class restaurants to compensate a stranger for some forgotten loss, or make a diner waiting for his companion better prepared to face the uncertainties of their encounter. Nobody stops the narcissus listening for hours to a song of joy in the water and believing it is a song of praise. When white lilies fill a room with their huge, pungent scent, I am confused by my thoughts about them, the opposite of violets, which make me pause where two sounds intersect and dissolve, indistinguishable as the tears shed at weddings and funerals, and the opposite of anemones, which are content with a song on the broad margins, a pastorale on the low mountain slopes. All of this is so I can say: the red rose is visible music, and jasmine is a message of longing from nobody to nobody.

Mahmoud Darwish, 'Visible music', in A River Dies of Thirst translated by Catherine Cobham

[wildlyconstant]

I ripped the feather duster apart to make a bird hat to warm my head under the moon. You lined tiny bottles of black currant vodka on the dash where a little gold tray held the gold ring your finger was too swollen to spear & the cigarette holder I took once into the shadows to kiss. * My eye painted church tops where the day before was sky I pushed my body against & the red wall slid gripping air around the stop-sign shaped room. I fell onto a carpet of dying plants & terra cotta, drank a vial of poppy juice & felt 100 hands land on my chest. * There was a knock on but no foot under the door. * The sunset matched my dress & you passed right through me like I’d only ever seen you in a shard of mirror so I stripped nude & knit a new dress from strings I pulled from the couch. * Your camp filled with basketballs & mine with cat fur & shirts sewn from leftover rags we cleaned the house for five days straight with. I remember the particular smudge one song left on my eye & the flashbulb it left in my mouth so now when I open it it blinds. * You took the plant leaf in your hand & stems heaved 100 hands up to the ceiling & I never told you but here I tell you I planted our dust bunnies in the dirt. * It was your booted lower leg I saw reflected, cut off at the foot. I found your tattoos in a cup liquefied, my face oval, blued. I spilled them on my arms & they bloomed dark morning glories.

Julie Doxsee, 'Knit'

[rabbit-light]

Twenty Years Later I Make a Realization About Her Shampoo

[wildlyconstant]

What do you smell, the winemaker asks, and I hesitate to answer because it’s an old girlfriend and weekends in her studio apartment, milk carton bookshelves and cracked walls and ceilings whose stains we pretended formed maps of countries like Mythica and Fornucopia. He waits politely but you can’t say you smell a lover, broken plaster, old jokes, a life you used to have. Finally, he suggests, Grapefruit? and I realize, yes, that’s it, the nape of her neck, her ears, her hair. Grapefruit.

Joseph Mills

thank you, rabbit-light

[wildlyconstant]

To wake when all is possible before the agitations of the day have gripped you                   To come to the kitchen and peel a little basketball for breakfast             To tear the husk like cotton padding       a cloud of oil misting out of its pinprick pores clean and sharp as pepper                            To ease each pale pink section out of its case so carefully       without breaking a single pearly cell                    To slide each piece into a cold blue china bowl the juice pooling       until the whole fruit is divided from its skin and only then to eat                 so sweet                          a discipline precisely pointless      a devout involvement of the hands and senses a pause   a little emptiness

each year harder to live within each year harder to live without

Craig Arnold, 'Meditation on a Grapefruit'

[wildlyconstant]

You took away all the oceans and all the room. You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it. Where did it get you? Nowhere. You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.

Osip Mandelstam, 'You took away all the oceans and all the room' translated by Clarence Brown and W.S. Merwin

[wildlyconstant]

Cypress

Visit it in the dark. Cicadas are inside your head as your hand reaches towards bark: you feel the latent heat first then the surface, scabbed with lichen you can’t see but know from the fizz where touch meets memory. Before all this, the scent, which is anti-language (only, as it drifts into your body the words slip in, as well), and made of earth, air, sun and human consciousness.

Jo Shapcott, in Of Mutability

[wildlyconstant]

Ask me

Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life. Others have come in their slow way into my thought, and some have tried to help or to hurt: ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say. You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden; and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say.

William Stafford

[wildlyconstant]

We sing to each other in pheromone, never certain how message matches to sender. Sometimes we taste our long past’s echo. We cultivate theories on the existence of dry land, spin theologies of loneliness. We hang translucent in love’s deepwater trenches.

John Clegg, from 'Mermaids', in Antler

[wildlyconstant]

Mysteries

At night, I do not know who I am when I dream, when I am sleeping.

Awakened, I hold my breath and listen: a thumbnail scratches the other side of the wall.

At midday, I enter a sunlit room to observe the lamplight on for no reason.

I should know by now that few octaves can be heard, that a vision dies from being too long stared at;

that the whole of recorded history even is but a little gossip in a great silence;

that a magnesium flash cannot illumine, for one single moment, the invisible.

I do not complain. I start with the visible and am startled by the visible.

Dannie Abse, from New Selected Poems

[wildlyconstant]

Night

The cold remote islands And the blue estuaries Where what breathes, breathes The restless wind of the inlets, And what drinks, drinks The incoming tide;

Where shell and weed Wait upon the salt wash of the sea, And the clear nights of stars Swing their lights westward To set behind the land;

Where the pulse clinging to the rocks Renews itself forever; Where, again on unclouded nights, The water reflects The firmament's partial setting;

--O remember In your narrowing dark hours That more things move Than blood in the heart.

Louise Bogan, in The Blue Estuaries