p e r e g r i n a t i o n s

@zhugeliangs

the entrails of night and parchment of day prose I like

3,474 posts

The bird feeders are empty but it is much too hot to feed the birds. And the squirrels often steal the seed, which raises my blood pressure. So forget the birds. And forget immortality and the durability of art. I’d rather be cool right now than immortal tomorrow. All of the above is very clear to me. Everything else is a mess.

Harvey Shapiro, “Hot Summer”, A Momentary Glory: Last Poems (via zhugeliangs)

He walks to the edge of the airfield to get aviation fuel for the steel drum rigged up in his tent as a stove. Rutted mud underfoot but the spring sun on his face feels good. Low mountains in the distance through clear air. Everything shines because yesterday he was on a mission and today, and probably for the next few days, he can ignore the early morning whistle followed by the cry of H Hour. Turn over, go back to sleep, Get up and walk in the beautiful world.

Harvey Shapiro, “Foggia, Italy”, A Momentary Glory: Last Poems (via zhugeliangs)

Now that I think of it I saw no damage, I saw planes going down, flames, steel piercing steel but no dead bodies piled up or strewn across fields. The bombed railroad yards in the Austrian snow. The thud of the exploding shells under the plane. The jagged hole suddenly opening beside my head. Is that what I know? It was on a bombing mission near Vienna when his oxygen mask clogged and he slipped into a deep, warm sleep that the radar operator, sitting across from him, had to pull him out of, feeding him pure oxygen from a tank. So these were death’s portals, he understood, when in his eighties in the hospital room he again began to give up the ghost. It’s all in Whitman’s threnody: “Come lovely and soothing death.”

Harvey Shapiro, “The Old War”, A Momentary Glory: Last Poems (via zhugeliangs)

The jagged hole suddenly opening beside my head. Is that what I know?

Harvey Shapiro, from “The Old War”, A Momentary Glory: Last Poems (via zhugeliangs)

All those tears. Every night she tells the story. All those tears. Is the soil in which the dead lie so dry it needs this? A small chorus around the dinner table and the speaker, with a single light on her face. All those tears.

Harvey Shapiro, “Remembering”, A Momentary Glory: Last Poems (via zhugeliangs)

I invite her absence to tea. We watch birch leaves burn gold in November twilight.They’re really more like spears than hearts, she says. I still love you, I confess, but it’s like a moth wing hiding in cedar-scented wool.

Cheryl Dumesnil, from “A Thousand Words for Goodbye”, Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes. (via zhugeliangs)

That bastard sun rises again, dissolving the only good dream I’ve had all year. My waking mind feels for hope, blind reach for eyeglasses on the nightstand or an oxygen regulator fallen from my mouth to the ocean floor.

Cheryl Dumesnil, from “Good Morning Heartache”, Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes. (via zhugeliangs)

Love your people like this stark light bathing the land.

Cheryl Dumesnil, from “The Words Are”, Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes. (via zhugeliangs)

[…] held only for a moment, as if on the breath of god before the exhale—you will never get that back. Nor will it ever leave you.

Cheryl Dumesnil, from “Notes to Myself on the Morning after His Birth”, Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes. (via zhugeliangs)

Who’s to say the hammered brass fish welded to those wrought iron waves won’t break free—the whole school turning flesh, swimming elliptical ribbons in the ocean overhead?

Cheryl Dumesnil, from “Get Ready”, Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes. (via zhugeliangs)

[…] What if you’re not the seventy-eight percent water you’ve read about, but a canoe-shaped feather riding its waves?

Cheryl Dumesnil, from “The Problem Is”, Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes. (via zhugeliangs)

[…] The sea anemone in your chest opens—tentacles undulating in tide pool sluices—then clenches shut on its prey, or the finger poke of fear.

Cheryl Dumesnil, from “Get Ready”, Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes. (via zhugeliangs)

Sometimes you have to let people fall.

Cheryl Dumesnil, from “The Acrobats of Pittsburgh”, Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes. (via zhugeliangs)

That there are too many birds—I know this already. But the buckshot-pierced dove’s opened mouth echoed my lover’s sleep-slackened jaw , so I covered its body with leaves and swore off my rifle forever. And if I decided love was possible because her eyelashes iridesced like peacock feathers, so be it. If a house sparrow arrives at my sill, sprig of language pinched in her beak, who am I to tell her no? The first time I saw the plastic owl perched on my San Francisco rooftop, I circled the building three times, awed by the fog-hazed visitation. The window-stunned robin who hunkered on my deck for hours—that she flew away meant one thing, that she left a red stain meant another.

Cheryl Dumesnil, “The Flock”, Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes (via zhugeliangs)

[…] the notes that longed to enter, always nibbling at your skin, a million silver minnows, a school of impotent songs.

Cheryl Dumesnil, from “A Million Silver Minnows”, Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes. (via zhugeliangs)

What if you’re […] Not matter forced to earth by gravity, but the air through which it falls?

Cheryl Dumesnil, from “The Problem Is”, Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes. (via zhugeliangs)

we trace our fingers along the filigree of your demise

Cheryl Dumesnil, from “Colossal Failure of Human Design, We Celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Your Death”, Showtime at the Ministry of Lost Causes. (via zhugeliangs)

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