The focal length is all wrong, I say
to the meteor shower.
Be calm, they say,
or the chimney swallows will steal
ember by ember
everything keeping you close to him
lying on the lawn, counting stars
shaken from the night’s branches
in summer storm.
I promise to pay the medical bill
for August’s sky: orbits of iron
pith & cloud-seed broken
against our atmosphere.
The telescope we built—
a cardboard tube, Teflon
& mirror—is a close for seeing
only what could have been,
can’t tell you anything
about this moment. Here, light
means destruction. A mattress
dragged across the wet field
means light. The swallows
ember in the chimney.
Lie still, the meteors say
above the apple’s barren
branches. Sometimes
the sky can only be torn apart
with the naked eye.
there anything which
is dead or alive more beautiful
than my body,to have in your fingers
(trembling ever so little)?
Looking into
your eyes Nothing,i said,except the
air of spring smelling of never and forever.
….and through the lattice which moved as
if a hand is touched by a
hand(which
moved as though
fingers touch a girl’s
breast,
lightly)
Do you believe in always,the wind
said to the rain
I am too busy with
my flowers to believe,the rain answered
| — | (via eecummings) |
| — | The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (via jdlayman) |
I touch you in the night, whose gift was you,
My careless sprawler,
And I touch you cold, unstirring, star-bemused,
That have become the land of your self-strangeness.
What long seduction of the bone has led you
Down the imploring roads I cannot take
Into the arms of ghosts I never knew,
Leaving my manhood on a rumpled field
To guard you where you lie so deep
In absent-mindedness,
Caught in the calcium snows of sleep?
And even should I track you to your birth
Through all the cities of your mortal trial,
As in my jealous thought I try to do,
You would escape me—from the brink of earth
Take off to where the lawless auroras run,
You with your wild and metaphysic heart.
My touch is on you, who are light-years gone.
We are not souls but systems, and we move
In clouds of our unknowing
like great nebulae.
Our very motives swirl and have their start
With father lion and with mother crab.
Dreamer, my own lost rib,
Whose planetary dust is blowing
Past archipelagoes of myth and light
What far Magellans are you mistress of
To whom you speed the pleasure of your art?
As through a glass that magnifies my loss
I see the lines of your spectrum shifting red,
The universe expanding, thinning out,
Our worlds flying, oh flying, fast apart.
From hooded powers and from abstract flight
I summon you, your person and your pride.
Fall to me now from outer space,
Still fastened desperately to my side;
Through gulfs of streaming air
Bring me the mornings of the milky ways
Down to my threshold in your drowsy eyes;
And by the virtue of your honeyed word
Restore the liquid language of the moon,
That in gold mines of secrecy you delve.
Awake!
My whirling hands stay at the noon,
Each cell within my body holds a heart
And all my hearts in unison strike twelve.
| — | A.S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden (via scout) |
seen from a great enough distance i cannot be seen
i feel this as an extremely distinct sensation
of feeling like shit; the effect of small children
is that they use declarative sentences and then look at your face
with an expression that says, ‘you will never do enough
for the people you love’; i can feel the universe expanding
and it feels like no one is trying hard enough
the effect of this is an extremely shitty sensation
of being the only person alive; i have been alone for a very long time
it will take an extreme person to make me feel less alone
the effect of being alone for a very long time
is that i have been thinking very hard and learning about existence, mortality
loneliness, people, society, and love; i am afraid
that i am not learning fast enough; i can feel the universe expanding
and it feels like no one has ever tried hard enough; when i cried in your room
it was the effect of an extremely distinct sensation that ‘i am the only person
alive,’ ‘i have not learned enough,’ and ‘i can feel the universe
expanding and making things further apart
and it feels like a declarative sentence
whose message is that we must try harder’
I am now going to ask you a favor which sounds quite crazy, and which I should regard as such, were I the one to receive the letter. It is also the very greatest test that even the kindest person could be put to. Well, this is it:
Write to me only once a week, so that your letter arrives on Sunday — for I cannot endure your daily letters, I am incapable of enduring them. For instance, I answer one of your letters, then lie in bed in apparent calm, but my heart beats through my entire body and is conscious only of you. I belong to you; there is really no other way of expressing it, and that is not strong enough. But for this very reason I don’t want to know what you are wearing; it confuses me so much that I cannot deal with life; and that’s why I don’t want to know that you are fond of me.
| — |
Franz Kafka wrote exactly the sort of love letters you’d expect. (via jlovely) (via pedrosanchez) |
While I was driving around on Saturday, I was thinking about whether or not people reach an event horizon of sorts in their romantic relationships. Once we cross a certain arbitrary threshold in our togetherness, does there come a time when we can no longer escape from the gravity created by our intimacy and we give in to its pull?
I am not referring to settling for someone. I think the settling process usually happens before a relationship ever progresses far enough to reach the event horizon. If you merely settle for your partner under the assertion that you probably won’t find anyone better, or that you don’t want to go through the difficulty of making yourself vulnerable to another human being, the intimacy in your relationship will never have gravity enough to really bring you to the point of no return.
I guess what I’m saying is that people get to a point in their relationships, and once this point is crossed, the way is shut behind them, and they are drawn by the gravitational pull of their accumulated intimacy toward whatever end.
I’m really tired. I wish this made more sense. Writing through this helped me clarify and understand my opinion. What does everyone else think?
I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off the clothes in the closet.
But after other Japanese women came,
there was no way to be sure which were
hers, and I stopped. A year later,
repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find
a long black hair tangled in the dirt.
speaking of love(of
which Who knows the
meaning;or how dreaming
becomes
if your heart’s mind)i
guess a grassblade
Thinks beyond or
around(as poems are
made)Our picking it. this
caress that laugh
both quickly signify
life’s only half(through
deep weather then
or none let’s feel
all)mind in mind flesh
In flesh succeeding disappear
(via eecummings)
The Swell Season - I Have Loved You Wrong
Here’s another track from The Swell Season’s new album, Strict Joy. It came out today, and it was definitely worth buying. (For those who don’t recognize The Swell Season, they’re the leads from “Once”.) I’ve been linking to their deluxe edition album, which includes the studio album, a live album and a concert on DVD for $18, but you can pick up the no-frills edition for $10, or you can get both the live album and the studio album for $15 on Amazon MP3. I don’t even have referral links set up for these. Perhaps I should!
On that note, time to shower and go to class.
