poetry365:

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.

micahruelle:

He doesn’t quite know what to do with me.
I lie beside him twitching in bed
and he says, “Is it your leg again?”
Oh no my love, it’s another cramping.
Year after year I’ve eaten him away
with the tyranny of niceness, Now now
calm down, no rage, no negativity…
that American wife thing I’ve done to
him, whom I could barely look at once
without fainting, heart thudding, throat tight with all
the crazy words that flung themselves like silken
spinnerets against him, who caught hold
and saved me— And now we have spun this shimmering
wide net which is dawn with cardinals singing
in the privet, which is our white bed
beneath the window, pillows rumpled, quilt
heavy and warm with the valley of cats,
which is his leg with its bony knee pressed
into me, my leg thrown over his, soft
cock fluttering sleepily in my hand now
his furred belly warms my back, he’s my bear—
But I miss the teeth that would grip my throat
once, the blood on the marble floor, me skidding
like a fish as we thrashed in my meness,
and the proud mark I bore, see, bruises, then
we showered where water flung to the four walls,
drenching the sink, salt-white towels, toilet,
in that bare Santorini bathroom,
nothing but the sea around—sea sea sea sea,
outside the window.

        Come back to me,
My splendid furred beast, your curled lip snarling.

It was a mineshaft peculiar to souls.
Like silent seams of silver ore they moved
as veins through the darkness. Between roots
sprung up the blood that issued to humankind
and heavy as porphyry this seemed in the darkness.
Nothing else was red.

-

Rocks were there
and forests lacking substance. Bridges over abysses
and the great, grey, opaque pool
that hangs over its long-distant source
like rainy skies over a landscape.
And between meadows, gentle and forebearing
appeared the pale stretch of a single path
laid out like a cloth strip for blanching.

-

They came along this very path.

-

In front, the slender man in the blue cloak
who mutely and without apology looked forward.
With no concern for chewing his step ate up
the path in huge bites, his hands hung
from his garments ungainly and clenched
and no longer knew the delicate lyre
that had grown into his left hand
as rose tendrils do on an olive branch.
And his mind was rent in two:
while his gaze ran on ahead like a canine,
turned round, came back and ever again went
on ahead and stared at the next turn waiting,
his hearing lingered back like an odour.
Sometimes it seemed to him this reached all the way
back to where they both were walking
who would follow him for this whole ascension.
Yet really this was only his own climbing’s echo
and the waft of his mantle that closed behind him.

-

But he said to himself: “They are still coming.”
Spoke it aloud and heard it echo away.
They were still coming but both of them
only frightfully slow. If he dared
turn around even once (were not turning around
the destruction of the whole process being accomplished
thus) he would surely see them,
the light-footed couple following him soundlessly.

-

The god of gateways and far-off messages,
with his helmet down for travel over his bright eyes
a slender staff slung from his body
and wings beating on the ankles of his feet
and to his left hand beholden: her,
The so-beloved, for whom out of one lyre
more sorrow poured than from all sorrowing women;
that became a world of sorrow in which
though everything were still there: forest and lake
and path and village: field, river and beast,
they were yet wholly within this sorrow-world;
as if round this other-earth a sun
and star-filled silent sky revolved,
a sorrow-sky with distorted constellations —
so beloved was she.

-

But she went by that god’s hand
her step restricted by long winding-shrouds
uncertain, gentle and without impatience.
She was within herself, like one whose hopes are high
and thought not at all of the man who strode ahead
nor of this path they were climbing up into life.
She was within herself. And her state of being dead
filled her to completeness.
Like a fruit with sweetness and darkness
she was so full with her great death
so new to her that she grasped nothing.

-

She was within a new maidenhead
and untouchable; her sex was shut
like a young flower’s petals toward evening
and her hands had grown so unused
to marriage that even the gentle god’s
infinitely lightly guiding contact
she suffered as a too sudden intimacy.
Already no longer was she the fair-haired woman
that in the poet’s song she sometimes echoed,
no longer the scent of the wide bed and its island,
the belonging of that man ahead no longer.

-

She was already loosened out like long hair
and surrendering like fallen rain
and shared about like hundredfold provisions.

-

She was already root.

-

And as abruptly
the god halted her and with anguish in his voice
spoke the words; “He has turned around!”
She grasped nothing but asked softly, “who?”

-

But in the distance, dark against the shining gateway
someone stood whose features
were not to be recognized. He stood and saw
how on the strip of the meadow-path

-

with a sorrowful look the god of far-off messages
turned away in silence, the form following
that was already going back its very same way
her step restricted by long winding-shrouds
uncertain, gentle and without impatience.

micahruelle:

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.

poetry365:

i thank You God for this most amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

poetry365:

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’

poetry365:

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.

pedrosanchez:

by Charles Bukowski

the best often die by their own hand
just to get away,
and those left behind
can never quite understand
why anybody
would ever want to
get away
from
them

eecummings:

“little tree
little silent Christmas tree
you are so little
you are more like a flower

who found you in the green forest
and were you very sorry to come away?
see i will comfort you
because you smell so sweetly

i will kiss your cool bark
and hug you safe and tight
just as your mother would,
only don’t be afraid

look the spangles
that sleep all the year in a dark box
dreaming of being taken out and allowed to shine,
the balls the chains red and gold the fluffy threads,

put up your little arms
and i’ll give them all to you to hold
every finger shall have its ring
and there won’t a single place dark or unhappy

then when you’re quite dressed
you’ll stand in the window for everyone to see
and how they’ll stare!
oh but you’ll be very proud

and my little sister and i will take hands
and looking up at our beautiful.
we’ll dance and sing
‘Noel Noel’”

— ee cummings

sleepanddream:

“because that is the nature of love, because one walks alone through the ruins of the heart, because the young must sleep

with their eyes open, because the angels tremble from so much beauty, because memory moves in orbits of absence,

because she holds her hands out in the rain, and rain remembers nothing, not even how it became itself.”

— from Las Ruinas del Corazon | Eric Gamalinda

This. I think I’ve even reblogged this before from poetry365.

poetry365:

“You should be in love,” he tells me

We look at each other
always
with guilt
and turn away.

(What revelations I suffer at your hands).

Every time I cross the street I glance sidelong into traffic hoping you are in all of the cars.

And for days
after people say
hello
Behind me on the sidewalk
And my heart stops.

I brighten
the way only a man
who loved me
would recognize

I turn around to look
But it’s
Only, always,
Only
Always
A man into his cellphone.

“Hello!” he says,
So sincerely that it hurts.

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)

m-shapes:

Poetry had left me several days before—
left our whole damn apartment a mess.
“Thees” and “thous” were strung across the ceiling
like spit wads, a careless collage of phrases—
his last big bash, before our eventual collapse.

He didn’t even bother to clean up the ink smears
across the wooden floor where he kissed me—
my knees, elbows, and nose—and when he kissed my mouth,
his words swelled as they slid down my throat,
causing me to choke.

I rushed to the toilet, huck-yacking
“halcyon”, “scintilla”, “mellifluous” and the final letters of “ethereal”
came out with a projectile splat on the side of the bowl.

“Eh,” I flushed, “Prose is a better lover, anyway.”