April 2012
40 posts
“Strangers kiss softly as moths, she thought.”
- In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje
“In the room where we lie,
light stains the drawn shades yellow.
We sweat and pull at each other, climb
with our fingers the slippery ladders of rib.
Wherever our bodies touch, the flesh
comes alive. Head and need, like invisible
animals, gnaw at my breast, the soft
insides of your thighs. What I want
I simply reach out and take, no delicacy now,
the dark human bread I eat handful
by greedy handful. Eyes fingers, mouths,
sweet leeches of desire. Crazy woman,
her brain full of bees, see how her palms curl
into fists and beat the pillow senseless.
And when my body finally gives in to it
then pulls itself away, salt-laced
and arched with its final ache, I am
so grateful I would give you anything, anything.
If I loved you, being this close would kill me.”
- “This Close” by Dorianne Laux (via atomiclanterns)
That’s how my heart is, I thought –
It lies coiled up inside of me, asleep,
then it springs out and shocks me
with all of its muchness.
– Description,
which lingers,
and loves for no reason.
- Tony Hoagland, from “Muchness”
“i woke without you and the igloo
seeming colder. i could peek
out the crawl-hole but if the entire
spinning earth’s imaginary i don’t want to know.
i have my pelts and visions
of you asleep in your summer skin loving
the deep heart of a tall grass prairie.
i have polar bears and snow
blindness. you have sunsets
striking the silent crows iridescent.
when they swoon to their own new beauty
and the chorus frogs kick in, do you think
of me thinking of you thinking of me?
i tell you what. if i had an albatross
i’d let it lift me like a message
to the jet stream just as the toothy flows
ingest our empty love-shell. you would know me
by the touch of ice on the tongue
of the wind. you would wait with a bouquet
of black feathers and the rest of
our story still warm on your lips.”
- : -Andrew Michael Roberts, “the moments before the crash landing are clearest”
Deflated.
Two Short Talks by Anne Carson
Beauty makes me hopeless. I don’t care
why anymore I just want to get away.
When I look at the city of Paris I long
to wrap my legs around it. When I
watch you dancing there is a heartless
immensity like a sailor in a dead calm
sea. Desires as round as peaches
bloom in me all night, I no longer
gather what falls.
Short Talk on Hedonism by Anne Carson (via poetryeater)
Dear Sydney,
Looking for some opinions on the National Art School (NAS), in comparison to COFA and SCA.
“What is it the I’ll want from you? Not love: that would be too much to ask. Not forgiveness, which isn’t yours to bestow. Only a listener, perhaps; only someone who will see me. Don’t prettify me though, whatever else you do: I have no wish to be a decorated skull.
But I leave myself in your hands. What choice do I have? By the time you read this last page, that- if anywhere- is the only place I will be.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin
“I tell you, the more I think, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”
—Vincent van Gogh“I’ve been rereading your story. I think it’s about me in a way that might not be flattering, but that’s okay. We dream and dream of being seen as we really are and then finally someone looks at us and sees us truly and we fail to measure up. Anyway: story received, story included. You looked at me long enough to see something mysterioso under all the gruff and bluster. Thanks. Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.”
― Richard Siken
Inside your head you hear
a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up
in a stranger’s bathroom,
standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away
from the dirtiest thing you know.
All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly
darkness,
suddenly only darkness.
In the living room, in the broken yard,
in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport
bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of
unnatural light,
my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.
I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,
smiling in a way
that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,
up the stairs of the building
to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,
I looked out the window and said
This doesn’t look that much different from home,
because it didn’t,
but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.
We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,
smiling and crying in a way that made me
even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I
just couldn’t say it out loud.
Actually, you said Love, for you,
is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s
terrifying. No one
will ever want to sleep with you.
Okay, if you’re so great, you do it—
here’s the pencil, make it work …
If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window
is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing
river water.
- Richard Siken
