I’ve always wanted to begin a poem
with the line, “I’ve always wanted
to begin.” Now I have. Best to end here,but then the universe is expanding
back into its black beginnings,
and space, aware of its own looming demise,is singing of possibilities. I’m almost over, it sings,
it’s almost over and sooner or later we’d be left
with nothing but time. If we live that long.Sometime before then all our dialects
will have moored on the gray sands of forgetting,
all our sad words will have startedto repeat themselves, as if sound didn’t dissipate
into stillness, as if not everything has been said before.
Here, let me tell you a joke: I am a man of faith.Or a child, a tree, some living thing
that will someday be a dead thing.
What does faith have to do with it? I know;it isn’t funny. Nothing funny about mortality,
how movement bleeds into clockwork,
how clockwork succumbs to its own igneous finitude.How we aid entropy by being born.
See? I only wanted to begin, now I’m humming
the ghost-heavy refrain of imminent endings.In that song about possibilities, someone
is hurling an empty bottle skyward. I see you:
You’re imagining it slowing towards its peak,anticipating gravity, its ruthless duty. Stop.
Don’t. Let’s go. Let’s not be around when it shatters.
Let’s not wait for an ending.- Mikael de Lara Co, “Poem That Had Some Difficulty With the First Line”
Posted on Tuesday at 9:35pm
25 notesMy tears are like the quiet drift
Of petals from some magic rose;
And all my grief flows from the rift
Of unremembered skies and snows.
I think, that if I touched the earth,
It would crumble;
It is so sad and beautiful,
So tremulously like a dream.
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Rimbaud, "Vigils"
Vigils
I
This is luminous repose, neither fever nor languor, in a bed or a meadow.
This is the friend, neither cool nor importunate. Friend.
This is the loved one, neither tormentor nor tormented. Loved one.
Air and world, in no way sought for. Life.
—So it was this?
—And the dream comes on.II
Light reverts, over the central joist. From the two ends of the room, unremarkable motifs, harmonic elevations that meet. The wall facing the observer is a psychological sequence of friezes in cross-section, atmospheric seams, geological strata.—A vivid, fleeting dream, with sentimental groups… beings of all kinds, in every conceivable guise.
III
The lamps and hearthrugs of the vigil sound like waves along the hull at night and deep below decks.
Sea of the vigil, like Amélie’s breasts.
The wall-hangings, up to halfway, an undergrowth of emerald-tinted lace where the doves of the vigil dart.
…………………………………………………………………………………………..
On the fireback in the blackened hearth, real suns on coastal strands: ah! wells of magic; only the one glimpse of dawn this time.—Rimbaud (tr. Jeremy Harding)
(via leopoldgursky)
What did I
do?
Seminated the night, as though
there could be others, more nocturnal than
this one.
Bird flight, stone flight, a thousand
described routes. Glances,
purloined and plucked. The sea,
tasted, drunk away, dreamed away. An hour
soul-eclipsed. The next, an autumn light,
offered up to a blind
feeling which came that way. Others, many,
with no place but their own heavy centres: glimpsed and
avoided.
Foundlings, stars,
black, full of language: named
after an oath which silence annulled.
And once (when? that too is forgotten):
felt the barb
where my pulse dared the counter-beat.
On the other side of a mirror there’s an inverse world, where the insane go sane; where bones climb out of the earth and recede to the first slime of love.
And in the evening the sun is just rising.
Lovers cry because they are a day younger, and soon childhood robs them of their pleasure.
In such a world there is much sadness which, of course, is joy …
-Russell Edson, “Antimatter”
(via lifeinpoetry)
for Aya at fifteen
Damp-haired from the bath, you drape yourself
upside down across the sofa, reading,
one hand idly sunk into a bowl
of crackers, goldfish with smiles stamped on.
I think they are growing gills, swimming
up the sweet air to reach you. Small girl,
my slim miracle, they multiply.
In the black hours when I lie sleepless,
near drowning, dread-heavy, your face
is the bright lure I look for, love’s hook
piercing me, hauling me cleanly up.
When Hades decided he loved this girl
he built for her a duplicate of earth,
everything the same, down to the meadow,
but with a bed added.
Everything the same, including sunlight,
because it would be hard on a young girl
to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness
Gradually, he thought, he’d introduce the night,
first as the shadows of fluttering leaves.
Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars.
Let Persephone get used to it slowly.
In the end, he thought, she’d find it comforting.
A replica of earth
except there was love here.
Doesn’t everyone want love?
He waited many years,
building a world, watching
Persephone in the meadow.
Persephone, a smeller, a taster.
If you have one appetite, he thought,
you have them all.
Doesn’t everyone want to feel in the night
the beloved body, compass, polestar,
to hear the quiet breathing that says
I am alive, that means also
you are alive, because you hear me,
you are here with me. And when one turns,
the other turns—
That’s what he felt, the lord of darkness,
looking at the world he had
constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind
that there’d be no more smelling here,
certainly no more eating.
Guilt? Terror? The fear of love?
These things he couldn’t imagine;
no lover ever imagines them.
He dreams, he wonders what to call this place.
First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden.
In the end, he decides to name it
Persephone’s Girlhood.
A soft light rising above the level meadow,
behind the bed. He takes her in his arms.
He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you
but he thinks
this is a lie, so he says in the end
you’re dead, nothing can hurt you
which seems to him
a more promising beginning, more true.— Louise Glück, A Myth of Devotion
(Source: mitochondria)
Love, I smashed my glass slipper
to build a stained glass window
for every wall inside my chest.
Now my heart is a pressed flower in a tattered Bible.
It is the one verse you can trust.
So I’m putting all of my words in your collection plate.
I am setting the table with bread and grace.
My knees are bent
like the corner of a page.
I am saving your place.
A Grave (excerpt) by Marianne Moore
Man, looking into the sea—
taking the view from those who have as much right to it as you have it to
yourself—
it is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing
but you cannot stand in the middle of this:
the sea has nothing to give but a well excavated grave.
(Source: anticipatedstranger)
