(Source: thespacesamidlove)
“As the tide washed in, the Dutch Tulip Man faced the Ocean.
“Conjoiner, rejoinder, poisoner, concealer, revelator. Look at it, he said rising up and rising down, taking everything with it.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Water” the Dutchman said. “Well, and time.”
—Peter Van Houten, An Imperial Affliction(Source: deaddthoughts)
Marie Howe, "After the Movie"For most of us, there is only the unattended
My friend Michael and I are walking home arguing about the movie.
He says that he believes a person can love someone
and still be able to murder that person.
I say, No, that’s not love. That’s attachment.
Michael says, No, that’s love. You can love someone, then come to a day
when you’re forced to think “it’s him or me”
think “me” and kill him.
I say, Then it’s not love anymore.
Michael says, It was love up to then though.
I say, Maybe we mean different things by the same word.
Michael says, Humans are complicated: love can exist even in the
murderous heart.
I say that what he might mean by love is desire.
Love is not a feeling, I say. And Michael says, Then what is it?
We’re walking along West 16th Street—a clear unclouded night—and I hear my voice
repeating what I used to say to my husband: Love is action, I used to say
to him.
Simone Weil says that when you really love you are able to look at
someone you want to eat and not eat them.
Janis Joplin says, take another little piece of my heart now baby.
Meister Eckhardt says that as long as we love images we are doomed to
live in purgatory.
Michael and I stand on the corner of 6th Avenue saying goodnight.
I can’t drink enough of the tangerine spritzer I’ve just bought—
again and again I bring the cold can to my mouth and suck the stuff from
the hole the flip top made.
What are you doing tomorrow? Michael says.
But what I think he’s saying is “You are too strict. You are
a nun.”
Then I think, Do I love Michael enough to allow him to think these things
of me even if he’s not thinking them?
Above Manhattan, the moon wanes, and the sky turns clearer and colder.
Although the days, after the solstice, have started to lengthen,
we both know the winter has only begun.(via dreaminginthedeepsouth)
Moment, the moment in and out of time,
The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,
The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning
Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply
That it is not heard at all, but you are the music
While the music lasts. —T. S. Eliot, from “The Dry Salvages” in The Four Quartets (via proustitute) “Poem 6”
Either way
It is past seven and there is a rumor that you are coming home.
When I saw you last, I found
that word in your mouth. It was
foreign, a small success for your vocabulary.
I stalked it all the way back to the house,
sucked it clean and dry and no longer holy,
hanging by a horrifying thread.
What will be the first thing you speak of tomorrow;
what wills your growth, what wills you to change?
If we are wanted,
if the earth swirls right, almost cloudlessly,
if you should find my hand and whittle out
a new word—
If you hiss
like a turntable
as you try to spin me round and round—
It is only seven; I trust you with the time.
I avoid speaking your name in conversation,
throwing it to the air as if it were nothing
more than an assumption of you; it is my last
mode of defence. The last item of clothing
to discard before I realise I’m naked in public.
Because they can hear it in my voice. I know.
Even in that one short syllable that means
everything and nothing; your name is as common
as you are rare. As easy as you are not.
As simple as love should be, but never is.
But when I’m alone, I tie my tongue softly
round the familiar sound, as if pronouncing
with conviction the phonetics of desire
will cause time to pause just long enough
for the earth to hear me naming my loss.
Jim Morrison – Poems from “Wilderness”
“Giving”lewis carroll’s genius is not only in the words themselves but the fact this poem can be read both horizontally and vertically.
My speech, in a word, hastened.
The best I have
is breaking that bank.
To each vow I’ve made, I say,
“You were not meant to be.”
To the isles I’ve pointed to,
“I cannot know any lands well enough.”
When the blackberries hang
swollen in the woods, in the brambles
nobody owns, I spend
all day among the high
branches, reaching
my ripped arms, thinking
of nothing, cramming
the black honey of summer
into my mouth; all day my body
accepts what it is. In the dark
creeks that run by there is
this thick paw of my life darting among
the black bells, the leaves; there is
this happy tongue.(sharingpoetry via bookoasis)
