Yes, it’s daily
that we move into each other—but this morning
I was separate even from myself—
my hands were shovels, I had mosquito netting for hair,
and the insect beating against the night
was my heart. My name was hallow
and the sky was made of shale when
I walked into a part of morning
I’ve never seen: the sky still heavy, still
smoldering with the nightmares of others,
the drunkenness and sorrow rising like dew, like fog,
like smoke back into the clouds. Suddenly,
my face was wet with it. I wanted to lie down
with it. To rest against the almost exhausted night.
Uncertain of what to do there
I started dividing the layers, the sediment,
thinking: Usually I sleep through his sadness.
And the morning asking: Why do you keep track
of the middle of the day when you should be
waxing the moon? How can these young fragile branches
be left out in the darkness, and who set that darkness
wandering inside your heart? Who can your love ignite,
like this, like kerosene?
And then the sky lit the morning.
And then I went in to set my own house on fire.
And then I lay down next to you:
a body filling with feathers or with snow
asking: and who are you that my love can light
like this, like kerosene.
Searching for Moons by Carol Ann Duffy
There is something to be said but I, for one,
forget. That star went out more years ago
than we can count. Its ghosts see dinosaurs.
The brain says No to the Universe, Prove it,
but the heart is susceptible, pining for a look,
a kind word. Some are brought to their knees,
pleading in dead language at a deaf ear. Spaceships
float in nothing in the dark, searching for moons
to worship with their fish eyes. It must be love.
May. 24, 2012 at 2:08pm with 225 notes
Reblogged from ydissahc
May. 9, 2012 at 6:05pm with 8 notes
Reblogged from lemmethink
First love? Never dies… @starsgowaltzing (Taken with instagram)
Me: I interviewed you before.
Basti: Sam.
After all these years, he still knows my name. <3
“
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
A Myth of Devotion by Louise Glück
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.
“
remember even love obeys laws of time and need, and like a simple wave rises to its height, breaks, and is over.
Textbook Statistics by Arkaye Kierulf
On average, 5 people are born every second and 1.78 die.
So we’re ahead by 3.22, which is good, I think.
The average person will spend two weeks in his life
waiting for the traffic light to change.
Pubescent girls wait two to four years
for the tender lumps under their nipples to grow.
So the average adult has over 1,460 dreams a year,
laughs 15 times a day. Children, 385 more times.
So the average male adult mates 2,580 times with five different people
but falls in love only twice in his life—possibly
with the same person. Seventy-nine long years for each of us,
awakened to love in our twenties, so more or less
thirty years to love our two lovers each. And if, in a lifetime,
one walks a total of 13,640 miles by increments,
Where are you headed, traveler?
is a valid philosophical question to pose to a man, I think, along with
Why does the blood in your veins travel endlessly?
on account of those red cells flowing night and day
through the traffic of the blood vessels, which if laid out
in a straight line would be over 90,000 miles long.
The great Nile River in Egypt is 4,180 miles long.
The great circle of the earth’s equator is 24,903 miles.
Dividing this green earth among all of us
gives a hundred square feet of living space to each,
but our brains take only one square foot of it,
along with the 29 bones of the skull, so
if you look outside your window with your mind only,
why do you hear the housefly hum middle octave, key of F?
If you listen to the cat on the rug by the fire with
the 32 muscles in your ear, you will hear
100 different vocal sounds. Listen to the dog
wishing for your love: 10 different sounds.
If you think loneliness is beyond calculation,
think of the mole digging a tunnel underground
ninety-eight miles long to China
in one single night. If you think beauty escapes you
or your entire genealogical tree, consider the slug
with its four uneven noses, or the chameleon shifting colors
under an arbitrary light. Think of the deepest point
in the deepest ocean, the Marianas Trench in the Pacific,
do you think anyone’s sadness can be deeper? In 1681,
the last dodo bird died. In the 16th century,
Queen Elizabeth suffered from a fear of roses.
Anne Boleyn had six fingers. People fall in love
twice. The human heart beats 3 billion times — only — in a lifetime.
If you attempt to count all the stars in the galaxy, one
every second, it’ll take 3 thousand years, if you’re lucky.
As owls are the only birds that can see the color blue
the ocean is bluish, along with the sky and the eyes
of that boy who died alone by that little unnamed river
in your dreams one blue night of the war
of one of your lives. (Do you remember which one?)
Duration of World War 1: four years, 3 months, 14 days.
Duration of an equatorial sunset: 128 seconds, 142 tops.
A neuron’s impulse takes 1/1000 of a second,
a morning’s commute from Prospect Expressway
to the Brooklyn Bridge, about 90 minutes,
forty-five without traffic.
Time it takes for a flower to wilt after it’s cut from the stem: five days.
Time left our sun before it runs out of light: five billion years.
Hence the number of happy citizens under the red glow
of that sun: maybe 50% of us, 50% on good days, tops.
Number who are sad: maybe 70% on the good days—
especially on the good days. (The first emotion’s more intense, I think,
when caught up with the second.) So children grow faster in the summer,
their bright blue bodies expanding. The ocean, after all, is blue
which is why the sky now outside your window is bluish
expanding with the white of something beautiful, like clouds.
Fact: The world is a beautiful place—once in a while.
Another fact: We fall in love twice. Maybe more, if we’re lucky.
“
tonight the body-hungers have sent out
their long-range signals
or love itself has risen
from its squalor of neglect.
their long-range signals
or love itself has risen
from its squalor of neglect.
“
Happy,” I muttered, trying to pin the word down. But it is one of those words like Love, that I never quite understood. Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them and I am no exception—especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. They are too elusive and far too relative when you compare them to sharp, mean little words like Punk and Cheap and Phony. I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, but the big ones are tough and it takes either a priest of a fool to use them with any confidence.
