we're all stories in the end
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“At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then—and only then—it is handed to you. From the corner of your eye you see motion. Something is moving through the air and headed your way. It is parcel bound in ribbons and bows; it has two white wings. It flies directly at you; you can read your name on it. If it were a baseball, you would hit it our of the park. It is that one pitch in a thousand you see in slow motion; it wings beat slowly as a hawk’s.
One line of a poem, the poet said—only one line, but thank God for the that one line—drops from the ceiling. Thorton Wilder cited this unnamed writer of sonnets: one line of a sonnet falls from the ceiling, and you tap in the others around it with a jeweler’s hammer. Nobody whispers it in your ear. It is like something you memorized once and forgot. Now it comes back and rips away your breath. You find and finger a phrase at a time; you lay it down cautiously, as if with tongs, and wait suspended until the next one finds you …”
—Annie Dillard, from The Writing Life (Harper & Row, 1989)
None of it’s for me,
my life is a world beyond love,
well beyond its reach.
At times I remember it,
the dried husk of an insect.
—Michael Boiano
(via apoetreflects)
Monet Refuses the Operation
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolves
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
~Lisel Mueller
Poetry is concerned with using and abusing, with losing with wanting, with denying with avoiding with adoring with replacing the noun. It is doing that always doing that, doing that and doing nothing but that. Poetry is doing nothing but losing refusing and pleasing and betraying and caressing nouns. That is what poetry does, that is what poetry has to do no matter what kind of poetry it is. And there are a great many kinds of poetry.
When I said.
A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
And then later made that into a ring I made poetry and what did I do I caressed completely caressed and addressed a noun.
(via apoetreflects)
Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you’re tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.
Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep.
Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.
(source; submitted by cakespeare)
(via cacchieressa)
Patiently, the Partial Brides
in the bridal shop window
wait.
The shop’s
closed up for the nightand yet
they wait
with the diligenceof the dead
and the mis-
understood.—See how she’slost her head,
how she her arms, how she
is nothing but a shelfdisplay,
as if there’d been a tussle
for a thrown bouquet.This one
is nothing but a bride-
shapedcage.
They stand around on needles
and pins,strangled
by the silences they sing.
The morning will cue novoluntary.
There is no telling
for whom the little frontdoor bell will ring.
—Todd Boss, from yellowrocket: poems (W. W. Norton & Co., 2008)
The earth’s roots and brown-black blood are busy
covering the soft, violated bodies of our loves.
Death is a secret, and the rain with its many hands
washes off the streets to the gutters death’s thick surprise.
The automatic shutter of the eye never fails,
the courtesies of the tongue. What goes on in the rooms of houses
is guarded from us by the hardwood doors,
the carefully closed windows. Whatever was said or done,
night will come, eagerly, to clean up.
And death will shield us, in time,
from the sun’s megalithic promise:
Tomorrow, the same day.
Tomorrow, the same day.
For example: A flower
is the most beautiful lie.
(via fuckyeahexistentialism)
“There is something irreconcilably, neurologically primal about the act of metaphor. This primal wildness conceals it from us. Of the hinterlands of the gray matter, where metaphors roam free, our data is all rumor, conjecture, and anecdote. Because metaphorical speech is such a commonplace, because almost anyone can and does produce metaphor on a daily basis, we assume that it is scrutable. Because it is a mental process, because it takes place inside our own heads (on our property), because it leaves our own authorial lips, we assume we know something of its workings. But we do not. Invariably, the only adequate way to describe the metaphorical event is by another metaphor.
It is a mystery hand going into a black mystery box. The head says, ‘Fetch me a metaphor, hand,’ and the hand disappears under a cloth. A moment later, the hand reappears, metaphor on its extended palm. But, despite the spontaneity and ease of this event, we have only a vague idea of where the image came from. In fact, we don’t know. And neither does the hand.”
—Tony Hoagland, from “‘Tis Backed Like a Weasel’ The Slipperiness of Metaphor” in Real Sofistikashun: Essays on Poetry and Craft (Graywolf Press, 2006)
that you don’t need to breathe;
that breathless silence is
the music of the dark
and it’s part of the rhythm
to vanish like a spark.
(via awritersruminations)
