this morning

Decided to put on that new white blouse with kind of medieval sleeves (purely dramatic act, sorry). Cutting the tag off, the scissors sleepily slipped and left a perfect heart shaped hole above the left hip. Heart shaped holes dont fit into my company's dress code so had to find and iron something else and almost missed my bus.

On the bus a big sticker in front of my nose said, in red: en caso de emergencias sigue las instrucciones. Yet instruccuiones were torn off by some bored passenger. So, having forgotten the book and the MP4 at home i spent half an hour inventing those . Quite a waste of time. They are much better like that, torn off.

The Autumn sunrises are the clearest, the air is so transparent and thin (hey:) that all things otherwise unseen are suddenly awake and visible. Like if someone would fix my eyesight.

and you say

Ты говоришь: все что было какой-то ад.
Ты говоришь: нам нужен новый формат.
Ты мне показываешь озеро кишащее змеями
Ты говоришь: ныряем,

здесь будет волшебный сад.

Я говорю: я подумаю.

Ты говоришь: ты подумай.

Я говорю: я подумаю.

Ты говоришь: ты подумай.

Я говорю: я тут посадила
несколько кустиков, тень не ахти какая,
но кислород и зелень и приятно для глаз.
Ты отвечаешь: я вижу что ты не хочешь
думать в сторону нас.

Anya Logvinova

There was a great tenderness to the sadness
when I would go there. She knew how much
I loved my wife and that we had no future.
We were like casualties helping each other
as we waited for the end. Now I wonder
if we understood how happy those Danish
afternoons were. Most of the time we did not talk.
Often I took care of the baby while she did
housework. Changing him and making him laugh.
I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before
throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with
my mouth against the tiny ear and throw
him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up.
The only way to leave even the smallest trace.
So that all his life her son would feel gladness
unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined
city of steel in America. Each time almost
remembering something maybe important that got lost.

Jack Gilbert

I have always thought a girl with an accordeon is hot beyond words:)

Maybe I should start using my dad's. I cannot play it, I´d just carry it around for hotness purposes:)

:)

Girls, take my advice, marry an animal. A wooly one is most consoling. Find a fur man, born midwinter. Reared in the mountains. Fond of boxing. Make sure he has black rubbery lips, and a sticky sweet mouth. A winter sleeper. Pick one who likes to tussle, who clowns around the kitchen, juggles hot baked potatoes, gnaws playfully on a corner of your apron. Not one mocked by his lumbering instincts, or who’s forever wrestling with himself, tainted with shame, itchy with chagrin, but a good-tempered beast who plunges in greedily, grinning and roaring. His backslapping manner makes him popular with the neighbors, till he digs up and eats their Dutch tulip bulbs. Then you see just how stuffy human beings can be. On Sundays his buddies come over to play watermelon football. When they finally get tired, they collapse on heaps of dried grass and leaves, scratching themselves elaborately, while I hand out big hunks of honeycomb. They’ve no problem swallowing dead bees stuck in the honey.

A bear boy likes to stretch out on the floor and be roughly brushed with a broom. Never tease him about his small tail, which is much like a chipmunk’s. If you do, he’ll withdraw to the hollow of some tree, as my husband has done whenever offended since he first left the broad-leafed woodlands to live in this city, which is so difficult for him. Let him be happy in his own way; filling the bathtub with huckleberries, or packing dark, earthwormy dirt under the sofa. Don’t mention the clawmarks on the refrigerator. (You know he can’t retract them.) Nothing pleases him more than a violent change in climate, especially if it snows while he’s asleep and he wakes to find the landscape blanketed. Then his teeth chatter with delight. He stamps and paws the air for joy. Exuberance is a bear’s inheritance. He likes northern light. Excuse me, please. His bellow summons me.

Let me start again. True, his speech is shaggy music. But by such gruff instruction, I come to know love. It’s difficult to hear the story of his forest years with dry eyes. He always snuffs damply at my hand before kissing it. My fingers tingle at the thought of that sensitive, mobile nose. You’ve no idea how long his tongue is. At night, I get into bed, pajama pockets full of walnuts. He rides me around the garden in the wheelbarrow now that I’m getting heavy with his cubs. I hope our sons will be much like their father, but not suffer so much discomfort wearing shoes.

The Bear-Boy of Lithuania
Amy Gerstler

*

The archipelago of kisses

We live in a modern society. Husbands and wives don't grow
on trees, like in the old days. So where
does one find love? When you're sixteen it's easy, like being
unleashed with a credit card
in a department store of kisses. There's the first kiss.
The sloppy kiss. The peck.
The sympathy kiss. The backseat smooch. The we shouldn't
be doing this kiss. The but your lips
taste so good kiss. The bury me in an avalanche of tingles kiss.
The I wish you'd quit smoking kiss.
The I accept your apology, but you make me really mad
sometimes kiss. The I know
your tongue like the back of my hand kiss. As you get older,
kisses become scarce. You'll be driving
home and see a damaged kiss on the side of the road,
with its purple thumb out. If you
were younger, you'd pull over, slide open the mouth's red door
just to see how it fits. Oh where
does one find love? If you rub two glances, you get a smile.
Rub two smiles, you get a warm feeling.
Rub two warm feelings and presto-you have a kiss. Now
what? Don't invite the kiss over
and answer the door in your underwear. It'll get suspicious
and stare at your toes. Don't
water the kiss with whisky. It'll turn bright pink and explode
into a thousand luscious splinters,
but in the morning it'll be ashamed and sneak out of your body
without saying good-bye,
and you'll remember that kiss forever by all the little cuts it left
on the inside of your mouth. You must
nurture the kiss. Turn out the lights. Notice how it illuminates
the room. Hold it to your chest
and wonder if the sand inside hourglasses comes from a special
beach. Place it on the tongue's pillow,
then look up the first recorded kiss in an encyclopedia: beneath
a Babylonian olive tree in 1200 B.C.
But one kiss levitates above all the others. The intersection
of function and desire. The I do kiss.
The I'll love you through a brick wall kiss. Even when
I'm dead, I'll swim through the Earth,
like a mermaid of the soil, just to be next to your bones.


Jeffrey McDaniel (EEUU, 1967- )

more

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

We're volleying words back and forth. Everything she says, I have something I can say back. We're sparking, and part of me just wants to sit back and watch. We're clicking. Not because a part of me is fitting into a part of her. But because our words are clicking into each other to form sentences and our sentences are clicking into each other to form dialogue and our dialogue is clicking together to form this scene from this ongoing movie that's as comfortable as it is unrehearsed.

.......

"You know what it's all about, Nick?"
"What what's all about?"
"It, Nick. What it's all about."
"No."
"The Beatles."
"What about The Beatles?"
"They nailed it."
"Nailed what?"
"Nailed what?"
"Everything."
"What do you mean?"
Dev takes his arm and puts it right against mine, skin to skin, sweat on sweat, touch on touch. Then he glides his hand into mine and intertwines ourfingers.
"This," he says. "This is why The Beatles gt it."
"I'm afraid I'm not following..."
"Other bands, it's all about sex. Or pain. Or some fantasy. But The Beatles, they knew what they were doing. You know the reason The Beatles made it so big?"
"What?"
" 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand.' First single. Fucking brilliant. Perhaps the most fucking brilliant song ever written, Because they nailed it. That's what everyone wants. Not 24-7 hot sex. Not a marriage that lasts a hundred years. Not a Porsche or a blow job or a million-dollar crib. No. They wanna hold your hand. They have such a feeling that they can't hide. Every single successful love song of the past fifty years can be traced back to 'I Wanna Hold Your Hand.' And every single successful love story has those unbearable and unbearably exciting moments of hand-holding. Trust me. I've though a lot about this."

.......

And maybe I'm realizing what a part of it I am, because suddenly we're not crashing as much as we're combining. The chords swirling around us are becoming a tornado, tightening and tightening and tightening, and we are at the center of it, and we are at the center of each other. My wrist touches hers right at the point of our pulses, and I swear I can feel it. That thrum. We are moving to the music and at the same time we are at a stillness. I am not losing myself in the barrage. I am finding her. And she is - yes, she is finding me. The crowd is pressing in on us and the bassline is revealing everything and we are two people who are part of a lot more people, and at the same time we're our own part. There isn't lonliness, only this intense twoliness. There's only one way to test it, and that is to dare a movement, to push it farther and see if she wants it to go there. I find her lips and I make that kiss and she's pulling my hair and I've got the fabric of her jacket bunched in a fist and it's nothing like talking and it's right there and we're taking it and takign it and taking it. And my eyes are closed and then my eyes are open and I see her eyes are open and there's a part of her that's pulling back even as our bodies are pressing and it's the fear, of course there's the fear, and I just hold her close to tell her I understand.

:)

*

Even if I now saw you
Only once,
I would long for you
Through worlds,
Worlds.

Izumi Shikibu

He untugs himself from her and walks away, then turns. She is still there. He comes back within a few yards of her, one finger raised to make a point.
"I just want you to know. I don't miss you yet."
His face awful to her, trying to smile. Her head sweeps away from him and hits the side of the gatepost. He sees it hurt her, notices the wince. But they have separated already into themselves now, the walls up at her insistence. Her jerk, her pain, is accidental, is intentional. Her hand is near her temple.
"You will," she says.

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive -
"Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

Billy Collins

Even if I now saw you
Only once,
I would long for you
Through worlds,
Worlds.

Izumi Shikibu

Where did we stop? In dead summer, that is
male, yellow. You stripped into that glare
of live gold.
It was like living in gold to try to touch you.
It was as if you were day.

None of this is true, but will you
let me have it, imaginary?

The laugh, the confidence, the symmetrical clean
body capable of itself, so being body
as to be naked even to the hands. Will you give me that?

Because, even if it is not true, I need
something now to look back to, in order to say,
I have been sudden in the sun's perfection,
I have had blood rise like light,
my hands have answered,
my memory is a bush of grown flame.

It is a kindness you can do me, to have been there
at the center of summer, yourself the attack of summer,
and to have made all that light out of being young.

I need to have loved you. I need to have told you so.

William Dickey

into the wild

*

summer days are over

For Vanessa*

Oh, swear to me to put in dreams your trust, and to believe in fantasy alone, and never let your soul in prison rust, nor stretch your arm and say: a wall of stone

VV Nabokov "The Gift"

photo from http://sov-photo.livejournal.com/

Don't listen to me; my heart's been broken.
I don't see anything objectively.

I know myself; I've learned to hear like a psychiatrist.
When I speak passionately,
That's when I'm least to be trusted.

It's very sad, really: all my life I've been praised
For my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight-
In the end they're wasted-

I never see myself.
Standing on the front steps. Holding my sisters hand.
That's why I can't account
For the bruises on her arm where the sleeve ends . . .

In my own mind, I'm invisible: that's why I'm dangerous.
People like me, who seem selfless.
We're the cripples, the liars:
We're the ones who should be factored out
In the interest of truth.

When I'm quiet, that's when the truth emerges.
A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.
Underneath, a little gray house. The azaleas
Red and bright pink.

If you want the truth, you have to close yourself
To the older sister, block her out:
When a living thing is hurt like that
In its deepest workings,
All function is altered.

That's why I'm not to be trusted.
Because a wound to the heart
Is also a wound to the mind.

Louise Glück

enough

*

I imagine the gods saying, We will
make it up to you. We will give you
three wishes, they say. Let me see
the squirrels again, I tell them.
Let me eat some of the great hog
stuffed and roasted on its giant spit
and put out, steaming, into the winter
of my neighborhood when I was usually
too broke to afford even the hundred grams
I ate so happily walking up the cobbles,
past the Street of the Moon
and the Street of the Birdcage-Makers,
the Street of Silence and the Street
of the Little Pissing. We can give you
wisdom, they say in their rich voices.
Let me go at last to Hugette, I say,
the Algerian student with her huge eyes
who timidly invited me to her room
when I was too young and bewildered
that first year in Paris.
Let me at least fail at my life.
Think, they say patiently, we could
make you famous again. Let me fall
in love one last time, I beg them.
Teach me mortality, frighten me
into the present. Help me to find
the heft of these days. That the nights
will be full enough and my heart feral.

Jack Gilbert

Al levantar esta mañana sentí - una sensación maravillosa - de tanta ligereza - que me fui a correr y decidi llevar tacones para el trabajo.

Siento que todos los caminos, la vertiginosa diversidad de todas las posibilidades de afuera ya no importa tanto. Ya no siento obligación de eligir entre todos estos caminos. Parece que está - por fin - apareciendo un camino por dentro, dibujado apenas visible - todavia - pero está. Por dentro. Y esto es lo que importa.

Tal vez estoy loca

if you could only

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34FIctxyZpU

Science fiction story

I will meet you again in the future. It will be 100 years from now. We will be evolved. We will be larger. We will be gentle with each other. When I try to touch your hand, my hand will feel like water. Your hand will feel like a fish. We will be evolved in different directions. We will be so gentle and evolved we won’t even be able to lift our glasses to our mouths. We will just sit in a bar, looking at the glasses, and being incredibly gentle with each other. You will gently slap my face. I will gently say something cruel. We will gently torture each other, not saying any of the things we’ve been thinking for the last 100 years.

We will not say, ‘I’ve missed you,’ or, ‘You look good,’ or, ‘I think I’ve made a terrible mistake.’

We will be too futuristic to say those things.

There will be mobile phones made of water and seeds, 1 millimetre in diameter.

There will be children that look like shrivelled dogs.

Every thing ever will have a slot to put money in, and when you put money in the slot the thing will vibrate.

There will be tinfoil, inflatable shoes, and holographic statues of the cast of Friends.

Everything will be okay.

The sun will be burnt out – it will be like a black floating acorn – and it will be dark in the bar, and I won’t be able to see if you are crying.

Chris Killen

Going to see "Bright Star" tonight. Not sure Keats dubbed in Spanish is exactly the right remedy, but what the hell

*

Perhaps it is the way Love’s promoted;
You’d think it came in a jar,
Something that could be spread
Over all that bothers us,
A heal-all, a wound cream,
A media promoted fairytale
Gutted of darkness.

Though its contradictions
Nail us to each other
And the hunger for it
Can be our undoing,
We still use it as a prop,
As proof we are living.

How hard to do other than
Give it precedence, forgetting
How friendship outlives it,
Commits fewer crimes,
Wears its name at times.

Brian Patten (yet again)

buen findesemana

estoy teniendo un dia largo, largo. de un calor que pesa demasiado. de pena. de cajas de trastos para ser mudados a otra casa. pesan. tengo verguenza decir como intenté deshacerme de todo eso. del peso. no funcionó. voy a llevarme afuera. a nadar, a beber, a correr por las calles, a comprar otra cosa inutil - otra tirita que no va a parar the bleeding

*

adorei

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uctrQBJSY8&feature=player_embedded

I want you to see the hole in my shirt where your
heart went through like a Colt 45, and opened
a dream at the back of the neck. Here, let me unbutton it for you.
Notice the ribs, those sweet things you loved, notice the insides,
the parchment lampshades, the books, the furniture. Notice yourself
sitting, holding my hand on a winter night, notice the look in
my eyes, now close it all up and walk away.

Stumble, pretend you're dead. Just for me, pretend you can be
hurt by something so simple as a failed emotion. Pretend you have seen
loss. For god's sake what was I holding when you said good morning.

pier giorgio di cicco

there is no real way to deal with what we lose

You fall in love with a person because your subconscious likes something about their subconscious, and it isn't until much later that you discover that the thing you subconscious liked was the fact that this person was built to hurt you in precisely the way you most fear.

Sarah Dunn

no tengo casa