Somewhere on the other side of this wide night

and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.

The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say

it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing

an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross

to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.

Margaret Atwood

( )

Image by Cig Harvey

*

Beautiful, sobbing 

high-geared fucking 

and then to lie silently 

like deer tracks in the 

freshly-fallen snow beside 

the one you love. 

That’s all.

Richard Brautigan

You are so beautiful and I am a fool

to be in love with you

is a theme that keeps coming up

in songs and poems.

There seems to be no room for variation.

I have never heard anyone sing

I am so beautiful

and you are a fool to be in love with me,

even though this notion has surely

crossed the minds of women and men alike.

You are so beautiful, too bad you are a fool

is another one you don't hear.

Or, you are a fool to consider me beautiful.

That one you will never hear, guaranteed.

For no particular reason this afternoon

I am listening to Johnny Hartman

whose dark voice can curl around

the concepts on love, beauty, and foolishness

like no one else's can.

It feels like smoke curling up from a cigarette

someone left burning on a baby grand piano

around three o'clock in the morning;

smoke that billows up into the bright lights

while out there in the darkness

some of the beautiful fools have gathered

around little tables to listen,

some with their eyes closed,

others leaning forward into the music

as if it were holding them up,

or twirling the loose ice in a glass,

slipping by degrees into a rhythmic dream.

Yes, there is all this foolish beauty,

borne beyond midnight,

that has no desire to go home,

especially now when everyone in the room

is watching the large man with the tenor sax

that hangs from his neck like a golden fish.

He moves forward to the edge of the stage

and hands the instrument down to me

and nods that I should play.

So I put the mouthpiece to my lips

and blow into it with all my living breath.

We are all so foolish,

my long bebop solo begins by saying,

so damn foolish

we have become beautiful without even knowing it.

"Nightclub", by Billy Collins

re-post

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would finally explain why the couples on their tombs are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records. But what if they are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor. Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script is not language but a map. What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.



The Forgotten Dialect Of The Heart
Jacque Gilbert

breath in breath out

by http://www.defelipe.ro/

the last winter's grenadine

hitting the ground

brightly split open

grass blades

pushing with violent joy

through the yielding

warm earth

a sparrow

caught in a hand

in a raw April field

all tenderest greens

and all fiery reds

is what my heart is

now

Secret

When you were sleeping on the sofa

I put my ear to your ear and listened

to the echo of your dreams.

That is the ocean I want to dive in,

merge with the bright fish,

plankton and pirate ships.

I walk up to people on the street that kind of look like you

and ask them the questions I would ask you.

Can we sit on a rooftop and watch stars dissolve into smoke

rising from a chimney?

Can I swing like Tarzan in the jungle of your breathing?

I don't wish I was in your arms,

I just wish I was peddling a bicycle

toward your arms.

Jeffrey McDaniel

Abril

Whatever happens. Whatever

what is is is what

I want. Only that. But that.

Galway Kinnell

*

Look, it's spring.


And last year's loose dust has turned into this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have come up trembling, slowly the brackens are uplifting their curvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have come home, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow, happiness, music, ambition.


And i am walking out into all of this with nowhere to go and no task undertaken but to turn the pages of this beautiful world over and over, in the world of my mind.




Mary Oliver


image by Anni Leppälä

leve:)

Evan says the idea that you can be transformed by love
is melodramatic and childish, the kind of thing you leave
behind at the last slumber party or give up the day you stop
actually pondering the existence of unicorns. He says
love unveils you. That whoever you were you still are.

Only now maybe you’re more so. You can afford courage.
Evan says it makes you shameless- that it’s safe now
to reclaim whoever you were before you became embarrassed.
He says we all masquerade as impassive people because
passion exposes ourselves as assailable (a word that means

defenseless). That love unmasks us and that’s risky. But
essential. This past year, I’ve sat back, quit asking for anything.
Evan says that love lets you be greedy, allows you to grasp
what you need and keep it. That we can’t be cheap with each other.
Sometimes he tests me from behind the lens of the camera,

Tell me what terrifies you. Tell me who is most necessary for your
survival. If I fidget he’ll insist I’m not answering honestly. Replay
the tape to show me where my eyes shifted away from him.
Evan says that he doesn’t trust people who don’t take drugs,
since that signals an inability to surrender to someone else.

Even early civilizations built rituals around narcotics. I don’t see
what’s so ceremonial about Evan and his friend smoking pot
to play Vice City, what sort of emotional integrity gets celebrated
the nights he cuts a few lines so we can screw longer. But I’m young,
Evan says, lucky he’s patient. He wishes I’d just let him instruct me.

"The Tutor"
Eireann Corrigan

everything is illuminated. it is. it is:)