May 2012
14 posts
2 tags
Love in the Orangery
clavicola:
When you see a seventy-pound octopus squeeze through a hole the size of a half-dollar coin, you
finally understand that everything you learn about the sea will only make people you love say You lie.
There are land truths that scare me: a purple orchid that only blooms underground. A German poet
buried in the heart of an oak tree. The lighthouse man who used to walk around the...
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“The winter I told you I think icicles are magic
you stole an enormous one from...”
– “Maybe I Need You,” Andrea Gibson (via clavicola)
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“I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one...”
– “XIII (Dedications),” Adrienne Rich (via clavicola)
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oblivion chiclets
tarts:
“I know it’s been one of those months, one of those lifetimes, when you dream of a laundromat, a place to unscrew your skull and toss your dirty thoughts into a machine, come back an hour later, your impulses all folded and clean.”
—Jeffrey McDaniel
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“I know that I am alive
between two parentheses.”
– Octavio Paz, from “Certainty”, in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957-1987, edited by Eliot Weinberger (via apoetreflects)
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Catalogue of Ephemera by Rebecca Lindenberg
fiddlersgreen:
You give me flowers resembling Chinese lanterns.
You give me hale, for yellow. You give me vex.
You give me lemons softened in brine and you give me cuttlefish ink. You give me all 463 stairs of Brunelleschi’s dome.
You give me seduction and you let me give it back to you. You give me you.
You give me an apartment full of morning smells—toasted bagel and black coffee and the...
3 tags
White Nights
ecantwell:
“Dogs don’t understand that a word can have several different meanings.” —Pat Miller, in The Power of Positive Dog Training.
I’m looking out the door and saying I wish we had a yard and the dog is fetching me a ruler three feet long. I’m looking out the door and whispering just permit me to—and he’s pawing at the back of my legs with the parking pass in his eager mouth. I’m face...
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Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Maenads"
poetryeater:
Somewhere I read that when they finally staggered off the mountain into some strange town, past drunk, hoarse, half naked, blear-eyed, blood dried under broken nails and across young thighs, but still jeering and joking, still trying to dance, lurching and yelling, but falling dead asleep by the market stalls, sprawled helpless, flat out, then middle-aged women, ...
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Anna Kamienska, "The Empty Places"
sharingpoetry:
Let us hurry to love people Jan Twardowski I didn’t manage to love anyone even though I hurried so much It was as if I had to love only empty places the dangling sleeves without the embrace the beret abandoned by the head the armchair that also should get up and leave the room the books no longer touched the comb with a silver hair left in it the cots babies...
April 2012
15 posts
3 tags
And All The Hours Standing Before Mirrors
ecantwell:
“What will die with me the day I die? What pathetic or frail image will be lost to the world?” —Jorge Luis Borges
Daisy chain of my veins. Jurassic heat coming off your face. The light that ended its long trek to earth at the threshold of our bedroom window at seven a.m. on a certain Saturday in April. Wrinkled map of continents turned to my side of the bed in the middle of a...
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I Got Drunk And Went Bowling by Kelley Bright...
The morning after there were bruises and texts that read, “Holy hot, Wyoming. I didn’t know you had it in you.” In reference to being pushed up against a wall in the men’s room at Houston’s Bar and Grill, I am unapologetic. I left the twins in the backseat of the car with the windows cracked. They have each other. I remember decorating the Christmas tree when I was young and Dad drinking in the...
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“A bruise, blue
in the muscle, you
impinge upon me.
As bone hugs the ache...”
– Excerpt from “The City In Which I Love You” by Li-Young Lee (via clavicola)
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Demonstrations by Danielle Sellers
Weeks before the new world began, we met at an ice-breaker.
I wore coral. The towers still stood. I did not have to scan the skyline for planes.
We practiced on our street corner. A mild event—
mounted policemen stood watch over the chanting of our muffled mass.
During the invasion’s first days, under the sprinkling of blossoms,
I followed you to the capitol. We held hands through the...
4 tags
What Lot's Wife Would Have Said (If She Wasn't A...
Do you remember when we met in Gomorrah? When you were still beardless, and I would oil my hair in the lamp light before seeing you, when we were young, and blushed with youth like bruised fruit. Did we care then what our neighbors did in the dark? When our first daughter was born on the River Jordan, when our second cracked her pink head from my body like a promise, did we worry what our...
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Rainer Maria Rilke, from "The Orchards"
sharingpoetry:
4. How many strange secrets have we told the flowers, in hopes that this delicate balance can tell us the weight of passion. The stars are all troubled from being mixed with our heartaches. And from the strongest to the weakest none no longer tolerate our varying moods our uprising, our cries —, except the untiring table and the bed (unconscious table).
From The...
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“They buy poetry like gang members
buy guns — for aperture, caliber,
heft and...”
– Dorianne Laux, “Savages” (via fleurishes)
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“When you use the word ‘flummox,’ for instance, your tongue is rolling across the...”
– B.K. Loren, from “Word Hoard” in Parabola, v.28, no.3, August 2003 (via apoetreflects)
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The Problem of Fiction by Marie Ponsot
She always writes poems. This summer she’s starting a novel. It’s in trouble already. The characters are easy—a girl and her friend who is a girl and the boy down the block with his first car, an older boy, sixteen, who sometimes these warm evenings leaves his house to go dancing in dressy clothes though it’s still light out. The girl has a brother who has lots of friends, is good in math, and...
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“My sister told me a soul mate is not the person
who makes you the happiest but...”
– Sierra DeMulder, “Love, Forgive Me” (via fleurishes)
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Stationery
ecantwell:
“Your letter opened a room which needed airing.” —John Steinbeck
When I came home the blinds were shut. There was a letter on my desk. The blisters I’d accumulated on my feet from all that running hadn’t yet collapsed. When I came home the blind man in the corner raised his hands above his head and clapped, just once, like he was firing off a starting pistol. We had been running...
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shinjimeown:
3:61 a.m.
Tell me something. Something the size of a thimble.
Tell me something that you keep inside of you that you can only reach after pieces of you fall away like matryoshka shells and all that’s left is a small, beating heart.
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“Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars — mere globs of gas...”
– Feynman Lectures on Physics (footnote), Richard Feynman (via lifeinpoetry)
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“To decide to do “this” as a living is to invite barbs that generally...”
– Eileen Myles on being a poet (source)
March 2012
13 posts
2 tags
“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father...”
– Sharon Olds, I Go Back to May 1937
(via grammatolatry)
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“Despite its long affiliation with loss, love also accrues: steady accumulation...”
– Julie Marie Wade, “There’s no hole on earth where the heart drops through without bringing something with it.” (via holdonmagnolia)
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“You want a physicist to speak at your funeral. You want the physicist to talk to...”
– Aaron Freeman, You Want A Physicist To Speak at your Funeral (via pratfall)
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COLLECTIVE
tarts:
after watching trees carousel across the screen of my phone I passed your old sharehouse and in the humid half-light recalled renovations, roaches, red wine & the grind of history repeating
whenever I tried learning my gender-neutral mother tongue I’d slip into schoolroom habits of scrambled chinese whispers: where turns into di mana becomes die stadt, the seins & signs of...
3 tags
“One of the gifts of the evening hours
is darkness, a velt screen between your...”
– Moira Egan, Vespers (via grammatolatry)
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Billy Collins, "Not Touching"
sharingpoetry:
The valentine of desire is pasted over my heart and still we are not touching, like things in a poorly done still life where the knife appears to be floating over the plate which is itself hovering above the table somehow, the entire arrangement of apple, pear, and wineglass having forgotten the law of gravity, refusing to be still, as if the painter had caught them all in a rare...
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“She waited for the train to pass. Then she said, ‘I sometimes think that...”
– Airplane, Haruki Murakami (via lifeinpoetry)
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Tinker Bell Thinks About What She Wants by Sally...
fiddlersgreen:
To this Tink replied in these words, ‘you silly ass,’ and disappeared into the bathroom. “She is quite a common fairy,” Peter explained apologetically, “she is called Tinker Bell because she mends the pots and kettles.” —J. M. Barrie, Peter Pan and Wendy
Tink. Tink. Makes me sick, the lick of their soft calls, this flighty work:
dust won’t take the dents from these pots,...
3 tags
“My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers
of my palms tell me so....”
– “Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem” by Bob Hicok (via atomiclanterns)
February 2012
13 posts
4 tags
Palindrome by Lisel Mueller
lifeinpoetry:
There is less difficulty — indeed, no logical difficulty at all — in imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which times goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the other … Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own time as “forward” and time in the other galaxy as “backward.”
— Martin...
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“I know a boy who called his girlfriend’s body a “crime scene.” Dad, my body is...”
– “Communion,” Jeanann Verlee (via clavicola)
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“When your mother hits you, do not strike back. When the boys call asking your...”
– “Unsolicited Advice to Adolescent Girls With Crooked Teeth and Pink Hair,” Jeanann Verlee (via clavicola)
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Poem That Had Some Difficulty With the First Line
ahuntersheart:
I’ve always wanted to begin a poem with the line, “I’ve always wanted to begin.” Now I have. Best to end here, but then the universe is expanding back into its black beginnings, and space, aware of its own looming demise, is singing of possibilities. I’m almost over, it sings, it’s almost over and sooner or later we’d be left with nothing but time. If we live that long. Sometime...
4 tags
Albert Goldbarth, "The Sciences Sing a Lullabye"
sharingpoetry:
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...
1 tag
Paradox - Michael Soltero
goldenhorses:
it’s better to make lists, you told me, citing those old poems about the end of numbers, the beginning of time, the tall oaks- white bearded and drunk, gazing at the stars. i pointed out the troublesome hum of machinery which haunts all houses (previously we had only heard the mad howling of ink on paper and the wind outside growling) you said it’s the furnace’s fire dying out,...
2 tags
i am certain this is something you do not know -...
goldenhorses:
the symbol for cat is two hands behind your back the symbol for too much sugar in the coffee is one step slowly to the right the symbol for i want to spend the rest of my life with you starts in the collection of favorite cowboys of the old west and i nearly lost myself there i fell behind a tumbleweed i think that’s what they call them the symbol for help is more...