Love in the Orangery
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 streets at night
with a lighted candle stuck into his skull. But winters in Florida—all the street corners have sad fruit
tucked into the curb, fallen from orangery truckers who take corners too fast. The air is sick with citrus
and yet you love the small spots of orange in walls of leafy green as we drive. Your love is a concrete canoe
that floats in the lake like a lead balloon, improbable as a steel wool cloud, a metal feather. This is the truth:
I once believed nothing on earth could make me say magic. You believe in the orange blossom tucked behind my ear.
“Love in the Orangery,” Aimee Nezhukumatathil
The winter I told you I think icicles are magic
you stole an enormous one from a neighbors drooping shingle
and gave it to me as a gift.
I kept it in my freezer for seven months
‘til the day I hurt my leg
and needed something to reduce the swelling.
Love
isn’t always magic.
Sometimes it’s just melting.
Where it’s black and blue.
Where it hurts the most.
Last night I saw your ghost
peddling a bicycle with a basket
towards a moon as full as my heavy head
and I wanted nothing more
than to be sitting in that basket
like ET, with my glowing heart glowing right through
my chest, and my glowing finger
pointing in the direction
of our home.
Two years ago I said, “I never want
to write our break-up poem.”
You built me a time capsule full of Big League Chew
and promised to never burst my bubble.
I loved you from our first date
at the batting cages
when I missed twenty-three balls in a row
and you looked at me like I was a home run
in the ninth inning of the World Series.
Now every time I hear the word love
I think, going, going…
The first week you were gone
I kept seeing your hand wave goodbye
like a windshield wiper in a flooding car
in the last real moment I believed
the hurricane would let me out alive.
Yesterday I carved your name into the surface
of an ice cube then held it against my chest
‘til it melted into my aching pores.
Today I cried so hard the neighbors knocked on my door
and asked if I wanted to borrow some sugar.
I told them if I left my sweet tooth in your belly button.
Love
isn’t always magic.
But if I offered my body to the magician,
if I told him to cut me in half
so after that I could come to you whole
and ask for you back
would you listen
for this dark alley love song?
For the winter we heated our home
from the steam off our own bodies?
I wrote you too many poems in a language
I did not yet know how to speak
but I know now
it doesn’t matter how well I say grace
if I am sitting at a table where I have no bread to eat.
So this is my wheat field.
You can have every acre, love.
This is my garden song.
This is my thunderstorm,
this is my fistfight with that bitter frost.
Tonight I begged another stage light
to become that back-alley street lamp we danced beneath
that night your warm mouth fell on my timid cheek
as I sang, “Maybe I Need You”
off key
but in tune.
Maybe I need you the way that big moon
needs that open sea.
Maybe I didn’t even know I was here
‘til I saw you holding me.
Give me one room to come home to.
Give me the palm of your hand.
Every strand of my hair is a kite string
and I have been blue in the face with your sky,
crying a flood over Iowa
so your mother can wake to Venice.
Love, I smashed my glass slipper
to build a stained glass window
for every wall inside my chest.
Now my heart is a pressed flower in a tattered Bible.
It is the one verse you can trust.
So I’m putting all of my words in your collection plate.
I am setting the table with bread and grace.
My knees are bent
like the corner of a page.
I am saving your place.
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains’ enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.” “XIII (Dedications),” Adrienne Rich (via clavicola)
oblivion chiclets
“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
between two parentheses.” Octavio Paz, from “Certainty”, in The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz: 1957-1987, edited by Eliot Weinberger (via apoetreflects)
Warsan Shire — For Women Who Are Difficult To Love
(read by the author)You are a horse running alone
and he tries to tame you
compares you to an impossible highway
to a burning house
says you are blinding him
that he could never leave you
forget you
want anything but you
you dizzy him, you are unbearable
every woman before or after you
is doused in your name
you fill his mouth
his teeth ache with memory of taste
his body just a long shadow seeking yours
but you are always too intense
frightening in the way you want him
unashamed and sacrificial
he tells you that no man can live up to the one who
lives in your head
and you tried to change didn’t you?closed your mouth more
tried to be softer
prettier
less volatile, less awake
but even when sleeping you could feel
him travelling away from you in his dreams
so what did you want to do love
split his head open?
you can’t make homes out of human beings
someone should have already told you that
and if he wants to leave
then let him leave
you are terrifying
and strange and beautiful
something not everyone knows how to love.
Catalogue of Ephemera by Rebecca Lindenberg
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 freckled lilies in the vase on the windowsill.
You give me 24-across.You give me flowers resembling moths’ wings.
You give me the first bird of morning alighting on a wire.
You give me the sidewalk café with plastic furniture and the boys
with their feet on the chairs.
You give me the swoop of homemade kites in the park on Sunday.
You give me afternoon-colored beer with lemons in it.You give me D.H. Lawrence,
and he gives me pomegranates and sorb-apples.You give me the loose tooth of California, the broken jaw of New York City.
You give me the blue sky of Wyoming, and the blue wind through it.You give me an ancient city where the language is a secret everyone is keeping.
You give me a t-shirt that says all you gave me was this t-shirt.
You give me pictures with yourself cut out.You give me lime blossoms, but not for what they symbolize.
You give me yes. You give me no.
You give me midnight apples in a car with the windows down.
You give me the flashbulbs of an electrical storm.
You give me thunder and the suddenly green underbellies of clouds.You give me the careening of trains. You give me the scent of bruised mint.
You give me the smell of black hair, of blond hair.
You give me Apollo and Daphne, Pan and Syrinx.
You give me Echo.You give me hyacinths and narcissus. You give me foxgloves
and soft fists of peony.You give me the filthy carpet of an East Village apartment.
You give me seeming not to notice.You give me an unfinished argument, begun on the Manhattan-bound F train.
You give me paintings of women with their eyes closed.
You give me grief, and how to grieve.(via lifeinpoetry & passade)
(Source: poetryfoundation.org)
White Nights
“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 down in a bowl
of oatmeal and I’m on the phone with you, I’m
explaining I’m face down in a bowl
of oatmeal and the dog’s barking in the corner
where we keep the 9-pound ball for me and the
13-pound ball for you and I’m trying to get him
to shut up, I’m yelling you don’t have to
bark and he’s on the table with the crayons
drawing me a tree and I’m shouting dammit
and he’s got the sandbags over his
little furry back and I’m crying now and saying
something like I’m sorry and the dog is
crying too and I realize that he’s had years
to learn I’m sorry means I know
I’m no good. And he’s got his paw over
my hand and when I lean in closer I swear
I can hear him say you look like
a million bucks and when he dreams later
that evening I can tell by the way
his legs twitch that he’s chasing hundreds
of thousands of deer through some imagined
forest. And you? You’ve left a Post-It
Note stuck to the top of my computer
with a drawing of a smiling cartoon stag
playing the drums with his antlers, and I can’t
help it, I’m smiling now, and the dog
wakes up from his dream and patters
over to my feet and sits and sighs dear,
my heart always beats for you.
Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Maenads”
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,
respectable housewives,
would come and stand nightlong in the agora
silent
together
as ewes and cows in the night fields,
guarding, watching them
as their mothers
watched over them.
And no man
dared
that fierce decorum.
Anna Kamienska, “The Empty Places”
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 outgrew
the drawers full of unnecessary things
the pipe with a chewed mouthpiece
the shoes molded to the shape of a foot
that departed barefooted
the phone-receiver where voices grew hush
I hurried so much to love
and naturally I didn’t manageTranslated by Grazyna Drabik and David Curzon
