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Mayo 25, 2011
A Homecoming
One faith is bondage. Two
are free. In the trust
of old love, cultivation shows
a dark graceful wilderness
at its heart. Wild
is that wilderness, we roam
the distances of our faith,
safe beyond the bounds
of what we know. O love,
open. Show me
my country. Take me home.
Wendell Berry
Posted by sarita at 1:17 AM
You may not be her first...
“You may not be her first, her last, or her only. She loved before she may love again. But if she loves you now, what else matters? She’s not perfect - you aren’t either, and the two of you may never be perfect together but if she can make you laugh, cause you to think twice, and admit to being human and making mistakes, hold onto her and give her the most you can. She may not be thinking about you every second of the day, but she will give you a part of her that she knows you can break - her heart. So don’t hurt her, don’t change her, don’t analyze and don’t expect more than she can give. Smile when she makes you happy, let her know when she makes you mad, and miss her when she’s not there.”
- Bob Marley
Posted by sarita at 1:17 AM
Mayo 15, 2011
Preliminary Report from the Committee on Appropriate Postures for the Suffering
We who wear clean socks and shoes are tired
of your barefoot complaining, your dusty footprints
on our just-cleaned rugs. Tired, too of your endless ploys—
the feigned amputations, the imaginary children
you huddle with outside the malls, your rags and bottles,
the inconvenient positions you assume. Though we remain
impressed by your emaciation and your hunger and,
frankly, find you photogenic and think your images
both alarming and aesthetically pleasing, to do anything
more than sigh will require a complex process
of application and review, a process that is currently
in the development stage. Meanwhile, may we suggest
you moderate your public suffering at least
until the Committee on Appropriate Postures for the Suffering
is able to produce guidelines. Do not be alarmed.
The committee has asked me to assure you
that they are sensitive both to the aesthetic qualities
of your suffering—the blank stares, the neotonous beauty
as the flesh recedes and the eyes seem to grow larger,
the haloes of flies—and to the physical limitations
of human endurance and the positioning of limbs.
They will, I am certain, ask that you not lift
your naked children like offerings to the gods.
On this topic, discussion has centered around the unfair
advantage such ploys give the parents of such children.
The childless, whether by choice or fate, are left
to wither silently in the doorways while those with children
proffer and gesticulate in the avenues unabated.
This offends our cherished sense of fairness,
the democratic impulse that informs and energizes
our discussions. Therefore, we ask for restraint,
and where restraint is lacking, we will legislate.
Please be forewarned. In addition, the committee
will recommend that the shouting of slogans,
whether directed at governments or deities, be kept
to a minimum. Not only is such shouting displeasing
aesthetically, but it suggests there is something
to be done. Believe me, no one is more acutely aware
of your condition than we who must ignore it everyday
on our way to the capitol. In this matter, we ask only
that you become more aware of your fellow citizens,
who must juggle iPods, blackberries, briefcases
and cell phones, lattes. Who must march steadily
or be trampled by the similarly burdened citizens
immediately behind them. Your shouting and pointing
does not serve you well. Those of us employed
by the agency are sworn to oversee you. If we seem,
as you suggest, to have overlooked you instead,
that is an oversight and will be addressed, I am certain,
in our annual review. Please be aware: To eliminate
your poverty, your hunger, your aesthetically
pleasing, yet disturbing, presence in our doorways,
above our heating grates, in our subway tunnels
and under our freeways would mean the elimination
of the agency itself and quite possibly a decline
in tourism. Those of us employed by the agency
have neither the stamina, persistence, nor the luminous
skin tones that you present to the viewing public.
Finally, to those who would recommend programs,
who would call for funding and action,
I must remind you that we have been charged not
with eliminating your suffering but with managing it.
by Jon Davis
Posted by sarita at 5:21 PM
Mayo 11, 2011
Self-portrait as Thousandfurs
To have been age enough.
To have been leg enough.
Been enough bold. Said no.
Been a girl grown into that
negative construction. Or said yes
on condition of a dress. To be yours
if my skirts skimmed the floors.
To have demanded each seam
celestial, appealed for planetary pleats.
And when you saw the sun a sequin,
the moon a button shaped from glass,
and in the stars a pattern
for a dress, when the commission
proved too minute, and the frocks
hung before me like hosts,
to have stood then at the edge
of the wood, heard a hound’s bark
and my heart hark in return.
To have seen asylum in the scruffs
of neck—mink, lynx, ocelot, fox,
Kodiak, ermine, wolf—felt a claw
curve over my sorrow then. Said yes
on condition of a dress. To be yours
if my skirts skimmed the floors.
To have demanded each seam
just short of breathing, my mouth
a-beg for bestial pleats.
And when you saw tails as tassels,
underskins sateen, and in entrails
damasks of flowers and fruit,
when the bet proved not too broad
for you, and before me, the cloak held
open as a boast, to have slipped
into that primitive skin. To have
turned my how how into a howl. To have
picked up my heavy hem and run.
by Stacy Gnall
Posted by sarita at 1:34 AM
Sojourn in the Whale
Trying to open locked doors with a sword, threading
the points of needles, planting shade trees
upside down; swallowed by the opaqueness of one whom the seas
love better than they love you, Ireland—
you have lived and lived on every kind of shortage.
You have been compelled by hags to spin
gold thread from straw and have heard men say:
"There is a feminine temperament in direct contrast to ours,
which makes her do these things. Circumscribed by a
heritage of blindness and native
incompetence, she will become wise and will be forced to give in.
Compelled by experience, she will turn back;
water seeks its own level";
and you have smiled. "Water in motion is far
from level." You have seen it, when obstacles happened to bar
the path, rise automatically.
by Marianne Moore
Posted by sarita at 1:30 AM
Happiness Writes White
I am a piece of chalk
scrawling words on an empty blackboard.
I am a banner of smoke
that crosses the blue air and doesn't dissolve.
I don't believe that only sorrow
and misery can be written.
Happiness, too, can be precise:
Doctor, there's a keen throbbing
on the left side of my chest
where my ribs are wrenched by joy.
Wings flutter in my shoulders
and blood courses through my body
like waves cresting on a choppy sea.
Look: the eyes blur with tears
and the tears clear.
My head is like skylight.
My heart is like dawn.
Edward Hirsch
Posted by sarita at 1:26 AM
Mayo 9, 2011
Civilization
There's an art
to everything. How
the rain means
April and an ongoingness like
that of song until at last
it ends. A centuries-old
set of silver handbells that
once an altar boy swung,
processing...You're the same
wilderness you've always
been, slashing through briars,
the bracken
of your invasive
self. So he said,
in a dream. But
the rest of it—all the rest—
was waking: more often
than not, to the next
extravagance. Two blackamoor
statues, each mirroring
the other, each hoisting
forever upward his burden of
hand-painted, carved-by-hand
peacock feathers. Don't
you know it, don't you know
I love you, he said. He was
shaking. He said:
I love you. There's an art
to everything. What I've
done with this life,
what I'd meant not to do,
or would have meant, maybe, had I
understood, though I have
no regrets. Not the broken but
still-flowering dogwood. Not
the honey locust, either. Not even
the ghost walnut with its
non-branches whose
every shadow is memory,
memory...As he said to me
once, That's all garbage
down the river, now. Turning,
but as the utterly lost—
because addicted—do:
resigned all over again. It
only looked, it—
It must only look
like leaving. There's an art
to everything. Even
turning away. How
eventually even hunger
can become a space
to live in. How they made
out of shamelessness something
beautiful, for as long as they could.
by Carl Phillips
Posted by sarita at 1:03 AM
Tornado at Night
They ran out in nightgowns to seek the protection
Of the overhang of the abandoned gas station,
And resembled the Erecthium's female columns.
The broken power lines flashed white
When they touched the wet ground,
And the girls' legs showed
As round shadows through their nightgowns.
I stayed in my apartment until the steps blew away.
My candle almost extinguished itself from sheer shaking.
A huge tree fell on my neighbor's car.
He was in it for safety.
Out he leaped from the unsquashed half
Making the voice of Donald Duck running from death.
I jumped from my balcony then,
And went walking in excess, shirtless,
Praising, opening my mouth, sleek the whips,
Shirtless, as when gods were men.
Stan Rice
Posted by sarita at 12:50 AM
Weeping... joy...
Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.
Psalm 30
Posted by sarita at 12:48 AM
True Love
In the middle of the night, when we get up
after making love, we look at each other in
complete friendship, we know so fully
what the other has been doing. Bound to each other
like mountaineers coming down from a mountain,
bound with the tie of the delivery-room,
we wander down the hall to the bathroom, I can
hardly walk, I hobble through the granular
shadowless air, I know where you are
with my eyes closed, we are bound to each other
with huge invisible threads, our sexes
muted, exhausted, crushed, the whole
body a sex—surely this
is the most blessed time of my life,
our children asleep in their beds, each fate
like a vein of abiding mineral
not discovered yet. I sit
on the toilet in the night, you are somewhere in the room,
I open the window and snow has fallen in a
steep drift, against the pane, I
look up, into it,
a wall of cold crystals, silent
and glistening, I quietly call to you
and you come and hold my hand and I say
I cannot see beyond it. I cannot see beyond it.
Sharon Olds
Posted by sarita at 12:44 AM
Daybreak in Alabama
When I get to be a composer
I'm gonna write me some music about
Daybreak in Alabama
And I'm gonna put the purtiest songs in it
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew.
I'm gonna put some tall tall trees in it
And the scent of pine needles
And the smell of red clay after rain
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyes
Of black and white black white black people
And I'm gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew
In that dawn of music when I
Get to be a composer
And write about daybreak
In Alabama.
Langston Hughes
Posted by sarita at 12:36 AM
Dear Tiara
I dreamed I was a mannequin in the pawnshop window
of your conjectures.
I dreamed I was a chant in the mouth of a monk, saffron-robed
syllables in the religion of You.
I dreamed I was a lament to hear the deep sorrow places
of your lungs.
I dreamed I was your bad instincts.
I dreamed I was a hummingbird sipping from the tulip of your ear.
I dreamed I was your ex-boyfriend stored in the basement
with your old baggage.
I dreamed I was a jukebox where every song sang your name.
I dreamed I was in an elevator, rising in the air shaft
of your misgivings.
I dreamed I was a library fine, I've checked you out
too long so many times.
I dreamed you were a lake and I was a little fish leaping
through the thin reeds of your throaty humming.
I must've dreamed I was a nail, because I woke beside you still
hammered.
I dreamed I was a tooth to fill the absences of your old age.
I dreamed I was a Christmas cactus, blooming in the desert
of my stupidity.
I dreamed I was a saint's hair-shirt, sewn with the thread
of your saliva.
I dreamed I was an All Night Movie Theater, showing the
flickering black reel of my nights before I met you.
I must've dreamed I was gravity, I've fallen for you so damn hard.
by Sean Thomas Dougherty
Posted by sarita at 12:35 AM
Mayo 5, 2011
The Art of Editing
Some authors really want their books to be loved and want themselves to be loved, but I don’t want that. I don’t want my hand held, I don’t want to be stroked, I don’t want to be patronized, I don’t want any of those things. And I never got any of that from Bob. As a result, our editing sessions are vital, they are hard, and they are tremendous fun. - Toni Morrison
You have to surrender to a book. If you do, when something in it seems to be going askew, you are wounded. The more you have surrendered to a book, the more jarring its errors appear. I read a manuscript very quickly, the moment I get it. I usually won’t use a pencil the first time through because I’m just reading for impressions. When I reach the end, I’ll call the writer and say, I think it’s very fine (or whatever), but I think there are problems here and here. At that point I don’t know why I think that—I just think it. Then I go back and read the manuscript again, more slowly, and I find and mark the places where I had negative reactions to try to figure out what’s wrong. The second time through I think about solutions—maybe this needs expanding, maybe there’s too much of this so it’s blurring that.
Editing requires you to be always open, always responding. It is very important, for example, not to allow yourself to want the writer to write a certain kind of book. Sometimes that’s hard. My favorite of Heller’s books is Something Happened. When we are working on a manuscript, Joe is always telling me (rightly) that I want him to write Something Happened again, and that he could only write it once. Inevitably you will like some of a writer’s books better than others. But when you’re working on a manuscript, that can’t matter. You have to be inside that book and do your best to make it as good as it can be. And if you can’t approach it in that spirit, you shouldn’t be working on it. - Bob Gottlieb
What is it that impels this act of editing? I know that in my case it’s not merely about words. Whatever I look at, whatever I encounter, I want it to be good—whether it’s what you’re wearing, or how the restaurant has laid the table, or what’s going on on stage, or what the president said last night, or how two people are talking to each other at a bus stop. I don’t want to interfere with it or control it, exactly—I want it to work, I want it to be happy, I want it to come out right. If I hadn’t gone into publishing, I might have been a psychoanalyst; I might have been, I think, a rabbi, if I’d been at all religious. My impulse to make things good, and to make good things better, is almost ungovernable. I suppose it’s lucky I found a wholesome outlet for it. - Gottlieb
Posted by sarita at 11:17 AM