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Octubre 19, 2011
playing with fire
something is always burning, passion,
pride, envy, desire, the internal organs
going chokingly up in smoke, as some-
thing outside the body exerts a pull
that drags us like a match across sand-
paper. something is always burning,
london, paris, detroit, l.a., the neighbor-
hoods no one outside seems to see until
they're backlit by flames, when the out-
siders, peering through dense, acrid,
black-&-orange-rimmed fumes, mis-
take their dark reflections for savages
altogether alien. how hot are the london
riots for west end pearls? how hot in tot-
tenham? if one bead of cream rolls down
one precious neck, heads will roll in brix-
ton: the science of sociology. the mark
duggan principle of cause and effect:
under conditions of sufficient pressure—
measured roughly in years + lead ÷ £s—
black blood is highly combustible.
by Evie Shockley
Posted by sarita at 1:13 PM
Evening Song
My song will rest while I rest. I struggle along. I'll get back to the corn and
the open fields. Don't fret, love, I'll come out all right.
Back of Chicago the open fields. Were you ever there—trains coming toward
you out of the West—streaks of light on the long gray plains? Many a
song—aching to sing.
I've got a gray and ragged brother in my breast—that's a fact. Back of
Chicago the open fields—long trains go west too—in the silence. Don't
fret, love. I'll come out all right.
by Sherwood Anderson
Posted by sarita at 1:09 PM
That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines...
“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heartache when we read those lines written by the hand of a master and recognize them as our own, as the tender shoots we stifled because we lacked the faith to believe in our own powers, our own criterion of truth and beauty. Every man, when he gets quiet, when he becomes desperately honest with himself, is capable of uttering profound truths. We all derive from the same source. There is no mystery about the origin of things. We are all part of creation, all kings, all poets, all musicians; we have only to open up to discover what is already there.”
- Henry Miller, Sexus: The Rosy Crucifixion
Posted by sarita at 11:53 AM
Love is about bottomless empathy...
“Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.
And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, ‘Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s’ is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources.”
—Jonathan Franzen, adapted from a Kenyon commencement address.
Full piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/29/opinion/29franzen.html
Posted by sarita at 11:50 AM
I love you means...
““‘I love you’ means that I accept you for the person that you are, and that I do not wish to change you into someone else. It means that I will love you and stand by you even through the worst of times. It means loving you even when you’re in a bad mood, or too tired to do the things I want to do. It means loving you when you’re down, not just when you’re fun to be with. ‘I love you’ means that I know your deepest secrets and do not judge you for them, asking in return that you do not judge me for mine. It means that I care enough to fight for what we have and that I love you enough not to let go. It means thinking of you, dreaming of you, wanting and needing you constantly, and hoping you feel the same way for me.””
- Jonathan Safran Foer
Posted by sarita at 11:48 AM
Love blurs your vision...
““Love blurs your vision; but after it recedes, you can see more clearly than ever. It’s like the tide going out, revealing whatever’s been thrown away and sunk: broken bottles, old gloves, rusting pop cans, nibbled fishbodies, bones. This is the kind of thing you see if you sit in the darkness with open eyes, not knowing the future.””
- Margaret Atwood, from Cat’s Eye
Posted by sarita at 11:47 AM
Then summer fades...
““Then summer fades and passes and October comes. We’ll smell smoke then,
and feel an unexpected sharpness, a thrill of nervousness, swift elation, a
sense of sadness and departure.””
Thomas Wolfe
Posted by sarita at 11:45 AM
Octubre 16, 2011
A Lover
by Amy Lowell
If I could catch the green lantern of the firefly
I could see to write you a letter.
Posted by sarita at 12:01 PM
Octubre 10, 2011
For Aaron Sheon
"Tiny hatches, if you make enough of them, make
an entire etching move," you told us while we smoked
in the lit cave of your Tuesday 1-2:15. We scratched
our pens: dance & film posters, flyers to end the war.
In our famous jeans we slouched before your podium & slides weaving
the movements & the solo trips.
"He was lonely." "She had no patron."
"Scale extends us & reins us in," you said of the strange Piranesis.
"Find the heart of a city by stepping in."
My alleys & arcades pressed onto the copperplate of my 20-year-old brain
fusing its hemispheres. I hitched to Colmar and found
the Isenheim Altarpiece, figures on the old panels aflame, then turned
my back on all religions because you'd shown us Goya's firing squad
& Daumier's gutters where people looked for water.
"Movement in a painting is important as Dante."
I've looked for Dante's houses, cafés, notebooks, & horse-stalls, & someone
always says Oh, you mean The Poet.
"The body doesn't make sense by itself," you said, pointing the red-tip
wand at the chalky nudes of Ingres. If I am lonely
in any town whose museum
treasures its one Whistler or Bonnard, I stand before the image
hear your voice; my eyes
un-scroll, I lift
again like a hinge.
by Judith Vollmer
Posted by sarita at 11:23 PM