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The sky from my road looking north.
– Posted from my iPhone
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WHY DO YOU STAY UP SO LATE? By Don Paterson
I’ll tell you, if you really want to know: remember that day you lost two years ago at the rockpool where you sat and played the jeweler with all those stones you’d stolen from the shore? Most of them went dark and nothing more, but sometimes one would blink the secret color it had locked up somewhere in its stony sleep. This is how you knew the ones to keep. So I collect the dull things of the day in which I see some possibility but which are dead and which have the surprise I don’t know, and I’ve no pool to help me tell– so I look at them…
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Return trip.
It was 2006, I was in Boston, taking the green line downtown and had just entered the underground station. The lines at the cashier windows on both sides of the turnstiles were long. A tall soldier, dressed in camouflage carrying a large duffle bag over his shoulder was staring at the lines too, obviously confused. I had already pre-purchased tokens (this was before they were phased out) and told him to follow me. I thumbed a gold token into the turnstiles for each of us. We went through and I found the stairs to the tracks. A few minutes of waiting I found him again. He still looked nervous and…
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You Are There by Erica Jong
You are there. You have always been there. Even when you thought you were climbing you had already arrived. Even when you were breathing hard, you were at rest. Even then it was clear you were there. Not in our nature to know what is journey and what arrival. Even if we knew we would not admit. Even if we lived we would think we were just germinating. To live is to be uncertain. Certainty comes at the end.
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Slowing tranquility
You have learned to enjoy the attribute of patience in itself, for it slows time, honors tranquility, and lets you savor a world in which you are clearly aware that your passage is but a brief candle. – Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone
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Pain is a gift.
When you were boys we ended every dinner cooked outside on the grill by toasting marshmallows. One day last year I found the perfect sticks at the supermarket. How could I not think of you? Long dowels with pointed ends wrapped in a plastic bag, despite their intended purpose they were made just for getting the marshmallows past the lip of the kettle deep towards the orange and grey coals. I bought them, brought them home. Even though I live alone. They sit, on top of my fridge, out of sight. But when I do catch a glimpse of them you’re with me, even for just a moment. – Posted…
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From Adrienne Rich’s “Twenty-One Love Poems”
No one’s fated or doomed to love anyone. The accidents happen, we’re not heroines, they happen in our lives like car crashes, books that change us, neighborhoods we move into and come to love. Tristan und Isolde is scarcely the story, women at least should know the difference between love and death. No poison cup, no penance. Merely a notion that the tape-recorder should have caught some ghost of us: that tape-recorder not merely played but should have listened to us, and could instruct those after us: this we were, this is how we tried to love, and there are the forces they had ranged against us, and these are…
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Memorial Day by Dennis Caraher
High school band. Memorial Day. Country cemetery. Marched all the way. We stood in formation, took off our caps. Stood with the nation, we played taps Year before Kennedy, year before King. Last year I cared about anything. But for that moment, we were one. Honoring soldiers At Arlington. Notes drifted across the plains. Swallows signaled oncoming rain. Station wagons, pickup trucks Rescued us then turned to rust We put on new uniforms Crisp, creased. Tattered, well-worn Some forget where we come from Some come to rest In Arlington When he was twelve, took my only son Lost ourselves in the Smithsonian Then Abraham, above the Mall. Then raised our…
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After a Noisy Night  by Laure-Anne Bosselaar
The man I love enters the kitchen with a groan, he just woke up, his hair a Rorschach test. A minty kiss, a hand on my neck, coffee, two percent milk, microwave. He collapses on a chair, stunned with sleep, yawns, groans again, complains about his dry sinuses and crusted nose. I want to tell him how much he slept, how well, the cacophony of his snoring pumping in long wheezes and throttles–the debacle of rhythm–hours erratic with staccato of pants and puffs, crescendi of gulps, chokes, pectoral sputters and spits. But the microwave goes ding! A short little ding! – sharp as a guillotine–loud enough to stop my words…
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An actual chat session transcript, or “everything I needed to know I learned from Comic Books”.
A friend and I chatting about fear and dreams. – Posted from my iPhone
