Suffer me gently in your dreams.
My somnambulant sighs
Will warm the edges of your bed.
Embrace my morphic specter,
Kiss illusory lips
That whisper to a sleeping ear.
Dreams are like the life
Unlived and forgot
That haunt our deconstructed lives.
Suffer me gently in your dreams
Caress illusion
And never doubt reality.
The great pain of things that will happen
turned into the most exquisite pleasure
when among a thousand photos that were displayed,
I had the grace and fortune of seeing you.
The kisses and the loving that was loved
recklessly from yours and my desire
flowering once again, will shine
in the misty light of daybreak.
The blessed past which was so cruel
and joyful today presents itself as tender
and makes my voice resonate again.
To exalt the resurrected love
that feeds on memory images,
changes the horror into sweetness.
~Carlos Drummond de Andrade
I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all
oppression and shame,
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men at anguish with
themselves, remorseful after deeds done,
I see in low life the mother misused by her children, dying,
neglected, gaunt, desperate,
I see the wife misused by her husband, I see the treacherous seducer
of young women,
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love attempted to be
hid, I see these sights on the earth,
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny, I see martyrs and
prisoners,
I observe a famine at sea, I observe the sailors casting lots who
shall be kill’d to preserve the lives of the rest,
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon
laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these–all the meanness and agony without end I sitting look out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.
~Walt Whitman
Ardella
I would liken you
To a night without stars
Were it not for your eyes.
I would liken you
To a sleep without dreams
Were it not for your songs.
~Langston Hughes
Where will I rediscover you
and will I?
The question sits on all the lips of those
who lie in bed alone. You is/are the name
each of us give to what we love the most
or what we have not, will not know. And it is almost always that One, absent,
Gone, through circumstance
or happenstance.
Where did I lose you and when? Did it
Happen even as we knew we were
discovering each other that first time.
Was loss a piece of swelling
big as the enlarging heart? Sweet basil growing greener reaches up
and through the grass like weeds.
Mallards form a rope across the sky
coming from the south in secret.
Cinnamon Teal bring up the rear. An early thaw has made all canyons
into rivulets.
The daisies saying love me now
or love me not.
If I have thought about you more than
now it must have been some other me
living in a different heartbreak house
surrounded by some other hedge of memory. I have been to town and back, to Greece
in dreams and in reality. To far shore,
near field, streets between and always I
have sought you out; on yellow days in
yellowed pages, through rages of the mind
and heart. I do not start out on a trip to
corner or beyond without you for you
have never left my head or would be heart. Where will I come upon you, if I do?
Perhaps in death or life again. When?
Perhaps not ever, what then? I'll give
It another day, a week. Another month.
A lifetime more or less, then I'll give up. |
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~Rod McKuen
Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form--no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space--ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold--the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn.
~Walt Whitman
When You Are Old
WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face among a crowd of stars.
~William Butler Yeats
Separation
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
~W. S. Merwin
From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then- in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life- was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.
~Edgar Allen Poe
How to Create an Agnostic
Singing with my son,
I clapped my hands
Just as lightning struck.
It was dumb luck.
But my son, awed, thought
I’d created the electricity.
He asked, “Dad, how'd you do that?”
Before I could answer,
thunder shook the house
And set off neighborhood car alarms.
“Dad,” he said. “Can you burn
down that tree outside my window?
The one that looks like a giant owl?”
O, my little disciple, my one boy choir,
I can’t do that
because your father,
your half-assed messiah,
is afraid of fire.
~Sherman Alexie
How shall I hold on to my soul, so that
it does not touch yours? How shall I lift
it gently up over you on to other things?
I would so very much like to tuck it away
among long lost objects in the dark
in some quiet unknown place, somewhere
which remains motionless when your depths resound.
And yet everything which touches us, you and me,
takes us together like a single bow,
drawing out from two strings but one voice.
On which instrument are we strung?
And which violinist holds us in the hand?
O sweetest of songs.
~Rainer Maria Rilke
| Missing Scenes |
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| She knows at once the spaces
where stories grow. The chance mention
of some frontier planet,
or a lost love. Something unresolved.
Five days a man spends off-camera.
Whatever happens out of sight, implied in a glance,
she can fill the gap. She sees them
everywhere now, the missing scenes, she can’t read
a book or watch a film
without shaping sequels, nor leave a man or woman
a corner of shadow
or a blank page. That day off sick, the week
away on business; who knows?
What couldn’t you do in three years at college, twenty
in a crap job, a fortnight’s
escape each summer? When she thinks, these days,
of her life, it seems to be
all missing scenes where something should have happened,
but when she looks for the stories,
they won’t come. |
~Sheenagh Pugh
The Just
A man who cultivates his garden, as Voltaire wished.
He who is grateful for the existence of music.
He who takes pleasure in tracing an etymology.
Two workmen playing, in a cafe in the South, a silent game of chess.
The potter, contemplating a color and a form.
The typographer who sets this page well, though it may not please him.
A woman and a man, who read the last tercets of a certain canto.
He who strokes a sleeping animal.
He who justifies, or wishes to, a wrong done him.
He who is grateful for the existence of Stevenson.
He who prefers others to be right.
These people, unaware, are saving the world.
~Jorge Luis Borges
Boys and Girls Together
Boys don't want to be princes.
Boys want to be shepherds who slay dragons,
maybe someone gives you half a kingdom and a princess,
but that's just what comes of being a shepherd boy
and slaying a dragon. Or a giant. And you don't really
even have to be a shepherd. Just not a prince.
In stories, even princes don't want to be princes,
disguising themselves as beggars or as shepherd boys,
leaving the kingdom for another kingdom,
princehood only of use once the ogre's dead, the tasks are done,
and the reluctant king, her father, needing to be convinced.
Boys do not dream of princesses who will come for them.
Boys would prefer not to be princes,
and many boys would happily kiss the village girls,
out on the sheep-moors, of an evening,
over the princess, if she didn't come with the territory.
Princesses sometimes disguise themselves as well,
to escape the kings' advances, make themselves ugly,
soot and cinders and donkey girls,
with only their dead mothers' ghosts to aid them,
a voice from a dried tree or from a pumpkin patch.
And then they undisguise, when their time is upon them,
gleam and shine in all their finery. Being princesses.
Girls are secretly princesses.
None of them know that one day, in their turn,
Boys and girls will find themselves become bad kings
or wicked stepmothers,aged woodcutters,
ancient shepherds, mad crones and wise-women,
to stand in shadows, see with cunning eyes:
The girl, still waiting calmly for her prince.
The boy, lost in the night, out on the moors.
~Neil Gaiman
1. The Alaska/Hawaii Effect
