That sweater always smelled of fuel oil, dirt and him, and one could never really know the difference.
Love this, Dad! :)
You remember too much
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?
She shifted to a question about airports.
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?
She shifted to a question about airports.
—
-Anne Carson, The Glass Essay.
(via summermachine)
Can I love Anne Carson more?
(Source: sarahlab)
Yvonne Georgina: I Remember, by Anne Sexton By the first of August the invisible...
I Remember, by Anne Sexton
By the first of August
the invisible beetles began
to snore and the grass was
as tough as hemp and was
no color - no more than
the sand was a color and
we had worn our bare feet
bare since the twentieth
of June and there were times
we forgot to wind up your
alarm clock and some nights
we took our gin warm and neat
from old jelly glasses while
the sun blew out of sight
like a red picture hat and
one day I tied my hair back
with a ribbon and you said
that I looked almost like
a puritan lady and what
I remember best is that
the door to your room was
the door to mine.
You’ll be comin’ home, someday soon
Home Again Home Again
by A. F. Moritz
Your parents had reached a long slow time,
as animals do, the great center of their lives,
when they gleam in their fells as though eternally,
unchanging. Or as a day can seem eternal
if you lie and watch the full clouds, conscious
of your own time: you soon must get up and leave.
So father, mother, the small shabby town,
its patch of earth going on as though forever: you
forgot them there, where they’d been since you started out
and where you could find them again—as anyone
forgets what he has to lean on
so deeply and heavily that it wounds his side
and the pain seems only himself.
Ungrateful? So you accused yourself one day,
waking suddenly. And when you went at last
to look for them where they always are, they’d gone,
or were withered alive, their mouths opening and closing
without sound. The buildings had leaned still farther
toward the dusty weeds and crumbs of old machines
littered everywhere inexplicably. And now
who will explain them? Your grandfather’s day
is as absent from your thought as is your own
gestation. And check the records:
what is written down says nothing.
The volumes all avoid the one question you have.
They’re like the notebooks you kept in adolescence:
you turn the endless pages and you wonder,
what did I know or feel, how did I live then,
what was this violence and love, this utter newness,
invention that could sing water and light, raging
at the first touch of dying, never mentioning death?
You went back and the bones of your native town
were like that, records from which something had escaped:
a skeletal mill that roofed ghostly technologies
where men once worked, coughed, burnt, bled.
And that way they had permitted the long pageants
of the children. And their mothers—whose images,
vague, identical, stalk by in the nights,
each one sorrowing and serene, her starved, enamelled,
hard flesh torn, her dress the blue of late dusk,
the heaven behind her a work of flat blinding gold.
This Morning in a Morning Voice
to beat the froggiest
of morning voices,
my son gets out of bed
and takes a lumpish song
along—a little lyric
learned in kindergarten,
something about a
boat. He’s found it in
the bog of his throat
before his feet have hit
the ground, follows
its wonky melody down
the hall and into the loo
as if it were the most
natural thing for a little
boy to do, and lets it
loose awhile in there
to a tinkling sound while
I lie still in bed, alive
like I’ve never been, in
love again with life,
afraid they’ll find me
drowned here, drowned
in more than my fair
share of joy.
-Todd Boss
“It’s very strange”
It’s very strange
the eggs are everywhere
There must be some mistake
the eggs are so close together
There seems to be no room for us
Push the eggs closer together
It’s impossible
We must get closer together
but beloved what will happen
with all the eggs everywhere
what will happen everywhere
to us
There must be some mistake
— Inger Christensen, from Light
Mongolia
When the white snowdrops appeared in the early grasses
Like the white spot on a dark horse’s head
I stopped for a second
And reflected on my innocent youth
The raindrops dance on leaves
Crystal bells echo in silence
Spring days when I used to run I will never catch again
B. Enkhjargal – Poet, Binder Soum, Khentii Aimag
(thanks for the pic, brother)
