May 2008
27 posts
1 tag
The Double-Bed Dream Gallows
Driving through hot brushy country in the late autumn, I saw a hawk crucified on a barbed-wire fence.
I guess as a kind of advertisement to other hawks, saying from the pages of a leading women’s magazine,
“She’s beautiful, but burn all the maps to your body. I’m not here of my own choosing.”
Richard Brautigan
1 tag
A WOMAN YOUNG AND OLD
I. FATHER AND CHILD SHE hears me strike the board and say That she is under ban Of all good men and women, Being mentioned with a man That has the worst of all bad names; And thereupon replies That his hair is beautiful, Cold as the March wind his eyes. William Butler Yeats
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Blackberry-picking
Late August, given heavy rain and sun For a full week, the blackberries would ripen. At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots...
2 tags
Atonement
It was the slow retraction, the retreat into autonomy which signaled the approaching end of Briony’s childhood. It was haunting Emily once more. Briony was her last, and nothing between now and the grave would be as elementally important or pleasurable as the care of a child. She wasn’t a fool. She knew it was self-pity, this mellow expansiveness as she contemplated what looked like...
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Atonement
It was clear enough—one person waiting for another was like an arithmetical sum, and just as empty of emotion. Waiting. Simply one person doing nothing, over time, while another approached. Waiting was a heavy word. He felt it pressing down, heavy as a greatcoat. Everyone in the cellar was waiting, everyone on the beach. She was waiting, yes, but then what? He tried to make her voice say the...
2 tags
Middlesex
Joking but not joking, Desdemona and Lefty embraced. At first they just hugged in the standard way, but after ten seconds the hug began to change; certain positions of the hands and strokings of the fingers weren’t the usual displays of sibling affection, and these things constituted a language of their own, announced a whole new message in the silent room. Lefty began waltzing Desdemona...
2 tags
Middlesex
On the deck of the Jean Bart, the three new French citizens looked back at the burning city, ablaze from end to end. The fire would continue for the next three days, the flames visible for fifty miles. At sea, sailors would mistake the rising smoke for a gigantic mountain range. In the country they were heading for, America, the burning of Smyrna made the front pages for a day or two, before being...
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Lolita
Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up. Vladimir Nabokov
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Heaven, 1963
It’s my favorite photo— captioned, “Daddy and His Sweetheart.” It’s in black and white, it’s before Pabst Blue Ribbon, before his tongue became a knife that made my mother bleed, and before he blackened my eye the time he thought I meant to end my life. He’s standing in our yard on Porter Road beneath the old chestnut tree. He’s wearing...
1 tag
Las Ruinas del Corazon
Juana the Mad married the handsomest man in Spain and that was the end of it, because when you marry a man more beautiful than you, they say you pretty much lost control of the situation. Did she ever listen? No. When he was away annexing more kingdoms, she had horrible dreams of him being cut and blown away, or spread on the rack, or sleeping with exotic women. She prayed to the twin guardians of...
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First Ice
A girl freezes in a telephone booth. In her draughty overcoat she hides A face all smeared In tears and lipstick. She breathes on her thin palms. Her fingers are icy. She wears earrings. She’ll have to go home alone, alone Along the icy street. First ice. It is the first time. The first ice of telephone phrases. Frozen tears glitter on her cheeks- The first ice of human hurt. Andrei...
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Little Sleep's-Head Sprouting Hair in the...
1 You scream, waking from a nightmare. When I sleepwalk into your room, and pick you up, and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me hard, as if clinging could save us. I think you think I will never die, I think I exude to you the permanence of smoke or stars, even as my broken arms heal themselves around you. 2 I have heard you tell the sun, don’t go down, I have stood by as you told...
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On Hedonism
Beauty makes me hopeless. I don’t care why anymore I just want to get away. When I look at the city of Paris I long to wrap my legs around it. When I watch you dancing there is a heartless immensity like a sailor in a dead calm sea. Desires as round as peaches bloom in me all night, I no longer gather what falls. Anne Carson
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The Threatened One
It is love. I will have to hide or flee. Its prison walls grow larger, as in a fearful dream. The alluring mask has changed, but as usual it is the only one. What use now are my talismans, my touchstones: the practice of literature, vague learning, an apprenticeship to the language used by the flinty Northland to to sing of its seas and its swords, the serenity of friendship, the galleries of the...
2 tags
Einstein's Dreams
Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but it is noble to live life, and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case. Alan Lightman
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Fall On Your Knees
When she caught sight of him she started running. She ran right into his arms and he swung her around like a little kid, laughing, and then they hugged. He thought his heart would kill him, he’d had no clue what it was capable of. His lips brushed her cheek, her hair smelled sweet and strange, an evil enchantment slid from him. The salt mist coming off Sydney Harbour crystallized in the fuzz...
2 tags
Fall On Your Knees
But she had seen him. She had spied him from her upstairs bedroom window when he came knocking at the kitchen door below, toting his earnest bag of tools—a blond boy so carefully combed. She had peeked at him through the mahogany railings carved with grapes as he entered the front hall and hung his coat in the closet beneath the stairs—his eyes so blue, his skin so fair. Taut and trim,...
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The Little Prince
“You are a funny animal,” he said at last. “You are no thicker than a finger…” “But I am more powerful than the finger of a king,” said the snake. The little prince smiled. “You are not very powerful. You haven’t even any feet. You cannot even travel…” “I can carry you farther than any ship could take you,” said the...
1 tag
Poem That Had Some Difficulty With the First Line
I’ve always wanted to begin a poem with the line, “I’ve always wanted to begin.” Now I have. Best to end here, but then the universe is expanding back into its black beginnings, and space, aware of its own looming demise, is singing of possibilities. I’m almost over, it sings, it’s almost over and sooner or later we’d be left with nothing but time. If we live that long. Sometime before then all...
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The Perilous Gard
“I’ve never thought of you like that,” said Christopher. “How could I? If you were any other woman, I could tell you I loved you, easily enough, but not you— because you’ve always seemed to me like a part of myself, and it would be like saying I loved my own eyes or my own mind. But have you ever thought of what it would be to have to live without your mind or...
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The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
Sometimes he would spend whole nights in tears, longing to be filled with such rays himself. But a woman loved, who yields, is still far from being a woman who loves. Oh nights of no consolation, which returned his flooding gifts in pieces heavy with transience. How often he thought then of the Troubadours, who feared nothing more than having their prayers answered. All the money he had acquired...
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Soneto XVII
No te amo como si fueras rosa de sal, topacio o flecha de claveles que propagan el fuego: Te amo como se aman ciertas cosas oscuras, secretamente, entre la sombra y el alma. Te amo como la planta que no florece y lleva dentro de sí, escondida, la luz de aquellas flores y gracias a tu amor vive oscuro en mi cuerpo el apretado aroma que ascendió de la tierra. Te amo sin saber cómo, ni cuándo, ni...
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Cry, the Beloved Country
We do not need the doctor any more. No white doctor, no black doctor, can help her any more. Oh child of my womb and fruit of my desire, it was pleasure to hold the small cheeks in the hands, it was pleasure to feel the tiny clutching of the fingers, it was pleasure to feel the little mouth tugging at the breast. Such is the nature of woman. Such is the lot of women, to carry, to bear, to watch,...
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A Shropshire Lad
XVIII Oh, when I was in love with you Then I was clean and brave, And miles around the wonder grew How well did I behave. And now the fancy passes by And nothing will remain, And miles around they’ll say that I Am quite myself again. A.E. Housman
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The House on Mango Street
I am an ugly daughter. I am the one nobody comes for. Nenny says she won’t wait for her whole life for a husband to come and get her, that Minerva’s sister left her mother’s house by having a baby, but she doesn’t want to go that way either. She wants things all her own, to pick and choose. Nenny has pretty eyes and it’s easy to talk that way if you are pretty. My mother says when I get older my...
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Manet's Olympia
She reclines, more or less. Try that posture, it’s hardly languor. Her right arm sharp angles. With her left she conceals her ambush. Shoes but not stockings, how sinister. The flower behind her ear is naturally not real, of a piece with the sofa’s drapery. The windows (if any) are shut. This is indoor sin. Above the head of the (clothed) maid is an invisible voice balloon: slut. But. Consider...
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Warming Her Pearls
for Judith Radstone Next to my own skin, her pearls. My mistress bids me wear them, warm then, until evening when I’ll brush her hair. At six, I place them round her cool, white throat. All day I think of her, resting in the Yellow Room, contemplating silk or taffeta, which gown tonight? She fans herself whilst I work willingly, my slow heat entering each pearl. Slack on my neck, her rope. She’s...
December 2007
2 posts
The Insusceptibles
Then the long sunlight lying on the sea Fell, folded gold on gold; and slowly we Took up our decks of cards, our parasols, The picnic hamper and the sandblown shawls And climbed the dunes in silence. There were two Who lagged behind as lovers sometimes do, And took a different road. For us the night Was final, and by artificial light We came indoors to sleep. No envy there Of those who might be...
1 tag
Sunday Afternoon
After the First Communion and the banqet of mangoes and bridal cake, the young daughters of the coffee merchant lay down for a long siesta, and their white dresses lay beside them in quietness and the white veils floated In their dreams as the flies buzzed. But as the afternoon burned to a close they rose and ran about the neighbourhood among the halfbuilt villas alive, alive, kicking a...