May 2012
2 posts
“Faith is not being sure. It is not being sure, but betting with your last cent…...”
– Mary Jean Irion. Yes, World: A Mosaic of Meditation. (via parkstepp)
1 tag
“Don’t be afraid. The future is not disguised
as sleep. It is a tango. It...”
– Traci Brimhall, from “Through a Glass Darkly” (via proustitute)
April 2012
10 posts
1 tag
“Words should wander and meander. They should fly like owls and flicker like bats...”
– My Name is Mina, David Almond (via wordsfromya)
3 tags
“Your voice, with clear location of June days,
Called me outside the window. ...”
– Richard Wilbur, June Light.
3 tags
One.
My deck of sages sits in their cardboard box, wedged between Shakespeare and crime thrillers and a stack of notepads, breathing in neglect and sheltering the dust motes fleeing the light. I sit and stare at this little ecosystem, looking for a keystone amongst the minutiae.
Two.
Stories told. Books finish. Things happen and people change. And it’s not that I am afraid of being alone, it...
“Stories are our prayers, so write and edit and tell them with due reverence,...”
– Jacqui Banaszynski, from Nieman Reports (via notquitelocal)
“my soul, you were
in the ether with all
the other
scattershot suns”
– Paul Celan, from Glottal Stop, trans. Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh (via proustitute)
3 tags
“In the end one simply withdraws
From others and time, one’s own time,...”
– John Koethe, Fear of the Future.
2 tags
Water slices into the bay as a fish scale, separates the pebbles from the sand, and recedes. We stood beside driftwood bleached like unburied bones and I reached out my hand.
At a corner in the labyrinth a woman turned her face to me and asked carelessly, Where do I go if I’ve lost someone? For a moment I pause to savour the strangeness of her wording and then I point, wordlessly, upstairs to...
4 tags
Dan Sultan,”Dingo”, Get Out While You...
5 tags
“A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound, which was polished...”
– Mark Strand, The Everyday Enchantment of Music.
March 2012
5 posts
3 tags
“Does someone want to know the way to spring?
He’ll remind you
the flower...”
– Li-Young Lee, Black Petal.
2 tags
fluttering-slips:
So Much Happiness -
for Michael
It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness. With sadness there is something to rub against, a wound to tend with lotion and cloth. When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up, something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.
But happiness floats. It doesn’t need you to hold it down. It doesn’t need...
3 tags
“I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart
against
The want of you;
Of...”
– Amy Lowell, The Letter.
February 2012
8 posts
3 tags
“What kind of sun expounds its rays
upon the hills but then mutes
like an...”
– Prageeta Sharma, Poem for Leigh Hunt.
3 tags
Jam Hsiao, “The One and Only You”...
1 tag
1 tag
“I’ve decided that some of us, fearful that the world we know might not outlive...”
– Alice Walker, “Coming In from the Cold” (1984), from Living by the Word: Selected Writings 1973-1987. (via thecomfortofmybooks)
January 2012
14 posts
2 tags
natk:
Life is what you think is waiting for you outside that front door, crying ‘use me’, but you can’t, not yet, not now, because you’re broke, you’re broken, you’re busy, you haven’t graduated, you can’t get the time from work, you can’t get the time at all. Life is not out that front door, waiting, it is in the room, it is the ache in your hand that you get when you write; it is the clothes...
3 tags
The heat is getting to me. It comes as a depletion of air, forcing films of water from my skin and it’s like breathing from the spout of a vacuum cleaner minus all the dust. I read of an English autumn, shuffling leaves and the smell of earth, sunshine slipping off bronzed foliage onto a road leading downhill. Cars weave by and it’s like a river minus all the water but still I am...
1 tag
1 tag
2 tags
“In the black hours when I lie sleepless,
near drowning, dread-heavy, your face...”
– Kim Addonizio, Mermaid Song.
3 tags
“You need me like ice needs the mountain
On which it breeds. Like print needs...”
– Monica Ferrell, Rime Riche.
2 tags
4 tags
Bones are grating against each other, all fifty-four of them, under the skin of my hands. It’s like a tango; except the tempo is all wrong. Once upon a time I used these hands to wring poison from my whining, dream-haunted brain; but now they lay useless. I’ve even stopped playing shadow puppets with them in the morning sun, because I’ve taken to waking before the sun rose. I...
December 2011
5 posts
3 tags
5 tags
It’s a laminated red card from the Alfred and its final sentence proclaims the holder of it to be radioactive until 2013. No sex without a condom and no holding babies, he tells me with a wink. I can still shake hands, though and he squeezes the back of my hand as though to prove it. His skin feels like paper softened from sweaty palms and repeated scrunching. Somehow I don’t doubt...
“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be...”
– Sylvia Plath (via stickyeyelids)
November 2011
24 posts
elvedon:
I am a catcher of stars by night, keeping dry bones from crying out in restlessness
A throbbing ache, remedied with sage leaves, the tender nocturnes of Chopin, and a small book of wispy poems bought at a vendor’s market around the corner
Printed words breathe, the writings of tinged wisteria under a lonely paper moon
1 tag
3 tags
