The breath’s slow drum-brush marks the end of Gillian’s time. Her hair’s haphazard marathon, swaying with the slowest jazz of afternoon. Detectives wandering at her breast; the nipple’s darker trilby. A black thief hair, returning to its crime.
*
Now, amongst the sheets, there is a trace of blacker hair, curled and blunt as shorthand. I watch her move, the blankets fanned across the mattress like a deal of cards. Her foot beside an ashtray shell, its butted cigarettes settled into parquetry. She dresses as a child might in a changing room, all half-under things. And what she’ll do tonight comes out of silence like a talking in her sleep. She’s leaving; and the similes are gone. A borrowed room, and everything quite suddenly and only like itself: this coat, this coat. This floor, this floor.
— John A. Scott, Singles
Letter
Today I did almost nothing. Read a little, tried to write a sentence to make another sentence seem necessary.
I wasn’t unhappy. Everything I could will myself to do I’d done, so I said I’d done enough.
Now I’m looking out my window: white pine, ash, a single birch, the leanings and crossings
of branches. And then the sky: pale, undecided. Years ago you wrote to me about a matter
that worried you, and you said at the end, “That’s probably the best, and most true, way to think about it.”
I kept your sentence in my notebook. I liked its shape. I admired the way, young as you were, you could feel
one kind of thinking adjusting into another, one truth becoming a better truth.
Now you’re far off, and alone, and I have no advice you haven’t already given yourself. What can I tell you?
That I’m here? That today, when I saw how tenderly the light was moving among those trees, I thought of you?
— Lawrence Raab
to wake and find you sitting up in bed with your black hair and gold skin leaning against the white wall a perfect slant of sunlight slashed across your chest as if God were Rembrandt or maybe Ingmar Bergman but luckily it’s too early to go to the movies and all the museums are closed on Tuesday anyway I’d rather be here with you than in New York or possibly Amsterdam with our eyes and lips and legs and bellies and the sun as big as a house in the sky and five minutes left before the world begins
— Lesléa Newman, “Possibly”
Despair is the state we fall into when our imagination fails. When we have no story that explains the present and describes the future, hope evaporates.
— George Monbiot
The Thing Is
to love life, to love it even when you have no stomach for it and everything you’ve held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands, your throat filled with the silt of it. When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you down like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this? Then you hold life like a face between your palms, a plain face, no charming smile, no violet eyes, and you say, yes, I will take you I will love you, again.
— Ellen Bass
Give Me This
I thought it was the neighbor’s cat back to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house but what came was much stranger, a liquidity moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still green in the morning’s shade. I watched her munch and stand on her haunches taking such pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth, as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead, I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest, and she is doing what she can to survive.
— Ada Limón
We’re still mid-winter but it feels, so often, like spring is already here. The claret ash is flowering and hums with bees. The bulbs have all flowered and birds are nesting.
The Idea of Order at Key West
She sang beyond the genius of the sea. The water never formed to mind or voice, Like a body wholly body, fluttering Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry, That was not ours although we understood, Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she. The song and water were not medleyed sound Even if what she sang was what she heard, Since what she sang was uttered word by word. It may be that in all her phrases stirred The grinding water and the gasping wind; But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang. The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea Was merely a place by which she walked to sing. Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew It was the spirit that we sought and knew That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea That rose, or even colored by many waves; If it was only the outer voice of sky And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled, However clear, it would have been deep air, The heaving speech of air, a summer sound Repeated in a summer without end And sound alone. But it was more than that, More even than her voice, and ours, among The meaningless plungings of water and the wind, Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made The sky acutest at its vanishing. She measured to the hour its solitude. She was the single artificer of the world In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea, Whatever self it had, became the self That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we, As we beheld her striding there alone, Knew that there never was a world for her Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know, Why, when the singing ended and we turned Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights, The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there, As the night descended, tilting in the air, Mastered the night and portioned out the sea, Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles, Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon, The maker’s rage to order words of the sea, Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred, And of ourselves and of our origins, In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
— Wallace Stevens
Tired
I am so tired of waiting, Aren’t you, For the world to become good And beautiful and kind? Let us take a knife And cut the world in two – And see what worms are eating At the rind.
