February 2012
51 posts
“I love you too much to let you think I can live without you. I don’t care if you...”
– A love letter as seen in La Belle Personne (via rudegirlqueer)
“… desire is full
of endless distances.”
– Robert Hass, from “Meditation at Lagunitas” (via proustitute)
ahuntersheart:
"But the room is cold, the words in the books are cold;
And the question of whether we get what we ask for
Is absurd, unanswered by the sound of an unlatched door
Rattling in wind, or the sound of snow on roofs, or glare
Of the winter sun. What we have learned is not what we were told.
I watch the snow, feel for the heartbeat that is not there."
-Weldon Kees, from "Early...
“Whatever we say
we know there is another
language under this one”
-W. S....”
– (via proustitute)
“No one understood the perfume
of the dark magnolia of your womb.
Nobody knew...”
– “Gacela of Unforseen Love,” Federico Garcia Lorca (via clavicola)
“No one understood the perfume
of the dark magnolia of your womb.
Nobody knew...”
– “Gacela of Unforseen Love,” Federico Garcia Lorca (via clavicola)
“Why did he write to her,
“I can’t live without you”?
And why did she write to...”
– Carl Sandburg (via mocasia)
“Our embrace lasted too long.
We loved right down to the bone.
I hear the...”
– Anna Świrszczyńska, from “I’ll Open the Window,” trans. Milosz and Nathan (via proustitute)
“Our bodies meshed in an aftermath of effort. We were one and the same dark...”
– Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions II, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (via proustitute)
“…We want to live like trees,
sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,...”
– Adrienne Rich, Twenty-One Love Poems (via fernsandmoss)
“You are a little soul carrying around a corpse.”
– Epictetus (via whimsicalele)
“Here on this ring of grass we have sat together, bound by the tremendous power...”
– Virginia Woolf, The Waves (via fernsandmoss)
“I sing to the day and to the moon,
to the sea, to time, to all the planets,
to...”
– Pablo Neruda, Sonnet 49 (via fernsandmoss)
“Beneath my hands
your small breasts
are the upturned bellies
of breathing...”
– Leonard Cohen, The Spice-Box of Earth (via fernsandmoss)
“It’s so nice
to wake up in the morning
all alone
and not have to tell...”
– “Love Poem,” Richard Brautigan (via clavicola)
“And the heart, unscrolled,
is comforted by such small things:
a cup of green...”
– Jane Hirschfield, from “Recalling a Sung Dynasty Landscape” (via proustitute)
“Death comes to me again, a girl
in a cotton slip, barefoot, giggling.
It’s not...”
– Dorriane Laux (via vernish)
“I was within and without. Simultaneously enchanted and repelled by the...”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald (via misswallflower)
“Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are the eternity and...”
– Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet (via proustitute)
“Some say you’re lucky
If nothing shatters it.
But then you wouldn’t...”
– Gregory Orr, from Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved (via growing-orbits)
Unblinking Grief by Charles Bukowski
ahuntersheart:
the last cigarettes are smoked, the loaves are sliced, and lest this be taken for wry sorrow, drown the spider in wine. you are much more than simply dead: I am a dish for your ashes, I am a fist for your vanished air. the most terrible thing about life is finding it gone.
The Joy That Tends Toward Unbecoming by Joseph...
ahuntersheart:
Say five men carry a sixth from the birches. He is thin from his night inside the river. Someone has pushed his wrists through his belt so it seems he has been out gathering blue flowers.
Someone is shouting the richer gospels. I remember a woman leaning on the window, thinking death had loosed its bird in the house. I remember the bird fell on the third day
and I had to...
Stoma by Stephen Palermo
ahuntersheart:
My grandfather would hold up in our basement bathroom, emptying his colostomy bag, cleaning the stoma with alcohol and cotton, the sterile smell of intake and waste, of being alive with malfunctioning parts— this ritual of maintenance and redirected necessity living proof that even open wounds serve a function. And then I got it: the body is nothing more than a creature of...
ahuntersheart:
When I put my hands on your body on your flesh I feel the history of that body. Not just the beginning of its forming in that distant lake but all the way beyond its ending. I feel the warmth and texture and simultaneously I see the flesh unwrap from the layers of fat and disappear. I see the fat disappear from the muscle. I see the muscle disappearing from around the organs and...
ahuntersheart:
I am a glass human. I am a glass human disappearing in rain. I am standing among all of you waving my invisible arms and hands. I am shouting my invisible words. I am getting so weary. I am growing tired. I am waving to you here. I am crawling around looking for the aperture of complete and final emptiness. I am vibrating in isolation among you. I am screaming but it comes out...
After All This by Richard Jackson
ahuntersheart:
After all this love, after the birds rip like scissors through the morning sky, after we leave, when the empty bed appears like a collapsed galaxy, or the wake of disturbed air behind a plane, after that, as the wind turns to stone, as the leaves shriek, you are still breathing inside my own breath. The lighthouse on the far point still sweeps away the darkness with the brush of...
Marrying the Violence by Marty McConnell
ahuntersheart:
I have taken the blueprint of your back for granted as if the sidewalk were not an altar and the sound of the shower not a hurricane bearing down – there is no ceremony for this. the night goes on in spite of the rain, much like the mail. make me a bullet of a mouth, sex love and money on the radio. not a bullet, a gun. not a gun, a harbor. to hold you, against this, against the...
The Love Song of the Square Root of Minus One (i)...
ahuntersheart:
I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble but I am invisible, blackbird over the dark field but I am invisible, what fills the balloon and what it moves through, knot without rope, bloom without flower, galloping without the horse, the spirit of the thing without the thing, location without dimension, without a within, song without throat, word without ink,...
Write a Book a Year by Deborah Digges
ahuntersheart:
Well the wild ride into the earth was thrilling, really, scared as I was and torn and sore. I say what other woman could have managed it? My life before then picking flowers against my destiny what glance, what meeting, who was watching, what we don’t know we know, the hour we chose and we are chosen. And suddenly the dead my mission, the dark my mission. He’d find me pounding out...
ahuntersheart:
“Objects exist and if one pays more attention to them than to people, it is precisely because they exist more than the people. Dead objects are still alive. Living people are often already dead.” —Jean Luc Godard
A Primer for the Small Weird Loves by Richard...
ahuntersheart:
1
The blond boy in the red trunks is holding your head underwater because he is trying to kill you, and you deserve it, you do, and you know this, and you are ready to die in this swimming pool because you wanted to touch his hands and lips and this means your life is over anyway. You’re in the eighth grade. You know these things. You know how to ride a dirt bike, and you know...
In the Cafe by Louise Glück
ahuntersheart:
It’s natural to be tired of earth. When you’ve been dead this long, you’ll probably be tired of heaven. You do what you can do in a place but after awhile you exhaust that place, so you long for rescue.
My friend falls in love a little too easily. Every year or so a new girl— If they have children he doesn’t mind— he can fall in love with children also.
So the rest of us get...
e.e. cummings, 1923
ahuntersheart:
i will wade out till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers I will take the sun in my mouth and leap into the ripe air Alive with closed eyes to dash against darkness in the sleeping curves of my body Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery with chasteness of sea-girls Will i complete the mystery of my flesh I will rise After a thousand years
lipping flowers And set my...
from a letter Kafka wrote to his friend:
ahuntersheart:
“we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”
ahuntersheart:
“A word - you know: a corpse.
Let us wash it, let us comb it, let us turn its eye towards heaven.” -Paul Celan
excerpt from Jean Daive’s Under the Dome: Walks...
ahuntersheart:
— Write. Do not doubt, I mean: do not deny poetry. — That is not easy. — I know. — It is not easy to find words again, I mean to relearn words or relearn to speak. It’s a little as if you were coming to after seventeen years in a coma and you heard yourself pronounce a single word: “write,” without any idea what the word means.
From the The Language of Inquiry by Lyn Hejinian
ahuntersheart:
In the gap between what one wants to say (or what one perceives there is to say) and what one can say (what is sayable), words provide for a collaboration and a desertion. We delight in our sensuous involvement with the materials of language, we long to join words to the world- to close the gap between ourselves and things- and we suffer from doubt and anxiety because of our...
“I saw a rose in the clouds,
I saw happiness on fire.”
– Pablo Medina, from “Cityscape 1” (via proustitute)
from My Story in a Late Style of Fire by Larry...
ahuntersheart:
And that day I could have stayed In New York. I had friends there. I could have strayed Up Lexington Avenue, or down to Third, & caught a faint Glistening of the sea between the buildings. But all I wanted Was to hold her all morning, until her body was, again, A bright field, or until we both reached some thicket As if at the end of a lane, or at the end of all desire, And...
MAHLER IN NEW YORK by Joseph Fasano
ahuntersheart:
Now when I go out, the wind pulls me into the grave. I go out to part the hair of a child I left behind,
and he pushes his face into my cuffs, to smell the wind. If I carry my father with me, it is the way a horse carries autumn in its mane.
If I remember my brother, it is as if a buck had knelt down in a room I was in.
I kneel, and the wind kneels down in me. What is it...
ahuntersheart:
“While we are alive, we cannot escape from masks or names. We are inseparable from our fictions, our features. We are condemned to invent a mask for ourselves and afterward to discover that the mask is our true face.” – Octavio Paz, 1970
nothing from nothing, halvard johnson
ahuntersheart:
The smile of a woman so beautiful that she is confined to a garden with walls so high that no one can see her, with walls so high that no one can see her smile.
ahuntersheart:
Ring the bells that still can ring Forget your perfect offering There is a crack, a crack in everything That’s how the light gets in.
- Leonard Cohen(Anthem)
Tear It Down by Jack Gilbert
ahuntersheart:
We find out the heart only by dismantling what the heart knows. By redefining the morning, we find a morning that comes just after darkness. We can break through marriage into marriage. By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond affection and wade mouth-deep into love. We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars. But going back toward childhood will not help. The village...
Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale by Dan...
ahuntersheart:
Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days. Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals. Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices. Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review each of your life’s ten...
Raymond Carver on the relationship between the...
ahuntersheart:
“What we do have in common is the fact that we’re human. That’s one of the things that writing can do; that’s one of the things that writing is ‘about’. It can make us realize our connections. It’s the same with music; you could listen to a piece by Mozart; I mean, what do Mozart and I have in common? Nothing. And yet when I hear a certain piece of music we connect somehow; it...
from When Death Comes by Mary Oliver
ahuntersheart:
When it’s over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement, I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
“Life may be sad, but it’s always beautiful.”
– Jean-Paul Belmondo in Pierrot le Fou (via wordsinbooks) (via ahuntersheart)
“i didn’t want any flowers, i only wanted
to lie with my hands turned up and be...”
– (via ahuntersheart)
“In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going...”
– (via ahuntersheart) 