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Perhaps the hardest thing about losing a lover is

to watch the year repeat its days.

It is as if I could dip my hand down

into time and scoop up

blue and green lozenges of April heat

a year ago in another country.

I can feel that other day running underneath this one

like an old videotape

Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

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My entire childhood in that house is etched into my brain like slides of Hopper's paintings, with the same mysterious, sticky loneliness. And I see myself in them like one of the people on an unmade bed, with a book abandoned on a bare chair, who looks out the window or sits beside a clean table, watching the blank wall. Because at home everything was resolved in whispers and the noise that could be heard most clearly, besides my violin portamento exercises, was when Mother put on her high-heeled shoes to go out. And while Hopper said that he painted to express what he couldn't put into words, I write with words because, even though I can see it, I'm unable to paint it. And I always see it like he did, through windows or doors that aren't quite closed. And what he didn't know, I have learned. And what I don't know, I invent and it's just as true. I know that you will understand me and forgive me.

- Jaume Cabré, Confessions

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Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.

Cheryl Strayed, Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar

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NOVEMBER

1

This creature kneeling

dusted with snow, its teeth

grinding together, sound of old stones

at the bottom of a river

You lugged it to the barn

I held the lantern,

we leaned over it

as if it were being born.

2

The sheep hangs upside down from the rope,

a long fruit covered with wool and rotting.

It waits for the dead wagon

to harvest it.

Mournful November

this is the image

you invent for me,

the dead sheep came out of your head, a legacy:

Kill what you can’t save

what you can’t eat throw out

what you can’t throw out bury

What you can’t bury give away

what you can’t give away you must carry with you,

it is always heavier than you thought.

Margaret Atwood

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James Sant [British. 1820-1916]   Ophelia

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💀 GOTHIC NIGHTMARES 💀

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Medieval Gold Heart-shaped Brooch with sword clasp, c. 1400. 

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Illustrations from THE ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO YOKAI MONSTERS by Japanese artist, Shigeru Mizuki (1922-2015).

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GREEN, GREEN IS MY SISTER’S HOUSE

don’t you dare climb that tree

or even try, they said, or you will be

sent away to the hospital of the

very foolish, if not the other one.

and i suppose, considering my age,

it was fair advice.

but the tree is a sister to me, she

lives alone in a green cottage

high in the air and I know what

would happen, she’d clap her green hands,

she’d shake her green hair, she’d

welcome me. truly

i try to be good but sometimes

a person just has to break out and

act like the wild and springy thing

one used to be. it’s impossible not

to remember wild and want it back. so

if someday you can’t find me you might

look into that tree or—of course

it’s possible—under it.

mary oliver, from a thousand mornings

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HURRICANE

it didn’t behave

like anything you had

ever imagined. the wind

tore at the trees, the rain

fell for days slant and hard.

the back of the hand

to everything. i watched

the trees bow and their leaves fall

and crawl back into the earth.

as though, that was that.

this was one hurricane

i lived through, the other one

was of a different sort, and

lasted longer. then

i felt my own leaves giving up and

falling. the back of the hand to

everything. but listen now to what happened

to the actual trees;

toward the end of that summer they

pushed new leaves from their stubbed limbs.

it was the wrong season, yes,

but they couldn’t stop. they

looked like telephone poles and didn’t

care. and after the leaves came

blossoms. for some things

there are no wrong seasons.

which is what i dream of for me.

mary oliver, from a thousand mornings

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POEM OF THE ONE WORLD

this morning

the beautiful white heron

was floating along above the water

and then into the sky of this

the one world

we all belong to

where everything

sooner or later

is a part of everything else

which thought made me feel

for a little while

quite beautiful myself.

mary oliver, from a thousand mornings

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life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.

may sarton, journal of a solitude

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i managed to push all this aside, including thirty or so letters, because, as i drove home through the clear autumn light, all along the Connecticut river, meeting the hills as old companions as i neared Brattleboro, i was determined to make space, inner space for a poem.

loss made everything sharp. i suffer from these brief weekends, the tearing up of the roots of love, and from my own inability to behave better under the stress.

the poem is about silence, that it is really only there that lovers can know what they know, and there what they know is deep, nourishing, nourishing to the palms of the hands and the soles of the feet. for a little while it is as if my nakedness were clothed in love. but then, when i come back, i shiver in my isolation, and must face again and try to tame the loneliness. the house is no friend when i walk in. only Punch gives a welcoming scream; there are no flowers. a smell of stale tobacco, unopened windows, my life waiting for me somewhere, asking to be created again.

may sarton, journal of a solitude

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the reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive. this morning i woke at four and lay awake for an hour or so in a bad state. it is raining again. i got up finally and went about the daily chores, waiting for the sense of doom to lift—and what did it was watering the house plants. suddenly joy came back because i was fulfilling a simple need, a living one.

may sarton, journal of a solitude

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Teach me mortality, frighten me

into the present. Help me to find

the heft of these days. That the nights

will be full enough and my heart feral.

Jack Gilbert, from I Imagine the Gods