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And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.

Kurt Vonnegut, from Slaughterhouse Five (via sunlightthroughwater)

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© sunlitwaterscape

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from Astonishments, Selected Poems of Anna Kamienska, edited and trans. by Grazyna Drabik and David Curzon, Paraclete Press, 2007

A Prayer That Will Be Answered | Anna Kamieńska

“A Prayer That Will Be Answered” Anna Kamieńska Lord let me suffer a lot
 and then let me die

 Allow me to walk through silence
 Let nothing not even fear linger after me 

Make the world go on as it always has 
let the sea continue to kiss the shore

 Let grass still remain green
 so a little frog could find shelter in it 

and someone could bury his face
 and weep his heart out

 Make a day dawn so bright 
it seems there is no more suffering

 And let my poem be transparent as a windowpane 
against which a straying bee hits its head

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Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

Theodore Roethke, from Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke  (via sunlightthroughwater)

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“Lines for Winter,” Mark Strand

       for Ros Krauss

Tell yourself as it gets cold and gray falls from the air that you will go on walking, hearing the same tune no matter where you find yourself— inside the dome of dark or under the cracking white of the moon’s gaze in a valley of snow. Tonight as it gets cold tell yourself what you know which is nothing but the tune your bones play as you keep going. And you will be able for once to lie down under the small fire of winter stars. And if it happens that you cannot go on or turn back and you find yourself where you will be at the end, tell yourself in that final flowing of cold through your limbs that you love what you are.

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Our loneliness is our strength. It’s not the same as being alone—almost the opposite. Loneliness is the sense of others, present but beyond our reach.

Lydia Millet, from Sweet Lamb of Heaven

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Tennessee

photo via jan

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“A Trip to the Moon,” Ruth Padel

My mother is moving house. She’s ninety-one and determined: words like sheltered accommodation are coming at us from outer space but it’s not like that, at least not yet. There are spare rooms in the new home, she’ll have a small garden, feed nuthatches, do her own cooking, grow shrubs. Still, down the slope will be a sanatorium. That’s the point. A clinic, an Alzheimer’s wing. She doesn’t want to be a burden. In every room is a vermilion string to pull if you fall over.

When I clear out her cupboards we find histories woven in every blanket, like this scorch mark made the winter the heating failed. Should she sell the oversize kitchen clock (which she still gets up on a ladder to wind every Sunday, as my dad used to do) to the blind piano tuner who took a shine to it when he came to value the piano? Or should it stay around in case one day some grandchild might give it a home?

For the first time in her life she’ll live only with things she has chosen. No husband or children to consider, no furniture from aunts. She can sell, she can give things away. Traumas of today, contracts to exchange, dates of completion, arguments over who’ll let the carpenter in to the new place to measure up, will be forgotten because forgetting is an issue let’s face it. And she is, she is facing it. She’ll be three miles from family but she’s going to an unknown zone.

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To touch and feel each thing in the world, to know it by sight and by name, and then to know it with your eyes closed so that when something is gone, it can be recognized by the shape of its absence. So that you can continue to possess the lost, because absence is the only constant thing. Because you can get free of everything except the space where things have been.

~  Nicole Krauss, from Man Walks Into a Room (via growing-orbits)

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Mountain, Barcelona.

March 2017.

instagram.com/pamelarivas

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“Mametz Wood,” Owen Sheers

For years afterwards the farmers found them – the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades as they tended the land back into itself.

A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade, the relic of a finger, the blown and broken bird’s egg of a skull,

all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white across this field where they were told to walk, not run, towards the wood and its nesting machine guns.

And even now the earth stands sentinel, reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.

This morning, twenty men buried in one long grave, a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm, their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre

in boots that outlasted them, their socketed heads tilted back at an angle and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open.

As if the notes they had sung have only now, with this unearthing, slipped from their absent tongues.

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But I always liked side-paths, little dark back-alleys behind the main road–there one finds adventures and surprises, and precious metal in the dirt.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, from The Brothers Karamazov (Penguin Classics, 2003)

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Rob McGuinness | @bobbimac

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If this were a novel, it would begin with a character, a man alone on a southbound train or a young girl on a swing by a farmhouse. And as the pages turned, you would be told that it was morning or the dead of night, and I, the narrator, would describe for you the miscellaneous clouds over the farmhouse and what the man was wearing on the train right down to his red tartan scarf, and the hat he tossed onto the rack above his head, as well as the cows sliding past his window. Eventually—one can only read so fast— you would learn either that the train was bearing the man back to the place of his birth or that he was headed into the vast unknown, and you might just tolerate all of this as you waited patiently for shots to ring out in a ravine where the man was hiding or for a tall, raven-haired woman to appear in a doorway. But this is a poem, not a novel, and the only characters here are you and I, alone in an imaginary room which will disappear after a few more lines, leaving us no time to point guns at one another or toss all our clothes into a roaring fireplace. I ask you: who needs the man on the train and who cares what his black valise contains? We have something better than all this turbulence lurching toward some ruinous conclusion. I mean the sound that we will hear as soon as I stop writing and put down this pen. I once heard someone compare it to the sound of crickets in a field of wheat or, more faintly, just the wind over that field stirring things that we will never see.

Billy Collins, “The Great American Poem” from The Virginia Quarterly Review (via sunlightthroughwater)

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How right it is to love flowers and the greenery of pines and ivy and hawthorn hedges; they have been with us from the very beginning.

Vincent Van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh (via h-o-r-n-g-r-y)

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