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oliviasacks · 1 year
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For love,
you leapt sometimes you walked away sometimes
that time on the phone you couldn’t get your breath I leapt but couldn’t get to you
I caught the brow that bid the dead I caught the bough that hid
I’m, you know, still here, tulip, resin, temporary--
-Jean Valentine
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oliviasacks · 1 year
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This one is from 1320
All I want to do is get drunk with my wife
An endless glass of wine both of us on the floor
So what if squares look down on us?
Boring and misguided are their miserable lives
When my wife is in the city and I'm home I want to cry
The moonlight on the cypress tree is a bitter light
No book has ever kissed me like she does
-Hafiz
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oliviasacks · 1 year
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When
When it’s over, it’s over, and we don’t know any of us, what happens then. So I try not to miss anything. I think, in my whole life, I have never missed the full moon or the slipper of it’s coming back. Or, a kiss. Well, yes, especially a kiss.
Mary Oliver
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oliviasacks · 3 years
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crossroads
My body, now that we will not be traveling together much longer I begin to feel a new tenderness toward you, very raw and unfamiliar, like what I remember of love when I was young–
love that was so often foolish in its objectives but never in its choices, its intensities.
Too much demanded in advance, too much that could not be promised– My soul has been so fearful, so violent: forgive its brutality.
As though it were that soul, my hand moves over you cautiously, not wishing to give offense but eager, finally, to achieve expression as substance:
it is not the earth I will miss, it is you I will miss.
Louise Gluck
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oliviasacks · 3 years
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to use a flower metaphor once more
Our early youth is like a flower at dawn with a lovely dewdrop in its cup, harmoniously and pensively reflecting everything that that surrounds it. But soon the sun rises over the horizon, and the dewdrop evaporates; with it vanish the fantasies of life, and now it becomes a question (to use a flower metaphor once more) whether or not a person is able to produce--by his own efforts as does the oleander--a drop that may represent the fruit of his life. This requires, above all, that one be allowed to grow in the soil where one really belongs, but that is not always so easy to find. 
- Kierkegaard 
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oliviasacks · 3 years
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The Layers by Stanley Kunitz
I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I was, though some principle of being abides, from which I struggle not to stray. When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned camp-sites, over which scavenger angels wheel on heavy wings. Oh, I have made myself a tribe out of my true affections, and my tribe is scattered! How shall the heart be reconciled to its feast of losses? In a rising wind the manic dust of my friends, those who fell along the way, bitterly stings my face. Yet I turn, I turn, exulting somewhat, with my will intact to go wherever I need to go, and every stone on the road precious to me. In my darkest night, when the moon was covered and I roamed through wreckage, a nimbus-clouded voice directed me: "Live in the layers, not on the litter." Though I lack the art to decipher it, no doubt the next chapter in my book of transformations is already written. I am not done with my changes.
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oliviasacks · 3 years
Link
This one is too long to post as text, worth the time to read. Maybe my favorite of his.
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oliviasacks · 4 years
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Good Bones
Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.
- Maggie Smith
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oliviasacks · 4 years
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A Blessing
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota, Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass. And the eyes of those two Indian ponies Darken with kindness. They have come gladly out of the willows To welcome my friend and me. We step over the barbed wire into the pasture Where they have been grazing all day, alone. They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness   That we have come. They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other. There is no loneliness like theirs.   At home once more, They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.   I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms, For she has walked over to me   And nuzzled my left hand.   She is black and white, Her mane falls wild on her forehead, And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist. Suddenly I realize That if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom.
- James Wright
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oliviasacks · 4 years
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The World Has Need of You
everything here seems to need us… —Rilke
I can hardly imagine it as I walk to the lighthouse, feeling the ancient prayer of my arms swinging in counterpoint to my feet. Here I am, suspended between the sidewalk and twilight, the sky dimming so fast it seems alive. What if you felt the invisible tug between you and everything? A boy on a bicycle rides by, his white shirt open, flaring behind him like wings. It’s a hard time to be human. We know too much and too little. Does the breeze need us? The cliffs? The gulls? If you’ve managed to do one good thing, the ocean doesn’t care. But when Newton’s apple fell toward the earth, the earth, ever so slightly, fell toward the apple as well.
- Ellen Bass
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oliviasacks · 4 years
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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
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oliviasacks · 4 years
Quote
The poem is a hymn to possibility; a celebration of the fact that the world exists, that things can happen.
John Ashbery
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oliviasacks · 5 years
Quote
I've never seen pigeons argue / I only see them soar
Huang Fan, Pigeons
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oliviasacks · 5 years
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morning song
Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry   Took its place among the elements. Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue. In a drafty museum, your nakedness Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls. I’m no more your mother Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow Effacement at the wind’s hand. All night your moth-breath Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen: A far sea moves in my ear. One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral In my Victorian nightgown. Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try Your handful of notes; The clear vowels rise like balloons.
- Sylvia Plath
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oliviasacks · 5 years
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blackberry, blackberry, blackberry
All the new thinking is about loss. In this it resembles all the old thinking. The idea, for example, that each particular erases the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown- faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk of that black birch is, by his presence, some tragic falling off from a first world of undivided light. Or the other notion that, because there is in this world no one thing to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds, a word is elegy to what it signifies. We talked about it late last night and in the voice of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone almost querulous. After a while I understood that, talking this way, everything dissolves: justice, pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat, muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her. Longing, we say, because desire is full of endless distances. I must have been the same to her. But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread, the thing her father said that hurt her, what she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous as words, days that are the good flesh continuing. Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings, saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
- Robert Haas, Meditations at Lagunitas
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oliviasacks · 5 years
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planetarium
A woman in the shape of a monster   a monster in the shape of a woman   the skies are full of them a woman      ‘in the snow among the Clocks and instruments   or measuring the ground with poles’ in her 98 years to discover   8 comets she whom the moon ruled   like us levitating into the night sky   riding the polished lenses Galaxies of women, there doing penance for impetuousness   ribs chilled   in those spaces    of the mind An eye,          ‘virile, precise and absolutely certain’          from the mad webs of Uranusborg                                                            encountering the NOVA   every impulse of light exploding from the core as life flies out of us             Tycho whispering at last             ‘Let me not seem to have lived in vain’ What we see, we see   and seeing is changing the light that shrivels a mountain   and leaves a man alive Heartbeat of the pulsar heart sweating through my body The radio impulse   pouring in from Taurus         I am bombarded yet         I stand I have been standing all my life in the   direct path of a battery of signals the most accurately transmitted most   untranslatable language in the universe I am a galactic cloud so deep      so invo- luted that a light wave could take 15   years to travel through me       And has   taken      I am an instrument in the shape   of a woman trying to translate pulsations   into images    for the relief of the body   and the reconstruction of the mind.
- Adrienne Rich
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oliviasacks · 5 years
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you have harnessed yourself ridiculously to this world
Tell the truth I told me                                When I couldn’t speak. Sorrow’s a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship                Or a child Who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer In the 1930s                                       Toward the iron lung of polio. According to the census I am unmarried                And unchurched.                                    The woman in the field dressed only in the sun. Too far gone to halt the Arctic Cap’s catastrophe, big beautiful Blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of  ice. I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible. For whom left am I first?                                                          We have come to terms with our Self Like a marmoset getting out of  her Great Ape suit.
- Lucie Brock-Broido
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