#dorianne laux

[wordscanbeenough]

And I saw it didn't matter / who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone.

Dorianne Laux, from “After Twelve Days of Rain”, What We Carry

[havingapoemwithyou]

trying to raise the dead by Dorianne Laux

[seekingstars]

Ray at 14 - Dorianne Laux

[firstfullmoon]

Dorianne Laux, “I Dare You”

[apoemaday]

Facts About the Moon

by Dorianne Laux

The moon is backing away from us an inch and a half each year. That means if you’re like me and were born around fifty years ago the moon was a full six feet closer to the earth. What’s a person supposed to do? I feel the gray cloud of consternation travel across my face. I begin thinking about the moon-lit past, how if you go back far enough you can imagine the breathtaking hugeness of the moon, prehistoric solar eclipses when the moon covered the sun so completely there was no corona, only a darkness we had no word for. And future eclipses will look like this: the moon a small black pupil in the eye of the sun. But these are bald facts. What bothers me most is that someday the moon will spiral right out of orbit and all land-based life will die. The moon keeps the oceans from swallowing the shores, keeps the electromagnetic fields in check at the polar ends of the earth. And please don’t tell me what I already know, that it won’t happen for a long time. I don’t care. I’m afraid of what will happen to the moon. Forget us. We don’t deserve the moon. Maybe we once did but not now after all we’ve done. These nights I harbor a secret pity for the moon, rolling around alone in space without her milky planet, her only child, a mother who’s lost a child, a bad child, a greedy child or maybe a grown boy who’s murdered and raped, a mother can’t help it, she loves that boy anyway, and in spite of herself she misses him, and if you sit beside her on the padded hospital bench outside the door to his room you can’t not take her hand, listen to her while she weeps, telling you how sweet he was, how blue his eyes, and you know she’s only romanticizing, that she’s conveniently forgotten the bruises and booze, the stolen car, the day he ripped the phones from the walls, and you want to slap her back to sanity, remind her of the truth: he was a leech, a fuckup, a little shit, and you almost do until she lifts her pale puffy face, her eyes two craters and then you can’t help it either, you know love when you see it, you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.

[thoughtkick]

I have always loved too much, or not enough.

Dorianne Laux

[thehopefulquotes]

I have always loved too much, or not enough.

Dorianne Laux

[perfectfeelings]

I have always loved too much, or not enough.

Dorianne Laux

[st-just]

That’s how it is sometimes — God comes to your window, all bright light and black wings, and you’re just too tired to open it.

-Dust, by Dorianne Laux

[soracities]

When I think of the years he drank, the scars on his chin, his thinning hair, his eye that still weeps decades after the blow, my knees weaken with gratitude for whatever kept him safe, whatever stopped the glass from cracking and shearing something vital, the fist from lowering, exploding an artery, pressing the clot of blood toward the back of his brain. Now, he sits calmly on the couch, reading, refusing to wear the glasses I bought him, holding the open book at arm’s length from his chest. Behind him the windows are smoky with mist and the tile floor is pushing its night chill up through the bare soles of his feet. I like to think he survived in order to find me, in order to arrive here, sober, tired from a long night of tongues and hands and thighs, music on the radio, coffee– so he could look up and see me, standing in the kitchen in his torn t-shirt, the hem of it brushing my knees, but I know it’s only luck that brought him here, luck and a love that had nothing to do with me, except that this is what we sometimes get if we live long enough, if we are patient with our lives.

“Music in the Morning”, Dorianne Laux

[missinyouiskillingme]

“I have always loved too much, or not enough.”

— Dorianne Laux, “After Twelve Days of Rain”

[dk-thrive]

Sometimes, when we're on a long drive,

and we've talked enough and listened

to enough music and stopped twice,

once to eat, once to see the view,

we fall into this rhythm of silence.

It swings back and forth between us

like a rope over a lake.

Maybe it's what we don't say

that saves us.

— Dorianne Laux, Enough Music in "What We Carry (BOA Editions, 1994) (via Regina Rosenfeld)

[havingapoemwithyou]

death comes to me again, a girl by Dorianne Laux

[quotemadness]

I have always loved too much, or not enough.

Dorianne Laux

[resqectable]

I have always loved too much, or not enough.

Dorianne Laux

[apoemaday]

Antilamentation

by Dorianne Laux

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read to the end just to find out who killed the cook. Not the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark, in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication. Not the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot, the one you beat to the punchline, the door, or the one who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones that crimped your toes, don’t regret those. Not the nights you called god names and cursed your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch, chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness. You were meant to inhale those smoky nights over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches. You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still you end up here. Regret none of it, not one of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing, when the lights from the carnival rides were the only stars you believed in, loving them for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved. You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake, ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house after the TV set has been pitched out the upstairs window. Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation. Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it. Let’s stop here, under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.