#stephen dobyns

[metamorphesque]

musings on grief

Evan Knoll, Grave of the Fireflies, Stephen Dobyns, Pablo Neruda, Donte Collins, Vincent Van Gogh, Natalie Diaz, Hannah Lock, @metamorphesque , Anna Akhmatova, Ocean Vuong

buy me a coffee

[aemperatrix]

Stephen Dobyns

[caritasangelus]

something about grief and the feelings i've been dealing with for a while

the only thing by sufjan stevens // beautiful short loser by ocean vuong // to people in paintings by @caritasangelus // bombay sapphire by holly warburton // forever winter by taylor swift // still life with skulls and bacon // john my beloved by sufjan stevens // final notations by adrienne rich // growing around grief // the reassurance by thom gunn // cigarette daydreams by cage the elephant // spirit hold by holly warburton // grief by stephen dobyns // this isn't the end by owl city

[secretsofscythes]

on rage; on violence; on grief.

Sue Zhao, Where to begin? / Dylan Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good night / Stephen Dobyns, Song For Putting Aside Anger / Vasili Pukirev, The Unequal Marriage / Sylvia Plath, Elm / Nicola Samori, Unknown / Kayleb Rae Candrilli, Sand & Slit / Kai Samuels-Davis, 2014 / Adrian Ghenie, Pie Fight Study 2 / Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides / Karl Bryullov, The Last Day of Pompeii

[runningfromadream]

Your name was the thread connecting my life; now I am fragments on a tailor's floor.

Stephen Dobyns

[tenth-sentence]

The snowflakes in the high beams looked immense.

"The Church of Dead Girls" - Stephen Dobyns

[whisperthatruns]

Fragments

Now there is a slit in the blue fabric of air. His house spins faster. He holds down books, chairs; his life and its objects fly upward: vanishing black specks in the indifferent sky. The sky is a torn piece of blue paper. He tries to repair it, but the memory of death is like paste on his fingers and certain days stick like dead flies. Say the sky goes back to being the sky and the sun continues as always. Now, knowing what you know, how can you not see thin cracks in the fragile blue vaults of air. My friend, what can I give you or darkness lift from you but fragments of language, fragments of blue sky. You had three beautiful daughters and one has died.

Stephen Dobyns

[nct-loves-exo]

Each thing I do, I rush through so I can do something else. In such a way do the days pass---a blend of stock car racing and the never ending building of a gothic cathedral. Through the windows of my speeding car I see all that I love falling away: books unread, jokes untold, landscapes unvisited...

Stephen Dobyns

[poem-today]

Where We Are

(after Bede) A man tears a chunk of bread off the brown loaf, then wipes the gravy from his plate. Around him at the long table, friends fill their mouths with duck and roast pork, fill their cups from pitchers of wine. Hearing a high twittering, the man looks to see a bird—black with a white patch beneath its beak—flying the length of the hall, having flown in by a window over the door. As straight as a taut string, the bird flies beneath the roofbeams, as firelight flings its shadow against the ceiling. The man pauses—one hand holds the bread, the other rests upon the table—and watches the bird, perhaps a swift, fly toward the window at the far end of the room. He begins to point it out to his friends, but one is telling hunting stories, as another describes the best way to butcher a pig. The man shoves the bread in his mouth, then slaps his hand down hard on the thigh of the woman seated beside him, squeezes his fingers to feel the firm muscles and tendons beneath the fabric of her dress. A huge dog snores on the stone hearth by the fire. From the window comes the clicking of pine needles blown against it by an October wind. A half moon hurries along behind scattered clouds, while the forest of black spruce and bare maple and birch surrounds the long hall the way a single rock can be surrounded by a river. This is where we are in history—to think the table will remain full; to think the forest will remain where we have pushed it; to think our bubble of good fortune will save us from the night—a bird flies in from the dark, flits across a lighted hall and disappears.

Stephen Dobyns

The passage from Bede, on which the poem is based, is, in A. M. Sellar’s translation of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People (G. Bell and Sons 1917): The present life of man upon earth, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparrow through the house wherein you sit at supper in winter, with your ealdormen and thegns, while the fire blazes in the midst, and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad.  The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter into winter again.  So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.  If, therefore, this new doctrine tells us something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.

[alinaandalion]

Your name was the food I lived on; now my mouth is full of dirt and ash. To say your name was to be surrounded by feathers and silk; now, reaching out, I touch glass and barbed wire. Your name was the thread connecting my life; now I am fragments on a tailor's floor.

“Grief” by Stephen Dobyns

[lonelychambersofmyheart]

[altheterrible]

[ukdamo]

Prague

Stephen Dobyns

The day I learned my wife was dying

I told myself if anyone said, Well, she had

a good life, I’d punch him in the nose.

How much life represents a good life?

Maybe a hundred years, which would

give us nearly forty more to visit Oslo

and take the train to Vladivostok,

learn German to read Thomas Mann

in the original. Even more baseball games,

more days at the beach and the baking

of more walnut cakes for family birthdays.

How much time is enough time? How much

is needed for all these unspent kisses,

those slow walks along cobbled streets?

[whats-in-a-sentence]

And the nails, how carefully they had been trimmed.

"The Church of Dead Girls" - Stephen Dobyns

[tenth-sentence]

I recall their pinkness when he waited on me at his pharmacy, the neatly pared cuticles, the buffed nails.

"The Church of Dead Girls" - Stephen Dobyns

[lecturedesam]

c’est lundi, que lisez-vous ?

c’est lundi, que lisez-vous ?

  C’est lundi que lisez-vous » est un rendez-vous créé par Mallou et s’inspire du It’s Monday, What are you reading ? par One Person’s Journey Through a World of Books. il a ensuite été repris par Les paravers de Millina. Le principe de ce rendez-vous est simple, il faut répondre à trois questions chaque lundi: Qu’ai-je lu la semaine passée ? Que suis-je en train de lire en ce moment? Que vais-je…