The Door
Go and open the door.
Maybe outside there’s
a tree, or a wood,
a garden,
or a magic city.
Go and open the door.
Maybe a dog’s rummaging.
Maybe you’ll see a face,
or an eye,
or the picture
of a picture.
Go and open the door.
If there’s a fog
it will clear.
Go and open the door.
Even if there’s only
the darkness ticking,
even if there’s only
the hollow wind,
even if
nothing
is there,
go and open the door.
At least
there’ll be
a draught.
Miroslav Holub (1923--1998), tr. from the Czech by George Theiner, text from Sean Singer’s daily email, The Sharpener
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“Memory, origin of narrative; memory, barrier against oblivion; memory, repository of my being, those delicate filaments of myself I weave, in time into a spider’s web to catch as much world in it as I can. In the midst of my self-spun web, there I can sit, in the serenity of my self-possession. Or so I would, if I could.”
— The Scarlet House, Angela Carter
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The problem with any first sentence, said Joan Didion, is that you're stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you've laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.
Before beginning, too many options. Then, in the next breath, none.
When you can't sleep, goes an old cure for insomnia, start telling yourself the story of your life. For some reason, writer's block has always felt to me like a kind of insomnia.
I like that Norman Mailer said there's a touch of writer's block in a writer's work every day.
I don't remember who said, Insomnia is the inability to forget.
When you're having trouble writing, get up, go out, take a walk in the street. You will discover that certain streets exist precisely for this purpose. Once, I saw a man---homeless by the look of him---digging through the trash. He pulled out a couple of sheets of newspaper, examined them, and threw them back. Fishing deeper, he hauled up a magazine, squinted at the cover, and threw it back. Shit, he said, walking away. There ain't nothing to read in these fucking cans anymore.
Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables (Riverhead Books, 2023)
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"It was an uncertain spring."
I had read the book a long time ago, and, except for this sentence, I remembered almost nothing about it. I could not have told you about the people who appeared in the book or what happened to them. I could not have told you (until later, after I'd looked it up) that the book began in the year 1880. Not that it mattered. Only when I was young did I believe that it was important to remember what happened in every novel I read. Now I know the truth: what matters is what you experience while reading, the states of feeling that the story evokes, the questions that rise to your mind, rather than the fictional events described. [...]
I like the novelist who confessed that the only thing to have stayed with him after reading Anna Karenina was the detail of a picnic basket holding a jar of honey.
Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables (Riverhead Books, 2023)
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Edward Gorey - Dracula & Lucy
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If I don't survive it, please
remember the
right things about me:
The time I was caught singing
among the violins.
Perhaps I lost my bow,
thought no one would notice the difference.
Perhaps
my voice came back
and so I used my voice.
Sarah Matthes, from “A Preposition to Follow 'Live'," Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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Getting Out of St. Paul
Hiding
in the tall grass
on the north
side of the tracks,
you're trying
to pull the burrs
out of my hair.
It's night.
My pack bolsters below my knees.
I crane my ear to the east
listening for the hum
of shifting steel.
Light another,
smoke silent
and slow. Calm
myself
by thinking
things I know:
that there are
other people
in the world,
that the heart
is a fingerless
glove.
I don't want new
thoughts, don't want
to look beyond
the next train.
A switchman rolls by
in an ancient caboose, laughing
at his radio. He knows
that there are other people
in the world.
Slip
your glove
around me.
From across the tracks
I imagine a bull
is watching us.
He sees two lost fireflies
alighting
and darkening, rising
and falling,
and, at the arrival
of a sweet,
low sound
in the distance,
suddenly going out.
Sarah Matthes, Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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Accidental Yahrzeit
It is still early December, it is the beginning
of the season of the death days
of so many I loved,
and the birthdays
of those other dead
who died in different seasons,
and the days are full
of meaningful oak leaves,
specific soups, a little sudden
crying by
the sheer
blue curtains---
you know when the sun catches
a whole universe
of hanging dust?
A bit of light better lit
by all the light
that surrounds it?
Under a white
draped cloth,
what you had made me:
a menorah.
Black and steel. Slim welds.
Opening fingers.
And the candles were too large
for their metal wells,
so we whittled them thinner with paring knives.
And you don't know
that the holiday ended days ago---
And I'm not going to tell you.
Nine white lights
open their eyes to a night
they've never seen, and the record player
spins a slipping voice through the room,
the heat is on, the couch is green,
the dark days of my longing
approach, they turn up my street,
they fill my yard with omens:
a sneaker tread, a grey fox
and a red, both
together,
a sapling seizing out of the ground
like an arm. But inside,
your arm is around me---
outside there is loss but inside
there is a deep
and abiding
remainder,
tomorrow there is all that
but look,
look at now,
this: my sorrow
suspended in your steel,
my light lit up in your love.
Sarah Matthes, Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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Transitory Mitzvah
In the subway car, a mystery of proximity: a yawn
passing from mouth to mouth,
across a line of seated strangers,
in perfect order. I watched it moving
like a secret through a row of children,
washing toward me as each person opened
their lips to swallow it up
and then, in unbroken revolution,
give it away.
I thought this must be G-d: air
moving through human bodies
like a soft needle picking up stitches along pale cloth.
And I felt my neighbor expand
in her crest of breath, hand
floating to her mouth
like wood rising in water,
and I prepared myself for the gift---
But the yawn turned across the aisle.
I saw it grow inside a child and then drift
into his mother, as it passed again
and again away from me.
What would you unsee
so you could be inside of it?
Could it ever be enough just to say:
it happened, nothing opened
or closed around me, air moved
and was wind, air moved and was
breath, air moved and was death,
my life, it did not change---
Sarah Matthes, Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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Lament for the Living
We feel them walking over us in their intolerable shoes,
knocking down our stone doors. And what
would they have us do---come outside?
We will not afternoon among the pigeons,
who loiter like blanched old men in a sauna,
moaning "arrgargahhh" but meaning to say
"shut the door" but meaning "let this day
end me." Their dicks lolling across their thighs,
gummy and white as gefilte fish.
Overwrought? Yes.
But this is just one tunnel through the story,
and it is not the one that leads to some outside
that is sweet and green. What if we had known
we were in the last five years of our lives?
What a relief! To look around and say
how fine it is, to awaken in the cracked sun,
to knock back a berry into our mouths
like a large and living pill! To have two
and a half years to eat before our time is reset
into a new measure of halfness. And it goes.
For decades we split ourselves across the longing
of an asymptote, until one day we reach down to wipe
and we're putting our hand
through a ghost.
And then it becomes intolerable. Like fruit salad---
a grape disguised in the juices of a cantaloupe.
We leave behind a dotted line, and all these people!
They follow it like a map to heaven,
when all we meant was "cut here."
Sarah Matthes, Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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Wet Body Hot Stone
In everything, I see only myself---
no need to paint irises on stones.
Dark fish gasp across rapids,
and my lungs and stomach gather
in a tight bouquet to spice the blood.
I cut my finger---the skin grows back
strong and smooth---
a new bright brick in my barricade.
Then comes the night
and there are no stilting tree tops
to make into my fingers, no nape of neck
pressed into this ditch of clay.
Night eats the liver
out of the river's stunned pools.
There must be more left than my mind.
Universe, please---
send me the shade of someone I love.
The old woman made of nightmare
who sits on my chest---even she
has her bad dreams.
My life has been the wet imprint
of someone else's body
as they rise from a wide, hot stone
and take to the river to rinse again.
When I die free me from parallel---
Let me feed every tree---
Sarah Matthes, Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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V.
There was a moment in this poem
when I walked into and out of a riddle
with the swift indifference
of a swinging silver pendulum,
when I could have slipped my tongue
like a wet key
into the air's warm door.
Do you remember the bird
and how she sort of came out of a banana?
I felt weird about that.
But at the moment I saw it,
clear and bright and physical
as a papier-mâché mobile of the sun
and its adorers.
There is a word
living inside the word "breathing,"
like a caged bird covered by thick muslin.
It's smaller than the shape
my mouth makes to say it---
quicker, like pointing to the night sky,
and saying only "never mind,
you missed it."
Sarah Matthes, from “To Examine the Marks in Fishes,” Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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II.
If I set the fish in the river,
the bird
will fish it out.
Of all the things our human tongues have done,
"fishing" is perhaps the greatest violence:
Making a name into a word
that means to kill the name.
Sarah Matthes, from “To Examine the Marks in Fishes,” Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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Self Portrait at the End of My Life
I do remember beauty:
A blue pool in the pine barrens,
the fermata of a summer afternoon,
tangles of hair on a soft stomach,
my lips combing through them;
Working quick and hard on a fire
in the black backyard, knowing soon
I'd see those bright lit faces bursting
through the screen door
saying there you are;
And then being alone:
howling on the mountain
until my spirit expands, pans out
and sees my body disappear
below the tree-line;
Or the vast expansive solitude
of being a child in the backseat of the car
at the end of a long trip home, the hum
of adult voices, my head cradled in the sling of the seatbelt,
the dark and permeable glass,
the sky spilling in---
Still, I wanted the next thing.
To collapse the paper dolls of my life
back into the flank of an aspen.
To hear the insides,
like floating with your ears below the water.
I suppose that's what I'm getting now,
though I always pictured it differently.
I thought I'd be on my back.
Sarah Matthes, Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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The Burning Bush Is a Blackberry Bush
I wrote the poem. And then I rewrote it, and made it worse.
I thought time would heal it. Time passed. I did research: Exodus,
midrash, my mother. I rewrote the poem. I ate fistfuls of soft berries. Navy
lips. Purple lips. Juice bursting out of black balloons. I made it worse.
The poem knocked around my mind like unlabeled preserves darkening in the fridge.
Outside the page: tableaus of simple beauty.
Three different trees in one line of sight---plum, pear, palm.
Inside: A hand runs under a faucet, the soap stinging invisible cuts to life.
Have you seen a blackberry bush at the exact moment of its blushing,
when its tight little spheres bleed the green seeds bloody---
have you walked by shoeless on the way to the lake,
the sun lifting the hairs on your cheek,
no matter where you turn, something you love coming after you,
the bush burning in the stripped light,
unripe, alive, surviving---
Sarah Matthes, Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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Aphasia
The barista I knew when I was young
says Come, sit with me,
and tells me how he doesn't believe
in reality anymore.
This chair, these teeth
could be anything
that isn't a chair,
or teeth.
I'm not interested in his latest endeavor,
a drawing he shows me, naming it "Shame."
A sketch of a man: such large hands over
what kind of face.
I have to go, or I say so, and sit on the street
that erupts twice a year:
once with white pear blossoms, once
in bare wired branches---vibrations in the sky.
At home my father watches the television
muted, saying Who is this, and What
are these fellows doing, and every few minutes
he hears a sound
that might be the ice box
spawning, and on double canes
he walks to the front door,
like a paper puppet shaking in the light.
I am going to stay on this bench a very long time,
watching autumn's fingers paint salted lines
around the spaces where the leaves have pressed
their damp brown bodies to the ground,
and I will try to find a way to carve the space around my body
into quiet, or lift a spindle
from my tongue to tighten these sounds
into simply something else.
When I finally go home, I am going
to ask my father how his day was, and he'll say The egg
is on top of the egg but he won't mean an egg
and he won't mean an egg.
Sarah Matthes, Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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There's a special darkness cast around
a single light left on at home.
Sometimes I think if I had known
they were just joking about eating the roach.
If I hadn't pretended my voice was lost
a day after it had come back.
If only I had known that the ones I would love
were the ones that would never leave
and that the staying would make them
so unlovable.
Sarah Matthes, from "Harder All the Time to Go Back to New Jersey," Town Crier (Persea Books, 2021)
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