Winter

"Follow the Map" Mono

Hell

The second-hardest thing I have to do is not be longing’s slave.

Hell is that. Hell is that, others, having a job, and not having a
job. Hell is thinking continually of those who were truly great.

Hell is the moment you realize that you were ignorant of the fact,
when it was true, that you were not yet ruined by desire.

The kind of music I want to continue hearing after I am dead is
the kind that makes me think I will be capable of hearing it then.

There is music in Hell. Wind of desolation! It blows past the egg-
eyed statues. The canopic jars are full of secrets.

The wind blows through me. I open my mouth to speak.

I recite the list of people I have copulated with. It does not take long.
I say the names of my imaginary children. I call out four-syllable
words beginning with B. THis is how I stay alive.

Beelzebub. Brachiosaur. Bubble-headed. I don’t know how I stay alive.
What I do know is that there is a light, far above us, that goes out
when we die,

and that in Hell there is a gray tulip that grows without any sun.
It reminds me of everything I failed at,

and I water it carefully. It is all I have to remind me of you.

--"Hell" Sarah Manguso

Alphabet (Inger Christensen)

early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought;
seclusion and angels exist;
widows and elk exist; every
detail exists; memory, memory’s light;
afterglow exists; oaks, elms,
junipers, sameness, loneliness exist;
eider ducks, spiders, and vinegar
exist, and the future, the future

--"Alphabet" excerpt

Wedding Dress (Sam Amidon)

Blessings

I love you all and am so proud of the people you've become.

Listening to Mountain Goats (I am going to make it through this year if it kills me), reading Dana Levin (a poem that makes me think of eating fish and chips in a cold March park in Toronto), drunk on dinner's wine and the week's emotions.

What you gave me

There are plenty of feelings worse than fretting restlessness. However, my entire body and brain has been knocked to the ground and the last 24 hours have been a productive hell in which despite all the checkmarks on my to do lists, I've gotten nothing done. Instead of feeling exhilarated and brilliant, I feel dull and dumb. And yet so on edge. The tired mind and caffeinated nerves. Woke at four-thirty. I never sleep any more, I stress the day & night away.

This makes me feel a bit better? Or not?

After the eighth morning I seek

and find

Again and again I aim straight

into the impossible The dogs bark

and around it all goes

What you gave my thoughts is pure

confusion, balance that's uncertain/

certain

What you gave me is all the impossible

My passion: to go further.

"TEXT/variabilities/8" Inger Christensen

Except it doesn't do what it should do, on its own. Christensen is like nice enough individual pictures that pieced together make a breathtaking puzzle. Better still, a kaleidescope, diamonds in a house of mirrors, infinitely reflecting, collapsing and expanding stars in the universe. If I were in a better mood you might give my thoughts "the insanity/ of feelings" or "the closeness/ of absence" or something so far from the variabilities of text...

There is a world of difference between breathtaking, breathless and being winded, exhausted.

My PDP/PLP depresses me. Think ahead 5 years. Okay: I want poetry and love. Maybe a dog. And its not just now. In January talking work with PH: where do you want to go, he asked and all I could think of was "Helsinki?"

Story of my life

I watched the arctic landscape from above
and thought of nothing, lovely nothing.
I observed white canopies of clouds, vast
expanses where no wolf tracks could be found.

I thought about you and about the emptiness
that can promise one thing only: plenitude—
and that a certain sort of snowy wasteland
bursts from a surfeit of happiness.

As we drew closer to our landing,
the vulnerable earth emerged among the clouds,
comic gardens forgotten by their owners,
pale grass plagued by winter and the wind.

I put my book down and for an instant felt
a perfect balance between waking and dreams.
But when the plane touched concrete, then
assiduously circled the airport's labryinth,

I once again knew nothing. The darkness
of daily wanderings resumed, the day's sweet darkness,
the darkness of the voice that counts and measures,
remembers and forgets.

"Balance" Adam Zagajewski

(I bought my plane tickets, I contemplated awkward dates and fake marriage, I am going in to the office on a Sunday, I dreamt of reading stories to my cousins & cinnamon toast, I did the dishes.)

Horses

But the greatest desire of all is to be
In the dream of another,
To feel a slight pull, like reins,
To feel a heavy pull, like chains.

"The Greatest Desire" Yehuda Amichai

"Where you are is where you are not"

I feel I am continually making the same deal with the devil. I keep making the same decision.

It should be noted that I originally typed "the sane decision." I guess the Freudian keyboard slip answers that.

I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope of the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith, and the love, and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.

"East Coker" excerpt, TS Eliot


Insatiable April, trees in place,
in their scraped-out place,
their standing.
Standing way.
Their red branch areas,
green shoot areas (shock),
river, that one.
I surprised a goose and she hissed.
I walk and walk with cold hands.
Back at the house it is filled with longing,
nothing to carry longing away.
I look back over my life.
I try to find analogies.
There are none.
I have longed for people before, I have loved people before.
Not like this.
It was not this.

Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

"Tag" excerpt, Anne Carson

That first time, autumn air, realization in the setting afternoon sun, walking home after shaking hands with the devil, hands chill in your pocket and your warm warm heart and the understanding of everything you've given up and gained, hands in your pocket, raw from the autumn wind.

And again now, and again now.

I need to learn to ask for it all. To sign away every part of my heart, and not just the longing in my lungs for the mother tongue either/or the angel hair ache in my stomach.

Mission Accepted

In yesterday's dream, I woke up from a dream, which was simply just reliving that real day. In this dream I was waking, choking on my coughing, "Are you okay?" I kept coughing, choking, trying to say "I can't go in to work."

I woke up, rasping, coughing at the cold air of the open window.


Day after day I think of you as soon as I wake up.
Someone has put the cries of the birds on the air like jewels.

"Short Talk on Le Bonheur d'etre Bien Aimée" --Anne Carson

"In the Spring I had Great Hunger..."

from today's New Yorker "Book Bench"

Iceland has been in the news a lot recently. When I heard that the poet Anne Carson was living there as an artist in residence, working on a choral piece in Stykkisholmur, I asked her what her impressions were of the headline-making nation:

Vast empty silent. Kinds of light unlike any other. Weather changing every ten minutes.

The choral piece, based on a sequence of Carson’s sonnets, will be scored by Kjartan, from Sigur Rós, and moved to New York next year.


(Exclamation marks, anticipation and punctuation marks of desire all around)

"A cleaving to a certain freedom..."

A melancholy rage, a fiery laze. A sullen funk, an unproductive morning. A glaring footdrag of errands, an armful of literary mags (the new Granta, the new Bookforum, the new Believer, buying the Boston Review for a new Anne Carson poem...) and a latte.

And a discovery. A wish, a truth:

To be free of the need
to make a waste of money
when my passion,
first and last,
is for the ecstatic lash
of the poetic line
and no visible recompense.

Fanny Howe, "Poem from a Single Pallet"

Wise words

The nearly right
And yet not quite
In love is wholly evil
And every heart
That loves in part
Is mortgaged to the devil.


I loved or thought
I loved in sort
Was this to love akin?
To take the best
And leave the rest
And let the devil in?


O lovers true
And others too
Whose best is only better
Take my advice
Shun compromise
Forget him and forget her.


"To the Tune of the Coventry Carol" Stevie Smith