meat

from "Persephone the Wanderer" (1), Louise Glück —

. . . . .

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

The terrible reunions in store for her
will take up the rest of her life.
When the passion for expiation
is chronic, fierce, you do not choose
the way you live.  You do not live;
you are not allowed to die.

You drift between earth and death
which seem, finally,
strangely alike.  Scholars tell us

that there is no point in knowing what you want
when the forces contending over you
could kill you.

White of forgetfulness,
white of safety—

They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life.  Earth

asks us to deny this rift, a threat
disguised as suggestion—
as we have seen
in the tale of Persephone
which should be read

as an argument between the mother and the lover—
the daughter is just meat.

. . . . .

take me through the sweet valley

 Say Valley Maker

with the grace of a corpse
in a riptide
I let go
and I slide slide slide
downriver
With an empty case by my side
an empty case
that’s my crime

and I sing (Say Valley Maker)
to keep from cursing
yes I sing (Say Valley Maker)
to keep from cursing

river oh
river end
river oh
river end
river go
river bend

take me through the sweet valley
where your heart blooms blooms blooms
take me through the sweet valley
where your heart is covered in dew dew dew

and when the river dries
will you bury me in wood?
where the river dries
will you bury me in stone?

oh I never really realized
death is what it meant
to make it on my own

because there is no love
where there is no obstacle
and there is no love
where there is no bramble
there is no love
on the hacked away plateau
and there is no love
in the unerring
and there is no love
on the one true path

oh I cantered out here
now I’m galloping back

so bury me in wood
and I will splinter
bury me in stone
and I will quake
bury me in water
and I will geyser
bury me in fire
and I’m gonna phoenix

I’m gonna phoenix

I'm gonna phoenix

—Smog (Bill Callahan)

lost libraries

"... We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.  The procession is very long and life is very short.  We die on the march.  But there is nothing outside the march so nothing can be lost to it.  The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece, or be written again in another language."

— from Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, quoted by James Gleick in The Information

another valentine

To Plath, to Sexton

So what use was poetry
to a white empty house?

Wolf, swan, hare,
in by the fire.

And when your tree
crashed through your house,

what use then
was all your power?

It was the use of you.
It was the flower.

-- Jean Valentine, The River at Wolf

difficult loves

The boy swung the muzzle of the gun around again.  It was strange, thinking it over, to be so surrounded by air, separated from other things by yards of air.  When he aimed the gun, on the other hand, the air was a straight invisible line drawn tight from the mouth of the rifle to the target, to the hawk flying up there in the sky with wings that did not seem to move.  When he pressed the trigger, the air was still as empty and transparent as before, but up there, at the other end of the line, the hawk was folding its wings and dropping like a stone.  From the open bolt floated the good smell of gunpowder.

                                                                       -- Italo Calvino, "The Crow Comes Last"

from Austerlitz

(just one of so many brilliant, quotable, single-sentence passages...)

"The frequent result, said Austerlitz, of resorting to measures of fortification marked in general by a tendency towards paranoid elaboration was that you drew attention to your weakest point, practically inviting the enemy to attack it, not to mention the fact that as architectural plans for fortifications became increasingly complex, the time it took to build them increased as well, and with it the probability that as soon as they were finished, if not before, they would have been overtaken by further developments, both in artillery and in strategic planning, which took account of the growing realization that everything was decided in movement, not in a state of rest."

— W. G. Sebald     

via lattea

Via Lattea 

by Jessica Abel 

(ca. 1995, and greatly diminished without her illustrations)

Do you know what the Milky Way is?

The galaxy is a great spinning disk, and we are inside the disc, and the Milky Way is what it looks like from the inside, edge on.

Some people look up and feel insignificant.  I choose to look up and feel a part of something huge.

Do you ever feel, in the summer, a night like a balm, like a kiss, like a soft velvet cape about your shoulders? 

A night that feels like nothing can be bad?  

A night that, despite its softness, feels like an adrenaline shot in your veins?

A night that feels like it belongs to an alternate-universe-you who lives a much happier life?

It's some sort of alchemy of heat and dark and stagelights, or streetlights, or starlight, that turns the leaden night into gold, 
                  
... and makes your heart stand in your throat.  You have to be in it, now, because you can't save it.  

It is fleeting.

passing over

it's springtime again, i'm going to massachusetts again.  no matter how beautiful it is, spring summer or fall, porch lights glowing in dusk, the sounds of the insects at night, seeing the view straight across from one hill top to the next—it will always be, to me, a place that i survived.  somehow i survived it.

and i'm sure the words of Jason Molina had some small part in that.  his voice, with its impossible clarifying pain.  it's hard to believe that he didn't survive whatever his massachusetts was.   


Almost Was Good Enough
          Songs: Ohia

It's been hard doing anything
winter stuck around so long
I kept trying anyhow and I'm still trying now
just to keep working just to keep working
I remember when it didn't use to be so hard
this used to be impossible
A new season has to begin
I can feel it leaning in whispering, Nothing's lonely now
Nothing anymore in pain
A tall shadow dressed how secrets always dress
when they want everyone to know that they're around
leaning in whispering, My friend over there
don't know what he's talking about
Did you really believe
that everyone makes it out?
Almost no one makes it out
I'm going to use that street to hide
from that human doubt
to hide from what was shining
and has finally burned us out
But if no one makes it out
How come you're talking to one right now
for once almost was good enough

birthday

 from Louise Glück, the Seven Ages

Amazingly, I can look back
fifty years.  And there, at the end of the gaze,
a human being already entirely recognizable,
the hands clutched in the lap, the eyes
staring into the future with the combined
terror and hopelessness of a soul expecting annihilation.

Entirely familiar, though still, of course, very young.
Staring blindly ahead, the expression of someone staring into utter darkness.
And thinking—which meant, I remember, the attempts of the mind
to prevent change.

Familiar, recognizable, but much more deeply alone, more despondent.
She does not, in her view, meet the definition
of child, a person with everything to look forward to.

This is how the others look; this is, therefore, what they are.
Constantly making friends
with the camera, many of them actually
smiling with real conviction—

I remember that age.  Riddled with self-doubt, self-loathing,
and at the same time suffused
with contempt for the communal, the ordinary; forever
consigned to solitude, the bleak solace of perception, to a future
completely dominated by the tragic, with no use for the immense will
but to fend it off—

That is the problem of silence:
one cannot test one's ideas.
Because they are not ideas, they are the truth.

All the defenses, the spiritual rigidity, the insistent
unmasking of the ordinary to reveal the tragic,
were actually innocence of the world.
Meaning the partial, the shifting, the mutable—
all that the absolute excludes.  I sat in the dark, in the living room.
The birthday was over.  I was thinking, naturally, about time.
I remember how, in almost the same instant,
my heart would leap up exultant and collapse
in desolate anguish.  The leaping up—the half I didn't count—
that was happiness; that is what the word meant.

from Jean Valentine:

     "As with rosy steps the morn"

           (-from Break the Glass-)


Everyone
on the other side of the earth
standing upside down, listening,
Everyone on the reverse of the picture
on the other side of the measuring eye

The five notes, slowly, over & over,
and with some light intent,
And the whole air,
no edge, no center,

And the light so thin, so fast—

                                  *

Don't listen to the words—
they're only little shapes for what you're saying,
they're only cups if you're thirsty, you aren't thirsty.

what happens in the heart simply happens

from Ted to Sylvia 
     (Hughes & Plath)

Child's Park

What did they mean to you, the azalea flowers?
Those girls were so happy, rending the branches.
Embracing their daring bouquets, their sumptuous trousseaux,
The wet, hot-petalled blossoms. Seizing their day.
Having a good time. Your homicidal
Hooded stare met them head on.
As if they were stealing the brands
Of your own burning. I hurried you off. Bullfrogs
Took you down through lily tangle. Your fury
Had to be quenched. heavy water,
Deeper, deeper, cooling and controlling
Your plutonium secret. You breathed water.

Freed, steadied, resurfaced, your eyes
Alit afresh on color, so delicate,
Splitting the prism,
As the dragonflies on the solid lilies.
The pileated woodpecker went writhing
Among the catalpas. It clung
To undersides and swooped
Like a pterodactyl. The devilry
Of the uncoiling head, the spooky wings,
And the livid cry
Flung the garden open.
You were never
More than a step from Paradise.
You had instant access, your analyst told you,
To the core of your Inferno--
The pit of the hairy flower.
At a sunny angle
The fountain threw off its seven veils
As the air swayed it. Here was your stair--
Alchemy's seven colours.
I watched you as you climbed it all on your own
Into the mouth of the azalea.

You imagined a veil-rending defloration
And a rebirth out of the sun--mixed up together
And somehow the same. You were fearless
To meet your Father.
His Word fulfilled, there, in the nuclear core.

What happens in the heart simply happens.

I stepped back. That glare
Flinging your old selves off like underthings
Left your whole Eden radioactive.

a little bit of Death Tractates

*by Brenda Hillman, of course*

A Dwelling

--And in the central valley,

people were dreaming of peaches.

Starlings ate the scalloped edges off new blossoms.

In the night orchards,

the dreamer walked over hot coals with the poems

and made creation seem effortless--there!

What do you fear in a poem?

(I fear the moment of excess, as in March,

when oxalis comes out all in one day.)

What do you fear in the poem?

(I fear that moment of withholding--

especially inside what I thought was free;

and I feared the poem was just like her,

that it would abandon me--)

particles of sun and pollen/more Brenda Hillman

i was sitting in a shaft of sunlight, looking out the big windows and the open door, and i watched all these motes of dust shining in the air, carried by the wind, and it was so beautiful... and then i realized it was the very same dust and pollen coating the city for the past week, making us all sick. but it made me think of this poem, too:

from Dark Matter —

I want to see everything but they say now
most of the universe is hidden;
they call what we can't see dark matter,
those particles straining unprovenly through
what is, sucking gravity from the edge
of galaxies. They're trying to find just one
speck of it . . . Why am I thrilled by the idea
that this hurried thing cannot be caught?
That this huge mountain's filled with it,
billions of it going through me every second.
That as I sit on this log, slightly drunk
from the high altitude, that
I'm being hit with it. Why love the thought
of being struck by a dark thing clean through.
That the little family throwing snow now
in their innocent ways are being penetrated
by an opposite, the main universe, a huge
allegorical black urgency—and we are nothing
but a rind of consciousness, a mild
excess, a little spare color, and not just us,
the thistles and the asters and the blackbirds . . .

Of course this happened at the start of time,
something had to pull away, and I've been trying
to love the missingness in the middle


—Brenda Hillman, Bright Existence

Jean Valentine

from My Mother's Body :


there is nothing to get. You can't eat money,
dear throat, dear longing,
dear belly, dear fatness,
dear silky fastness: ecstatic lungs' breath,
you can't protect yourself,
there is nothing to get.

poem for tonight

...
Branch scraping again. It made the sound
of missingness, like you. It made
the sound of tiny eiffel towers on their sides.
But it was the dark girl
or the dark boy self you were missing.
Doesn't matter what it was about. Dirty moon-moon. Little
drugged missionary stars came out.

So you took their advice and stayed awake in half
as in a tunnel where you are the only one
going the opposite way,
—not so yellow, not so open,—
you come out and the trees have split
between the past with its type of fire
and the future with its,
you can burn through one sweet branch at a time,
you can gather up the branches with your large large heart
but you're not going to be one thing, ever again—



—Brenda Hillman, from "Branch, Scraping," Bright Existence