February 2012
12 posts
2 tags
My Grandmother’s Love Letters by Hart Crane
There are no stars tonight
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.
There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother’s mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.
Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible...
1 tag
My Dead Friends - Marie Howe
I have begun, when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question to ask my dead friends for their opinion and the answer is often immediate and clear. Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child in my middle age? They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—whatever leads to joy, they always answer, to more life and less...
3 tags
I Never Knew Y☀u From The Sun: Now That I am in... →
I think of you and the continents brilliant and arid and the slender heart you are sharing my share of with the American air as the lungs I have felt sonorously subside slowly greet each morning and your brown lashes flutter revealing two perfect dawns colored by New York see a vast…
2 tags
West Wind #2 - Mary Oliver
You are young. So you know everything. You leap
into the boat and begin rowing. But listen to me.
Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without
any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.
Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and
your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to
me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent
penny, or a scuffed...
2 tags
On the road to San Romano (1948) - Andre Breton
Poetry is made in a bed like love. It’s rumpled sheets are the dawn of things. Poetry is made in the woods.It has the space it needs.Not this one but the other one whose form is lent it by.The eye of the kite. The dew on a horsetail. The memory of a bottle frosted over on a silver tray. A tail rod of tourmaline on the sea. And the road of the mental adventure. That climbs abruptly. One...
3 tags
1 tag
4 tags
Moonstruck Is The Best
Ronny Cammareri: Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn’t know this either, but love don’t make things nice - it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren’t here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong...
2 tags
The Old Age of Nostalgia by Mark Strand
Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined future, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love or a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced that even the smallest particle of the surrounding world was charged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, and one would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind- loosened river of...
2 tags
Letter from Jackson Pollack's dad to his son
Dear Son Jack,
Well it has been some time since I received your fine letter. It makes me a bit proud and swelled up to get letters from five young fellows by the names of Charles, Mart, Frank, Sande, and Jack. The letters are so full of life, interest, ambition, and good fellowship. It fills my old heart with gladness and makes me feel “Bully.” Well Jack I was glad to learn how you felt about...
3 tags
Autopsy in the Form of an Elegy - John Stone
In the chest in the heart was a vessel was the pulse was the art was the love was the clot small and slow and the scar that could not know the rest of you was very nearly perfect.
3 tags
There is a limit to the amount of misery and disarray you will put up with, for love, just as there is a limit to the amount of mess you can stand around the house. You can’t know the limit beforehand, but you will know when you’ve reached it. I believe this.
When you really start letting go, this is what it’s like. A lick of pain, furtive, darting up where you don’t expect it. Then a...
