December 2010
37 posts
SOME THINGS ABOUT MY TRIP HOME
I.
My father hasn’t smoked a cigarette in seven months, drinks wine and tea instead of beer and coffee.
II.
My aunt is sick. Instead of having Christmas dinner at our house that my mother, whose one and only pure joy is Christmas, has so lovingly decorated, we bring dinner to her. We lived in the house that she lives in now for the early parts of my childhood. Things are different now...
SOME THINGS THAT ARE IN MY HEART
I. UNCERTAINTY
A kiss could be a promise that could be an expectation that could be a mistake that I’m not ready or am unwilling to make.
II. CERTAINTY
The sublime pleasures of a love unconditional: the softness of waking, the comfort of knowing. These things, they are simple.
III. ANOTHER TRUTH
Electricity.
IV. THINGS THAT ARE OUT OF MY CONTROL
Everything: I am limited. I can only...
IN IMITATION OF FOR LOVE BY JULIANA SPAHR
(with a Line Stolen from Ted Berrigan)
If he or she is clumsy in places, those are clumsy places and when he or she says I have a lover or a husband or a wife, we or I feel sad, or is it just clumsy? can’t one make it simple, or at least simpler? or why can’t it be that way for just one moment? I am writing this on a hip pocket pad, a waterproof one but I am not crying, never...
SENTENCINGS BY JANE HIRSHFIELD
A thing too perfect to be remembered: stone beautiful only when wet. * * * Blinded by light or black cloth— so many ways not to see others suffer. * * * Too much longing: it separates us like scent from bread, rust from iron. * * * From very far or very close— the most resolute folds of the mountain are gentle. * * * As if putting arms into woolen...
THINGS I HAVE DONE IN MY TWO DAYS AT HOME
I. DAVID I am back in Tucson for the holidays. It’s cloudy here, and everyone is depressed about it. I saw my oldest friend yesterday, and he said “I can’t handle not seeing the sun, man, it’s messing with me.” He’s in law school, a little jaded, pissed about the prison industrial complex, and flying to Europe tomorrow morning to ask the woman he loves to marry...
THAT WAS THE FIRST DAY & WE NEVER FORGOT IT BY...
Our questions started small: why was the radio warm when we came home, why did the souffle fall not once but thrice? At noon the sun shone as per usual, but there were moon-glints on the garbage lids. On the subway train rain began to fall among the silver poles & onto our heads— we didn’t see the man in the corner clutching a rosebush, couldn’t know that its roots were...
http://www.nationalportraitgallery.net/ →
And http://www.nationalportraitgallery.us/ now link to the full version of David Wojnarowicz’s “A Fire in My Belly”
when the lights go out on us
your low lying shore opens welcomingly to one...
ABC
a bug bite a broken heart a bruise on my neck a blue comforter stained with sex a curious encounter a case of anxiety a call that came too late a craving that’s hard to name
WHY PEOPLE BE MAD AT ME SOMETIMES BY LUCILLE...
they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and I keep on remembering mine
shiver at the sight of you
SOME OBSERVATIONS
I.
Everyone here is familiar. Sometimes I actually do know them, either from the past or the new of my life, sometimes they are just doppelgangers of my old friends—the same color bicycle, the same gait, the same haircut. I’m drawn to a certain type of person, I don’t deny it.
II.
Getting called a faggot on the bus, I realize that teenagers are the same everywhere.
III.
...
FOR JOHN, WHO BEGS ME NOT TO ENQUIRE FURTHER BY...
Not that it was beautiful, but that, in the end, there was a certain sense of order there; something worth learning in that narrow diary of my mind, in the commonplaces of the asylum where the cracked mirror or my own selfish death outstared me. And if I tried to give you something else, something outside of myself, you would not know that the worst of anyone can be, finally, an accident of hope....
“What is remembering? Remembering brings the absent into the present, connects...”
– Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost
“One” on “One”: Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young... →
How lucky am I to work so closely with these women?
toughest:
Hey, Cheena!
I like your poem.
What...
Some Things I Just Don’t Want To Know