December 2011
12 posts
6 tags
Still Falling for Her
The phlox in the jar is softening, from the sphere of it a blossom flutters, and the whole sagging thing makes me think of my mother’s flesh, when she was elderly, and it was wilting, keeping its prettiness in its old-fangled gentleness. It’s as if I’m falling in love, again, with my mother, through the gallowsglass of my own oncoming elderliness, as if, now that she has been gone from the...
2 tags
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
– Thomas Merton (Thank you, libraryland)
2 tags
“Love is distinct from desire… Because its aim is not satisfaction, but being.”
– Jacques Lacan, Seminar I, trans. John Forrester (via proustitute)
2 tags
“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature...”
– Søren Kierkegaard (via bardsandsages)
6 tags
“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves...”
– Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (via weelittleactress)
2 tags
“Never be serious for too long.”
– Dr. Stanley Hughes (via imasuperlame)
9 tags
Robert Hass, "A Story about the Body"
The young composer, working that summer at an artist’s colony, had watched her for a week. She was Japanese, a painter, almost sixty, and he thought he was in love with her. He loved her work, and her work was like the way she moved her body, used her hands, looked at him directly when she mused and considered answers to his questions. One night, walking back from a concert, they came to her...
5 tags
“Beginnings are brutal, like this accident
of stars colliding, mute explosions...”
– Each Sound, Dorianne Laux
(via grammatolatry)
5 tags
Jacques Réda, "The Letter Scale"
One of the objects I’ve treasured most in my life Is this letter scale which, long ago, you gave me. I was an active correspondent at the time, Even sending lots of letters overseas. While still enjoying the pleasure of going to the post, I now had another: assessing exactly, in advance, At my counter, the cost of packets and envelopes, To which, price list in hand, I stuck my stamps. I use it...
5 tags
“Would lightning do? Would a new watch?
There aren’t going to be any plums, red...”
– “Sonnet” by Rick Barot (via clavicola)
4 tags
“The half-stripped trees
struck by a wind together,
bending all,
the leaves...”
– William Carlos Williams, “Approach of Winter” (via proustitute)
1 tag
poetbabble:
You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.
-Joan Didion