Our Union by Hafiz

I am in love with every detail of Joanna & Alex's wedding but it was this reading from their ceremony that I can't get out of my head:

Our union is like this:

You feel cold, so I reach for a blanket to cover our shivering feet.
A hunger comes into your body, so I run to my garden and start digging potatoes.
You asked for a few words of comfort and guidance, and I quickly kneel by your side offering you a whole book as a gift.
You ache with loneliness one night so much you weep, and I say here is a rope, tie it around me, I will be your companion for life.

{photo of Alex & Joanna by Max Wanger}

Autumn Day by Rainer Maria Rilke

Lord: it is time. The summer was so immense.
Lay your shadow on the sundials,
and let loose the wind in the fields.

Bid the last fruits to be full,
give them another two more southerly days,
press them to ripeness, and chase
the last sweetness into the heavy wine.

Whoever has no house now will not build one anymore.
Whoever is alone now will remain so for a long time,
will stay up, read, write long letters,
and wander the avenues, up and down,
restlessly, while the leaves are blowing.

{I took this photo this past weekend as Sean was gracious to lend a pocket to my ever-growing leaf collection}

In summer

 

In summer, the song sings itself.             

-William Carlos Williams

(I'm off to listen to that song.)

{image by ladyLara}

Marginalia*

*I am doing some light housekeeping to my site and decided to move this from the sidebar (where it seemed oh so appropriate) to it's final resting place, here.  

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious,
skirmishes against the author
raging along the borders of every page
in tiny black script.
If I could just get my hands on you,
Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien,
they seem to say,
I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head.

Other comments are more offhand, dismissive-"Nonsense."  "Please!" "HA!!" -
that kind of thing.
I remember once looking up from my reading,
my thumb as a bookmark,
trying to imagine what the person must look like
why wrote "Don't be a ninny"
alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson.

Students are more modest
needing to leave only their splayed footprints
along the shore of the page.
One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's.
Another notes the presence of "Irony"
fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal.

Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers,
Hands cupped around their mouths.
"Absolutely," they shout
to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin.
"Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!"
Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points
rain down along the sidelines.

And if you have managed to graduate from college
without ever having written "Man vs. Nature"
in a margin, perhaps now
is the time to take one step forward.

We have all seized the white perimeter as our own
and reached for a pen if only to show
we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages;
we pressed a thought into the wayside,
planted an impression along the verge.

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria
jotted along the borders of the Gospels
brief asides about the pains of copying,
a bird signing near their window,
or the sunlight that illuminated their page-
anonymous men catching a ride into the future
on a vessel more lasting than themselves.

And you have not read Joshua Reynolds,
they say, until you have read him
enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling.

Yet the one I think of most often,
the one that dangles from me like a locket,
was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye
I borrowed from the local library
one slow, hot summer.
I was just beginning high school then,
reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room,
and I cannot tell you
how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
when I found on one page

A few greasy looking smears
and next to them, written in soft pencil-
by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
whom I would never meet-
"Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love."

- Billy Collins

{photographs by Jordaan Mason}

She tells her love while half asleep

She tells her love while half asleep, 
       In the dark hours, 
               With half-words whispered low: 
As Earth stirs in her winter sleep 
       And puts out grass and flowers 
                Despite the snow, 
                Despite the falling snow. 

by Robert Graves

{photograph by love_child_kyoto}

I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone

I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone

by Richard Brautigan

I was trying to describe you to someone a few days ago. You don't look like any girl I've ever seen before.

I couldn't say "Well she looks just like Jane Fonda, except that she's got red hair, and her mouth is different and of course, she's not a movie star..."

I couldn't say that because you dont look like Jane Fonda at all.

I finally ended up describing you as a movie I saw when I was a child in Tacoma Washington. I guess I saw it in 1941 or 42, somewhere in there. I think I was seven, or eight, or six.

It was a movie about rural electrification, a perfect 1930's New Deal morality kind of movie to show kids. The movie was about farmers living in the country without electricity. They had to use lanterns to see by at night, for sewing and reading, and they didn't have any appliances like toasters or washing machines, and they couldn't listen to the radio. They built a dam with big electric generators and they put poles across the countryside and strung wire over fields and pastures.

There was an incredible heroic dimension that came from the simple putting up of poles for the wires to travel along. They looked ancient and modern at the same time.

Then the movie showed electricity like a young Greek god, coming to the farmer to take away forever the dark ways of his life. Suddenly, religiously, with the throwing of a switch, the farmer had electric lights to see by when he milked his cows in the early black winter mornings. The farmer's family got to listen to the radio and have a toaster and lots of bright lights to sew dresses and read the newspaper by.

It was really a fantastic movie and excited me like listening to the Star Spangled Banner, or seeing photographs of President Roosevelt, or hearing him on the radio "... the President of the United States... "

I wanted electricity to go everywhere in the world. I wanted all the farmers in the world to be able to listen to President Roosevelt on the radio....

And that's how you look to me.

{image by mark.os}

Poems on the Underground

Years ago, while I was backpacking through Europe - I picked up some fantastic posters at the London Transport Museum.  I adored them and had them hanging in various apartments for years.  The we got rid of everything to move overseas.  Of what was dispersed, there isn't much that I miss.  But I do miss those posters.  

Both the posters and my favorite book of poetry are from the Poems on the Underground initiative. Launched in 1986, "Poems on the Underground is a project to bring poetry to a wider audience by displaying various poems or stanzas on advertising boards across the London Underground rapid transit network."  

Oh, how I love this idea.

blue bicicletta

It seems to me, that Nicole Docimo of Blue Bicicletta is as much a poet as an artist.  Two of my very favorite things.  Is it any wonder why I love her work? 

breathe

Wage peace with your breath.



Breathe in firemen and rubble,


breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red wing blackbirds.



Breathe in terrorists 
and

breathe out sleeping children and freshly mown fields.



Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.



Breathe in the fallen and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.



Wage peace with your listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.



Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.



Make soup.



Play music, memorize the words for thank you in three languages.



Learn to knit, and make a hat.



Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,


imagine grief
 as the outbreath of beauty
or the gesture of fish.



Swim for the other side.



Wage peace.



Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious:



Have a cup of tea and rejoice.



Act as if armistice has already arrived.


Celebrate today.

                                                                        wage peace –

judyth hill - september 12, 2001

first seen here.

{image from Fort Photo}

this is just to say

I have eaten 

the plums 

that were in 

the icebox 

and which 

you were probably 

saving 

for breakfast. 

Forgive me 

they were 

delicious 

so sweet 

and so cold. -- 

William Carlos Williams


{image from provincijalka's}

Song of Solomon 8:6-7

Bind me as a seal upon your heart,
as a seal upon your arm,
for love is strong as death,
jealousy is fierce as the grave.
Its flashes are flashes of fire,
the very flame of the Lord.
Many waters cannot quench love,
neither can floods drown it.
If a man offered for love
all the wealth of his house,
he would be utterly despised.

{image by Rodney Smith}

Come. And be my baby.

 

The highway is full of big fast cars
going nowhere fast
And folks is smoking anything that'll burn
Some people wrap their lives around a cocktail glass
And you sit wondering
where you're going to turn.
I got it.
Come. And be my baby.

Some prophets say the world is gonna end tomorrow
But others say we've got a week or two
The paper is full of evey kind of blooming horror
And you sit wondering
what you're gonna do.
I got it.
Come. And be my baby.

-Maya Angelou

{image found here}

I Am Not Yours

I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light.

Oh plunge me deep in love, put out
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.

-Sara Teasdale

{image from Vermont Ferret's flickr}

Words, Wide Night

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say 
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.

-Carol Ann Duffy

{image via Lolita}

Her Anxiety

Earth in beauty dressed 

Awaits returning spring. 

All true love must die, 

Alter at the best 

Into some lesser thing. 

Prove that I lie. 

Such body lovers have, 

Such exacting breath, 

That they touch or sigh. 

Every touch they give, 

Love is nearer death. 

Prove that I lie.

-William Butler Yeats

{image by Rodney Smith}

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the joy 
at the bend in the road where we turned toward 
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands, 
from sweet fellowship in the bins, 
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all, 
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside, 
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into 
the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live 
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy 
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to 
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom. 

-Li-Young Lee

{image from Hanna Friden via Lolita}

some sound advice:

Then wear the gold hat, if that will move her, 
If you can bounce high; bounce high for her too 
Till she cries "Lover, gold-hatted, 
high-bouncing lover, I must have you!"

-Thomas Parke D'Invilliers (F. Scott Fitzgerald)

{image by Rodney Smith}

since feeling is first

since feeling is first 

who pays any attention 

to the syntax of things 

will never wholly kiss you; 

wholly to be a fool 

while Spring is in the world 

my blood approves, and kisses are a better fate 

than wisdom 

lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry - 

the best gesture of my brain is less than 

your eyelids' flutter which says 

we are for each other; then 

laugh, leaning back in my arms 

for life's not a paragraph 

And death i think is no parenthesis

-e.e. cummings

 {image by Inga Kommentarer via Lolita}

True Love

It is true love because
I put on eyeliner and a concerto and make pungent observations about the great issues of the day
Even when there's no one here but him,
And because
I do not resent watching the Green Bay Packers
Even though I am philosophically opposed to football,
And because
When he is late for dinner and I know he must be either having an affair or lying dead in the middle of the street,
I always hope he's dead.

It's true love because
If he said quit drinking martinis but I kept drinking them and the next morning I couldn't get out of bed,
He wouldn't tell me he told me,
And because
He is willing to wear unironed undershorts
Out of respect for the fact that I am philosophically opposed to ironing,
And because
If his mother was drowning and I was drowning and he had to choose one of us to save,
He says he'd save me.

It's true love because
When he went to San Francisco on business while I had to stay home with the painters and the exterminator and the baby who was getting the chicken pox,
He understood why I hated him,
And because
When I said that playing the stock market was juvenile and irresponsible and then the stock I wouldn't let him buy went up twenty-six points,
I understood why he hated me,
And because
Despite cigarette cough, tooth decay, acid indigestion, dandruff, and other features of married life that tend to dampen the fires of passion,
We still feel something
We can call
True love. 

-Judith Viorst

{image by Katrina}

Love in a Bathtub

Years later we'll remember the bathtub
the position of the taps
the water, slippery
as if a bucketful of eels had joined us ...
we'll be old, our children grown up
but we'll remember the water sloshing out
the useless soap,
the mountain of wet towels.
'Remember the bathtub in Belfast?'
we'll prod each other

Sujata Bhatt

{image by Erika Svensson via LOLITA}