November 2011
1 post
August 2011
2 posts
July 2011
10 posts
I would like to be the air
that inhabits you for a moment
only. I would like to be that unnoticed
& that necessary.
from Variations of the Word Sleep by Margaret Atwood
May 2011
1 post
March 2011
2 posts
November 2010
2 posts
I have your good clothes in the car
So cut your hair so no one knows
I have your dreams and your teethmarks
And all my fingernails are painted
I’m here to take you now
- The National
October 2010
7 posts
September 2010
3 posts
plata rasa
dictionaryofobscuresorrows:
n. the tranquil sound of a running dishwasher, whose steady rhythmic shushing reminds you that when you were a pioneer in the wilderness of life, you wanted nothing more than your mother’s voice resonating against your cheek, which puts you completely at peace with not having circumnavigated anything solo.
August 2010
3 posts
“It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. … What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a...
July 2010
3 posts
If there is justice in some other world, those
like myself, whom nature forces
into lives of abstinence, should get
the lion’s share of all things, all
objects of hunger, greed being
praise of you. And no one praises
more intensely than I, with more
painfully checked desire, or more deserves
to sit at your right hand,
- from Vespers by Louise Gluck
“Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work—the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside—the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don’t show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within—that you...
June 2010
6 posts
Clarissa Vaughn: He gives me that look. Julia: What look? Clarissa Vaughn: To say your life is trivial. You are so trivial.
- The Hours
Before Summer Rain
Suddenly, from all the green around you,
something—you don’t know what—has disappeared;
you feel it creeping closer to the window,
in total silence. From the nearby wood
you hear the urgent whistling of a plover,
reminding you of someone’s Saint Jerome:
so much solitude and passion come
from that one voice, whose fierce request the downpour
will grant. The walls,...
The Kanji we use for the word she—a woman far away. To us men, women will always appear to be on a distant shore.
- Kaji, Neon Genesis Evangelion
May 2010
10 posts
I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been.
- from Virginia’s last letter to Leonard Woolf
I regret bitterly
The years of loving you in both
Your presence and absence,
- From Circe’s Torment by Louise Glück
My dear, it was a moment
to clutch at for a moment
so that you may believe in it
and believing is the act of love, I think,
even in the telling, wherever it went.
- from The Expatriates by Anne Sexton
Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won’t know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say...
Circe's Power by Louise Glück
I never turned anyone into a pig.
Some people are pigs; I make them
Look like pigs.
I’m sick of your world
That lets the outside disguise the inside. Your men weren’t bad men;
Undisciplined life
Did that to them. As pigs,
Under the care of
Me and my ladies, they
Sweetened right up.
Then I reversed the spell, showing you my goodness
As well as my power. I saw
We could be happy here,...