Tag: words

ADA LIMÓN

FULL GALLOP

The night after, I dream I chop
all the penises off, the ones that
keep coming through the walls.

Tied in sweat-wet sheets, I wake
aching, how I’ve longed for touch
for so much of my bodied time.

In the shower later, I notice new
layers I’ve grown, softness love tosses
you after years of streetlights alone.

I will never harm you, your brilliant
skin I rub against in the night,
still, part of me is haunted—

a shadow baying inside me
who wants to snap her hind leg
back, buck the rider, follow

that fugitive call into oblivion.

Cameron A. Lawrence

I WILL LOVE YOU IN THE MORNING

when three birds appear as one bird
on the horizon

when distance blurs
fact but not vision

I will love you
when three birds become one bird

and the one turns silver as a biplane
but quieter

I will love you
when the sun turns birds into silver

and one bird divides into three

I will love you
when three birds become distant
particles firing around

a nucleus of blue morning

and you are a bird and I am a bird
when we are blurred silver

           when your beginning becomes
my beginning becomes my end

I will love you when we are bright
as a biplane in the sun

      when I am
a bird on the horizon and disappear into you

then reappear still a bird turning silver
still a particle flying into blue

Devin Kelly

SOMETIMES I’M IN MY HEAD SO LONG & WHEN YOU GET HERE IT FEELS LIKE A DISRUPTION

My lover tells me the moment I
cross the threshold of her door.
Outside a man yells the price of produce
while all above like pen marks
upon a sheet of colored paper
birds traverse the infinite paths that connect
where they are to where they’re going
with an ease I’ve only seen
in a drunk man stumbling toward
a piss’ pain-free release.
I am trying to hold on to each small
almost forgotten orb of my grace
until someone takes it from me.
When you kiss me often
it feels like the tongue in my mouth
has assumed the weight & shape
of a bear’s lung. It takes
such great stamina to bear
the pain of this world
while forever holding out on the momentary
possibility of a scream. Clutch me
like you mean it. Don’t be
so timid. It’s not like you
to want without wanting, to listen to
the faint tune disrupting your head
& not find within it
a melody.

           I have an idea.
I’m sick of birds & I think
we might be better than their
twirling-all-innocent-&-not-giving-a-fuck.
I’ve been holding in my small, just created womb
a thimble of happiness. It looks
like jello you just shot a bullet through.
It’s quite literally an explosion of color,
like a flower dropped acid & tried
to make a baby with another flower.
You can have it.
I’ve never known
quite what to do with it
& I know you’re having
a hard time believing in anything
other than yourself anymore.
So take it. Drink up! Even the trees
grow weary waiting
for you to climb them & shoo
these pesky birds away.

David Welch

AFTER RILKE

                      —a cento

1.

not from shyness     this silence of theirs
no ear but is half broken

             and nearly touchable

air without object     a gust within God     a wind
grows now too heavy for you to bear

~

all becomes arbor

                         resurrected
             into all that may be seen

and flings it     free of sorrow     heavenward

~

antenna to antenna we posit
             this sweetness     thick at first
begrudging us

             changing like cloud formations

in course of time they break
though we     like swimmers     tax ourselves
                                                                          at length

2.

you whom I loved like an unnamed flower

                         you breeze     so full of spots

who with the dead

             by one deft touch
do we know     or do we not

“The Lost and Unlost Poetry and the irrevocable past”; CAROLYN FORCHE INTERVIEWED BY THE EDITORS of Poetry Magazine

Can the poetry of witness be a purely spiritual phenomenon? That is, can the dynamic that you’re describing in this essay, the permanent wounding of consciousness and language, occur from metaphysical, as well as physical, trauma?

If we think of the spiritual as a way of knowing, one can be wounded spiritually. Jean-François Lyotard would argue that the language of the Torah is permanently wounded by the experience of the divine. Jacob endures wrestling with the stranger, his angel. The slightest shock or event can send you from one thinking to another; trauma is said to occur when this shock is sufficiently strong as to overwhelm. If the experience of God is traumatic, it is because we meet with the incommensurate.

xii.
But the silence is certain. This is why I write. I am alone and I write. No, I am not alone. There is someone here who is trembling. […]

xv.
The pleasure of losing yourself in the image foreseen. I rose from my body and went out in search of who I am. A pilgrim of my self [or from my self; the Spanish is ambiguous], I have gone to the one who sleeps in the winds of her country.

xvi.
My fall that is endless into my fall that is endless, where no one expected me, since when I looked to see who expected me, I saw no other thing than my self.

xvii.
Something falling in the silence. My final word was I, but by this I meant the luminous dawn.

Alejandra Pizarnik, “Paths of the Mirror” (via heteroglossia)

He said he would be back and we’d drink wine together
He said that everything would be better than before
He said we were on the edge of a new relation
He said he would never again cringe before his father
He said that he was going to invent full-time
He said he loved me that going into me
He said was going into the world and the sky
He said all the buckles were very firm
He said the wax was the best wax
He said Wait for me here on the beach
He said Just don’t cry

I remember the gulls and the waves
I remember the islands going dark on the sea
I remember the girls laughing
I remember they said he only wanted to get away from me
I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets,
a trashy lot
I remember she told me those who try out inventions are worse
I remember she added : Women who love such are the
Worst of all
I have been waiting all day, or perhaps longer.
I would have liked to try those wings myself.
It would have been better than this.

Muriel Rukeyser, Waiting for Icarus (via grammatolatry)
Source: grammatolatry

Corona by Paul Celan

Autumn eats its leaf out of my hand: we are friends.
From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:
then time returns to the shell.

In the mirror it's Sunday,
in dream there is room for sleeping,
our mouths speak the truth.

My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one:
we look at each other,
we exchange dark words,
we love each other like poppy and recollection,
we sleep like wine in the conches,
like the sea in the moon's blood ray.

We stand by the window embracing, and people
   look up from the street:
it is time they knew!
It is time the stone made an effort to flower,
time unrest had a beating heart.
It is time it were time.

It is time.
From the nuts we shell time and we teach it to walk:
then time returns to the shell.

In the mirror it's Sunday,
in dream there is room for sleeping,
our mouths speak the truth.

My eye moves down to the sex of my loved one:
we look at each other,
we exchange dark words,
we love each other like poppy and recollection,
we sleep like wine in the conches,
like the sea in the moon's blood ray.

We stand by the window embracing, and people
   look up from the street:
it is time they knew!
It is time the stone made an effort to flower,
time unrest had a beating heart.
It is time it were time.

It is time.

Paul Celan

Aspen Tree

Aspen Tree, your leaves glance white into the dark.
My mother's hair was never white.

Dandelion, so green is the Ukraine.
My yellow-haired mother did not come home.

Rain cloud, above the well do you hover?
My quiet mother weeps for everyone.

Round star, you wind the golden loop.
My mother's heart was ripped by lead.

Oaken door, who lifted you off your hinges?
My gentle mother cannot return.

The Window by Diane di Prima

curdspluswhey:

you are my bread
and the hairline
noise
of my bones
you are almost
the sea
you are not stone
or molten sound
I think
you have no hands

this kind of bird flies backward
and this love
breaks on a windowpane
where no light talks
this is not time
for crossing tongues
(the sand here
never shifts)

I think
tomorrow
turned you with his toe
and you will
shine
and shine
unspent and underground