Tag: words

Emily Dickinson

And were You lost, I would be – 
Though My Name
Rang loudest
On the Heavenly fame – 

And were You – saved – 
And I – condemned to be
Where You were not – 
That self – were Hell to Me – 

So We must meet apart – 
You there – I – here – 
With just the Door ajar
That Oceans are – and Prayer – 
And that White Sustenance – 
Despair –

Because you love
the usual, rain, tired sky, you cannot pray
not even if it helps explain your sudden wish
to be the old man watching all this from his porch,
not asked for any pretense of work or joy to take
what sight still gives of color, and in slack
light to lift no hand to change a thing within
this perfect world of promised dark ?
just to see, and in plain seeing judge, as well
as any god could ask, all things good
which do not chorus for attention.

–Art Homer excerpt of “Duplex on Main” from What We Did After Rain

Painting on Plato’s Wall

The shadows behind people walking
in the bright piazza are not merely
gaps in the sunlight. Just as goodness
is not the absence of badness.
Goodness is a triumph. And so it is
with love. Love is not the part
we are born with that flowers
a little and then wanes as we
grow up. We cobble love together
from this and those of our machinery
until there is suddenly an apparition
that never existed before. There it is,
unaccountable. The woman and our
desire are somehow turned into
brandy by Athena’s tiny owl filling
the darkness around an old villa
on the mountain with its plaintive
mewing. As a man might be
turned into someone else while
living kind of happy up there
with the lady’s gentle dying.

–Jack Gilbert

If a man is not willing to break patriarchal rules that say that he should never change—especially to satisfy someone else, particularly a female—then he will choose being right over being loved. He will turn away from loved ones and choose his manhood over his personhood, isolation over connectedness.

bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004)
Source: books-and-barricades

Trouble by Jack Gilbert

That is what the Odyssey means.
Love can leave you nowhere in New Mexico
raising peacocks for the rest of your life.
The seriously happy heart is a problem.
No the easy excitement, but summer
in the Mediterranean mixed with
the rain and bitter cold of February
on the Riviera, everything on fire
in the violent winds. The pregnant heart
is drive to hopes that are the wrong
size for this world. Love is always
disturbing in the heavenly kingdom.
Eden cannot manage so much ambition.
The kids ran from all over the piazza
yelling and pointing and jeering
at the young Saint Chrysostom
standing dazed in the church doorway
with the shining around his mouth
where the Madonna had kissed him.

HOTELS

lunchboxpoems:

In the semidark we take everything off,
love standing, inaudible; then we crawl into bed.
You sleep with your head balled up in its dreams,
I get up and sit in the chair with a warm beer,
the lamp off. Looking down on a forested town
in a snowfall I feel like a novel—dense
and vivid, uncertain of the end—watching
the bundled outlines of another woman another man
hurrying toward the theater’s blue tubes of light. 

C.D. WRIGHT