from “Night on the Island”

All night I have slept with you
next to the sea, on the island.
Wild and sweet you were between pleasure and sleep,
between fire and water.

Perhaps very late
our dreams joined
at the top or at the bottom,
up above like branches moved by a common wind,
down below like red roots that touch.

Perhaps your dream
drifted from mine
and through the dark sea
was seeking me
as before,
when you did not yet exist,
when without sighting you
I sailed by your side,
and your eyes sought
what now—
bread, wine, love, and anger—
I heap upon you
because you are the cup
that was waiting for the gifts of my life.

I have slept with you
all night long while
the dark earth spins
with the living and the dead,
and on waking suddenly
in the midst of the shadow
my arm encircled your waist.
Neither night nor sleep
could separate us.

I have slept with you
and on waking, your mouth,
come from your dream,
give me the taste of earth,
of sea water, of seaweed,
of the depths of your life,
and I received your kiss
moistened by the dawn
as if it came to me
from the sea that surrounds us.

- Pablo Neruda, translated by Donald D. Walsh

 

and still, I wait for him, my cup.

The World Before Them

Actually, it was sweet and heavy with juice
and we passed it back and forth, a river
of nectar running down her chin and mine
until we were full and our faces shone
and could not tell receiver from giver.
I loved its weight in my hand, bruised
just a little from having fallen
from those high, green limbs. And we took its seed
and planted more when we left that place
so we’d always be sure to have its taste
upon our tongues. That was her idea, freed
us from worrying about the future. And all in
all, we didn’t. We ate them to the core.
It’s as though we’d been provided for.

- Steve Kronen

 

gorgeous, esctatic, brilliant fullness. let’s have more and more and more of this.

from “Today My Alarm Went Off at 12:30 p.m.”

… I feel alienated by people who express concern about me without
defining their concern in terms of a specific solution or goal
I dont feel comforted by the idea of an afterlife
I dont want to continue experiencing things after I die
I want someone to pull my hair because I like the idea of someone
controlling my head without touching my head

what is the difference between being an independent person
and being a person who is accepting of loneliness

- Mira Gonzalez

Love Poem for What It Is

There’s nothing in the world that loves you
more than the space you already take up.
There’s nothing in the world that won’t
forget you faster than you forgot
the last person that stepped out from your life.
When the cat reaches up
one needled paw to drag down a book
from your desk, then another,
that’s not love—that’s dominance.
When you reach up your hand and try to wheedle
someone else’s to hold it, that’s love
dominating you. There’s no word for loving more
than you should, just the feeling of excess,
as if your tongue burst in a rash of red sequins,
as if everyone can see your stutter in the air,
staccato love you, love you, and nothing in the world
standing in that space to receive it.

– Rebecca Hazelton

Maritime

even when your tongue
is the only muscle in you i love

even when the grease in your
hair sticks to me for a week

even when your mouth is
ripe on mine

even when your pioneer hands
take the shape of my hips

you are not the tired voice i
want to hear in the morning

you are not the wound on my
thigh i tell stories about

you are not a shield from the
rain and you stay dry

you are an old wooden ship all your own

- Amanda Birkner

 

auuuuugh

from “The Year of Magical Thinking”

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death. We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind. We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe their husband is about to return and need his shoes.

- Joan Didion

On Morality

Of course we would all like to “believe” in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home. And of course it is all right to do that; that is how, immemorially, thing have gotten done. But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in The New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with “morality.” Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.

- Joan Didion

preach it, joan.