from farren. thank you for helping me give this feeling words this year. five is a long time to go without a mama. Splitting 1. My body opens over San Francisco like the day- light raining down each pore crying the change of light I am not with her I have been waking off and on all night to that pain not simply absence but the presence of the past destructive to living here and now Yet if I could instruct myself, if we could learn to learn from pain even as it grasps at us if the mind, the mind that lives in this body could refuse to let itself be crushed in that grasp it would loosen Pain would have to stand off from me and listen its dark breath still on me but the mind could begin to speak to pain and pain would have to answer: We are older now -adrienne rich
Crush
Maybe my limbs are made
mostly for decoration,
like the way I feel about
persimmons. You can't
really eat them. Or you
wouldn't want to. If you grab
the soft skin with your fist
it somehow feels funny,
like you've been here
before and uncomfortable,
too, like you'd rather
squish it between your teeth
impatiently, before spitting
the soft parts back up
to linger on the tongue like
burnt sugar or guilt.
For starters, it was all
an accident, you cut
the right branch
and a sort of light
woke up underneath,
and the inedible fruit
grew dark and needy.
Think crucial hanging.
Think crayon orange.
There is one low, leaning
heart-shaped globe left
and dearest, can you
tell, I am trying
to love you less.
-Ada Limon
I found this in this week's New Yorker. And for the record, persimmons are my favorite fruit.
The Heiligenstadt Testament
Three miles from my adopted city
lies a village where I came to peace.
The world there was a calm place,
even the great Danube no more
than a pale ribbon tossed onto the landscape
by a girl's careless hand. Into this stillness
I had been ordered to recover.
The hills were gold with late summer;
my rooms were two, plus a small kitchen,
situated upstairs in the back of a cottage
at the end of the Herrengasse.
From my window I could see onto the courtyard
where a linden tree twined skyward —
leafy umbilicus canted toward light,
warped in the very act of yearning —
and I would feed on the sun as if that alone
would dismantle the silence around me.
At first I raged. Then music raged in me,
rising so swiftly I could not write quickly enough
to ease the roiling. I would stop
to light a lamp, and whatever I'd missed —
larks flying to nest, church bells, the shepherd's
home-toward-evening song — rushed in, and I
would rage again.
I am by nature a conflagration;
I would rather leap
than sit and be looked at.
So when my proud city spread
her gypsy skirts, I reentered,
burning towards her greater, constant light.
Call me rough, ill-tempered, slovenly— I tell you,
every tenderness I have ever known
has been nothing
but thwarted violence, an ache
so permanent and deep, the lightest touch
awakens it. . . . It is impossible
to care enough. I have returned
with a second Symphony
and 15 Piano Variations
which I've named Prometheus,
after the rogue Titan, the half-a-god
who knew the worst sin is to take
what cannot be given back.
I smile and bow, and the world is loud.
And though I dare not lean in to shout
Can't you see that I'm deaf? —
I also cannot stop listening.
THIS
NOT my new bicycle.
anyone else watching generation kill?
sooo good.
the story of the father
after the funeral of his son the suicide,
going home and burning all the photographs of that dead boy;
standing next to the backyard barbecue,
feeding the pictures to the fire; watching the pale smoke
rise and disappear into the humid Mississippi sky.
Aware that he is standing at the edge of some great border,
ignorant that he is hogging all the pain.
How quiet the suburbs are in the middle of an afternoon
breathing in the chemistry of burning Polaroids,
watching the trees over the rickety fence
seem to lift and nod in recognition.
Later, he will be surprised
by the anger of his family:
the wife hiding her face in her hands,
the daughter calling him names
—but for now, he is certain of his act; now
he is like a man destroying a religion,
or hacking at the root of a tree—
to watch the father use a rusty piece of wire
to nudge the last photo of the boy
the face going brown, the memory undeveloping.
It is not the misbegotten logic of the father;
it is not the pity of the snuffed-out youth;
It is the old intelligence of pain
that I admire:
how it moves around inside of him like smoke;
how it knows exactly what to do with human beings
to stay inside of them forever.
