APRIL 2021
the bad poem which will always be a mark of not being able to really say goodbye to a place
reading letters as a certain world flickers away in a small, oval window
not feeling real. then feeling it.
smoking uncertain cigarettes in the lonely, stilled silences, watching stray cars dropping passengers off, not being sure where I’m getting to, being there anywhere
“but i have decided to become a public beach an opera house
a regularly scheduled flight—something that can’t help being
in the right place at the right time”
magnolias, after a long time
sleep
looking at the sea and thinking of those on the other side of it
home
“and not reverently learn from transience
the emotions for what future
slopes of the heart, in pure space?”
putting hands on the books that were left behind
“The desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.”
he who has pondered deepest, loves what is most alive
reading the letters between pasternak, tsvaeteva, and rilke. writing a letter to delphine. the sacredness of these various acts meet across the great elapse of decades (“I wished to go outside to see what one poet’s thinking of another had done to the air and the sky.”)
the coldness of the water which shocks you clean
but you can always return
arms, wine, meals, dusk, wonder, grace. that inimitable, rare feeling: you can always, always return.
w. s. merwin during the brief day dedicated to this planet, a reminder that we are always in the presence of what we do not deserve
the shedding rosebush, the juice-sweet fragrance of blackberries, a short walk to the seashore along which the whole world seems to be ripe with blooming
as lionel trilling said: variousness, possibility, complexity, difficulty
picking up shallcross in a bookstore briefly before putting it down for fear of becoming too enraptured in its certainty
what feels like an entirely private pleasure, reading alice oswald at-face with the delineating horizon, stray stones rendered porcelain by salt, the discreet carousel of lapping waves
the composition of a meal for the ones that have led you until you were grown, around a table whose eternality seems incontrovertible, the ease of togetherness, the simple knowing of having departed and having come. . .
home
