untitled by Olya Virich on Flickr.
(via deepdelved)
We talked for a few minutes. She told me that she’d had a plan to join the Navy out of high school, but that fell apart because her knees were bad. She told me that she’d just finished working a 12 hour shift on a food truck. She told me that she’d moved to New York for no reason, just to get out of Kansas. “But I’m so glad I came,” she said.
“Why’s that?” I asked. Her eyes began to water.
“Because I’m so in love with a girl right now.”
Cy Twombly - Scenes from an Ideal Marriage (1986) - Acrylic and pencil on paper
“All I ever did to that apartment was hang fifty yards of yellow theatrical silk across the bedroom windows, because I had some idea that the gold light would make me feel better, but I did not bother to weight the curtains correctly and all that summer the long panels of transparent golden silk would blow out the windows and get tangled and drenched in the afternoon thunderstorms. That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”
— “Goodbye To All That,” Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (via commovente)
Mastery
(for Basho, Zooey & Vico)
The dogs do not think
but instead are the flush joinery of drive and muscle,
heart and intent, now, and now again
aloft between the greening crusts of fields
and June’s high-ceilinged
heaven.
For all their flight they’re stillpoint,
flashing lure and paradigm
of how to live and how to love on earth,
completely, now, and as if their sensuous kingdom will
have no end.
They do not think:
felled tree to cross, dead-fall to manage,
midge-thick morning to pass,
but inhabit already
the ample bliss on the other side:
stream ripe for drinking,
the boon of newborn mud,
the fresh rinds and flash of rabbits, and
grasses churned with lust and smudged with fox musk—
all that they enter and, thus anointed,
become.
Dorene Evans
for Emmett
(Source: rabbit-light)
aye nako
*: love strike/sex strike/crush strike/amor mundi
my own desires are not to be trusted (to hold hands, to make out, to fuck, to send someone a letter, to crush, to make plans). love of the couple variety always makes my life stand still, with all the illusion that things are moving at lightening speed. that things are happening. because to actually make things happen takes a lot of courage, means a lot of failure, and i have preferred to fail at romantic love than at other things. i have preferred to sink my investments into sure to fail schemes, proven long ago to be full of holes, than to venture into unknown places, new questions. maybe it is possible to love different, with other people who want to travel elsewhere, whose friendship will be like some ever changing string, cat’s cradle, cat’s eye, exchanged between our hands. i’m thinking of how nice it is to see one’s smile reflected back with the smile of another, and how to multiply that feeling. i want to be excited again for the projects that are not us but need us to stand in a similar space.
Birds of America
Naked and truthful the birds of America
joined forces under a pale winter sun
that hung over my house like a sucked
cough lozenge or spooked moon
for what felt like centuries but in truth
was just the season of my comeuppance.
Black and white warblers, house wrens,
fox sparrows and finches built intricate
yet casually tousled nests resembling
scarecrows’ hairdos, right out in the open,
where I could easily see them, and nuthatches
too, but I was quite blind. Briefly seen,
though not by me, was the sickly
heroin bird who nods off mid-twitter,
waking in late spring craving koolaide
and Halloween candy. Vireos appeared—
not much to look at yet armed with warm,
winning personalities if you but trouble
to get to know them. Nature thus
seductively rustling her petticoats
could not touch me for longest time
after you left. I was deaf to the eerie orchestra
of crickets seep seep seeping on tepid
summer eves, and did not taste the pot
brownies friends offered which I dutifully
chewed but could not get me high.
Nor did expertly mixed gin and tonics
flecked with colorless pulp of fresh lime
take the edge off, enliven me or give me
peace. Nor could pork chops fried
with apple slices rouse me, nor the smell
of potatoes lyonaisse; nor did the clownish
antics of a handsome black Labrador
cavorting at the frilly hem of the foaming ocean
make me grateful. Then fall hurled itself down
with its customary thud. Intrepid birds
of America, you persisted though I was
such a goner. Scruffy starlings—not considered
desirable birds but dear to me now, modest
thrushes and buntings, and male quail
with topknots like commas: there was no
flourish of trumpets or 21 gun salutes heralding
the recovery of one who’d believed herself
dead, only more birdsong persevering till
I could finally hear again. Though I know full
well it was never your feathered intent to revive
me, still I find myself deeply in your debt. These
flung handfuls of millet, peanuts and sunflower
seed hardly seem a fitting or rich enough reward.
Amy Gerstler
