January 2012
For last year’s words belong to last year’s language And next year’s words await another voice.
—T. S. Eliot
December 2011
You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever
you like. This is yellow.
Outside the window
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world,
which is round and has only
the colors of these nine crayons.
This is the world,...
surrounding myself with walls and tanks of fish
submerging myself in the task of measuring
each day the spoonfuls
inhabited by the hours
bodies with the smell of bodies
causality of the moment
only scorched fingers remain
in the fire of the cards
the admirable immobility of boredom
thus paper or invention
the odor of what is dream at the dreams mouth
a sweet and pasty expanse
in the...
But the door that faces the void
is open day and night
and the void is brimming with objects
with voices motors noises and waiting
behind a small window of transitors
lights appliances and interminable
streets like tongues
that fall on the slope
of a single throat of tomorrows
that perspire a sooty bitter dew
of hours moving down river
like dead fish by the thousands
of rats that live...
I write you from the landscapes
still unknown to me,
from evenings I recall
although I was never there.
I write you from the night,
from the darnkess that
mysteriously invades the corners
of the tiny house
where I still do not live.
I write you from this
white and empty room
that awaits the conquest
of furniture and frames,
of the green aging of the plants
and the mixed aroma of...
He had mixed up the characters in the long novel he was writing. He forgot who they were and what they did. A dead woman reappeared when it was time for dinner. A door-to-door salesman emerged out of a backwoods trailer wearing Chinese robes. The day the murderer was supposed to be electrocuted, he was buying flowers for a certain Rita, who turned out to be a ten-year-old girl with thick glasses...
Doctor Matthew O'Connor, be mine.
“Personally, if I could, I would instigate Meat-Axe Day, and out of the goodness of my heart I would whack your head off along with a couple of others. Every man should be allowed one day and a hatchet just to ease his heart.” -Djuana Barnes
“Your devotion to the past is perhaps like a child’s drawing.” -Djuana Barnes
I have a pack of letters.
I have a pack of memories.
I could cut out the eyes of both.
I could wear them like a patchwork apron.
I could stick them in the washer, the drier,
and maybe some of the pain would float off like dirt?
Perhaps down the disposal I could grind up the loss.
Besides-what a bargain-no expensive phone calls.
No lengthy trips on planes in the fog.
No manicky laughter or...
“Your body that includes everything
you have done, you have had done
to you and...”
– Margaret Atwood
O little root of a dream you hold me here undermined by blood, no longer visible to anyone, property of death.
Curve a face that there may be speech, of earth, of ardor, of things with eyes, even here, where you read me blind,
even here, where you refute me, to the letter.
-Paul Celan
