I Am Thinking Of Love. Which Means In My Tongue That I Am Praying For It To Be Saved From Never Knowing

“I am thinking of love. Which means in my tongue that I am praying for it to be saved from never knowing me.”

— Paul Guest, closing lines to “A Long Time I’ve Wanted to Say Something,” The Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge: Poems (Ecco, 2008)

buffleheadcabin:

“It was one of those moments that in retrospect have come to seem prophetic … Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.”

— Rachel Cusk, from Outline (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015)

“‘Love’, this English word: like other English words it has tense. ‘Loved’ or ‘will love’ or ‘have loved’. All these tenses mean love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, love is '爱’ (ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.”

—

August

Our neighbor, tall and blonde and vigorous, the mother of many children, is sick. We did not know she was sick, but she has come to the fence, walking like a woman who is balancing a sword inside of her body, and besides that her long hair is gone, it is short and, suddenly, gray. I don’t recognize her. It even occurs to me that it might be her mother. But it’s her own laughter-edged voice, we have heard it for years over the hedges. All summer the children, grown now and some of them with children of their own, come to visit. They swim, they go for long walks at the harbor, they make dinner for twelve, for fifteen, for twenty. In the early morning two daughters come to the garden and slowly go through the precise and silent gestures of T'ai Chi. They all smile. Their father smiles too, and builds castles on the shore with the children, and drives back to the city, and drives back to the country. A carpenter is hired—a roof repaired, a porch rebuilt. Everything that can be fixed. June, July, August. Every day, we hear their laughter. I think of the painting by van Gogh, the man in the chair. Everything wrong, and nowhere to go. His hands over his eyes.

“so the beach was less a paradise, more hurricane backwash. so the afternoon sped straight on into the pitch-black night spent together, but apart. so you drank the witch hazel and shattered the screens but their face was still there, burning, burning, burning. throw in the towel. burn the poems. there’s no love so good that you can’t grind it out like an old cigarette. you chose ‘now’ and maybe it should have been ‘never’. who cares. start again. drink out of bottles, not people. shatter the cup. use the pieces to cut your brake lines. set the whole car on fire, if you have to. you’re not in the desert anymore. lick the wounds. fuck the earthquake. howl at the moon. run for cover. you don’t have to be a poet in order to say, save yourself. we are still young and still foolish and still writing about our hearts, but they were never meant to be eaten.”

— THE POET RETRACTS HER EARLIER STATEMENT WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE, by jones howell (via joneshowell)

“There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don’t really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man’s life. I was happy before I ever met [her]. I’ve plenty of what are called ‘resources.’ People get over these things. Come, I shan’t do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden jab of red-hot memory and all this ‘commonsense’ vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.”

C. S. Lewis, from A Grief Observed (Faber and Faber, 1961)