August

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.

Dogfish

Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing kept flickering in with the tide and looking around. Black as a fisherman’s boot, with a white belly. If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin, which was rough as a thousand sharpened nails. And you know what a smile means, don’t you? * I wanted the past to go away, I wanted to leave it, like another country; I wanted my life to close, and open like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song where it falls down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery; I wanted to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know, whoever I was, I was alive for a little while. * It was evening, and no longer summer. Three small fish, I don’t know what they were, huddled in the highest ripples as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body one gesture, one black sleeve that could fit easily around the bodies of three small fish. * Also I wanted to be able to love. And we all know how that one goes, don’t we? Slowly * the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water. * You don’t want to hear the story of my life, and anyway I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen to the enormous waterfalls of the sun. And anyway it’s the same old story — a few people just trying, one way or another, to survive. Mostly, I want to be kind. And nobody, of course, is kind, or mean, for a simple reason. And nobody gets out of it, having to swim through the fires to stay in this world. * And look! look! look! I think those little fish better wake up and dash themselves away from the hopeless future that is bulging toward them. * And probably, if they don’t waste time looking for an easier world, they can do it.

“‘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.”

—

“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)

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)

Luke

I had a dog who loved flowers. Briskly she went through the fields, yet paused for the honeysuckle or the rose, her dark head and her wet nose touching the face of every one with its petals of silk with its fragrance rising into the air where the bees, their bodies heavy with pollen hovered— and easily she adored every blossom not in the serious careful way that we choose this blossom or that blossom— the way we praise or don’t praise— the way we love or don’t love— but the way we long to be— that happy in the heaven of earth— that wild, that loving.