The Shadow Of A Thing Doesnt Exist Without The Original To Cast It. A Dry Bed Was Still Once A River.

“The shadow of a thing doesn’t exist without the original to cast it. A dry bed was still once a river. A bell unrung is still a bell.”

— Jodi Picoult, from The Book of Two Ways (Ballantine, 2020)

“The Italians have a word for the store of poems you have in your head: a gazofilacio […] in its original language it actually means a treasure chamber of the mind. The poems I remember are the milestones marking the journey of my life. And unlike paintings, sculptures or passages of great music, they do not outstrip the scope of memory, but are the actual thing, incarnate.”

— Clive James, ‘The poems I remember are the milestones marking the journey of my life,’ The Guardian (26 September 2020)

It is raining, without meaning to. The way sometimes you hurt someone, also without meaning to.

Gemma Gorga, from “16,” transl. Sharon Dolin, Book of Minutes (Oberlin College Press, 2019)

“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)

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.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body       love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.