A Week [after Svens Funeral], Im Cooking Fish On A Wood Fire Outside And My Son, Yves, Brings Me A Glass

“A week [after Sven’s funeral], I’m cooking fish on a wood fire outside and my son, Yves, brings me a glass of wine to drink and holds a bowl of olives. It’s getting dark and my eyes are sore from the smoke, so I feel for a couple with my fingers without looking, and pop one into my mouth. As I spit out the stone and try to define the flavour–sharp, bitter-black, Greek–a thought crosses my mind: From now on I taste olives for Sven too.”

John Berger, ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, Confabulations

“The woman sets the table. She watches me beat the eggs. I scramble them in a saucepan, as my now-dead friend taught me; they stand deeper and cook softer, he said. I take our plated, spoon eggs on them, we sit and eat.”

Andre Dubus, “On Charon’s Wharf”, Broken Vessels

“When a dead tree falls in a forest it often falls into the arms of a living tree. The dead, thus embraced, rasp in wind, slowly carving a niche in the living branch, shearing away the rough outer flesh, revealing the pinkish, yellowish, feverish inner bark. For years the dead tree rubs its fallen body against the living, building its dead music, making its raw mark, wearing the tough bough down as it moans and bends, the deep rosined bow sound of the living shouldering the dead.”

Dorianne Laux, “Cello”

Flora and Fauna by Vanessa Gillings

“I mean, things are going to happen all the time. The unendurable happens. People we love and we can’t live without are going to die. We’re going to die. One day we’re going to have to leave our children and die, leave the plants, and the bunnies, and the sunlight, and the rain and all that. I mean it’s unendurable. Art knows that. Art holds that knowledge. All art holds the knowledge that we’re both living and dying at the same time. It can hold it. And thank God it can because nothing out in the capitalistic corporate world is going to shine that back to us, but art holds it.”

— Marie Howe, interviewed by Krista Tippett for On Being (via bostonpoetryslam)

Chickens in a winter garden  🐔

by Lucy Grossmith

( via )

People in rooms drinking tea, drinking wine in the same rooms and outdoors, taking trains and driving and planting tomatoes and harvesting tomatoes, kissing or watching others kiss while wanting to be kissed, a spider living by the stove as tigers and grizzly bears roam Ohio being killed after their owner opened their cages and shot himself, people talking about childhood while holding babies, hands behind the heads that can’t support their own weight, eating lunch and other meals at tables, sitting at other tables smoking or wanting to smoke, having a beer in a room before a funeral and a beer in the same room after the funeral, a spider living in the window as a woman cuts all her hair off in Nome and mails it to her mother’s chemoed head in Memphis, people going on too long and people letting people go on too long, standing in a doorway meeting the lover of their son, taking her coat, her scarf, offering tea, liking her smile, people drinking too much and people letting people drink too much, making beds for them, helping them in, people sitting beside people under trees, trees under clouds, clouds under sun, sun under whatever sun is under and beyond reproach.

— Bob Hicok, “Life,” in Elegy Owed