When Fleabag Said, With All The Love I Have For Her. I Dont Know Where To Put It Now. And When Anne Carson

when fleabag said, “with all the love i have for her. i don’t know where to put it now.” and when anne carson wrote, “you remember too much, / my mother said to me recently. / why hold onto all that? and i said, / where can i put it down?” and when mitski sang, “i don’t know what to do without you / i don’t know where to put my hands” and when donnie smith in magnolia (1999) cried, “i really do have love to give! i just don’t know where to put it!” and when emily dickinson once wrote, “we outgrow love, like other things / and put it in the drawer —”

“The afternoon is falling into dreams”

—

Antonio Machado, from “Over coarse rock in the middle of the square,” Eighty poems of Antonio Machado (Gaetano Massa Las Americas, 1959)

“Fernando Silva ran the children’s hospital in Managua. On Christmas Eve, he worked late into the night. Firecrackers were exploding and fireworks lit up the sky when Fernando decided it was time to leave. They were expecting him at home to celebrate the holiday.

He took one last look around, checking to see that everything was in order, when he heard cottony footsteps behind him. He turned to find one of the sick children walking after him. In the half-light he recognized the lonely, doomed child. Fernando recognized that face already lined with death and those eyes asking for forgiveness, or perhaps permission.

Fernando walked over to him and the boy gave him his hand.

‘Tell someone,…’ the child whispered. ‘Tell someone I’m here.’”

— Eduardo Galeano, “Christmas Eve”, The Book of Embraces (1989)

“When I fed the pigs and two of them got to scrapping over an old soft onion, I thought: that’s love. Love is eating. Love is a snarling pig snout and long tusks. Love is the colour of blood. Love is what grown folk do to each other because the law frowns on killing.”

— Catherynne M. Valente, from Six Gun Snow White (via lifeinpoetry)

cold war (2018) dir. paweł pawlikowski / the lighthouse (2019) dir. robert eggers

The dead are for morticians & butchers to touch. Only a gloved hand. Even my son will leave a grounded wren or bat alone like a hot stove. When he spots a monarch in the driveway he stares. It’s dead, I say, you can touch it. The opposite rule: butterflies are too fragile to hold alive, just the brush of skin could rip a wing. He skims the orange & black whorls with only two fingers, the way he learned to feel the backs of starfish & horseshoe crabs at the zoo, the way he thinks we touch all strangers. I was sad to be born, he tells me,because it means I will die. I once loved someone I never touched.

Robin Beth Schaer, “Holdfast,” via poets.org (via bostonpoetryslam)