a c l o c k w i t h o u t h a n d s

Nov 22 2009 ∞
“

She is standing on my eyelids
And her hair mingles with mine,
She has the shape of my hands,
She has the color of my eyes,
She dissolves into my shadow
Like a stone against the sky.

Her eyes are always open
And she doesn’t let me sleep.
Her dreams in daylight
Cause the suns to drift away,
Make me laugh, weep and laugh,
Speak when I have nothing to say.
— “A woman in love” par Éluard
+ ∞
“

Your hair of oranges in the emptiness of the world
In the emptiness of windowpanes heavy with silence
And shadow where my bare hands seek all your reflections.

Illusory is the shape of your heart
And your love is like my lost desire.
O amber sighs, dreams, gazes.

But you’ve not always been with me. My memory
Is still darkened from having seen you come
And go. Time uses words like love.
— “[Your hair of oranges]” par Éluard
+ ∞
“ Make the sure one laugh,
Was she in stone?
She will melt.
— “V” par Éluard
Nov 16 2009 ∞
“ A blond girl is bent over a poem. With a pencil sharp as a lancet she transfers the words to a blank page and changes them into strokes, accents, caesuras. The lament of a fallen poet now looks like a salamander eaten away by ants.
When we carried him away under machine-gun fire, I believed that his still warm body would be resurrected in the word. Now as I watch the death of the words, I know there is no limit to decay. All that will be left after us in the black earth will be scattered syllables. Accents over nothingness and dust.
— “Episodes in a Library” by Zbigniew Herbert
Nov 13 2009 ∞
(via mouthfullofgommy)

(via mouthfullofgommy)

+ ∞
“ We’re writing poetry and advancing feminist poetics at a time when girls grow up with less access to interiority, less ability to imagine their own bodies and what they might want than ever before. She is expected to get in position. The media purports what she is and was. I love Cathy Wagoner’s new book My Job suggesting at various points that she could be writing a sex manual for adolescent girls. That’s the kind of advancement of feminist poetics I endorse. All kinds of private revolutions for the female body and mind. The brave and the playful, the imaginative men can come. I would advocate a poetry full of characters like CA Conrad’s The Book of Frank who delivers mad obscene haiku healing yes I said it healing in 137 tiny doses over eleven years, unstoppable poetry that hurts and turns a mirror to pain and risks being viewed as the problem when CA you’re the cure. Poems that can be sung, that step outside of the reading room, into the studio, poems that design themselves into collective projects so people can see what poets do, poets climbing up a mountain, talking among themselves and making a film about it, working publicly against poisoning our water, slicing the tops off our mountains, extracting gas from under the ground at what cost. Poets running for small local offices, women fighting to put sex education back in the schools, sex in our poems, poems in our songs, time in our lives, time to lose, to lie on the mat to make tiny adjustments, to live. To live long as we’ve got.
— Excerpt from “Yoga for Losers pt. II” by Eileen Myles (I’ve seen Eileen a handful of times at used bookstores and every time she says “excuse me” and brushes past, I want to thank her for being Eileen).
+ ∞
“ And you too move back slowly through your life
— Excerpt from “Zone” by Guillaume Apollinaire
+ ∞
“

More than anything in the world
I love these evenings when we’re together,
the quiet evenings in summer, the sky still light at this hour.

So Penelope took the hand of Odysseus,
not to hold him back but to impress
this peace on his memory:

from this point on, the silence through which you move
is my voice pursuing you.
— Excerpt from Louise Gluck’s “Quiet Evening”
+ ∞
“ Lived to see you throwing
Me aside. That fought
Like netted fish inside me. Saw you throbbing
In my syrups. Saw you sleep. And lived to see
That all that all flushed down
The refuse. Done?
It lived in me.
You live in me. Malignant.
Love, you ever want me, don’t.
— “Hesitate to Call” by Louise Gluck
+ ∞
“ You go your way
I’ll go your way too
— “The Sweetest Little Song” by Leonard Cohen
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