literature

Amor Fati

Standard

Amor Fati
–Sandra Lim

Inside every world there is another world trying to get out,
and there is something in you that would like to discount this world.
The stars could rise in darkness over heartbreaking coasts,
and you would not know if you were ruining your life or beginning a real one.
You could claim professional fondness for the world around you;
the pictures would dissolve under the paint coming alive,
and you would only feel a phantom skip of the heart, absorbed so in the colors.
Your disbelief is a later novel emerging in the long, long shadow of an earlier one—
is this the great world, which is whatever is the case?
The sustained helplessness you feel in the long emptiness of days is matched
by the new suspiciousness and wrath you wake to each morning.
Isn’t this a relationship with your death, too, to fall in love with your inscrutable life?
Your teeth fill with cavities. There is always unearned happiness for some,
and the criminal feeling of solitude. Always, everyone lies about his life.

Photo by Bastien Nvs on Unsplash

sleeping

Standard

Sleeping
–Jane Hirshfield

 

 

riddle

Standard

Riddle
–Laura Kasischke

I am the mirror breathing above the sink.

There is a censored garden inside of me.

Over the worms someone has thrown
a delicately embroidered sheet, and
also the child at the rummage sale—

more souvenirs than memories.

I am the cat buried beneath the tangled ivy. And also

the white weightless egg floating over it, which is
the cat’s immortal soul. Snow

where there were leaves.
Empty plastic cups after the party on the beach.
The ash rising above the fire, like a flame.
The Sphinx with so much sand
blowing vaguely in her face. The last
shadow that passed over the blank
canvas in the empty art museum.

I am the impossibility of desiring the person you pity.

The petal of the Easter lily—

O, that ghost of a tongue.
O, that tongue of a ghost.
What would I say if I spoke?

I am the old lady in a wheelchair
in the corner of the nursing home, like

a star flung up into the infinite, the infinite, cold
silent darkness of this universe. I am

that old woman as a little girl
in brilliant shoes
some beautiful summer afternoon,
laughing bitterly.

Photo by Christian Mackie on Unsplash

from below

Standard

From Below
–Denise Levertov

I move among the ankles
of forest Elders, tread
their moist rugs of moss,
duff of their soft brown carpets.
Far above, their arms are held
open wide to each other, or waving
what they know, what
perplexities and wisdoms they exchange,
unknown to me as were the thoughts
of grownups when in infancy I wandered
into a roofed clearing amidst
human feet and legs and the massive
carved legs of the table,
the minds of people, the minds of trees
equally remote, my attention then
filled with sensations, my attention now
caught by leaf and bark at eye level
and by thoughts of my own, but sometimes
drawn to upgazing-up and up: to wonder
about what rises so far above me into the light.

 

 

Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash

untitled

Standard

Untitled
–Nikita Gill

Take this as your warning,
This book will pick out the bones
within you as it picked out the bones
within me.

We are the closets
we hold our skeletons in.
And now they are knocking,
asking to get out.

Photo by Nino Liverani on Unsplash

 

take a left here

Standard

Take a Left Here
–Jess Rizkallah

i climb mountains with monasteries
named for the moon

and the moon whispers
a secret to the tides                There. That’s The Beginning.

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

givingly

Standard

Givingly
–Carl Phillips

– So here we are again, one-handedly fingering
the puckered edges of the exit-wounds
memory leaves behind, he said, and he tossed
his leash made of stars, then tightened it,

around the antlers it seems I forget, always,
about having. Smell of nightfall when it
hasn’t settled yet. Insatiability and
whatever else hidden behind the parts

that hide it. Surely any victim – sacrificial
or not – deserves better, I thought, him leading me
meanwhile toward the usual place, the branches
grow more givingly apart, there, as if to say

Let pass. The wind was clean. The wind
was a good thing, in his hair, and across our faces.

Photo by Derick Daily on Unsplash

another place

Standard

Another Place
–P.K. Page

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

elegy

Standard

Elegy
–Natasha Trethewey

For my father

I think by now the river must be thick
        with salmon. Late August, I imagine it
as it was that morning: drizzle needling
        the surface, mist at the banks like a net
settling around us — everything damp
        and shining. That morning, awkward
and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked
        into the current and found our places —
you upstream a few yards and out
        far deeper. You must remember how
the river seeped in over your boots
        and you grew heavier with that defeat.
All day I kept turning to watch you, how
        first you mimed our guide’s casting
then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky
        between us; and later, rod in hand, how
you tried — again and again — to find
        that perfect arc, flight of an insect
skimming the river’s surface. Perhaps
        you recall I cast my line and reeled in
two small trout we could not keep.
        Because I had to release them, I confess,
I thought about the past — working
        the hooks loose, the fish writhing
in my hands, each one slipping away
        before I could let go. I can tell you now
that I tried to take it all in, record it
        for an elegy I’d write — one day —
when the time came. Your daughter,
        I was that ruthless. What does it matter
if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting
        your line, and when it did not come back
empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights,
        dreaming, I step again into the small boat
that carried us out and watch the bank receding —
        my back to where I know we are headed.

 

Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash

parting song

Standard

Parting Song
–Jill Alexander Essbaum

First
it is one day without you.
Then two.
And soon,
our point: moot.
And our solution, diluted.
And our class action (if ever was)
is no longer suited.
Wherewith I give to looting through
the war chest of our past
like a wily Anne Bonny
who snatches at plunder or graft.
But the wreck of that ransack,
that strongbox, our splintering coffer,
the claptrap bastard
of the best we had to offer,
is sog-soaked and clammy,
empty but for sand.
Like the knuckle-white cup
of my urgent, ghastly hands
in which nothing but
the ghost of love is held.
Damn it to hell.

 

Photo by Marcial Bollinger on Unsplash