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All She Wrote by Harryette Mullen

All She Wrote by Harryette Mullen

but aren’t you sorry you will never see
a tulip that would make you offer all
you own for the layered, translucent promise

in its brown paper wrapper? Aren’t you sorry
you never saw John Keats in his dressing gown
scribbling an ode beneath his flowering plum,

will never know the ten thousand men with haemophilia
infected with HIV two decades ago,
and the purpose that briefly lit their brilliant veins?

- katrina vandenberg

“

…read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
“

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

from ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’ by Sylvia Plath

who are you,little i

(five or six years old)
peering from some high

window; at the gold

of november sunset

(and feeling:that if day
has to become night

this is a beautiful way)

— e. e. cummings

*

fishingboatproceeds:

Chris and Marina Waters, my best friends in Indianapolis, had a son on Thursday morning. Thinking about newborn Cole and the life ahead of him reminded me of this poem by e. e. cummings, not so much of the poem itself (which is lovely), but because of what isn’t in it: It is true that day has to become night.

But night becomes day, too—and in an equally (and similarly) beautiful way.

*

“by means of sleep, day uses night to block out the night” — since Blanchot, night and day and sleep have changed forever, and are stifling one another. But then, I am an insomniac. And melodramatic.

L’art by Ezra Pound

L’art by Ezra Pound

‘The Agamemnon Rag’ by Jack Conway

‘The Agamemnon Rag’ by Jack Conway
‘Mirror’ by Sylvia Plath finest part: “like a terrible fish”

‘Mirror’ by Sylvia Plath

finest part: “like a terrible fish”

from Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas

from Fern Hill by Dylan Thomas

fishingboatproceeds: At Alfredo Jaar’s Park of the Laments at the IMA, in the midst of a long bike ride, cloudless sky, feeling the kind of happy that you can never explain to people because there is no particular reason for the feeling: I just like riding my bike. It wakes me up. Opens the eyes of my eyes. This feeling is such a close cousin of the kind of sadness I feel driving at night by myself—that pure almost pleasant sadness that you also can’t ever explain to anyone. Anyway it all reminds me of this poem by ee cummings. Nothing particularly fancy about it. It just captures the feeling for me. i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes (i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth day of life and love and wings:and of the gay great happening illimitably earth) how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any-lifted from the no of all nothing-human merely being doubt unimaginable You? (now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

fishingboatproceeds:

At Alfredo Jaar’s Park of the Laments at the IMA, in the midst of a long bike ride, cloudless sky, feeling the kind of happy that you can never explain to people because there is no particular reason for the feeling: I just like riding my bike. It wakes me up. Opens the eyes of my eyes.

This feeling is such a close cousin of the kind of sadness I feel driving at night by myself—that pure almost pleasant sadness that you also can’t ever explain to anyone.

Anyway it all reminds me of this poem by ee cummings. Nothing particularly fancy about it. It just captures the feeling for me.

i thank You God for most this amazing day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today, and this is the sun’s birthday;this is the birth day of life and love and wings:and of the gay great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing breathing any-lifted from the no of all nothing-human merely being doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

from ‘Healing a Lunatic Boy’ by Charles Causely (full poem)

from ‘Healing a Lunatic Boy’ by Charles Causely (full poem)

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