January 2012
4 posts
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"Slow Leak" - Ellen Doré Watson
I don’t know how to wish you well. Your hair is out of control, you are downgraded and strange. You used to be the man who whopped open his chest, wandered on a happy shoestring, made a nearly perfect girl. Times we were electric. Our talks teased out newness, mixed surprising pigment. Our battles were not over ground that mattered, so we walked away from them with invisible limps, beautiful...
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"Arriving" - Marge Piercy
People often labor to attain what turns out to be an entrance to a small closet or a deep pit or sorrow like a toothache of the brain. I wanted you. I fought you for yourself, I wrestled to open you, I hung on. I sat on my love as on the lid of a chest holding a hungry bear. You were what I wanted: you still are. Now my wanting feeds on success and grows, a cowbird chick in a warbler’s nest,...
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"Harmony in the Boudoir" - Mark Strand
After years of marriage, he stands at the foot of the bed and
tells his wife that she will never know him, that for everything
he says there is more that he does not say, that behind each
word he utters there is another word, and hundreds more be-
hind that one. All those unsaid words, he says, contain his true
self, which has been betrayed by the superficial self before her.
“So you...
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December 2011
10 posts
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"Navigating Love and Autism" - NY Times →
(click Here to get to the article and short video)
“We think of love as oxytocin… and all that, that binds us to other people.
But in the figurative sense, I would say that love is an unselfish attachment to another person,
in that you’re attached to somebody both for what they can do for you, but mostly what you can do for the other person.”
(Words taken from the end...
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"We don’t condemn it as immature" - W. Timothy...
from Paulo Coelho’s blog:
In the newspaper, a text I cut out and place on my briefcase. The author is W. Timothy Gallway: “When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice it is small, but we do not criticize it as “rootless and stemless.” ‘We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. “When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as...
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40 FREE Christmas songs from Paste Magazine! →
40 FREE Christmas songs from Paste Magazine! (Proceeds from tips will be donated to Charity:Water) FEATURING… ______________________ Deer Tick Fitz and The Tantrums The Polyphonic Spree She & Him Army Navy Class Actress Roman Candle Diamond Rugs Body Language Quiet Company Seryn Damien Jurado Woods Summer Camp The Barr Brothers Chamberlin Rosie Thomas Tristen Josh T. Pearson Toad the...
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"Coping" | Audre Lorde
It has rained for five days running the world is a round puddle of sunless water where small islands are only beginning to cope a young boy in my garden is bailing out water from his flower patch when I ask him why he tells me young seeds that have not seen sun forget and drown easily.
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"The Country of Marriage" - Wendell Berry
1.
I dream of you walking at night along the streams
of the country of my birth, warm blooms and the nightsongs,
of birds opening around you as you walk.
You are holding in your body the dark seed of my sleep.
2.
This comes after silence. Was it something I said
that bound me to you, some mere promise
or, worse, the fear of loneliness and death?
A man lost in the woods in the dark, I...
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"Love, Forgive Me" - Sierra DeMulder
after Rachel McKibbens My sister told me a soul mate is not the person who makes you the happiest but the one who makes you feel the most, who conducts your heart to bang the loudest, who can drag you giggling with forgiveness from the cellar they locked you in. It has always been you. You are the first person I was afraid to sleep next to, not because of the fear you would leave in the night but...
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"Difference" - Anna Kamieńska
Powiedz mi jaka jest różnica między nadzieją, a oczekiwaniem bo moje serce tego nie rozumie Ciągle się rani o szkło oczekiwania ciągle się gubi we mgle nadziei… Translated by Grazyna Drabik and David Curzon “Difference” Anna Kamieńska Tell me what’s the difference between hope and waiting because my heart doesn’t know It constantly cuts itself on the glass of waiting It...
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"What I Learned From My Mother" - Julia Kasdorf
I learned from my mother how to love the living, to have plenty of vases on hand in case you have to rush to the hospital with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole grieving household, to cube home-canned pears and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife...
November 2011
1 post
5 tags
"Misgivings" - William Matthews
“Perhaps you’ll tire of me,” muses
my love, although she’s like a great city
to me, or a park that finds new
ways to wear each flounce of light
and investiture of weather.
Soil doesn’t tire of rain, I think,
but I know what she fears: plans warp,
planes explode, topsoil gets peeled away
by floods. And worse than what we can’t
control is what we could;...
October 2011
4 posts
“Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what...”
– Epicurus (via quote-book)
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““A Hundred Ways To Say Your Name”
Tania De Rozario
I avoid speaking your...”
– a poem a day (via trailsofsnails)
“I, with a deeper instinct, choose a man who compels my strength, who makes...”
– Anaïs Nin (via imfantasyparade)
September 2011
2 posts
4 tags
“When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a...”
– Ann Druyan (via keepitupstairs)
Ann Druyan doesn’t get as much love as she should.
(via telegantmess)
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August 2011
1 post
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"Chance Meeting" - Susan Browne
I know him, that man walking- toward me up the crowded street of the city, I have lived with him seven years now, I know his fast stride, his windy wheatfield hair, his hands thrust deep in his jacket pockets, hands that have known my body, touched its softest part, caused its quick shudders and slow releasings, I have seen his face above my face, his mouth smiling, moaning his eyes closed and...
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torch song for you | daphne gottlieb
Since you’ve gone, all I can do is sit at home and sing the great love songs. I don’t want to set the world on fire. I just want to start a small conflagration in your apartment that quickly grows into a five-alarm blaze and you grab the cat and your laptop and run out the door and I, having crawled down the fire escape, come strolling down the street and...
July 2011
10 posts
5 tags
Autobiography | Alfian bin Sa'at
Like most of us, I can’t remember how I was separated from my first love (Did it die, did I break it, was it stolen Or did it fly out through the open window?) I didn’t have the radio-tuning parents Who filled the house with music Or instilled in me “a love of the cinema.” I never recalled my mother coming home From the hairdressers’ with a new hairdo Or father...
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The City | Constantine P. Cavafy
You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than this one. Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong and my heart lies buried like something dead. How long can I let my mind moulder in this place? Wherever I turn, wherever I look, I see the black ruins of my life, here, where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.” You won’t...
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"Modern Love" - Douglass Dunn
It is summer, and we are in a house That is not ours, sitting at a table Enjoying minutes of a rented silence, The upstairs people gone. The pigeons lull To sleep the under-tens and invalids, The tree shakes out its shadows to the grass, The roses rove through the wilds of my neglect. Our lives flap, and we have no hope of better Happiness than this, not much to show for love Than how we are, or...
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"This is what you shall do..." by Walt Whitman
“This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated...
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"Door in the Mountain" - Jean Valentine
Never ran this hard through the valley never ate so many stars I was carrying a dead deer tied on to my neck and shoulders deer legs hanging in front of me heavy on my chest People are not wanting to let me in Door in the mountain let me in
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“We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the...”
– Carl Sagan (via the-green-chemist)
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For Jeff | Kasia Clarke →
trailsofsnails:
“For Jeff” Kasia Clarke I didn’t know you, Jeff, but you were three seats away from me and now you’re gone. Forever. I never will know you. No one ever will again. Is this how you imagined yourself at nineteen, that invincible time, when everything’s right with the stars above, friends around, music moving through all of this and then not, never more. Like the raven’s preaching,...
June 2011
21 posts
1 tag
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"The Embrace" - Mark Doty
You weren’t well or really ill yet either; just a little tired, your handsomeness tinged by grief or anticipation, which brought to your face a thoughtful, deepening grace. I didn’t for a moment doubt you were dead. I knew that to be true still, even in the dream. You’d been out—at work maybe?— having a good day, almost energetic. We seemed to be moving from some old...
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"Self-esteem & happiness are not the ends" →
From the blog (click title to read it all):
In the case of “body image,” for example: I think that the (female, in particular) relationship with the body and the self in general is an important topic not because poor self-image interferes with the ultimate end of happiness and self-love, but because it interferes with the one’s ability to engage in the truly important human...
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“…be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now.”
-Rainier Maria Rilke, “Letters to a...
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I rarely share anything personal that I write for myself, but I will make an exception.
It’s taken me a long time to realize that we’re all going to call something different by the name of “love.” It makes it easier to get along with people if we’re respectful of that. We take our feelings for someone else and call them “love” because we don’t know what else to call it. We know, deep down, we...
4 tags
"Even Dirty Birds" - Dorothea Lasky
Sun on the shadows, even dirty birds are nice when they brush up against you Like the pigeons in the park when they come whirling at you they are nice To feel their wings and necks against you, like wind only better Because they are living Grey birds because they are dirty With city soot, the smokestacks Of living in a sour time, the way that we breathe so In every city legend we work Too fast to...
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"Lunch" - John Davies
what becomes of them
the red napkin, the soup her nervous nail polish tapping the marble table
her insulted mouth closing on lasagne and salad
the chilled dew of chablis on her peach coloured lips
her sceptical shoulders when she speaks
and her skin shimmering resentment when he speaks
what becomes of them when the table is cleared and she leaves to invent a life without miracles
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"I Remember" - Anne Sexton
By the first of August the invisible beetles began to snore and the grass was as tough as hemp and was no color—no more than the sand was a color and we had worn our bare feet bare since the twentieth of June and there were times we forgot to wind up your alarm clock and some nights we took our gin warm and neat from old jelly glasses while the sun blew out of sight like a red picture hat...
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