....And EVEN MORE! (Even though nobody likes my quotes
) Rediscovered these today:
Pablo Neruda:
“I love things with a wild passion, extravagantly. I cherish tongs, and scissors; I adore cups, hoops, soup turrents, not to mention of course- the hat. I love all things, not only the grand, but also the infinitely small: the thimble, spurs, dishes, vases. Oh, my soul, the planet is radiant, teeming with pipes in hand, conductors of smoke; with keys, saltshakers, and well, things crafted by the human hand, everything- the curve of a fabric, the new bloodless birth of gold, the eyeglasses, nails, brooms, watches, compasses, coins, the silken plushness of chairs. Oh humans have constructed a multitude of pure things: objects of wood, crystal, cord, wondrous tables, ships, staircases. I love all things, not because they might be warm or fragrant, but rather because- I don’t know why, because this ocean is yours, and mine: the buttons, the wheels, the little forgotten treasures, the fans of feathery love spreading orange blossoms, the cups, the knives, the shears, everything rests in the handle, the contour, the traces of fingers, of a remote hand lost in the most forgotten regions of the ordinary obscured. I pass through houses, streets, elevators, touching things; I glimpse objects and secretly desire something because it chimes, and something else because, because it is as yielding as gentle hips, something else I adore for its deepwater hue, something else for its velvety depths. Oh irrevocable river of things. People will not say that I only loved fish or plants of the rain forest or meadow, that I only loved things that leap, rise, sigh, and survive. It is not true: many things gave me completeness. They did not only touch me. My hand did not merely touch them, but rather, they befriended my existence in such a way that with me, they indeed existed, and they were for me so full of life, and they lived with me half-alive, and they will die with me half-dead.”
If love wants you, suddenly your past is
obsolete science. Old maps,
disproved theories, a diorama.
The moment our bodies are set to spring open.
The immanence that reassembles matter
passes through us then disperses
into time and place:
the spasm of fur stroked upright; shocked electrons.
-Anne Michaels, “Last Night’s Moon” (excerpt)
The wolf runs.
It runs three legged, like all damaged creatures, across the snow.
She thinks: this is true.
She thinks: this is a life.
She thinks: I do not want to die, but my life will always be like this—wounded and animal, lurching against white.
-Lidia Yuknavitch, The Small Backs of Children
Often when I imagine you
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer
and I am dark, I am forest.
-Rainer Maria Rilke, from I, 45
We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of raccoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within that body.
-Jack Gilbert: Tear It Down