The Sea

Or perhaps our writhing bodies,
entangled on the sand,
 
will write our love 
in a calligraphy that only the sea is wise 
and immense enough to read
and understand.

Araby

"Her name sprang to my lips at moments in strange prayers and praises which I myself did not understand. My eyes were often full of tears (I could not tell why) and at times a flood from my heart seemed to pour itself out into my bosom. I thought little of the future. I did not know whether I would ever speak to her or not or, if I spoke to her, how I could tell her of my confused adoration. But my body was like a harp and her words and gestures were like fingers running upon the wires."

James Joyce, from Araby

I sleep in my clothes

I want to disappear.  

To grow smaller and smaller, 

less and less noticeable,

until I wink out of existence.

I sleep in my clothes.

I am not talking about what you think I am.

That act is abrupt, and has an impact.

It calls attention, and upsets.

It leaves a void.  

Which is not what I want. 

I keep my shades drawn.

I want to disappear.  

To be forgotten.

So that when I slip beneath the surface of this world,

I do not leave a ripple.

It so happens

It so happens I am sick of being a man.
And it happens that I walk into tailor shops and movie houses
withered, impenetrable, like a swan made of felt
navigating my way in a water of wombs and ashes.

The smell of barbershops makes me break into hoarse sobs.
The only thing I want is to lie still like stones or wool.
The only thing I want is to see no more stores, no gardens,
no more goods, no spectacles, no elevators.

It so happens that I am sick of my feet and my nails
and my hair and my shadow.
It so happens I am sick of being a man.

Still it would be marvelous
to terrify a law clerk with a cut lily,
or kill a nun with a blow on the ear.
It would be great to go through the streets with a green knife
letting out yells until I died of the cold.

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark,
insecure, stretched out, shivering with sleep,
going on down, into the moist guts of the earth,
taking in and thinking, eating every day.

I don't want so much misery.
I don't want to go on as a root and a tomb,
alone under the ground, a warehouse with corpses,
half frozen, dying of grief.

That's why Monday, when it sees me coming
with my convict face, blazes up like gasoline,
and it howls on its way like a wounded wheel,
and leaves tracks full of warm blood leading toward the night.

And it pushes me into certain corners, into some moist houses,
into hospitals where the bones fly out the window,
into shoe shops that smell like vinegar,
and certain streets hideous as cracks in the skin.

There are sulphur-colored birds, and hideous intestines
hanging over the doors of houses that I hate,
and there are false teeth forgotten in a coffeepot,
there are mirrors that ought to have wept from shame and terror,
there are umbrellas everywhere, and venoms, and umbilical cords.

I stroll along serenely, with my eyes, my shoes, my rage, forgetting everything,
I walk by, going through office buildings and orthopedic shops,
and courtyards with washing hanging from the line:
underwear, towels and shirts from which slow
dirty tears are falling.

-Pablo Neruda, Walking Around

Always

Facing you
I am not jealous.

Come with a man
at your back,
come with a hundred men in your hair,
come with a thousand men between your bosom and your feet,
come like a river
filled with drowned men
that meets the furious sea,
the eternal foam, the weather.

Bring them all
where I wait for you:
we shall always be alone,
we shall always be, you and I,
alone upon the earth
to begin life.

-Pablo Neruda

Wind

I have died, but you are still among the living.

And the wind, keening and complaining,
makes the country house and the forest rock
-not each pine by itself,
but all the trees as one,
together with the illimitable distance;
It makes them rock as the hulls of sailboats
rock on the mirrorous waters of a boat basin.

And this the wind does not out of bravado
or in a senseless rage,
but so that in it's desolation
it may find words
to fashion a lullaby for you.

-Boris Pasternak

Manyoshu

Everybody tells me
my hair is too long

I leave it
as you saw it last
dishevelled by your hands.

-Lady Sono No Omi Ikuha

trinity

It is not that I really love her anymore.

It is that the connection between us
-the slender, silken thread that was my lifeline,
the incandescent electric arc that gave me light and warmth-
was itself the third person in the relationship.

And it is the death of that third person that I am grieving.

communion

"Loneliness does not come from being alone, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important." -Carl Jung

(w)holy

"And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight, as I may say, even for a moment: these are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot tell, and of which she has only a dark and doubtful presentiment.

Suppose Hephaestus, with his instruments, to come to the pair who are lying side by side and to say to them, ‘What do you people want of one another?’ They would be unable to explain. And suppose further, that when he saw their perplexity he said: ‘Do you desire to be wholly one; always day and night to be in one another’s company? For if this is what you desire, I am ready to melt you into one and let you grow together, so that being two you shall become one, and while you live live a common life as if you were a single man, and after your death in the world below still be one departed soul instead of two—I ask whether this is what you lovingly desire, and whether you are satisfied to attain this?’—there is not a man of them who when he heard the proposal would deny or would not acknowledge that this meeting and melting into one another, this becoming one instead of two, was the very expression of his ancient need.

And the reason is that human nature was originally one and we were a whole, and the desire and pursuit of the whole is called love."

Plato, Symposium

The Eclipse

"As long as we were in love, we understood each other. There was nothing to understand.” L’eclisse (1962)

father's day

She never lay in bed with me, and looked at my hands.

I woke this morning, feeling the soreness of cuts incurred from a week of carpentry. As I examined them, noting the stiffness and calluses, I recalled how she never lingered with me in bed, studying the details of my fingers . She did mention at least three times through the years that I had appealing, handsome hands. But she never held them, committing their details to memory. Of course, such acts cannot be demanded, but are born only of wonder, and love.

She never let me touch her face. Not with my own face, or with my hands.
She said it would cause blemishes.

She used to be a little hurt that I never did a drawing of her, though that complaint eventually ceased. But she forgets the one that I did that first autumn, as she sat nude, assembling a puzzle on the dining room table. I sat behind her, adoring the contours of her 23 year old form, flawless as a sailboat hull. In love with the exquisite line that flowed from the nape of her neck to fall over her shoulder, tracing with the graphite it's subtleties down her torso to her hip.

I soon learned of course, even in that first year, that those curves would never really be mine.

And so, eventually, I gave up studying them.

Adam

They say that the woman was taken from a wound in Adam's side.
If this is true, then all Adams have such wounds.
I know that this is true, because I have such a wound.

Longer than most, it runs from the top of my scalp down the length of my torso, slicing open my right inner thigh,
and terminating somewhere below the knee, on the face of my shin.

Deeper than most, it penetrates to bone,
the slowly thumping box containing my soul, mute in vivisection.


They say that god closed up the wound afterward.
but this is not true.
I know that this is not true, because my wound has never closed,
and remains a moist, sensitive, bloody gash.

Both a hemorrhage and a portal.
Not unlike a woman's bloody gash.

may my heart always be open to little

may my heart always be open to little
birds who are the secrets of living
whatever they sing is better than to know
and if men should not hear them men are old

may my mind stroll about hungry
and fearless and thirsty and supple
and even if it's sunday may i be wrong
for whenever men are right they are not young

and may myself do nothing usefully
and love yourself so more than truly
there's never been quite such a fool who could fail
pulling all the sky over him with one smile

-e.e. cummings

a conversation

Son: "If it were possible to have extra limbs attached to your body, would you have it done?"

Father: "Hmmm. If they could do it so that it looked cool? Perhaps. Some extra arms maybe. But only if it could be done in a way that looked aesthetically pleasing."

Son: "Yeah. If they could do it so that it looked cool, I would definitely get two huge, muscled arms added. And then I would become a Space Pirate."

trees

"I begin to sigh too, for I feel that people are like trees that move, trees that have lost their roots and are always in search of the soil. I have a hazy idea that humans have come from trees that broke off in a wild whirlwind eons ago..."

"I have my bedtime book in my hand and my pocket light and walk toward the mountain over the edges of the moorland in rubber boots. The book is a relative of mine, I feel; it is made out of trees and human thought, and thus the relationship becomes twofold. These are ancient poems that I am taking to the mountains..."

from "The Book Collection" and "Night", by Gyrdir Eliasson