My Secret

"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye."

- Antoine de St. Exupery

Kobayashi Issa

  
         Naked

on a naked horse

         in pouring rain!

Kobayashi Issa (1763-1827)

Tonight

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's.  She will be another's.  Like my kisses before.
Her void. Her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her. 

-Pablo Neruda

vulnerability

A profoundly beautiful talk on the nature of human connection. The first third is a little slow til she gets deeply into her subject, but it is well worth watching the whole thing.

"Brene Brown studies vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame." 

"To let ourselves be seen. To love with our whole hearts, even though there is no guarantee."

a-flutter

"What is it about her that I find so compelling?  When she is truly open to me (rare, these days), I feel like I am holding a small, fragile bird in my cupped hands, it's heart fluttering frantically.  But it does not fly away.   It is that moment of wonder that I live for."

Ashes and Snow

"In the beginning of time, the skies were filled with flying elephants.
Every night they lay down in the same place in the sky,
And dreamt with one eye open.

When you gaze up at the stars at night, you are looking into the unblinking 

eyes of elephants, who sleep with one eye open,
To best keep watch over us..."

from Ashes and Snow, Gregory Colbert

yes I said yes I will Yes.

"...and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Jame Joyce, from Ulysses

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