Poems: Parker. Rilke.

Words of Comfort to Be Scratched on a Mirror

Helen of Troy had a wandering glance;
Sappho’s restriction was only the sky;
Ninon was ever the chatter of France;
But oh, what a good girl am I!

~Dorothy Parker

Exposed On The Cliffs Of The Heart

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Look, how tiny down there,
look: the last village of words and, higher,
(but how tiny) still one last
farmhouse of feeling. Can you see it?
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Stoneground
under your hands. Even here, though,
something can bloom; on a silent cliff-edge
an unknowing plant blooms, singing, into the air.
But the one who knows? Ah, he began to know
and is quiet now, exposed on the cliffs of the heart.
While, with their full awareness,
many sure-footed mountain animals pass
or linger. And the great sheltered birds flies, slowly
circling, around the peak’s pure denial. – But
without a shelter, here on the cliffs of the heart…

~Rainer Maria Rilke

An Onion

“Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.”

~Carol Ann Duffy

The Search

“Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that you’ve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you say and actually want to hear more. You share hopes for the future, dreams that will never come true, goals that were never achieved and the many disappointments life has thrown at you. When something wonderful happens, you can’t wait to tell them about it, knowing they will share in your excitement. They are not embarrassed to cry with you when you are hurting or laugh with you when you make a fool of yourself. Never do they hurt your feelings or make you feel like you are not good enough, but rather they build you up and show you the things about yourself that make you special and even beautiful. There is never any pressure, jealousy or competition but only a quiet calmness when they are around. You can be yourself and not worry about what they will think of you because they love you for who you are. The things that seem insignificant to most people such as a note, song or walk become invaluable treasures kept safe in your heart to cherish forever. Memories of your childhood come back and are so clear and vivid it’s like being young again. Colours seem brighter and more brilliant. Laughter seems part of daily life where before it was infrequent or didn’t exist at all. A phone call or two during the day helps to get you through a long day’s work and always brings a smile to your face. In their presence, there’s no need for continuous conversation, but you find you’re quite content in just having them nearby. Things that never interested you before become fascinating because you know they are important to this person who is so special to you. You think of this person on every occasion and in everything you do. Simple things bring them to mind like a pale blue sky, gentle wind or even a storm cloud on the horizon. You open your heart knowing that there’s a chance it may be broken one day and in opening your heart, you experience a love and joy that you never dreamed possible. You find that being vulnerable is the only way to allow your heart to feel true pleasure that’s so real it scares you. You find strength in knowing you have a true friend and possibly a soul mate who will remain loyal to the end. Life seems completely different, exciting and worthwhile. Your only hope and security is in knowing that they are a part of your life.”

~Bob Marley

Here and There

I do not know how to open the fan

of this life and snap it shut tight.  I want

the knots to all lynch fast enough,
someone to kiss me hard enough, deep
enough, and for good.

-Rebecca Dunham

She asked, ‘You are in love, what does love look like?’ to which I replied, ‘Like everything I’ve ever lost come back to me.’

-Nayyirah Waheed

Nothing makes me happier and nothing makes me sadder than you.

-Nicole Krauss

(via A Poet Reflects)

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Torpor, Verses

Forced into a heat and humidity induced torpor, I had let the urge to write slip away in favour of quiet evenings of sitting cross-legged on a woven reed mat in my semi-darkened room, dressed in my favourite pair of red and grey checkered shorts and powder blue t-shirt, listening to the pleasant hum of the air-conditioner, sipping a tall glass of iced lemonade, and reading ‘Stories of Vladimir Nabokov‘ and ‘Zorba the Greek‘ in the faint yellow light of a book-lamp. This explains the brief, disjointed, stream of consciousness blog posts in the recent past. Content and length has been massacred by the brutal weather and accompanying ennui. So, I share few verses and a quote I came upon recently:

Had I told the sea
What I felt for you,
It would have left its shores,
Its shells,
Its fish,
And followed me.
~ Nizar Qabbani

Strangest, and sad as a blind child, not to see
Ever you, never to hear you, endlessly
Neither you there, nor coming  … Heavy change!—

~ John Berryman

 

If you’re a bird, be an early early bird-
But if you’re a worm, sleep late.

 ~ Shel Silverstein

When you fish for love, bait with your heart, not your brain.

~ Mark Twain

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Simple Feelings, Simple Words

 

“I knew what you needed: simple feelings, simple words.

Your silence was effortless and windless, like the silence of clouds or plants.

All silence is the recognition of a mystery.

There was much about you that seemed mysterious.”

~ Sounds, Vladimir Nabokov

(Picture: The Storyteller’s Shed)

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T.H.White

“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.” 

“Perhaps we all give the best of our hearts uncritically–to those who hardly think about us in return.”  

“They had a year of joy, twelve months of the strange heaven which the salmon know on beds of river shingle, under the gin-clear water. For twenty-four years they were guilty, but this first year was the only one which seemed like happiness. Looking back on it, when they were old, they did not remember that in this year it had ever rained or frozen. The four seasons were coloured like the edge of a rose petal for them.”  

“He did not like the grown-ups who talked down to him, but the ones who went on talking in their usual way, leaving him to leap along in their wake, jumping at meanings, guessing, clutching at known words, and chuckling at complicated jokes as they suddenly dawned. He had the glee of the porpoise then, pouring and leaping through strange seas.”

“Education is experience, and the essence of experience is self-reliance.” 

“Unfortunately we have tried to establish Right by Might, and you just can’t do that” 

 ~T.H.White

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The Long Answer Is No

Q: Can I convince a person about whom I’m crazy to be crazy about me?

A: The short answer is no. The long answer is no. The sad but strong and true answer is no.There are so many things to be tortured about, sweet pea. So many torturous things in life. Don’t let a man who doesn’t love you to be one of them.

~ From the “Dear Sugar” column in ‘Tiny, Beautiful Things’ by Cheryl Strayed.

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A Timeless Song

Rediscovered a timeless song that captures the agony, the stubborn but simple hopes, and the yearnings of those in love. Song: Lag Ja Gale Ke Phir Singer: Lata Mangeshkar Movie: ‘Woh Kaun Thi’

लग जा गले के फिर ये, हँसी रात हो ना हो
शायद फिर इस जनम में, मुलाक़ात हो ना हो

हम को मिली हैं आज ये घडीयाँ नसीब से
जी भर के देख लीजिये, हम को करीब से
फिर आप के नसीब में, ये बात हो ना हो
शायद फिर इस जनम में, मुलाक़ात हो ना हो

पास आईये के हम नहीं आयेंगे बार बार
बाहे गले में डाल के, हम रो ले जार जार
आँखों से फिर ये, प्यार की बरसात हो ना हो
शायद फिर इस जनम में, मुलाक़ात हो ना हो

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Just An Old Song

आनेवाला पल, जानेवाला है
हो सके तो इस में जिन्दगी बिता दो
पल जो ये जानेवाला है

एक बार यूँ मिली, मासूम सी कली
खिलते हुए कहाँ, खुशबाश मैं चली
देखा तो यही है, ढूंढा तो नहीं है
पल जो ये जानेवाला है

एक बार वक्त से, लम्हा गिरा कही
वहा दास्ताँ मिली, लम्हा कही नहीं
थोडासा हँसा के, थोडासा रुला के
पल ये भी जानेवाला है

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Joan Didion

“I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” (So true)

“Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” 

“A single person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty.”

“That was the year, my twenty-eighth, when I was discovering that not all of the promises would be kept, that some things are in fact irrevocable and that it had counted after all, every evasion and every procrastination, every mistake, every word, all of it.”  

“Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs.” 

“I closed the box and put it in a closet.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.” 

“Water is important to people who do not have it, and the same is true of control.” 

“To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are on the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notions of us… ” 

“I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and a proven competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.”

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Dylan & Pablo

“Friend, my enemy, I call you out. You, you, you there with a bad thorn in your side. You there, my friend, with a winning air. Who pawned the lie on me when he looked brassly at my shyest secret. With my whole heart under your hammer. That though I loved him for his faults as much as for his good. My friend were an enemy upon stilts with his head in a cunning cloud.”

“I love you so much I’ll never be able to tell you; I’m frightened to tell you. I can always feel your heart. Dance tunes are always right: I love you body and soul: —and I suppose body means that I want to touch you and be in bed with you, and i suppose soul means that i can hear you and see you and love you in every single, single thing in the whole world asleep or awake” 

“We can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don’t know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don’t care that we don’t.”

“It snowed last year too: I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.”  

~Dylan Thomas 

 

 —————————————————————————————-

Your Laughter

Laugh at the night,
at the day, at the moon,
laugh at the twisted
streets of the island,
laugh at this clumsy
boy who loves you,
but when I open
my eyes and close them,
when my steps go,
when my steps return,
deny me bread, air,
light, spring,
but never your laughter
for I would die.

~Pablo Neruda

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Dear Jesus, Do Something

“Dear Jesus, do something.”

“Maybe the only thing that hints at a sense of time is rhythm; not the recurrent beats of the rhythm but the gap between two such beats, the gray gap between black beats: the Tender Interval.”  

“In spite of everything I loved you, and will go on loving you–on my knees, with my shoulders drawn back, showing my heels to the headsman and straining my goose neck–even then. And afterwards–perhaps most of all afterwards–I shall love you, and one day we shall have a real, all-embracing explanation, and then perhaps we shall somehow fit together, you and I, and turn ourselves in such a way that we form one pattern, and solve the puzzle: draw a line from point A to point B…without looking, or, without lifting the pencil…or in some other way…we shall connect the points, draw the line, and you and I shall form that unique design for which I yearn.”

“When we remember our former selves, there is always that little figure with its long shadow stopping like an uncertain belated visitor on a lighted threshold at the far end of some impeccably narrowing corridor.”  

“Let all of life be an unfettered howl. Like the crowd greeting the gladiator. Don’t stop to think, don’t interrupt the scream, exhale, release life’s rapture. Everything is blooming. Everything is flying. Everything is screaming, choking on its screams. Laughter. Running. Let-down hair. That is all there is to life. ”

“Toska – noun /ˈtō-skə/ – Russian word roughly translated as sadness, melancholia, lugubriousness. No single word in English renders all the shades of toska. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom.”  

“Literature was not born the day when a boy crying “wolf, wolf” came running out of the Neanderthal valley with a big gray wolf at his heels; literature was born on the day when a boy came crying “wolf, wolf” and there was no wolf behind him.”

~Vladimir Nabokov (My Personal God)

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Jeffrey Eugenides

“I don’t know what you’re feeling, I won’t even pretend.”

“You never get over it, but you get to where it doesn’t bother you so much.”

“She may have looked normal on the outside, but once you’d seen her handwriting you knew she was deliciously complicated inside.”

“It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.” 

“She could become a spinster, like Emily Dickinson, writing poems full of dashes and brilliance, and never gaining weight.”

“Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s fantasy.” I’d like to show how “intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members” connects with “the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age.” I’d like to have a word for “the sadness inspired by failing restaurants” as well as for “the excitement of getting a room with a minibar.” I’ve never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I’ve entered my story, I need them more than ever. ” 

“A love story can never be about full possession. The happy marriage, the requited love, the desire that never dims–these are lucky eventualites but they aren’t love stories. Love stories depend on disappointment, on unequal births and feuding families, on matrimonial boredom and at least one cold heart. Love stories, nearly without exception, give love a bad name. We value love not because it’s stronger than death but because it’s weaker. Say what you want about love: death will finish it. You will not go on loving in the grave, not in any physical way that will at all resemble love as we know it on earth. The perishable nature of love is what gives love its importance in our lives. If it were endless, if it were on tap, love wouldn’t hit us the way it does. And we certainly wouldn’t write about it.”

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Every Single Word

“While I can’t have you, I long for you. I am the kind of person who would miss a train or a plane to meet you for coffee. I’d take a taxi across town to see you for ten minutes. I’d wait outside all night if I thought you would open the door in the morning. If you call me and say ‘Will you…’ my answer is ‘Yes’, before your sentence is out. I spin worlds where we could be together. I dream you. For me, imagination and desire are very close.”

“What should I do about the wild and the tame? The wild heart that wants to be free, and the tame heart that wants to come home. I want to be held. I don’t want you to come too close. I want you to scoop me up and bring me home at nights. I don’t want to tell you where I am. I want to keep a place among the rocks where no one can find me. I want to be with you.” 

“Do you fall in love often?

Yes often. With a view, with a book, with a dog, a cat, with numbers, with friends, with complete strangers, with nothing at all.” 

“Yes, we are [friends] and I do like to pass the day with you in serious and inconsequential chatter. I wouldn’t mind washing up beside you, dusting beside you, reading the back half of the paper while you read the front. We are friends and I would miss you, do miss you and think of you very often. I don’t want to lose this happy space where I have found someone who is smart and easy and doesn’t bother to check their diary when we arrange to meet.” 

“Trust me, I’m telling you stories.”

~JeanetteWinterson

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There Never Was Such An Animal

“You’re not like the others. I’ve seen a few; I know. When I talk, you look at me. When I said something about the moon, you looked at the moon, last night. The others would never do that. The others would walk off and leave me talking. Or threaten me. No one has time any more for anyone else. You’re one of the few who put up with me.“

(Note: The world is getting busier each day, and we discreetly explore the outer limits of our peripheral vision to find someone who would put up with us, the good and the bad, without being judgemental. It involves a lot of luck.)

“He glanced back at the wall. How like a mirror, too, her face. Impossible; for how many people did you know who reflected your own light to you? People were more often–he searched for a simile, found one in his work–torches, blazing away until they whiffed out. How rarely did other people’s faces take of you and throw back to you your own expression, your own innermost trembling thought?” 

(Note: In my relatively short life, I had met only one person who mirrored my innate and well-concealed restlessness, but I didn’t stick around to find out more. It intimidated me.)

“I feel I’m doing what I should’ve done a lifetime ago. For a little while I’m not afraid. Maybe it’s because I’m doing the right thing at last. Maybe it’s because I’ve done a rash thing and don’t want to look the coward to you.“

(Note: For a little while we lose the fear. Just for a little while.)

“Are you happy?”

(Note: Yes. But I am afraid to think beyond what is obvious and within reach.)

“How do you get so empty? he wondered. Who takes it out of you? And that awful flower the other day, the dandelion! It had summed up everything, hadn’t it? ‘What a shame! You’re not in love with anyone!’ And why not?”

(Note: Seriously, how?)

“Stuff your eyes with wonder. Live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. see the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that . Shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.”

(Note: Life’s unpredictability scares me immensely if I take a moment to take it all in, but then where is the fun and thrill without the surprise bumps and bends in the road?)

“I ate them like salad, books were my sandwich for lunch, my tiffin and dinner and midnight munch. I tore out the pages, ate them with salt, doused them with relish, gnawed on the bindings, turned the chapters with my tongue! Books by the dozen, the score and the billion. I carried so many home I was hunchbacked for years. Philosophy, art history, politics, social science, the poem, the essay, the grandiose play, you name ’em, I ate ’em.”

(Note: I would religiously follow this diet for a lifetime. Just garnish it with some fiction. I don’t mind the kyphosis either.)

“But most of all, I like to watch people. Sometimes I ride the subway all day and look at them and listen to them. I just want to figure out who they are and what they want and where they are going. Sometimes I even go to Fun parks and ride in the jet cars when they race on the edge of town at midnight and the police don’t care as long as they’re insured. As long as everyone has ten thousand insurance everyone’s happy. Sometimes I sneak around and listen in subways. Or I listen at soda fountains, and do you know what? People don’t talk about anything.”

(Note: Hmm. The last time I enjoyed talking to someone was exactly ninety-nine days ago. The rest of the umpteen conversations since then has coalesced into an indistinct lump of words. How many of us have real conversations and not vacuous daily updates?)

~Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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David Foster Wallace

“How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.”

“It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know.” 

“Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.”

“What if sometimes there is no choice about what to love? What if the temple comes to Mohammed? What if you just love? without deciding? You just do: you see her and in that instant are lost to sober account-keeping and cannot choose but to love? “

“We’re all lonely for something we don’t know we’re lonely for. How else to explain the curious feeling that goes around feeling like missing somebody we’ve never even met?” 

“The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.” 

“You will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do.”  

“Acceptance is usually more a matter of fatigue than anything else.” 

“The parts of me that used to think I was different or smarter or whatever, almost made me die.”

“Both destiny’s kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person’s basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can’t even hear because you’re in such a rush to or from something important you’ve tried to engineer.”  

“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny pathos in a dog’s yawn, the timeless sigh in the opening of the hermetically-sealed jar, the splattered laugh in the frying egg, the minor-D lament in the vacuum’s scream; that only we feel the panic at sunset the rookie kindergartner feels at his mother’s retreat. That only we love the only-we. That only we need the only-we. Solipsism binds us together, J.D. knows. That we feel lonely in a crowd; stop not to dwell on what’s brought the crowd into being. That we are, always, faces in a crowd.”

“The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes. But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think…The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali–it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.

So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.” 

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Where They Say It Better

Stand very still.
Look at me, my eyes,
if that will help.
The words I really want to say to you
are under these.
~J. Allyn Roser
 
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)

~e.e.cummings

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land. 

 ~Pablo Neruda

 And then read this.

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Desired Ruin

“Maybe…you’ll fall in love with me all over again.”
“Hell,” I said, “I love you enough now. What do you want to do? Ruin me?”
“Yes. I want to ruin you.”
“Good,” I said. “That’s what I want too.”
 

― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

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Two Sleepy People

Here we are
Out of cigarettes
Holding hands and yawning
Look how late it gets

Two sleepy people by dawn’s early light
And too much in love to say goodnight

Here we are
In the cosy chair
Picking on a wishbone
From the frigid air

Two sleepy people with nothing to say
And too much in love to break away

Do you remember
The nights we used to linger in the hall?
Your father didn’t like me at all

Do you remember
The reason why we married in the fall?
To rent this little nest and get a bit of rest

Well, here we are
Just about the same
Foggy little fella
Drowsy little dame

Two sleepy people by dawn’s early light
And too much in love to say goodnight

By Hoagy Carmichael 

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What is Stopping You?

“Mother, have you noticed that this society we’re in tends to be a little…repressive?”

“What does that mean, Eugenie? What does that mean, that strange new word, ‘repressive,’ that I have never heard before?”

“It means…it’s like when you decide to do something, and you get up out of your chair to do it, and you take a step, and then become aware of frosty glances being directed at you from every side.”

“Frosty glances?”

“Your desires are stifled.”

“What desires are you talking about?”

“Just desires in general. Any desires. It’s a whole…I guess atmosphere is the…word…a tendency on the part of the society…”

“You’d better sew some more pillow cases, Eugenie.”

– Donald Barthelme

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Rainer Maria Rilke

That’s love: Two lonely persons keep each other safe and touch each other and talk to each other.

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 now 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. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

We need, in love, to practice only this: letting each other go. For holding on comes easily; we do not need to learn it.

Believe in a love that is being stored up for you like an inheritance, and have faith that in this love there is a strength and a blessing so large that you can travel as far as you wish without having to step outside it.

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Cohen

 I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch,
he said to me, “You must not ask for so much.”
And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door,
she cried to me, “Hey, why not ask for more?”

———————————————— 

 True love leaves no traces
If you and I are one
It’s lost in our embraces
Like stars against the sun

As a falling leaf may rest
A moment on the air
So your head upon my breast
So my hand upon your hair

And many nights endure
Without a moon or star
So we will endure
When one is gone and far

True love leaves no traces
If you and I are one
It’s lost in our embraces
Like stars against the sun

———————————————– 

 I cannot follow you, my love,
you cannot follow me.
I am the distance you put between
all of the moments that we will be.

———————————————— 

  Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic ’til I’m gathered safely in
Lift me like an olive branch and be my homeward dove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
 

Oh let me see your beauty when the witnesses are gone
Let me feel you moving like they do in Babylon
Show me slowly what I only know the limits of
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the wedding now, dance me on and on
Dance me very tenderly and dance me very long
We’re both of us beneath our love, we’re both of us above
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to the children who are asking to be born
Dance me through the curtains that our kisses have outworn
Raise a tent of shelter now, though every thread is torn
Dance me to the end of love

Dance me to your beauty with a burning violin
Dance me through the panic till I’m gathered safely in
Touch me with your naked hand or touch me with your glove
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love
Dance me to the end of love

 

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Parker& Bishop

 On Being A Woman

Why is it, when I am in Rome,
I’d give an eye to be at home,
But when on native earth I be,
My soul is sick for Italy?

And why with you, my love, my lord,
Am I spectacularly bored,
Yet do you up and leave me- then
I scream to have you back again?
 

~Dorothy Parker

One Art

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like a disaster.
 

~Elizabeth Bishop

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Mop Me Up From The Floor

I would continue to share poems about love all throughout this month. The following poem reveals the inevitable identity of the lover; one who waits and hopes. Simple and profoundly true.

Even if I now saw you
Only once,
I would long for you
Through worlds,
Worlds.

~Izumi Shikibu

I would curl up and die happy in this poem. It teases, delights, seduces; and oh, how it loves!

Valentine 

 The things about you I appreciate
May seem indelicate:
I’d like to find you in the shower
And chase the soap for half an hour.
I’d like to have you in my power
And see your eyes dilate.
I’d like to have your back to scour
And other parts to lubricate.
Sometimes I feel it is my fate
To chase you screaming up a tower
Or make you cower
By asking you to differentiate
Nietzsche from Schopenhauer.
I’d like successfully to guess your weight
And win you at a fête.
I’d like to offer you a flower.

I like the hair upon your shoulders,
Falling like water over boulders.
I like the shoulders too: they are essential.
Your collar-bones have great potential
(I’d like your particulars in folders
Marked Confidential).

I like your cheeks, I like your nose,
I like the way your lips disclose
The neat arrangement of your teeth
(Half above and half beneath)
In rows.

I like your eyes, I like their fringes.
The way they focus on me gives me twinges.
Your upper arms drive me berserk.
I like the way your elbows work.
On hinges …

I like your wrists, I like your glands,
I like the fingers on your hands.
I’d like to teach them how to count,
And certain things we might exchange,
Something familiar for something strange.
I’d like to give you just the right amount
And get some change.

I like it when you tilt your cheek up.
I like the way you not and hold a teacup.
I like your legs when you unwind them.
Even in trousers I don’t mind them.
I like each softly-moulded kneecap.

I like the little crease behind them.
I’d always know, without a recap,
Where to find them.

I like the sculpture of your ears.
I like the way your profile disappears
Whenever you decide to turn and face me.
I’d like to cross two hemispheres
And have you chase me.

I’d like to smuggle you across frontiers
Or sail with you at night into Tangiers.
I’d like you to embrace me.

I’d like to see you ironing your skirt
And cancelling other dates.
I’d like to button up your shirt.
I like the way your chest inflates.
I’d like to soothe you when you’re hurt
Or frightened senseless by invertebrates.

I’d like you even if you were malign
And had a yen for sudden homicide.
I’d let you put insecticide
Into my wine.
I’d even like you if you were Bride
Of Frankenstein
Or something ghoulish out of Mamoulian’s
Jekyll and Hyde.
I’d even like you as my Julian
Or Norwich or Cathleen ni Houlihan.
How melodramatic
If you were something muttering in attics
Like Mrs Rochester or a student of Boolean
Mathematics.

You are the end of self-abuse.
You are the eternal feminine.
I’d like to find a good excuse
To call on you and find you in.
I’d like to put my hand beneath your chin,
And see you grin.
I’d like to taste your Charlotte Russe,
I’d like to feel my lips upon your skin
I’d like to make you reproduce.

I’d like you in my confidence.
I’d like to be your second look.
I’d like to let you try the French Defence
And mate you with my rook.
I’d like to be your preference
And hence
I’d like to be around when you unhook.
I’d like to be your only audience,
The final name in your appointment book,
Your future tense.

~John Fuller

*Mop me up from the floor. I have melted.* 

 

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You Come Too

I had been trying to ebb away from the shore of love. But it is just this damn month. It makes me want to read poems. Seriously.

Understand, I’ll slip quietly

Away from the noisy crowd

When I see the pale

Stars rising, blooming over the oaks.

I’ll pursue solitary pathways

Through the pale twilight meadows,

With this only one dream:

You come too.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

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Wendy Cope mirrors my heart, gives ‘Two Cures for Love’

Today I discovered Wendy Cope’s poems-pithy, lighthearted, unpretentious and achingly familiar. Read them out loud and slow. Do the words mean anything to you?

Worry
I worry about you-

So long since we spoke.
Love, are you downhearted,
Dispirited, broke?
I worry about you.
I can’t sleep at night.
Are you sad? Are you lonely?
Or are you all right?
They say that men suffer,
As badly, as long.
I worry, I worry,
In case they are wrong.

Some More Light Verse
You have to try. You see the shrink.
You learn a lot. You read. You think.
You struggle to improve your looks.
You meet some men. You write some books.
You eat good food. You give up junk.
You do not smoke. You don’t get drunk.
You take up yoga, walk and swim.
And nothing works. The outlook’s grim.
You don’t know what to do. You cry.
You’re running out of things to try.

You blow your nose. You see the shrink.
You walk. You give up food and drink.
You fall in love. You make a plan.
You struggle to improve your man.
And nothing works. The outlooks grim.
You go to yoga, cry and swim.
You eat and drink. You give up looks.
You struggle to improve your books.
You cannot see the point. You sigh.
You do not smoke. You have to try.

Valentine

 My heart has made its mind up
And I’m afraid it’s you.
Whatever you’ve got lined up,
My heart has made its mind up
And if you can’t be signed up
This year, next year will do.
My heart has made its mind up
And I’m afraid it’s you.

 
A Vow
 I cannot promise never to be angry;
I cannot promise always to be kind.
You know what you are taking on, my darling –
It’s only at the start that love is blind.
And yet I’m still the one you want to be with
And you’re the one for me – of that I’m sure.
You are my closest friend, my favorite person,
The lover and the home I’ve waited for.
I cannot promise that I will deserve you
From this day on. I hope to pass that test.
I love you and I want to make you happy.
I promise I will do my very best. 

Two Cures for Love

1 Don’t see him. Don’t phone or write a letter.
2 The easy way: get to know him better.
 

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The Forgotten Dialect of Heart

The Forgotten Dialect of Heart

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

-Jack Gilbert

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You Must Allow Me To Tell You

I imagine I am in love. And as lovers of book lovers will tell you, we have a thing for creating an ambience that mirrors our mood. I have a new and highly customized playlist on my iPod. Today I dusted a thick tome of Jane Austen’s complete works and placed it on my bedside. 1336 pages, and in minute print. I like the arduous challenge of tackling a thick tome, more so if it is the re-reading of old novels; I cherish the anticipation of coming upon certain sentences, the thrill of encountering the familiar twists in the tale; but mostly the joy is in reading words that reflect the state of my heart. I would wallow in the warm glow of whatever it is that I feel as I read about Mr.Darcy and the likes. Sadly, my beloved John Thornton isn’t included in this collection.

And then I stumbled upon this amazing coffee mug, while browsing through one of my favorite book sites. I can’t think of anything remotely as romantic and as lovely and as true as the words Darcy chooses to tell Elizabeth how he feels about her.

“In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you.“

 

*Swoon*

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Come here…

Just wanted to share two of my favorite love songs…the first one is from a movie I absolutely love…”Before Sunrise”

COME HERE

-Kath Bloom

There’s a wind that blows in from the north,
And it says that loving takes its course.
Come here. Come here.
No I’m not impossible to touch,
I have never wanted you so much.
Come here. Come here.
Have I never lay down by your side?
Baby, let’s forget about this pride.
Come here. Come here.
Well, I’m in no hurry.
You don’t have to run away this time.

WHEN I NEED YOU

When I need you
I just close my eyes and I’m with you
And all that I so want to give you
It’s only a heartbeat away
When I need love
I hold out my hands and I touch love
I never knew there was so much love
Keeping me warm night and day
Miles and miles of empty space in between us
The telephone can’t take the place of your smile
But you know I won’t be traveling forever
It’s cold out, but hold out, and do like I do
When I need you
I just close my eyes and I’m with you
And all that I so want to give you
It’s only a heartbeat away
It’s not easy when the road is your driver
Honey that’s a heavy load that we bear
But you know I won’t be traveling a lifetime
It’s cold out, but hold out; and do like I do
Oh, I need you
When I need love
I hold out my hands and I touch love
I never knew there was so much love
Keeping me warm night and day

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