i love spring because everything is green and cute and there’s pink petals flying through the wind and i’m here for it. it’s year 5 and maeve started a little potted plant garden to keep her entertained. most things in the farm are automated by now so it’s nice to have lil every day tasks like these
And when they bombed other people’s houses, we
protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not
enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America
was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house–
I took a chair outside and watched the sun.
In the sixth month
of a disastrous reign in the house of money
in the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,
our great country of money, we (forgive us)
lived happily during the war.
There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.
I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.
I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.
And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.
It's hard knowing that if we wait for the perfect house, even an offer of 110% of the list price might not get it. It's hard seeing a great house and knowing that it's out of our price range, and that prices will be 10-20% higher in a year, and we don't save fast enough to keep up. Even if we could save that much, it's hard to get our minds around spending $700,000+ on a house.
It's hard to know where to compromise - location? size? HOA? If we compromise, it's really hard to swallow that we will still have to pay over half a million dollars for that. If we compromise, it's hard to deal with the possibility that if we'd waited, maybe we would've found the perfect house! But then that brings us back around to how the perfect house will still probably be snatched out from under us by something offering $25k over our 110% offer, and all of that in cash no less.
when i was a teenager it felt very revolutionary to be cruel to myself. like some kind of slow passive protest against how much everything hurt. i starved myself of sleep and food and tenderness because it felt right. it felt sharp and angry and radical and i wanted to be those things. adulthood is the realisation that the world is already working to cut into you well before you learn how to do it yourself. caring for yourself and others is the real protest
I.
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II.
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III.
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV.
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V.
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI.
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII.
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII.
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX.
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X.
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI.
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII.
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII.
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Coal miner's child using a hole in the door to enter a bedroom with a smoking pipe in one hand and a gun in the other in Bertha Hill, West Virginia. Photo by Marion Post Wolcott. 1938