He had hardly ever been in there, since his first summer, when he had walked around noiselessly, with his hands behind his back, an intruder in the temple of marital love; his own love fantasies had taken envious possession of it, like squatters, in the married couple’s absence.
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty
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Everyone’s getting older. When I crossed that line in my mind where I knew I was with the person that I wanted to marry, it was a very heavy thing, because you’re inviting death into your life. You know that’s hopefully after many, many, many years, but the idea of death stops being abstract, because there is someone you can’t bear to lose.
Joanna Newsom, in interview
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In the contest of “Imagination vs. Reality,” I am drawn to “versus.”
Dodie Bellamy, ‘Incarnation’
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Why did I write? what sin to me unknown
dipped me in ink, my parents’, or my own?
As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame,
I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.
I left no calling for this idle trade,
No duty broke, no father disobeyed.
The Muse but served to ease some friend, not wife,
To help me through this long disease, my life.
Alexander Pope, ‘Epistle to Dr Arubthnot’
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Walking Like A Robin
take 3 or 4 steps then stop
look taste smell touch & hear
is there anything to eat?
oh look, there’s some caviar
it must be my birthday, thanks
i must be very old, like seventy
i guess I’m falling apart, i’ll just
sew myself back together but will it last?
please take a piece of me back home, each piece
is anti-war and don’t pay your rent. in fact,
remember: property is robbery, give everybody
everything. other birds walk this way too.
Bernadette Mayer
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Silly me. I thought love was real
& the body imaginary.
Ocean Vuong, 'Eurydice'
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Who, if cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies
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Patient Zero Rides the Medium of Flight, 1978
The work of a flight attendant is volume,
get the orders taken, get the food out there,
don’t spend too long on any one question.
Sometimes there are people in your section
who have never flown before,
they ask you which cities are underneath them.
You see an aristocratic thrill cross their faces,
like the people who first started to fly
over the middle states,
above the fields and sparse water,
later and later each day,
until the light grew low and dangerous.
Soon, on the contours of San Francisco,
the hidden levels of Manhattan,
men will be rising into their rooms for days at a time.
The doctors will start to piece your history together
on the table in front of them,
they will stare at the new implications of flight.
Gaetan, when they tell you to stop having sex,
they mean,
The world is different now
it could be different for years and years.
You won’t ask them if they’re happy in their work.
Or what else you should live for, suddenly,
dying, after ten years just beautiful and wanted.
Joel Zizik
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A Geat woman too sang out in grief;
with hair bound up, she unburdened herself
of her worst feats, a wild litany
of nightmare and lament; her nation invaded,
enemies on the rampage, bodies in piles,
slavery and abasement. Heaven swallowed the smoke.
Beowulf, tr. Seamus Heaney
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Scimitar curve of the coast,
the bright lights of Hotel Helios
at night blue on the Tigullian,
houses in Liguria, how above the café
awnings, a palimpsest of colors – apricot
and ochre, the huddled Italian pines,
red roofs with curved repetitive tiles,
the church of Santa Margherita a Montici
where Galileo went for comfort.
These things I store
against the dying of friends, blackouts,
my own death parched and miniscule,
the heart beating out its own defiance.
I want to sing, Where e’re you walk, my voice
rising, cool games shall fan the glade.
I want to sing, I attempt from love’s sickness
to fly in vain. I want to sing, Blow, blow,
thy winter wind. I want to sing, Lullay,
lullay, the faulcon hath bourne my love away.
Edith Jenkins
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I refuse to remember the dead.
And the dead are bored with the whole thing.
But you – you go ahead,
go on, go on back down
into the graveyard,
lie down where you think their faces are;
talk back to your own bad dreams.
Anne Sexton, 'A Curse Against Elegies'
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The stream and the broken pottery; what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself, - life hurry past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars. In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a vessel of one’s throat and nostrils and held it on one’s breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals.
Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark
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1
There is a gold light in certain old paintings
That represents a diffusion of sunlight.
It is like happiness, when we are happy.
It comes from everywhere and from nowhere at all
And the poor soldiers sprawled at the feet
Share in its charity equally with the cross.
2
Orpheus hesitated beside the black river.
With so much to look forward to he looked back.
We think he sang then, but the song is lost.
At least he had seen once more the beloved back.
I say the song went this way: O prolong
Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong.
3
The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work.
One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good.
The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar.
Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good.
And all that we suffered through having existed
Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.
Donald Justice
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Aubade Beginning in Handcuffs
After sam sax
Sometimes I pronounce aubade: obeyed
for the way this particular desire stumbles
the tongue. Hunger’s vocabulary is a fickle
thing. How many lovers have said that
they adore me, but meant instead they saw
in me a door? A thing to be entered. Language
shifts an image like the light. To lash can mean
both beat & bind. I’m lashed against the bed
by dawn’s red blaze. The whole room welted
tidy by the sky between the blinds. To cuff
can also mean to hold or harm, each word
doubled – body & a body’s shadow. I want
& all at once I flicker beneath you. I beg you
to bruise me & so exchange faggot for fruit.
O, how gentle lust alters a body, conjugates
Prey into prayer. The history of handcuffs
is old as myth if memory serves. The legend
goes, Greek hero invented them to steal
prophecy from the mouth of a shapeshifter
god & the story gathered blood from there.
The root of the word religion is a Latin verb
meaning to bind. As in, the worshipper is bound
to their god. Two hands paired in steel or prayer.
When I say obey, I mean we have chosen
the softer side of every verb, dulled the sharp
edge of a memory, sea glass against the tongue.
For the first time, when the handcuffs’ steel
lips unkiss my wrists as morning stains every
surface a fading bruise, I am already free
as the first breath after confession.
Torrin A. Greathouse
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On the evenings when my parents held parties, the drawing-room mirrors multiplied to infinity the scintillations of a crystal chandelier. Mama would take her seat the grand piano to accompany a lady dressed in a cloud of tulle who played the violin and a cousin who performed on the cello. I would crack between my teeth the candied shell of an artificial fruit, and a burst of light would illuminate my palate with a taste of black-currant or pineapple: all the colours, all the lights were mine, the gauzy scarves, the diamonds, the laces; I held the whole party in my mouth. I was never attracted to paradises flowing with milk and honey, but I envied Hansel and Gretel their gingerbread house: if only the universe we inhabit were completely edible, I used to think, what power we would have over it! When I was grown up I wanted to crunch flowering almond trees, and take bites out of the rainbow nougat of the sunset. Against the night sky of New York, the neon signs appeared to me like giant sweetmeats and made me feel frustrated.
Simone De Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, tr. James Kirkup
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Revolutionary Letter #12
the vortex of creation is the vortex of destruction
the vortex of artistic creation is the vortex of self destruction
the vortex of political creation is the vortex of flesh destruction
flesh is in the fire, it curls and terribly warps
fat is in the fire, it drips and sizzling sings
bones are in the fire
they crack tellingly in
subtle hieroglyphs of oracle
charcoal signed
the smell of your burning hair
for every revolutionary must at last will his own destruction
rooted as he is in the past he sets out to destroy
Diane di Prima
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Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?
Fare you well: had you such a loss as I,
I could not give better comfort than you do.
I will not keep this form upon my head,
When there is such disorder in my wit.
O Lord! my boy, my Arthur, my fair son!
My life, my joy, my food, my all the world!
My widow-comfort, and my sorrows’ cure!
William Shakespeare, King John
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