smakkabagms

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Mary Oliver, from Long Life: Essays And Other Writings originally published in 2004

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Solar Eclipse, Howard Russell Butler, 1925

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Art by Trina Schart Hyman from The Sleeping Beauty

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Lush Roses.

Art Print by Lisa Marie Kindley from Oregon.

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'To the Church in Ephesus' by Sidney Sime, (1867 - 1941)

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'Dragon'. Witold Pruszkowski. 1896.

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The Hours unyoked themselves like chariots off to war - there is nothing sweet left, every tenderness has been violated every fantastical thought - of dragon, wand, or wing - is gone the world has belittled us, pried open like the heart's thousand eyelids forced to watch its own upheaval already I see the bones peeking out from our thinning flesh another name is lost to an insurmountable past, will time take even the memory of love? the phantom of hours spent wading the black waters murked by hook and plague and story life, put your hand in my hand, the horses run wildly onwards - they stampede the pine needles of my childhood into mud, no one will remember the worms they go to feed

#poem #spilled ink #poetry #writeblr

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and the lights flicker out - sleep calls, I forget it, sometimes, the temptation that heroes feel Odysseus and the sirens, his men and their bag of wind how pointless their suffering home, home as temptation, the impossibility of its fulfillment are we always reaching backwards into realms made unreal by the vague skewering of memory?

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grief is the final act of love even my bones collect you a swathe of longing for no-end

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August, red and common as a wound, what question can I ask of the creature I am?  The heart, worm-wedded, heavier than I - is plucked from heaven’s final branch by the impartial, haphazard hand of nature. Over the hill, it is autumn already. I want everything - the earth’s grossness, the leaf-dark filth, the flat, fathomless expanse of renunciation. I renounce knowing, I renounce childhood, even beauty: let me be nothing of what I once wanted in the primacy of youth

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I think of woodlands I’ll never see and grow old who would want this? the humiliation of reason or time’s erroneous breath                             the way failure purges us of all meaning

lonely plumes of elsewhere, scatter my hair like ashes, the wind returns nothing to me and my arms burn with the leaden weight of things forgotten                 they are like me, how could I leave them? removed from the grim, quiet indignity of solitude I find no new names for the birds, though they are as changed as I and as weary as lilies       how long I wait, to be wakened into tenderness but it is a rumor, like all else, as if after having returned to the earth the earth refuses me  

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farewell to spiders, cobwebs forged in sweeping waterlights I have lured the deaths from this season as a creek lures an animal to drink nothing is as confined as the stars each wrong the world commits against me is a doorway that leads into gardens abandoned by the rumors of love. I know loneliness I know the way a window loses itself among the guiltless, peasant dreams the terrible is everyday, like dust or lost memories farewell to loss, I will not remember you and the window     will smother the world outside

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I am afraid of the world, the amaranth ash, the violet spreading light that echoes the falling of my name’s fossil the hunt and harvest are incongruent, desire has fled from necessity what I hang on the sill of my life are scraps and beginnings host of a dark language, I scatter like so many hooves borne on by a prey’s panic, blue                                       and unpossessable the humiliation in asking to be loved

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'A moonlight ride on an owl's back' from Fairy Guardians by F. Willoughby, 1875

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let me not forget those forests, the way the sea scrapes at the fog feeding the seedlings of darker dreams - how embarrassing, to want you, or anything, still - have I not aged enough past it? 

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Moonlit Night (Ferdinand Knab, 1864)

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Detail from 'The New World' poster, Kilian Eng, 2023