thepoemeater-blog

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4.

The light has changed; middle C is tuned darker now. And the songs of morning sound over-rehearsed. —

This is the light of autumn, not the light of spring. The light of autumn: you will not be spared.

The songs have changed; the unspeakable has entered them.

This is the light of autumn, not the light that says I am reborn.

Not the spring dawn: I strained, I suffered, I was delivered. This is the present, an allegory of waste.

So much has changed. And still, you are fortunate: the ideal burns in you like a fever. Or not like a fever, like a second heart.

The songs have changed, but really they are still quite beautiful. They have been concentrated in a smaller space, the space of the mind. They are dark, now, with desolation and anguish.

And yet the notes recur. They hover oddly in anticipation of silence. The ear gets used to them. The eye gets used to disappearances.

You will not be spared, nor will what you love be spared.

A wind has come and gone, taking apart the mind; it has left in its wake a strange lucidity.

How privileged you are, to be passionately clinging to what you love; the forfeit of hope has not destroyed you.

Maestro, doloroso:

This is the light of autumn; it has turned on us. Surely it is a privilege to approach the end still believing in something.

Louise Gluck from “October,” in Averno

#autumn #song #music #light #sun #death #loss #wind #belief #the end #grief #change #spring #seasons #Persephone #sacrifice #love #hope #october

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The Laughing Heart 

your life is your life don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission. be on the watch. there are ways out. there is light somewhere. it may not be much light but it beats the darkness. be on the watch. the gods will offer you chances. know them. take them. you can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes. and the more often you learn to do it, the more light there will be. your life is your life. know it while you have it. you are marvelous the gods wait to delight in you.

Charles Bukowski

#charles bukowski #poetry #how to live #light #darkness #depression #gamble #changechanc #chance #risk #death #life #delight #the gods

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Green Apples

In August we carried the old horsehair mattress to the back porch and slept with our children in a row. The wind came up the mountain into the orchard telling me something: saying something urgent. I was happy. The green apples fell on the sloping roof and rattled down. The wind was shaking me all night Long, shaking me in my sleep like a definition of love, saying, this is the moment, here, now.

Ruth Stone

#poetry #august #bliss #states of bliss #ruth stone #green apples #mountains #apples #harvest #how to live #love

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I am locked in a little cedar box with a picture of shepherds pasted onto the central panel between carvings. The box stands on curved legs. It has a gold, heart-shaped lock and no key. I am trying to write my way out of the closed box redolent of cedar. Satan comes to me in the locked box and says, I’ll get you out. Say My father is a shit. I say my father is a shit and Satan laughs and says, It’s opening. Say your mother is a pimp. My mother is a pimp. Something opens and breaks when I say that. My spine uncurls in the cedar box like the pink back of the ballerina pin with a ruby eye, resting beside me on satin in the cedar box. Say shit, say death, say fuck the father, Satan says, down my ear. The pain of the locked past buzzes in the child’s box on her bureau, under the terrible round pond eye etched around with roses, where self-loathing gazed at sorrow. Shit. Death. Fuck the father. Something opens. Satan says Don’t you feel a lot better? Light seems to break on the delicate edelweiss pin, carved in two colors of wood. I love him too, you know, I say to Satan dark in the locked box. I love them but I’m trying to say what happened to us in the lost past. Of course, he says and smiles, of course. Now say: torture. I see, through blackness soaked in cedar, the edge of a large hinge open. Say: the father’s cock, the mother’s cunt, says Satan, I’ll get you out. The angle of the hinge widens until I see the outlines of the time before I was, when they were locked in the bed. When I say the magic words, Cock, Cunt, Satan softly says, Come out. But the air around the opening is heavy and thick as hot smoke. Come in, he says, and I feel his voice breathing from the opening. The exit is through Satan’s mouth. Come in my mouth, he says, you’re there already, and the huge hinge begins to close. Oh no, I loved them, too, I brace my body tight in the cedar house. Satan sucks himself out the keyhole. I’m left locked in the box, he seals the heart-shaped lock with the wax of his tongue. It’s your coffin now, Satan says. I hardly hear; I am warming my cold hands at the dancer’s ruby eye— the fire, the suddenly discovered knowledge of love.

Sharon Olds, “Satan Says”

#sharon olds #poetry #satan says #writing #love #family #evil #wicked #truth #father #mother #escape #trap #pain #trauma #torture #childhood #fire #hell #sacrifice

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In our silence, we were asking those questions friends who trust each other ask out of great fatigue, each one hoping the other knows more

and when this isn’t so, hoping their shared impressions will amount to insight.

Is there any benefit in forcing upon oneself the realization that one must die? Is it possible to miss the opportunity of one’s life?

Questions like that.

The snow heavy. The black night transformed into busy white air.

Something we hadn’t seen revealed. Only the meaning wasn’t revealed.

Louise Gluck, from “Averno,” in Averno

#louise gluck #averno #poetry #loss #friendship #silence #intimacy #questions #how to live #life #death #snow #meaning #night

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When Hades decided he loved this girl he built for her a duplicate of earth, everything the same, down to the meadow, but with a bed added.

Everything the same, including sunlight, because it would be hard on a young girl to go so quickly from bright light to utter darkness

Gradually, he thought, he'd introduce the night, first as the shadows of fluttering leaves. Then moon, then stars. Then no moon, no stars. Let Persephone get used to it slowly. In the end, he thought, she'd find it comforting.

A replica of earth except there was love here. Doesn't everyone want love?

He waited many years, building a world, watching Persephone in the meadow. Persephone, a smeller, a taster. If you have one appetite, he thought, you have them all.

Doesn't everyone want to feel in the night the beloved body, compass, polestar, to hear the quiet breathing that says I am alive, that means also you are alive, because you hear me, you are here with me. And when one turns, the other turns—

That's what he felt, the lord of darkness, looking at the world he had constructed for Persephone. It never crossed his mind that there'd be no more smelling here, certainly no more eating.

Guilt? Terror? The fear of love? These things he couldn't imagine; no lover ever imagines them.

He dreams, he wonders what to call this place. First he thinks: The New Hell. Then: The Garden. In the end, he decides to name it Persephone's Girlhood.

A soft light rising above the level meadow, behind the bed. He takes her in his arms. He wants to say I love you, nothing can hurt you

but he thinks this is a lie, so he says in the end you're dead, nothing can hurt you which seems to him a more promising beginning, more true.

Louise Gluck, “A Myth of Devotion” from Averno 

#louise gluck #hades #persephone #autumn #poetry #averno #love #devotion #myth #light #sun #night #moon #stars #meadow #nature #fear #terror #longing #tenderness #touch #the body #death #truth #beginning #safety #honesty

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There was a war between good and evil. We decided to call the body good.

That made death evil. It turned the soul against death completely.

Like a foot soldier wanting to serve a great warrior, the soul wanted to side with the body.

It turned against the dark, against the forms of death it recognized.

Where does the voice come from that says suppose the war is evil, that says

suppose the body did this to us, made us afraid of love–

Louise Gluck, “Crater Lake,” from Averno

#louise gluck #persephone #poetic #crater lake #averno #loss #the body #good #evil #war #soul #shadow #love #whew #autumn #the soul

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Time was experienced  less as narrative than ritual. What was repeated had weight. 

Louise Gluck, from “Prism” in Averno

#ritual #time #repetition #prism #louise gluck #averno #poetry #memory #narrative #trauma #writing

[thepoemeater-blog]

Persephone is having sex in hell. Unlike the rest of us, she doesn't know what winter is, only that she is what causes it.

She is lying in the bed of Hades. What is in her mind? Is she afraid? Has something blotted out the idea of mind?

She does know the earth is run by mothers, this much is certain. She also knows she is not what is called a girl any longer. Regarding incarceration, she believes

she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.

The terrible reunions in store for her will take up the rest of her life. When the passion for expiation is chronic, fierce, you do not choose the way you live. You do not live; you are not allowed to die.

You drift between earth and death which seem, finally, strangely alike. Scholars tell us

that there is no point in knowing what you want when the forces contending over you could kill you.

White of forgetfulness, white of safety—

They say there is a rift in the human soul which was not constructed to belong entirely to life. Earth

asks us to deny this rift, a threat disguised as suggestion— as we have seen in the tale of Persephone which should be read

as an argument between the mother and the lover— the daughter is just meat.

When death confronts her, she has never seen the meadow without the daisies. Suddenly she is no longer singing her maidenly songs about her mother's beauty and fecundity. Where the rift is, the break is.

Song of the earth, song of the mythic vision of eternal life—

My soul shattered with the strain of trying to belong to earth—

What will you do, when it is your turn in the field with the god?

Louise Gluck, from “Persephone the Wanderer,” in Averno

#louise gluck #persephone #hades #desire #the wants #mothers #family #daughters #poetry #averno #choice #agency #maiden #coming of age #loss of innocence #nature #seasons #autumn #death #hell #shadow #power #the soul #october

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I was young here. Riding the subway with my small book as though to defend myself against

the same world:

you are not alone, the poem said, in the dark tunnel.

Louise Gluck, from “October,” in Averno

#louise gluck #poetry #october #averno #youth #memory #loss #ageing #subway #nyc #solitude #companionship #tunnel

[thepoemeater-blog]

3.

Snow had fallen. I remember music from an open window.

Come to me, said the world. This is not to say it spoke in exact sentences but that I perceived beauty in this manner.

Sunrise. A film of moisture on each living thing. Pools of cold light formed in the gutters.

I stood at the doorway, ridiculous as it now seems.

What others found in art, I found in nature. What others found in human love, I found in nature. Very simple. But there was no voice there.

Winter was over. In the thawed dirt, bits of green were showing.

Come to me, said the world. I was standing in my wool coat at a kind of bright portal — I can finally say long ago; it gives me considerable pleasure. Beauty the healer, the teacher —

death cannot harm me more than you have harmed me, my beloved life.

Louise Gluck, from “October,” in Averno

#louise gluck #Persephone #october #Fall #autumn #averno #poetry #nature #beauty #art #love #healing

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One Way to Say I Love You

The inside of this room is getting greener every day.

She has developed a growing affection for houseplants,

setting them all over, on shelves, tables, and dressers,

hanging them from hooks. She tells me their names:

Peace Lilly, Sansevieria, Golden Pothos, Wandering Jew.

Some are soft and feathery; Others are stiff, straight and serious.

She says blowing gently on the leaves means “I love you.”

I take her word for it and send the phrase on an idle breeze,

but the plants make no reply, growing slowly in the lowlight.

- Joshua Barnhart

#joshua barnhart #poetry #poem #plants #houseplants #plant mom #tenderness #sunlight #light #green #nature #attention

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The Yearner

I stacked three pillows, made sure my head was heavy with bills, wine, yesterday’s deadline, and I slept hard, tight as cement on my left arm. The needles came. At dawn, I dragged it like a salmon from under my body. A part of me is dead. Now I can shake my own hand, meet myself again for the first time. How my fingers feel to one another, strangers, for a tingling moment, I am another. Promise? This time will be different.

Rachel Long

#poetry #poem #rachel long #longing #the yearner #sleep #ritual #the body #morning #spell #healing #return to yourself

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Please Don't

tell the flowers—they think the sun loves them. The grass is under the same simple-minded impression about the rain, the fog, the dew. And when the wind blows, it feels so good they lose control of themselves and swobtoggle wildly around, bumping accidentally into their slender neighbors. Forgetful little lotus-eaters, solar-powered hydroholics, drawing nourishment up through stems into their thin green skin, high on the expensive chemistry of mitochondrial explosion, believing that the dirt loves them, the night, the stars— reaching down a little deeper with their pale albino roots, all Dizzy Gillespie with the utter sufficiency of everything. They don't imagine lawn mowers, the four stomachs of the cow, or human beings with boots who stop to marvel at their exquisite flexibility and color. They persist in their soft-headed hallucination of happiness. But please don't mention it. Not yet. Tell me what would you possibly gain from being right?

Tony Hoagland, from Application for Release from the Dream

#Tony Hoagland #please don't #poetry #poem #nature #flowers #grass #sun #rain #wind #happiness #delusion #dream #outdoors #destruction #hallucination

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“while underneath my own shoes  I suddenly can feel the emptiness of space;  and over my head, I see light falling from the sky

that all these years I might have been leaning back to gaze at and long for and praise.”

Tony Hoagland, from “A History of High Heels” from Application for Release from the Dream

#Tony Hoagland #poetry #light #sunlight #praise #beauty #joy #worship #longing #pleasure

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“Yesterday I wish for rain, the cold clear kind that falls from very high, and when it fell, I felt such joy. 

But it’s what I don’t pray for that can rescue me. Surprise, surprise, only surprise will help me on my way.”

-- Tony Hoagland, from “Aiport” from Application for Release from the Dream

#Tony Hoagland #poetry #poem #survival #escape #joy #rain #surprise #rescue #salvation #prayer

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“The baby starts out as a luminous jellybean of god  and gradually transforms into a strange, lopsided growth: 

a man who will not let himself be touched; an aging girl who smiles and is angry with the moon. 

Underneath the smile is bitterness, and underneath the bitterness is grief, and underneath the grief the desire to survive at any cost.”

-- Tony Hoagland, from “Airport” from Application for Release from the Dream

#Tony Hoagland #life #childhood #grief #bitterness #survival #touch #loss #infant #baby #anger #growing up #ageing