unequally | 白日夢

白日夢

Where is the lost smile going? I’ll rescue you without disappearing yet. There is always an exit somewhere. Let’s dive as deep as our sins. A magnet that can’t be taken for a long time, a maze that can’t be fluttered around; throw out the junk in the sea at minus 100 degrees. My darkness that rings the alarm bell laughs a little. Dream feeling that seems to unravel: I don’t want to know hypocrisy or hypocrisy: I don’t want to see it anymore. You are no longer in me. Goodbye black ragged, messy, messy puzzles messed up, a circuit that can’t be smashed to the bottom of the abyss where the shadows and afterimages cling to each other... laugh. Uncontrollable loneliness in everyday life swallowed traces of dreams that sow, burn out the endless days of silence. Let’s escape the night without meaning and no answer. Ascend to the heavens. Disappear, it’s reward to be scattered and decayed. (I’ll love you.) The end of the dream continues.

Where is the real end?

宇宙人×ASA-CHANG&巡礼×押見修造

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goodbyes
( jillian weise )

begin long before you hear them
and gain speed and come out of
the same place as other words.
They should have their own
place to come from, the elbow
perhaps, since elbows look
funny and never weep. Why
are you proud of me? I said
goodbye to you forty times.
I see your point. That is
an achievement unto itself.
My mom wants me to write
a goodbye poem. It should fit
inside a card and use the phrase,
“You are one powerful lady.”
There is nothing powerful
about me though you might
think so from the way I spit.
I don’t want to say goodbye
to you anymore. I heard
the first wave was an accident.
It happened in the Cave
of the Hands in Santa Cruz.
The four of them were drinking
and someone killed
a wild boar and someone else
said, “Hey look, I put my hand
in it. Saying goodbye is like that.
You put your hand in it and then
you take your hand back.

anything that moves the world toward light is a blessing.
( marty mcconnell )

You, and you, and you, whom I had the fortune to meet, or maybe missed.
( mary oliver )

Reasons to Live
( alison luterman )

[...] Music is the day’s blood,
it weaves under and over the roar of the train,
the way thought plays its sweet percussion in our wrists and throats,
even while we sit so quietly
we can hear the small sounds our hearts make
when they have finished breaking themselves
against the rock of the impossible and the beautiful.
Mother-in-law, musician, friend, you know how hard I tried
to make a bridge, to make a tunnel
between one man and one woman
or between the human and divine in both of us,
between spirit and animal. That I failed is beside the point. [...]

The Dislocated Room
( richard siken )

[...] This is the place, you say to yourself, this is the place where everything
starts to begin,
the wounds reveal a thicker skin and suddenly there is no floor.
Meanwhile,
there is something underneath the building that is trying very hard
to get your attention---
a man with almond eyes and a zipper that runs the length
of his spine.
You can see the shadow that the man is throwing across
the linoleum,
how it resembles a boat, how it crosses the tiles just so,
the masts of his arms rasping against the windows.
He's pointing at you with a glass of milk
as if he's trying to tell you that there is
some sort of shining star now buried deep inside you and he has to
dig it out with a knife.
The bell rings, the dog growls,
and then the wind picking up, and the light falling, and his mouth
flickering, and the dog
howling, and the window closing tight against the dirty rain.
Here is the hallway and here are the doors and here is the fear of the
other thing, the relentless
thing, your body drowning in gravity.
This is the in-between, the waiting that happens in the
space between
one note and the next, the place where you confuse
his hands with the room, the dog
with the man, the blood
with the ripped-up sky. [...]

It doesn't matter where I sleep. It doesn't matter where I sleep.
( jennifer michael hecht )

Around you move many seas. It is impossible not to drown a little. In Bulfinch’s, an anchor is let down into the garden. This is to remind us that we live underwater.
( sarah manguso )

Do not eat from the palm of your hand a fluid ounce of what you may need. Do something illegal. You only have to be there when they bring the contraband in. You only have to leave yourself behind.
( jennifer militello )

Prayer
( rainer maria rilke )

Night, silent night, in which are woven
wholly white things, red, colorful things,
scattered colors that have been elevated
to one Darkness, one Silence,— bring
me too into relationship with the Many
which you have persuaded and acquired. Do
my senses still play too much with the light?
Does my countenance from the surrounding
objects still bring disturbance
into relief? Pass judgement upon my hands:
Do they not lie there like tools, like things?
Is not even the ring common
upon my hand, and does not the light
shine so completely, full of trust, upon them,—
as if they were paths, which, when illumined,
branch not differently, as when in darkness? . . .

The fourth was I didn't belong to anyone. I wouldn't allow myself to belong 
to anyone.
( marie howe )

I want you to see through my intentions / I want you to know the price of desire / the scale of things, I want you to understand / why they overestimate the kindness
( serge van duijnhoven )

All right, just a moment. That they always take the rope away from me and cut it. Lately I've been so prepared, and there was already a little bit of eternity in my guts.
( rainer maria rilke )

Try to Remember Some Details
( yehuda amichai )

Try to remember some details. Remember the clothing
of the one you love
so that on the day of loss you'll be able to say: last seen
wearing such-and-such, brown jacket, white hat.
Try to remember some details. For they have no face
and their soul is hidden and their crying
is the same as their laughter,
and their silence and their shouting rise to one height
and their body temperature is between 98 and 104 degrees
and they have no life outside this narrow space
and they have no graven image, no likeness, no memory
and they have paper cups on the day of their rejoicing
and paper cups that are used once only.

Try to remember some details. For the world
is filled with people who were torn from their sleep
with no one to mend the tear,
and unlike wild beasts they live
each in his lonely hiding place and they die
together on battlefields
and in hospitals.
And the earth will swallow all of them,
good and evil together, like the followers of Korah,
all of them in their rebellion against death,
their mouths open till the last moment,
praising and cursing in a single
howl. Try, try
to remember some details.

And this hour, what is dead is worried and what is living is fugitive.
( li-young lee )

Imagine You Are Driving
( john glenday )

Imagine you are driving
nowhere, with no one beside you;
with the empty road unravelling and ravelling
in sympathy as the wheel turns in your hands.

On either side the wheatfields go shimmering
past in an absence of birdsong, and the sky
decants the shadows of the weather from itself.
So you drive on, hopeful of a time

when the ocean will rise up before you like dusk
and you will make landfall at last --
some ancient, long-forgotten mooring,
which both of you, of course, will recognise;

though as I said before, there is no one beside you
and neither of you has anywhere to go.

The Opposite of Nostalgia
( eric gamalinda )

[ ... ] Between you and memory

everything is water. Names of the dead,
or saints, or history.
There is a realm in which
---no, forget, it,

it’s still too early to make anyone understand.
A man drives a stake
through his own heart
and afterwards the opposite of nostalgia

begins to make sense: he stops raking the leaves
and the leaves take over
and again he has learned
to let go.

I’m beginning to think I will never see you again, that I will never see anything again but the twenty yards or so of visibility in stark panorama around my broken sled.
( mindy nettifee )

It is the history of the forest, she says, of ways we get lost; I would like to say how it all happened; I would like to put it right.
( arlene kim )

Going There
( jack gilbert )

Of course it was a disaster.
The unbearable, dearest secret
has always been a disaster.
The danger when we try to leave.
Going over and over afterward
what we should have done
instead of what we did.
But for those short times
we seemed to be alive. Misled,
misused, lied to and cheated,
certainly. Still, for that
little while, we visited
our possible life.

Not
( sophie cabot black )

that you are unloved
but that you love
and must decide which

to remember; tracks left
in the field, a language
of going away or coming back--

and to look up
from the single mind,
to let untangle

the far-off snow
from sky
until no longer

held as proof
is also where birds
find agreement

strung along branches
each with their own song
for the other,

every note used
to sing anyway--
how to hold the already

as the not yet

Unexpected tragedy is all that can stop me.
( tim dlugos )

What's So Amazing
( nate pritts )

I have entered a cloud
& I am sore afraid;

I am standing
alone & the light

is dazzling bright.
There was a moment

when I knew the steps
I was taking would lead

where I needed
to go so I took them,

I did it,
I took those steps

& I was awake
in my own life & you

do not understand
it is not you it is me,

me wanting, me needing
something outside

to anchor this regret to.

What have you known of loss that makes you different from other men?
( gilgamesh )

Sadiq
( brian turner )

It is a condition of wisdom in the archer to be patient
because when the arrow leaves the bow, it returns no more.
—SA’DI

It should make you shake and sweat,
nightmare you, strand you in the desert
of irrevocable desolation, the consequences
seared into the vein, no matter what adrenaline
feeds the muscle its courage, no matter
what god shines down on you, no matter
what crackling pain and anger
you carry in your fists, my friend,
it should break your heart to kill.

The trees are so stark against the sky today I feel a bit like I am living in a picture which is to say I feel surreal and held in one place and held tenderly by the hand of someone I once knew, folded and tucked away by someone else, placed in one of those boxes we all have where we put the things we cannot let go of, the things we want to keep but not see, nor need to, and I think the heart is like that sometimes that it holds distantly to what it might as well just let go. I tell myself a thousand stories about myself. I tell myself You are a good man, you are a bad man, you are wasting your life, you are doing something right.
( clay matthews )

I didn't have the radio-tuning parents who filled the house with music or instilled in me "a love of the cinema." I never recalled my mother coming home from the hairdressers' with a new hairdo or father teaching me fishing, or staying up to watch football on TV. He did once bring a kite home but hung it on my bedroom wall (he turned it into a portrait, it wasn't his fault the wall never became more of a sky).
( alfian bin sa'at )

Snowshoe to Otter Creek
( stacie cassarino )

love lasts by not lasting
—Jack Gilbert

I’m mapping this new year’s vanishings:
lover, yellow house, the knowledge of surfaces.
This is not a story of return.
There are times I wish I could erase
the mind’s lucidity, the difficulty of Sundays,
my fervor to be touched
by a woman two Februarys gone. What brings the body
back, grieved and cloven, tromping these woods
with nothing to confide in? New snow reassumes
the circleting trees, the bridge above the creek
where I stand like a stranger to my life.
There is no single moment of loss, there is
an amassing. The disbeliever sleeps at an angle
in the bed. The orchard is a graveyard.
Is this the real end? Someone shoveling her way out
with cold intention? Someone naming her missing?

Why is the shadow I cast always yours?
( richard jackson )

War Photo 2
( margaret atwood )

Even if you had remained alive,
we would never have spoken.
Suppose we'd shared a road,
a car, a bench, a table -

Maybe you would have offered me
a piece of bread, a slice of lemon.
Or else there would have been suspicion,
or fear, or nothing.

Now though it seems I am asking
and you are answering:

Why is the tree dying?
It is dying for lack of truth.

Who has blocked the wells of truth?
Those with guns.

What if they kill all those with no guns?
Then they will kill one another.

When will there be compassion?
When the dead tree flowers.

When will the dead tree flower?
When you take my hand.

This is the kind of thing
that goes on only in poetry.
You are right to be suspicious of me:
I can't speak your absence for you.

(Why is it then I can hear you so clearly?)

I am living.
I remember you.
( what the living do — marie howe )

It is in the watches of the night that impressions are strongest and words most eloquent.
( qur’an 73:1 )

I bend into the form of a bridge, anything to remind me I am still alive.
( brian turner )

And I knew winter was in store for every leaf on every tree on that road. Was inescapable for each one we passed. And for me. It is winter and the stars are hidden.
( eavan boland )

Edited 2021-03-25 20:54 (UTC)

the fidelity of epitaphs (20 days later)
( marty mcconnell )

[...] you feel

like a cloth set down on something spilled.
useful but soiled. handy, but not essential.
maybe you’ll evaporate, or come apart

in the wash. maybe you’ll figure out
what binds you to this planet
is not a magnet, but a cord so fine
you can slide it across one hand, fold

your fingers around the slippery
umbilical. pull. here is sorrow.
pull. and here is bread. pull. some light
breaks across the linoleum. pull.
where do we go from here.

Les Séparés
( marceline desbordes-valmore )

N'écris pas. Je suis triste, et je voudrais m'éteindre.
Les beaux étés sans toi, c'est la nuit sans flambeau.
J'ai refermé mes bras qui ne peuvent t'atteindre,
Et frapper à mon coeur, c'est frapper au tombeau.
N'écris pas!

N'écris pas. N'apprenons qu'à mourir à nous-mêmes.
Ne demande qu'à Dieu . . . qu'à toi, si je t'aimais!
Au fond de ton absence écouter que tu m'aimes,
C'est entendre le ciel sans y monter jamais.
N'écris pas!

N'écris pas. Je te crains; j'ai peur de ma mémoire;
Elle a gardé ta voix qui m'appelle souvent.
Ne montre pas l'eau vive à qui ne peut la boire.
Une chère écriture est un portrait vivant.
N'écris pas!

N'écris pas ces doux mots que je n'ose plus lire:
Il semble que ta voix les répand sur mon coeur;
Que je les vois brûler à travers ton sourire;
Il semble qu'un baiser les empreint sur mon coeur.
N'écris pas!

Apart
( marceline desbordes-valmore )

Do not write. I am sad, and want my light put out.
Summers in your absence are as dark as a room.
I have closed my arms again. They must do without.
To knock at my heart is like knocking at a tomb.
Do not write!

Do not write. Let us learn to die, as best we may.
Did I love you? Ask God. Ask yourself. Do you know?
To hear that you love me, when you are far away,
Is like hearing from heaven and never to go.
Do not write!

Do not write. I fear you. I fear to remember,
For memory holds the voice I have often heard.
To the one who cannot drink, do not show water,
The beloved one's picture in the handwritten word.
Do not write!

Do not write those gentle words that I dare not see,
It seems that your voice is spreading them on my heart,
Across your smile, on fire, they appear to me,
It seems that a kiss is printing them on my heart.
Do not write!

There will be no going back.

( may sarton )

I don’t want to leave this life without ever having come home

( andrea gibson )

Things
( fleur adcock )

There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.

Goodbye in Slow Motion with Those Trees Waving Back
( alexander long )

As if these words could alter wind's lucid course
And make the trees wave hello again;

As if the wind had something new to bless,
Confess; that, finally, today's losses were palpable, explicable

Even; as if there were a reason for this self-pity
To descend again like shade

From the maples and lilacs and palms,
The sweet peach and lacquered locust,

Those cherries, chestnuts, and oranges .... It has to be

All of them, all of them
lining those streets whose names I loved:

Calle de la Bonanova, Rue Descartes, Aldstadter Ring,
And further still, Coates and Sharon, which aren't

In Barcelona, Paris, or Prague, but from Sharon Hill, from childhood,
Places that don't exist anymore.

As if childhood were some tourist destination to visit
Off season, walking those sun-stroked sidewalks,

Sipping wine in the street-side cafés, saying hello to those
I'll never know in a tongue I used to know.

As if anyone's history were myth, and that myth an unconditional love
For loss. As if sorry didn't exist,

Any need for sorry.

If only childhood would tell the wind where to go,
If only it had a home.

If only this poem could hold childhood in its hands—
All gnarl-knuckled, chapped, blood-cracked—long enough

To say goodbye, to the bartender in Prague
Who was from Brooklyn, who talked with me awhile

About what home can't mean to him anymore, who got lost
Hiking in the Alpines and "ended up in here somehow, never left.... "

As if childhood's a place never left and never found, never
Said goodbye to;

As if that mattered now, as if there were time enough
To say goodbye to childhood

With all the slowness loss demands;

As if loss and childhood were distinct.

As if there were someone to talk with, walk and smoke with.

Besides, after awhile, we'd feel a need to sleep,
This me and that you I once was,

Our skin chilled a little, turning to gooseflesh a little, swept
By an August breeze weaving its way through the trees.

It doesn't matter, though, does it?
You've already begun to name the trees for yourself.

But feel that?

The trees are waving, too.

I'd like to teach you the names of these trees, to confess
How much I need to miss you to finish this off.

A Story That Could Be True
( william stafford )

If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without ever telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.

He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by--
you wonder at their calm.

They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
"Who are you really, wanderer?"--
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
"Maybe I'm a king."

And On The Third Day
( andrew allport )

We called off the search,
and the weary climbed down from the glacier
with their dogs exhausted in the spring sun
too tired to eat the ice in their paws.

We had called his name, mostly for show,
a ritual that kept us moving: in the high bowls,
their stunted pines predating the flood,
in the steep ravines sliding loose with scree,
loudly at first, then speaking it to each other
then spelling it out on forms required by law.

It is a form of praying, he claimed, to walk
out to the very edge of your life. Every time
the reply comes clear as a stone
at our thin crowns. It misses
almost every time, humming as it goes.

And though you will be more thirsty than Noah was before
the flood, you'll find you've forgotten things you once
needed: how to hold on, for example, and how to swallow.
( elaina m. ellis )

Tomorrow
( charles wright )

he metaphysics of the quotidian was what he was after:
A little dew on the sunrise grass,
A drop of blood in the evening trees,
a drop of fire.

If you don’t shine you are darkness.
The future is merciless,
everyone’s name inscribed
On the flyleaf of the Book of Snow.

Detail of the Hayfield
( richard siken )

I followed myself for a long while, deep into the field.
Two heads full of garbage.

Our scope was larger than I realized,
which only made me that much more responsible.

Yellow, yellow, gold, and ocher.
We stopped. We held the field. We stood very still.

Everyone needs a place.

You need it for the moment you need it, then you
bless it--
thank you soup, thank you flashlight--

and move on. Who does this? No one.

I have given my love to what is worthy of love. Is that not the kingdom, and the never perishing spring?
( the farthest shore - ursula k le guin )

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