July 2012
21 posts
from "August: An Anniversary Suite"
1. Paper
Opening to a private sky
birch bitings and burnt flutter. Our tent stretched— smoke over the threshold when you ushered me through.
No talk— night in the low roofs of our mouths, night
hidden in a stand of aspens, out there and between us, newly ringed, keys in the ignition. Idling
stardust, mosquitoes. Koriusai, Utamaro, Ursa Major’s erotic drawings
closer now to black...
“I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything enters me more...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge (S. Mitchell, translator)
7 tags
To The Harbormaster
I wanted to be sure to reach you; though my ship was on the way it got caught in some moorings. I am always tying up and then deciding to depart. In storms and at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide around my fathomless arms, I am unable to understand the forms of my vanity or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder in my hand and the sun sinking. To you I offer my hull and the tattered...
“We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm...”
– Ernest Hemingway, “A Moveable Feast”
6 tags
Paula: What do you think was the most important advance that women of color made on the work of those earlier male thinkers?
Junot: Well, first of all these sisters were pretty clear that redemption was not going to be found in the typical masculine nostrums of nationalism or armed revolution or even that great favorite of a certain class of writerly brother: transracial intimacy. Por favor! If...
6 tags
“How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures...”
– Darl, As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
Gacela of Unforeseen Love
No one understood the perfume of the dark magnolia of your womb. Nobody knew that you tormented a hummingbird of love between your teeth.
A thousand Persian little horses fell asleep in the plaza with moon of your forehead, while through four nights I embraced your waist, enemy of the snow.
Between plaster and jasmins, your glance was a pale branch of seeds. I sought in my heart to give you the...
“I’d tell all my friends but they’d never believe me, they’d...”
– “Subterranean Homesick Alien,” Radiohead