January 2011
50 posts
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Born Yesterday
Tightly-folded bud,
I have wished you something
None of the others would:
Not the usual stuff
About being beautiful,
Or running off a spring
Of innocence and love—
They will all wish you that,
And should it prove possible,
Well, you’re a lucky girl.
*
But if it shouldn’t, then
May you be ordinary;
Have, like other women,
An average of talents:
Not ugly, not...
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“What an astonishing thing a book is. Across the millennia, an author is speaking...”
– Carl Sagan (via invaderxan) (via teachingliteracy)
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“Happiness at last, happiness close to tears, because I wish to hold against me,...”
– Albert Camus, Notebooks: 1951-1959 (via acamusobsession)
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David Sedaris →
Let it be known: I love David Sedaris. I first heard him on tape in the car when I was 13, and can say to this day that no writer has ever made me laugh so hard. He continually inspires me with his wit, searing honesty, and subtle optimism. His life story is just as wonderful: coming from a middle-class family of six, dropping out of college twice, and working a number of years as a...
“You know that place between sleeping and awake, that place where you can still...”
– J.M. Barrie (via contrive)
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Trading for Heaven
I saw you at the top of the stairs.
Now I live a secret life.
*
I saw you holding open the door.
Now I’m filling the pages with
*
things I can’t tell anyone.
Now I’m more alone than I’ve ever been.
*
I traded every beyond, every someday,
for heaven in my lifetime. Now I’m dying
*
of my life. Now I’m alive
inside my death.
*
Do you see the space...
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Seven Happy Endings
Love, after talking all night,
where are we? Where did we begin?
I needed to name this, needed to know
what we meant when we said we,
when we said us, when we said this.
I wanted to call it something:
Shadows on the garden wall.
A man rowing out alone to sea.
Seven happy endings.
And you? You were happy
with two rooms, and a door to divide them.
And daylight on either side of the...
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Goodnight
You’ve stopped whispering and are asleep. I go on listening
to apples drop in the grass beyond the window. Earlier we tried to guess
each fall’s moment, but neither kept up that little game of hope
or fear for long. Now, your weight against me is like … I was about to say
like no other, unmistakably human, my son’s. But truth is, you’re simply
heft. Burden...
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You Must Sing
He sings in his father’s arms, sings his father to sleep, all the while seeing how on that face grown suddenly strange, wasting to shadow, time moves. Stern time. Sweet time. Because his father
asked, he sings; because they are wholly lost. How else, in immaculate noon, will each find each, who are so close now? So close and lost. His voice stands at windows, runs everywhere.
Was death...
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The City
The city exulted, all in flowers.
Soon it will end: in fashion, a phase, the epoch, life.
The terror and sweetness of a final dissolution.
Let the first bombs fall without delay.
At Dawn
How enduring: how we need durability.
The sky before sunrise is soaked with light.
Rosy color taints buildings, bridges and the Seine.
I was here when she, with whom I walk, wasn’t born yet
And the cities on a distant plain stood intact
Before they rose in the air with the mist of sepulchral brick
And the people who lived there didn’t know.
Only this moment at dawn is real to...
