(no subject)

[rajmahall.livejournal.com]

Please, Water, Hear My Pleas

Oh please, Water, hear my pleas...
Water dark green water
Don't carry my parents away
Smashing their hollow lives against the rocks
Bashing them again and again
Relentless and merciless
Until their bones are stripped of flesh
And bob like driftwood on your roaring currents.
( Read more... )

absences

[anomalous.livejournal.com]

Rain patters on a sea that tilts and sighs.
Fast-running floors, collapsing into hollows,
Tower suddenly, spray-haired. Contrariwise,
A wave drops like a wall: another follows,
Wilting and scrambling, tirelessly at play
Where there are no ships and no shallows.

Above the sea, the yet more shoreless day,
Riddled by wind, trails lit-up galleries:
They shift to giant ribbing, sift away.

Such attics cleared of me! Such absences!




by Philip Larkin. I am completely in love with him lately.

(no subject)

[projectmatt.livejournal.com]

why things burn
daphne gottlieb

My fire-eating career came to an end
when I could no longer tell
when to spit and when

to swallow.
Last night in Amsterdam,
1,000 tulips burned to death.

I have an alibi. When I walked by
your garden, your hand
grenades were in bloom.

You caught me playing
loves me, loves me
not, metal pins between my teeth.

I forget the difference
between seduction
and arson,

ignition and cognition. I am a girl
with incendiary
vices and you have a filthy never

mind. If you say no, twice,
it's a four-letter word.
You are so dirty, people have planted

flowers on you: heliotropes. sun-
flowers. You'll take
anything. Loves me,

loves me not.
I want to bend you over
and whisper: "potting soil," "fresh

cut." When you made
the urgent fists of peonies
a proposition, I stole a pair of botanists'

hands. Green. Confident. All thumbs.
I look sharp in garden
shears and it rained spring

all night. 1,000 tulips
burned to death
in Amsterdam.

We didn't hear the sirens.
All night, you held my alibis
so softly, like taboos

already broken.

When I Buy Pictures

[spiritualorchid.livejournal.com]

or what is closer to the truth,
when I look at that of which I may regard myself as the imaginary possessor,
I fix upon what would give me pleasure in my average moments:
the satire upon curiousity in which no more is discernible
than the intensity of the mood;
or quite the opposite - the old thing, the medieval decorated hatbox,
in which there are hounds with waists diminishing like the waist of the hourglass,
and deer and birds and seated people;
it may be no more than a square of parquestry; the literal biography perhaps,
in letters standing well apart upon a parchment-like expanse;
an artichoke in six varieties of blue; the snipe-legged hieroglyphic in three parts;
the silver fence protecting Adam's grave, or Michael taking Adam by the wrist.
Too stern an intellectual emphasis upon this quality or that detracts from one's enjoyment.
It must not wish to disarm anything; nor may the approved triumph easily be honored -
that which is great because something else is small.
It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,
it must be "Lit with piercing glances into the life of things";
it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.


Marianne Moore, When I Buy Pictures