Looking away from longing -- Jack Gilbert

[aimlesswanderer.livejournal.com]

Looking away from longing
by Jack Gilbert

On Fish Mountain, she has turned away
from the temple where they painted
pictures of Paradise everywhere inside
so that a population who prayed only
not to live could imagine yearning.
She is looking at a tree instead.
Below is a place where the man
and the beautiful woman will eat
cold noodles almost outside on a hot day.
Below that is the sound of fast water
with a barefoot woman beside it beating
an octopus on the wet stones. And then
the floor of the valley opening out onto
the yellow of blooming mustard and smoke
going straight up from large farmhouses
in the silent early evening. Where they
will walk through all of it slowly,
not talking much. A small him
and a smaller her with long black hair,
so happy together, beginning the trip
toward where she will die and leave him
looking at the back of her turned away
looking at a small tree.

-- from The Great Fires, (poems 1982-1992).

+  I suspect this is the story of Gilbert and Michiko (Gilbert's wife), close to Michiko's death due to an illness.

(no subject)

[eugenetapdance.livejournal.com]

HUMPBACKS
by Mary Oliver

( There is, all around us,/this country/of original fire. )

Lit (or: to the scientist I am not speaking to any more)-- Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

[cest-laila.livejournal.com]

Don’t say you didn’t see this coming, Jason.

Don’t say you didn’t realize this would be my reaction
and that you never intended for me to get all worked up,
because if that were true, then you are dumber
than Lenny from Mice and Men, blinder than Oedipus
and Tierus put together and can feel less
than a Dalton Trumbo character.

You put the Dick in Dickens and the Boo in kowski
and are more Coward-ly then Noël.

But you don’t understand any of these references,
Do you, Jason? Because you ‘don’t read’.
You are a geology major and you once told me
That, ‘Scientists don’t read popular literature,
Cristin, we have more important things to do’.

Well, fuck you.

Be glad you don’t read, Jason,
because maybe you won’t understand this
as I scream it to you on your front lawn,
on Christmas Day, brandishing three hypodermic needles,
a ginsu knife and a letter of permission
from Bret Easton Ellis.

Jason, you are more absurd than Ionesco.
You are more abstract than Joyce,
more inconsistent than Agatha Christie
and more Satanic than Rushdie’s verses.
( Read more )