“Emotions, in my experience, aren't covered by single words. I don't believe in "sadness," "joy," or "regret." Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I'd like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, "the happiness that attends disaster." Or: "the disappointment of sleeping with one's fantasy." I'd like to show how "intimations of mortality brought on by aging family members" connects with "the hatred of mirrors that begins in middle age." I'd like to have a word for "the sadness inspired by failing restaurants" as well as for "the excitement of getting a room with a minibar." I've never had the right words to describe my life, and now that I've entered my story, I need them more than ever. ”

― Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

oh YES!

NPR's story on The Healing Power of Blues Dancing:

LAURA SULLIVAN, host: We're going to take a turn now on the dance floor.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I PUT A SPELL ON YOU")

SULLIVAN: There's a style called blues dancing. It's a kind of marriage between European and African-American styles, born in the Jim Crow South.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I PUT A SPELL ON YOU")

SULLIVAN: They say that dancing to the blues is like falling in love. That's what attracted reporter Lindsey Lee Keel. Here's what she found.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I PUT A SPELL ON YOU")

NINA SIMONE: (Singing) I put a spell on you.

LINDSEY LEE KEEL: You hear that? It's Nina Simone. And this is the blues.

(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "I PUT A SPELL ON YOU")

SIMONE: (Singing) 'Cause you're mine. Du, du, du, du, du, du, du, du, du, du...

KEEL: It's Monday night in San Francisco's Mission District, and I've just arrived at the Polish Club. It's not a bar. It's a community center that tonight, and every Monday night, attracts a crowd of devout blues dancers.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEEL: The room is warm, the windows have begun to fog, the lighting is dim. Couples are close, dancing slowly, arms around necks, heads on shoulders, foreheads pressed together.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEEL: Hips pulsate at the beat. Partners spin out for a moment of space between them, and then they move together again like molecules that can't resist each other.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEEL: Though it might look like it, these dancers are not in love with each other. Some may not even know the name of the person they're dancing with. But everyone is here for that connection, for that feeling.

CAT HUGHES: It's falling in love, that's what it is. It's crazy.

KEEL: This is Cat Hughes. She's been a blues dancer for three years.

HUGHES: Every dance is like a love affair. You're falling in love for three minutes with the music, with your partner, with your connection. And it can be dangerous because you're falling in love like, a million times a night, and it can really screw with your emotions. But it can also be amazing.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEEL: Dancing this way takes some getting used to. Back when she was first starting, blues dancer Krystal Wanberg remembers telling a prominent dancer in the scene how nervous she was.

KRYSTAL WANBERG: And he was like, OK, just play along with me. Pretend that I am your one, true love. And I kind of gave him this weird look. He's like, wait, wait, wait. I am your one, true love, and I have been called off to war, and I'm leaving tomorrow. You may never see me again. He's like, dance with me like that. I was just like, ah.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

KEEL: Wanberg was hesitant, but then she gave in.

WANBERG: And then we danced, and it was just the most incredibly connected dance. I was completely, completely done. Like, I was a blues dancer after that. It was done.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEEL: Many dancers talk about before blues and after blues. Vhary Leggat started dancing almost two years ago. She says before blues, she had a drinking problem. She struggled with a negative body image. She sometimes felt suicidal. But after blues...

VHARY LEGGAT: I have become more connected to my body. You can't go to a dance and say, I don't want to be reminded that my body exists - because that's what dancing is. And so that's extremely important for me because I had never before found a situation where I wanted that to be true.

KEEL: For Leggat, blues dancing is about transformation.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

LEGGAT: My release from fear and sadness started with getting sober, and ended with learning to dance.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

LEGGAT: Because of those two things, I am awake, and I am healing.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEEL: Blues music was once called the devil's music.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEEL: But for so many, blues has saved them.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEEL: Though the Polish Club may not have a neon sign that says Blues Saves - shining like a guiding light for the wayward - and you won't see dancers at your door holding pamphlets, for Hughes, Wanberg and Leggat, the road to a better life began at the Church of Blues.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

KEEL: For NPR News, I'm Lindsey Lee Keel.

Yesterday I began to write a long dissertation-worthy (and perhaps every bit as yawn-inducing) paragraph about the three books I finished over the weekend. (I am, tragically or miraculously, a serial multi-tasker).

The friend who sent me the quote I posted a while ago had actually never read the book from which it originated. Coincidentally, this book was in my long queue of books to read, and I moved it up. This was one of the books I read last week. I finished it in two sittings, and felt at once this terrible sadness that it was over, and this wonderful luckiness that I had the pleasure of reading it.

The book is not perfect. It's impossibly romantic, in a way that's downright unbelievable. The vocabulary that the teenagers use in the book is awe-strikingly advanced, and the wit sharper than I've ever known wit to be.

I feel akin to those kinds of stories, because I am a very flawed human being, and I've retained an almost pathetic romanticism that weighs me down with constantly unfulfilled expectations as I trod through relationship after relationship. My long-ago studies of SAT words have left me with an insatiable love for looking up words I don't know the meaning of, and I fall to pieces over the kind of rare sophisticated wit that doesn't take itself too seriously.

Anyway. Some quotes:

"... and then he broke down, just for one moment, his sob roaring impotent like a clap of thunder unaccompanied by lightning, the terrible ferocity that amateurs in the field of suffering might mistake for weakness."

"It occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true, because there is always the thought that everything might be done better and again."

"And of course, if you ever do decide to write anything else, even if you don't want to publish it, I'd love to read it. Frankly, I'd read your grocery lists."

"But of course there is always a hamartia."

"Pain demands to be felt.:"

"I'm in love with you, and I'm not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things."

"Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace. It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you."

All quotes from The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. 

Planets

What gravity is this

or, what matter are you

that I find myself drawn to your center, 

yes, down to my very core?

When they failed to define us as planets any longer,
the loneliness hung between us
but not shared at first, it was just
there -

and facing our separate worlds abandoned,

we cling to each other
afraid at once that
this orbit will last forever
and yet also that it will end

we trace the patterns in our wary heartbeat
(more like constellations than just a lone star,)
we allow the void to empty into our palms
(more like stillness than just dark,)

until your breath becomes my universe
and my quiet becomes your song

Two more tango poems by L. Kwan (He's cranking them out). 

First Tango Lesson


In the beginning. Not feet.

But small children who were raised in the forest, vying to be in front of the other, their earnest display of welcome.

I remember long ago playing with them in the forest.

When I saw the men with guns coming and I abandoned them.

"Hello again. My name is."

My language tossed aside.

Only interest and wonder at such difference or indifference on our parts, eyes taking in what I might call "countenance."

In other words

How to communicate my hunger
Now that I too was in their forest. How to survive with grubs and berries, roots dug up and acorns ground into gruel.

How naked I became.

Not even a rag to cover my loins before them.

Hair matted to their foreheads, dirt on the brow and chin, their tongues tasting every green thing and remembering the scent on their upper lips.

Such wildness of feeling I had lost
Not innocence
They were still children after all
Human like me.

One a boy. The other a girl. Teaching something simple but necessary to share. They stood there and took turns holding me.

The word for shelter.

---

Endeavour

Between nights of tango, the day fills itself
with space shuttles perched on jumbo jets,
a reminder that even our loftiest efforts must end.

At the office, we rush onto the roof, gravel and tar
pungent and crunching beneath our shoes. 
The wind splits our collars and this close to the edge

our feet pinch the deck like rail birds as our chatter mocks
the street-stuck gawkers ten stories below us. I get woozy
with imagining gravity and breaking it, like water rising

to the chest, carried into salty seas, or a sudden womb
enveloping my grown body, how being held and holding you
feels simultaneous, what the interior of a circle must be.

Our CEO shouts and points at a large seagull, again
at a plastic bag, jellyfish puffing through the rare air,
everything not quite what we want to see,

but no one’s cynical this high up, and we’re all in love
with what we might see and dizzy ourselves,
each second another door into the possible,

the delay of gratification more satisfying
than the thing itself, ceremoniously lumbering
its space-weary cargo across downtown’s rake of buildings

where you illuminate my darkest corners, throw flares
into the unknown. Curiosity can fling a man
from an entire planet, this much I know. We risk love

everyday. Tonight, I’ll step into your space and feel the clean
coldness of you, weightless in your vastness
where our most precise experiments can be tested.

And though you may refuse my theories, I know

my body warms you, as any body in heaven would.

I sit next to MB's office. He's a Steel City old-timer, been here all his life working in the oil and gas industry. He's worked in the field all his life, wears jeans to the office every day ("because no one has told me I can't").

When cookies or candy or other sweets are involved, I compete readily with him. I can down 6 cookies in the blink of an eye. Yesterday he stopped by to chat, and we started talking about Reese's peanut butter cups. He said he can eat an entire bag of the Reese's pieces, and I said I would too except for my wariness about my waistline. He stared at me for a full 30 seconds in disbelief and told me that I am the size of a stick. I never deny that I'm in decent shape, but I know that my metabolism isn't that of my 16 year old self, either. But MB asked me why all women are worried about this stuff. I conjured up what I usually say, some mish-mash about the media, and magazines, and models.

He said, "let me tell you something. When I look at a Monet painting, I think, that's really beautiful. I think, I could look at this for a long time and think it's beautiful, but inevitably, when I see the same thing every day, and the same type of painting at every turn, even the paintings that everyone consider extraordinary are going to get ordinary. So I don't think people should be so concerned about their paintings looking like a Monet painting. Maybe they should just make their paintings look like their own painting."

And that was the mind blowing wisdom I received yesterday from a guy who works out in the field.

rainy morning. 

Becoming Weather, 21
by Chris Martin
I was out interviewing clouds         amassing                     the notes of a sky pornographer    while patches                                              of the city subnormalized by fear of fear            like a reef bleaching closed                     I took to the streets                               looking for a human velocity               feeling                 disequilibrium                                          heavy in the abundance                              of summer light                                                        the silent apathy               of stars     which is neither                                               silent nor apathetic I             am       becoming                 weather                                                                                  and               I don't                                plan on doing                                                                       it alone

Last week, instead of walking to dinner, I walked to a bookstore. And I spent my dinner money on books.

These days I feel torn when I see books I want, because I now own a Kindle to make my travel reading easier. But poetry, poetry I always buy in book form. I like to scan the poetry section and find all the tiny volumes hidden among the overwhelming anthologies of the more famous, classical poets. I don't pretend to know anything about poetry. I haven't studied literature, and I haven't learned how to analyze writing. Sometimes these tiny, simple volumes take me by surprise as I flip through them. Usually it's certain words, or the simplicity of the typography, or the modesty of the cover. Shyly, and perhaps predictably, I admit that I love to read about love.

I plucked Eliza Griswold's Wideawake Field from the shelf. I thumbed through the pages. I secretly confess that I took photos of the poems I liked, until I realized I was photographing every page. While the language is simple, I believe this is precisely what stopped me in my tracks. Her conciseness allows her poetry to transcend the usually complex language that is required to describe such heavy human emotion, such as loneliness, not taking things for granted,  and, of course, love.

Well. Of course, I took this as my meal, and my heart felt full.

---

The synopsis:

The chairs have come in

and the crisp yellow thwock

of the ball being hit

says somehow, now that it's fall,

I'm a memory of myself.

My whole old life--

I mourn you sometimes

in places you would have been.

                                     --October

The poems in this fierce debut are an attempt to record what matters. As a reporter's dispatches, they concern themselves with different forms of desolation: what it means to feel at home in wrecked places and then to experience loneliness and dislocation in the familiar. The collection arcs between internal and external worlds--the disappointment of returning, the guilt and thrill of departure, unexpected encounters in blighted places-- and, with ruthless observations etched in the sparest lines, the poems in Wideawake Field sharply and movingly navigate the poles of home and away.

The title poem trails at the end of the book:

I’ve never been where we are,
although the glass studded
with soldier’s rusted buttons
says we aren’t the first.
The airstrip’s islands of cracked macadam
suggest an ancient volcano.
We are the volcano.

We, the notes sung
by a creator, who, if not singular,
is creation—
not an idea, a force.
Let us tumble.
Let us laugh at our grip.
If these are last days,
let them not catch us sleeping
but awake in this field, and ready.

---

The lone review on Amazon reads:
"As someone who has spent a great deal of my life overseas, and particularly in areas of conflict, it felt like Eliza had accompanied me for much of it. Yet I think her work moves beyond the specific and touches on the universal struggling to be - and because we are - only human."

B.


---

from Work in Progress, previously unpublished poetry by Eliza Griswold. These poems are longer, and more specific to her work as a reporter.

Metamorphosis

The mimosa trees misunderstand
the New Year’s heat, and burst
into mustard tufts across the garden—
their premature buds a birth
forced by the earth’s unnaturalness.
Poor trees, like nine-year-old girls
who have to negotiate breasts.  It’s death
pressing up under the most tender flesh.
In this age, most of us feared ours
were tumors, and we were in season.

Long ago, a girl could become a tree.
Daphne’s fingers sprouted twigs;
root hairs branched from her toes;
her torqued curls gnarled into limbs.
She thickened, as we do, in self-defense.

Libyan Proverbs

The naked man in the caravan has peace of mind.
He who has luck will have the winds blow him his firewood.
He whose trousers are made of dry grass should not warm himself at the fire.
He howled before going mad, and led a lion by the ear.
Like the sparrow, he wanted to imitate the pigeon’s walk but lost his own.
Walk with sandals till you get good shoes. Where the turban moves,
there goes the territory. Him whom you do not see, see his companions.
Men meet but mountains don’t.  Always taking, not giving back,
even mountains will be broken down.
Penny piled on penny will make a heap.
Fish eats fish and he who has no might dies.
The small donkey is the one everybody rides.
My belly before my children.  Sons I have not got,
but I have a mess on my clothes. Only the unlucky coin
is left in the purse. As long as a human being lives
he will learn. Learn to shave by shaving orphans.
He who is to be hanged can insult the Pasha.
In the house of a man who has been hanged
do not talk of rope. Much shouting and crowds
over a hedgehog’s slaughter. The funeral
is big but the corpse is a mouse.
I lick my grindstone and sleep in peace.

Sabaudia

The delicate Italian town
preserves its symbols—
its sheaves of wheat and axes
stamped onto manhole covers.
A balcony presses past a worker’s window
in the same crossed shape
of wheat bound by wheat.
Yet the white, weathered farmers
have fled utopia. This block is let
to gypsies and Africans.
The cash crop is kiwis.
All markets are black.
Without meaning to, I file
these facts to show you,
ambassador to a country
that no longer exists.

The only place I miss more than home when I am away from it is New York City.

Listening to Enrique Rodriguez and absentmindedly watching Pablo y Noelia glide across the floor.




More poems below by L. Kwan.


Another’s

Another’s...another’s, you are in the arms of another
and here, I, powerless to stop you, watch

the one I can’t have with the one I can’t be, holding
each other, even through the goose cackles of cortinas.

Earlier we strode cleaving to Di Sarli, lost in the lush
hedgerows of his violins, and I had a better chance

than he does now, to step into you with a feather and hear
the sound of lightness as it bore our weight on a pause.

But I was afraid to share a tired line, how upon your descent
among our shadows, so many had already uttered,

‘a great weight fell into the well of my chest, and out poured desire.’
Silent, we parted respectfully, the vegetable scent leaving.

You felt what the music dictated, nothing more. So here,
take these lines I’ve roughened on the hot stones of my ribs.

Take them. They may be the only thing better
than the arms you are in, and the one thing that lasts longer.

----

Arriving at the Cortina Again 

I know how a tanda ends with nothing 
I am at the end of love 

Rather I am unsure how to go on
I imagine a train punctua

ted by the caboose

Feels like no longer possessing
I see a woman on the rear platform

She looks to be waving a white handkerchief
Or her dress is billowing as the train keeps leaving

The caboose is getting pulled into a tunnel without exit
The tunnel reappears on the other side of earth

Or the tunnel has not yet been dug out
The crash for one would sound beautiful

Then beauty is a pile up with a woman at the end
Or maybe the tunnel keeps going, meaning down

There’s no picturing a train moving endlessly down
I imagine nothing is too dark to see ahead

She is looking backwards and going forward
It is this way when a woman feels like being swallowed

I let out a long loud O
A pleasure to do so in a tunnel

Even if the tunnel steadily descends to Hades
Who would decide on such a trip

Maybe she was never real
Her dress looks more like a flag on its pole

The flag is flown atop the tallest building
It flaps and flaps and keeps getting smaller

I remember that surrender of once loved
I break like a dish or I keep falling

You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.

-Anais Nin in a letter to Leonard W.

Excerpt from an interview with Carl Phillips

4. You’ve written a lot about restlessness as the force to pivot around in art—how do you think this problem or gift of restlessness fuels another writerly concern, obsession? Does it go hand in hand with being an artist, or more specifically, a poet?

Restlessness tosses us from one thing to another. Obsession is a focusing on a single thing. But we don’t know what our obsessions might be, until restlessness tosses us in their direction—some stick, and others don’t. Just as we meet many people in a life, but we fall in love with a handful, if we’re lucky. I think both restlessness and obsession go hand in hand with being an artist, but I also think they go hand in hand with being a human being who is truly alive.

...

6. How intimately are politics and poetry linked in your mind? Do you consider every poem to be a political act, by its existence as an artifact, or do you have to decide to write a “political poem?”

I suppose every poem is political in some way. If the reigning mode is a plainspoken style of English, for example, perhaps to write poems like mine is a political act, arguing for independent uses of language. To write a poem about love between two men is not, to my mind, political, but I suppose it is, within a culture of homophobia. I’ve been told I’m political for refusing to write about race—I’m not sure what it means to write about race, anymore than I can say why I’m occasionally still told that I don’t seem to write a black poem. What is a black poem? What is a political poem?

7. There has been a lot of discussion lately about the future of the printed word and the solvency of literary journals and publishing in general. As a writer who publishes extensively in literary journals both high- and low-profile, what can you say about the value and necessity of these outlets?

I think journals are essential, for reasons that I can’t entirely explain. Partly it has to do with my need to feel—physically feel—something in my hands, with pages, with a smell of new paper, or old paper, to it. To read things online is a totally detached experience, for me. I feel alone in the room, somehow. Maybe that doesn’t make journals technically necessary, but art itself isn’t necessary either. Without it, though, the fabric of life would lack texture.

AXIS, By L. Kwan

Much used, this word, and maligned
in times of war. So many evils
amok in our world, sweetheart, we need

to line them up, to be aware of
which man to fear, what planes
to watch and how to think, but I can only think

of you, my dear, my axis I care for, your line
I must toe, my sun pillar at daybreak, my syzygy
of lunar eclipses, unseen but felt as tides,
strong-legged to my harbor waves. I push

on you, my tries to enter, to knock
you over with maleness, with brute and brio
but gentle and against, your hips
receive me, steer straight my sword, and foil

this commoner’s insurrection, your empire,
oh empress, will stand and fly
itself from the capital flagpole, on which we snap
our banners of flesh, admired from afar
like the Eiffel Tower, which is your neck
its sides carving up, or a sliding down

towards your vaulted clavicles, steeple to your cathedral,
Notre Dame, in which I pray, I confess
how I envy
the drop of sweat
tumbling its every surface
on your surface, making steam, an engine

pulsing, pushing pulleys, cranked tension
and release of lungs where my breath
adds to your breath, our minds
subtracted, bodies only meant to multiply
our steps, my legs
dividing your legs
to propel us along the Y,

according to Z, you gifted time,
and lifted me up the X
where it marks the spot for us to reach
our hands beneath

and bring up our two axes
to hew our hands as one
and swing us our axes

one tree down, a forest to go,
a forest to dull us, our axes,
so we have some to grind, baby
let's do it, we'll sharpen our blunts
and edge out the crowd, thin us

our logs and pile it on, we’ll build
us a floor, a dance hall, a home, here

the foundation, its corners and degrees,
here the measured roof, the leeward window,
here the basement and bedroom braced,
everything's leveled, everything’s plumb.
Here is my hand, and here you are, my dear, the door.

For the record, I almost never listen to my voicemails. It's a really strange habit, since I'm almost neurotic about reading emails on time.

I just spent an hour going through voicemails that I hadn't listened to since May. about 80% of them are from two people. I loved to hear the greeting in each one. The most popular ones being: "Rose!" or "This is..."

It makes me happy to click through them all and hear the different emotions that come from the same voices.

It's been a while since I listed some of the music that I've been listening to lately.

• Stars- Lights Changing Colour
• Stars- Hold On When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give It
• Sun Kil Moon- Among the Leaves
• Regina Spektor- How
• Regina Spektor- Firewood
• Regina Spektor- Don't Leave Me (Ne Me Quitte Pas)
• Ben Harper- Burn One Down
• Pretty Lights- Finally Moving
• Meaghan Smith- Here Comes Your Man
• Creedence Clearwater Revival- Have You Ever Seen The Rain?
• Morcheeba- I Am The Spring
• Blind Pilot- 3 Rounds and a Sound
• The Irrepressibles- In This Shirt (which was featured in So You Think You Can Dance and also makes an appearance during the new Step Up Revolution movie. Jussayin.)
• Matt Nathanson- All We Are
• Clory Martin- Summer Spent
• Ratatat- Loud Pipes
• Sam Cooke- Sugar Dumpling
• My Brightest Diamond- Be Brave

update: Matchbox


it’s quiet tonight and you
instruct me where i should place my head when in close embrace,
looking straight backward instead of
pressed against your cheek.

in the midst of our battlefield of ochos cortados and
molinetes (which Quixote also attacked in earnest),
my gasoline-drenched legs make contact against the gunpowder of your smoldering words

and one morning we looked down and found that
the hardwood beneath us was burning,
around us the bandits of movement, burning
upon us the bandages of poetry, burning
bees and honey, and anthologies of a mere thought named Peace
burning.

i'm still the gasoline,
i still smell and taste like burning fuel
lying here with pieces of past
here, where our antebellum innocence reeks of happiness
and where the remains of our independence we find
wounded and strewn all over the ground.

it’s quiet tonight and i
listen patiently to the intent within your chest
while the swords of your breath
challenge duels with the air

“Let me explain a few things,”
you offered in the dark
and in your wordless explanation you
fastened your body to my arms
and reminded me with galloping silence
that love is not always melancholy
and songs are not always sad
and poetry doesn’t always burn,
and peace can be more than thought
and breathing doesn’t always mean fighting

and if these are the nights of vulnerable fires,

let me be water just this once
let me break against your harbor of sand.

Matchbox- 8/29/2008

it’s quiet tonight and you
instruct me where i should place my head when in close embrace,
looking straight backward instead of
pressed against your cheek.

in the midst of our battlefield of ochos cortados and bad breath,
my gasoline-drenched legs rub against the gunpowder of your smoldering words
and one morning the hardwood was burning,
bandits of movement, burning
bandages of poetry, burning
bees and honey, and anthologies of a mere thought named Peace
burning.

i'm still the gasoline,
i still smell and taste like burning fuel
lying here with pieces of past

here, where our antebellum innocence reeks of happiness
and where the remains of our independence are wounded and strewn all over the ground

it’s quiet tonight and i
listen patiently to your chest
while the swords of your breath
challenge duels with the air

“Let me explain a few things,”
you offered in the dark
and in your wordless explanation you
fastened your body to my arms
and reminded me with galloping silence
that love is not always melancholy
and songs are not always sad
and poetry doesn’t always burn,
and peace can be more than thought
and breathing doesn’t always mean fighting

and if these are the nights of vulnerable fires,

let me be water just this once
let me break against your harbor of sand.

Someone asked Loren if she could share his poem. His response: "yea share and write your own poems to share, i'm trying to start a revolution of feeling"




Parting Words and Salida, by Loren Kwan


If you had read this after our very last tango
And not this first day, everything still to be explored

And if I will have been honest
Then you will know these things I want to keep hidden

I am not always honest
Nor am I particularly courageous
My eye, as if to follow the flight of a startled bird
Will avoid your gaze
My embrace will stiffen with fright
And my language be useless

If I am brave at all
It is because I am thinking first of myself, my floor
And not you
I am hunting for my self among the circling throng
And not the quietude of you

For I have been afraid of you my whole life
You who are destined to change me
Who will turn my foot one way, and my head another

So that I might trust a direction I cannot yet see
But must go

Today, Addie's post.

Related to one of my recent posts about Junot Diaz:

Near the end of this book Yunior writes, “The half-life of love is forever.” I love that line and have been carrying it in my head for weeks now. But, I can’t help but wonder: What is the half-life of sexual desire?

For some guys sexual desire doesn’t last any longer than it takes them to consummate it. But it really does depend, doesn’t it? Some lovers burn themselves deeply into you and are not easily forgotten. But I figure the real reason I can’t forget some of my lovers is because I truly loved them. Desire lives longer inside of love—that’s been my experience. From what I’ve seen desire without love is vulnerable to any and all vicissitudes. But desire within love is invincible.

from an interview with Diaz: here

I create these fears in my mind
I match your actions to my fears

I make the imperfections real by willing them to be

--


When someone tells me they understand, that it's okay, that they are there for me:

"That's what the people who've consoled me the most deeply in my sorrow have done. They've spoken those words or something like them every time I needed to hear it; they've plainly acknowledged what is invisible to them, but so very real to me. I know saying those cliched and ordinary things makes you feel squirmy and lame. I feel that way too when I say such things to others who have lost someone they loved. We all do. It feels lame because we like to think we can solve things. It feels insufficient because there is nothing we can actually do to change what's horribly true.
But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got."

- Cheryl Strayed, "Tiny Beautiful Things"

opened the curtains to the sunrise
opened my email to a quote my friend sent me:
"I fell in love the way you fall asleep: slowly, then all at once."

The all-too familiar feeling of abandonment
scratches listlessly against my ears.

You are already bringing down the walls
of a fortress I didn't have time to build.

There was something overtly uncautious about the way your hands slid over my skin.
There was no light in the room,
it was too early even for the sun.

Nobody could hear our dreams.
How do you stop dreaming and remain human?

It was an eternity that we have known each other.
But it felt like we had never spoken
or perhaps we never listened.

Our deaf ears had reasons of their own.
And now we deftly cling to syllables that seem nonsensical.
We turn to stanzas that do not rhyme.

My hesitation is louder than our deafness
My hurt beats faster than our hearts

I do not know how to run,
I only ever learned how to stand
Still against the non-sunlit room
Still against the rivalry of sisterhood
Still against the arguments that rise from your lips
Still against your kisses that pour against my tougue.

Junot Diaz's new book is coming out soon. This week, in fact. 

This Is How You Lose Her features nine stories by Junot Diaz, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in 2008. At the center of each story is Yunior (making his third appearance in Diaz's work), a Dominican American stud who, despite his macho exterior, aches to be loved. At first blush, this slim volume lacks the ambition and scope of Oscar Wao, a condensed pop-culture epic. But Diaz has done an extraordinary thing here: He has taken Yunior's heart and battered it every which way to show how love--romantic, physical, or familial--can affect even the most masculine character. The final story, "The Cheater's Guide to Love," features the collection's stickiest line: "The half-life of love is forever." Diaz compares heartbreak to radiation, its strength decaying exponentially over time. You can bury it underground and try to forget about it, but it never goes away entirely. --Kevin Nguyen

This morning:
- what got me out of bed, to my delight, green tea blend in place of the usual English black tea
- an unanswered call to my mother
- Clory Martin crooning about Austin
- soul food for breakfast, which was late enough to be lunch, which included grits (which we spooned the butter out of) and waffles and pork chop and amazing potatoes
- trying to wash away the headache that is throbbing, and the webs of sleepiness that wash over my body
- reading interviews with Borges.

Jorge Luis Borges being interviewed by Stephen Cape, 1980:

SC: Do you think of words as having effects that are inherent in the word or in the images they carry?

Borges: Well yes, for example, if you attempt a sonnet, then, at least in Spanish, you have to use certain words. There’s only a few rhymes. And those of course may be used as metaphors, peculiar metaphors, since you have to stick to them. I would even venture to say — this of course is a sweeping statement — but perhaps the word ‘moon’ in English stems from something different that the word ‘luna’ in Latin or Spanish. The moon… the word ‘moon’ is a lingering sound. Moon is a beautiful word. The French word is also beautiful: ‘lune’. But in Old English the word was ‘mona’. The word isn’t beautiful at all, two syllables. And then the Greek is worse. We have ‘celena’, three syllables. But the word ‘moon’ is a beautiful word. That sound is not found, let’s say in Spanish. The moon. I can linger in words. Words inspire you. Words have a life of their own.

SC: The word’s life of its own, does that seem more important than the meaning that it gives in a particular context?

Borges: I think that the meanings are more or less irrelevant. What is important, or the two important facts I should say, are emotion, and then words arising from emotion. I don’t think you can write in an emotionless way. If you attempt it, the result is artificial. I don’t like that kind of writing. I think that if a poem is really great, you should think of it as having written itself despite the author. It should flow.

…

SC: The Hopi Indians are used as an example many times, because of the nature of their language, of how language and vocabulary thought-

Borges: I know very little about it. I was told of the Pampas Indians by my grandmother. She lived all of her life in Junin; that was on the western end of civilization. She told me as a fact that their arithmetic went thus. She held up a hand and said, “I’ll teach you the Pampas Indians’ mathematics.” “I won’t understand,.” “Yes,” she said, “you will. Look at my hands: 1, 2, 3, 4, Many.” So, infinity went on her thumb.

the Tango space is a cautious one for me, now. for many reasons.
sometimes I feel as though it is a series of scenes from Waking Life, and not only because Glover Gill scored the soundtrack.
I have disjointed conversations in between disjointed dances,
tango tango vals tango tango milonga.
TTVTTM they say,
and .


Every since I met L, I have wanted to read his poetry. Poetry books are stacked everywhere in his apartment. I am hesitant to post this here because this is his, and it is for an Intended audience. but as this place has been a collection of notes that explode with inspiration for me, I am putting it here for safekeeping and contemplation.


Preparing to Cabaceo, by L. Kwan


I am taller than most parked cars in my neighborhood
whose city blocks take
about two thoughts to stride across.
The amount of time I avoid a stranger’s eye contact
comes close to four steps,
then I peer up again to inspect the bungalows and cottages
dressed in leaves of ivy, glassy from too much light.

At times the sun is very warm upon the asphalt,
though often the coastal fog has nightly crept beneath the bridge
and driven attractive, young people indoors.
We are all average and the men roughly weigh
within twenty pounds of each other which is comforting.
Music is playing for one half of the room
to watch the other half dance.
The women lose themselves among talk of other women
because what is beautiful remains a debate in this era
of recession, while the young men busy themselves with side-stares
as their beards grow hoary and their drink glasses
empty beneath broad-hazy grins.
The syrupy air in these rooms smells of medicine and sometimes
nobody is looking to be healed,
causing a reluctant abandonment into the cold.
Outside the stars have come out
with the primitive force of prophecy, bones strewn about.
I breathe quieter than half the population
as I continue over the crest of Dolores towards home.
Thinking of one thing at a time before each red light enlarges in my vision,
I keep a good pace by myself.
Every so often a young woman also stops at the crosswalk
and leans her frame on the roughness of the lamppost.
I am smoother than most stones against her hand.

My favorite response so far to my now-obsolete online dating profile:

"I don't believe it."

“I am awfully greedy; I want everything from life. I want to be a woman and to be a man, to have many friends and to have loneliness, to work much and write good books, to travel and enjoy myself, to be selfish and to be unselfish.”

- Simone de Beauvoir 

(from addie)

the mornings here:

the light through the windows is grey. 

the ceiling fan turns quietly. 

the blankets have gotten hot from the night time heat. 

the light dapples across the couch in the living room. 

my black tea is unsweetened. 

it was a dreamless sleep. 

Note to self: pop up shows 

who puts the heart in your heartbreak?