December 2010
15 posts
whitlovesdalejr88:
Oh my beloved. How happy I was that day when you came here from the railway, and set your hair aright in my looking glass and then sat with me at my table, and lay resting in my big chair. I am like the children o my beloved and I play at marriage—I play with images of the life you will not give to me o my cruel one.
-Yeats (from the manuscript books)
‘Ah, do not mourn,’ he said, ‘That we are tired, for other loves await us; Hate on and love through unrepining hours. Before us lies eternity; our souls Are love, and a continual farewell.’
-Yeats, “Ephemera”
I had no idea that the gate I would step through to finally enter this world
would be the space my brother’s body made. He was a little taller than me: a young man
but grown, himself by then, done at twenty-eight, having folded every sheet,
rinsed every glass he would ever rinse under the cold and running water.
This is what you have been waiting for, he used to say to me. And I’d...
How many times do I have to tell you how the grass spreads, your little pile notwithstanding, in a dark mass which by smoothing over the surface you have finally fully obscured? Watching you
stare into space in the tidy rows of the vegetable garden, ostensibly working hard while actually doing the worst job possible, I think
you are a small irritating purple thing and I would like to see you...
We look at the world once, in childhood. The rest is memory.
-Louise Gluck, “Nostos”
The card-in-front-of-you, from the East, terrible.
Nobody bears witness for the witness.
-Celan, “Ashglory”
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Tell your fingers accompanying you far in- side the crevasses, how I knew you, how far I pushed you into the deep, where my most bitter dream slept with you heart-fro, in the bed of my inextinguishable name.
-Paul Celan, “On the White Phylactery”
Go blind today already: eternity too is full of eyes—
Midday, with seconds’ flurry, in the roundgraveshadow, into my chambered pain —with you, hither- silenced, I lived two days in Rome on ocher and red— you come, I already lie there, gliding light through the doors, horizontal—:
the arms holding you become visible, only they. That much
secrecy I still summoned, in spite of all.
-Paul Celan, “Midday”