a gallery full of excerpts

My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—         equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me         keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be         astonished. The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture. Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart         and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy         to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all, over and over, how it is         that we live forever.

In paradise the work week is fixed at thirty hours and manual labor is only pleasantly more tiring than typing so that a morning chopping wood is barely enough to make the ham sandwich and the cold bottle of beer a bit more delicious at the rough wooden table afterward

Punctuation is underused because words flow one into the other like branching streams of snowmelt wrinkling over rough granite into alpine meadows where tiny stars pass themselves off as flowers and the children weave green stems into crowns which are the only trappings worn by the rulers who are wise and listen intently to their subjects without merely thinking of what words they will offer in response

The parks are clean the social system stable and the new eight day week has created a gentle hammock of time in what used to be Sunday evening where the bells toll and streets are closed so families might stroll the avenues

Old men still wear their pants too high public fountains are still fish-scaled with coins the authorities have yet to solve how the smell of frying food hangs in the air for hours

At first the great beyond was to have been quite different each life was to have comprised one note in the harmonious thrum of a cosmic chord but they found it too difficult to reduce even simple lives to a single sound and a gluey paste kept getting caught at the back of the angels’ throats

after Richard Siken

so when i walk down the street, i hold hands with the wind. there’s a chimney coughing up ahead & a sky so honey, i could almost taste it. a cat struts away from me & two yellow eyes become four: just like that, i’m the loneliest creature on this block. soon the streetlights will come alive & television sets will light up with blues. stay with me. while the sky is still golden, hold the ladder so i can climb, & from the highest rung, i can scrape away a drizzle of light to wear around my neck. alone is the star i follow. in love & in solitude: alone is the home with the warmest glow.

peach yogurt, 03.17.20

taglist + transcript under the cut (ask to be added/removed):

Peach Yogurt

after Frank O’Hara

i want peach yogurt. i want forgiveness and cubed fruit on the table and for someone to hold my hands. i want to look at the stars without a telescope and make up my own constellations, 8pm but still warm outside, lying in the grass with love running towards me until my body forgets it is a body. no more past-tense verbs, no more perpetually closed windows, no more stamping my feet against the tile. i am going to make scrambled eggs in the morning and i won’t mind that they don’t taste good. i am going to believe that there is no one alive who is luckier than me. at dinnertime, i sit on the porch making promises to myself while the sounds of cooking drift through the screen door: the whistle of the kettle, the click-click of the stove as the gas hisses to life. a glass of mango juice sweats in my palm and i tell it that i am grateful, for spilled strawberry milkshakes and the warbler in the back garden that never stops singing and my heart behind my front teeth. i tell it that i am done aiming low, that a year from now i will be the guttural, back-of-the-throat scream you make when the rollercoaster finally drops. i pluck an eyelash off my cheek and wish for spring to take up residence in my lungs. i wish for small kindnesses, more peach yogurt, more sunday mornings, more sitting on the kitchen counter with my feet dangling off the edge. i wish for the world to be so kind to me that i come undone.

Mahmoud Darwish, “Like a Small Café, That’s Love,” in Almond Blossoms and Beyond, tr. Mohammad Shaheen [text ID under the cut]

if I make it to heaven, I will ask for all of the small pleasures I could have had on earth. And I’m sure this will upset

the divine order. I am a simple man. I want, mostly, a year that will not kill me when it is over.

A hot stove and a wooden porch, bent under the weight of my people. I was born, and it only got worse

from there. In the dead chill of a doctor’s office, I am told what to cut back on and what to add more of.

None of this sounds like living. I sit in a running car under a bath of orange light and eat the fried chicken

that I promised my love I would stray from for the sake of my heart and its blood

labor. Still, there is something about the way a grease stain begins small and then tiptoes its way along

the fabric of my pants. Here, finally, a country worth living in. One that falls thick from whatever

it is we love so much that we can’t stop letting it kill us. If we must die, let it be inside here. If we must.

truly anything by mary oliver, naomi shihab nye, rainer maria rilke, joy harjo, audre lorde, kahlil gibran... it just feels like there is so much space for the falling in their poetry. especially this poem by joy harjo: