#pmsad

where to begin...maybe you should start by saying that things never really fall into place until you actually stop moving long enough to let them. so maybe i finally stopped moving...and that's when you came in. i wasn't quite expecting that, i've known you for awhile, you and your friends and your poems and things like that. so how did that happen? where was i when i should have known it was you? i guess i was too busy being lost in myself and my "pain" that i didn't notice. and now that i've finally settled in, you've begun to feel like home. i'd rather not give it a name. if i did, it might decide to pack up and leave...and as selfish as that sounds, i like having it around. almost as much as i like having you around. so now i sit and stare. you stare back. this is good, i say. i quite like it, you say back. i smile (like a bloody idiot, might i add) and you end up laughing. this is good, i say to myself. very good.

by Jack Gilbert Light is too bare, too simple for her. She has lived in the darkness so long, she prefers it. Sits among the shrubs in the woods at night, singing of Orpheus, who sings prettily but innocently. She knows we are rendered by time, by pain and desire, so makes a home always in the present. He still dotes on what was lost and the losing of it, his cracked voice singing of his young voice singing about love. The dark has derived an excitement from her. Eurydice sings of passion as a foreign country. Says candles made from birds and tigers, from tallow of fox and snake, burn with a troubling radiance. Orpheus sings about the smell of basil growing in the rusting five-gallon can on the wall between his vineyard and the well. Eurydice tells of animals searching each other on the bed meanwhile, shameful and vibrant. He sings of soup cooking in the dented pot. Of how fine it was out there in the stony fields, eating and grieving and solitary year after year. --from The Great Fires (Poems 1982-1992)