Something Worth Trying
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- compact space
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I found a piece of your hair on a sweater
I haven’t worn since last winter
Where do I begin when all I see are endings?
Someone somewhere... -
Still Eating Oranges round-up #4
Back to Still Eating Oranges round-up #3
In only one year, Still Eating Oranges has achieved more success than...
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Rita Guibert: You have often said that you don’t believe in originality.
Pablo Neruda: To look for originality at all costs is a modern...
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Anonymous asked: After endless traumatic experiences from standing inside the train, I felt anxious when I entered but found no available seat. I felt a sudden mix of extreme emotions and couldn't help but glare at those men who were seated comfortably, trying to avoid the sharp glares from other women who couldn't find seats as well. I almost jumped when I felt someone pat my shoulder. Thankfully, it was a lady who kindly offered me the seat beside her. I'd really like to thank her properly for saving me. :)
On the way there a couple of startled wings fluttered, and that was all. One goes there alone. It is a lofty building made entirely of open spaces, a building which sways all the time, but is never able to fall. The sun, changed into a thousand suns, drifts in through the open slivers. And an inverse law of gravity takes hold in the play of light: this house floats anchored in the sky, and what falls falls upward. It makes you turn around. In the woods it is all right to grieve. It’s all right to see the old truths, which we usually keep packed away in the luggage. My roles down there in the deep places fly up, hang like dried skulls in an ancestor hut on a remote Melanesian island. A childlike light around the terrifying trophies. Woods are mild that way.
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(trans. Robert Bly)
A Map of the World
One of the ancient maps of the world
is heart-shaped, carefully drawn
and once washed with bright colors,
though the colors have faded
as you might expect feelings to fade
from a fragile old heart, the brown map
of a life. But feeling is indelible,
and longing infinite, a starburst compass
pointing in all the directions
two lovers might go, a fresh breeze
swelling their sails, the future uncharted,
still far from the edge
where the sea pours into the stars.
Ted Kooser(via lexically)
hey, this is me! thanks for posting, man.
I’ve always wanted to begin a poem
with the line, “I’ve always wanted
to begin.” Now I have. Best to end here,
but then the universe is expanding
back into its black beginnings,
and space, aware of its own looming demise,
is singing of possibilities. I’m almost over, it sings,
it’s almost over…
There’s an art
to everything. How
the rain means
April and an ongoing-ness like
that of song until at last
it ends. A centuries-old
set of silver handbells that
once an altar boy swung,
processing … You’re the same
wilderness you’ve always
been, slashing through briars,
the bracken
of your invasive
self. So he said,
in a dream. But
the rest of it—all the rest—
was waking: more often
than not, to the next
extravagance. Two blackamoor
statues, each mirroring
the other, each hoisting
forever upward his burden of
hand-painted, carved-by-hand
peacock feathers. Don’t
you know it, don’t you know
I love you, he said. He was
shaking. He said,
I love you. There’s an art
to everything. What I’ve
done with this life,
what I’d meant not to do,
or would have meant, maybe, had I
understood, though I have
no regrets. Not the broken but
still flowering dogwood. Not
the honey locust, either. Not even
the ghost walnut with its
non-branches whose
every shadow is memory,
memory … As he said to me
once, That’s all garbage
down the river, now. Turning,
but as the utterly lost—
because addicted—do:
resigned all over again. It
only looked, it—
It must only look
like leaving. There’s an art
to everything. Even
turning away. How
eventually even hunger
can become a space
to live in. How they made
out of shamelessness something
beautiful, for as long as they could.
