Letter to a Mute

If I could reach you now, in any way

At all, I would say this to you:

This afternoon I walked into a thicket

Of gold flowers that had no idea

What they were after. They couldn't hear a thing.

I walked among a million small, deaf ears

Breaking their gold into the afternoon.

I think they were like you, golden, golden,

Unable to express a single thing.

I walked among them, thinking of you,

Thinking of what it would be like

To be completely solitary. Once I was alone like that.

All the field was humming, brimming

With some brazen kind of song, and I

Thought that somehow I could disappear

Into the empty hall of your right ear,

Wandering through the slender bones of you.

But I knew that I could never let you know

That it is lame summer here, that I

Can hear the crickets every evening

Hollowing out the darkness at my window,

That you have vanished into a dark tunnel

Where I have tried to reach you with my mouth

Till my mouth ran gold, spilling over everything.

Tonight I looked into your face, tenderly,

Tenderly, but I can never find you there.

I can only touch your quiet lips.

If I could stick my pen into your tongue,

Making it run with gold, making

it speak entirely to me, letting the truth

Slide out of it, I could not be alone.

I wouldn't even touch you, for I know

How you are locked away from me forever.

Tonight I go out looking for you everywhere

As the moon slips out, a slender petal

Offering all its gold to me for nothing.

--Thomas James

(Nautilus, Edward Weston, 1927)

Shell

In front of the mirror in my parents' bedroom there lay a pink shell. I stole up to it on tiptoe and in a swift motion, raised it to my ear. I wanted to catch it when it wasn't pining with its monotonous sound. Though I was little, I knew that even if you love someone very much, it sometimes happens that you forget all about it.

--Zbigniew Herbert

Plath, writing on her typewriter, Yorkshire, 1956

But at least I wrote today--my first new poem since leaving Provincetown. And I have a brand new typewriter! Well, actually, it's quite old (appears to be from the forties or so); my Polish grandfather handed it down to me as a gift, since he never uses it anymore. In celebration, some of my favorite quotes from Crazyhorse's Top 100 Quotes About Writing (my list is poetry-oriented, obviously):

“All good writing is swimming underwater and holding your breath."
—F. Scott Fitzgerald

“Writing is easy. You just sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.”
—Red Smith

"You owe reality nothing and the truth about your feelings everything."
—Richard Hugo

"Once your life is organized so beautifully that there's a table, and a chair, and a typewriter, that already is an incredible triumph."
—Leonard Cohen

“The poet is he that hath fat enough, like bears and marmots, to suck his claws all winter. He hibernates in this world, and feeds on his own marrow.”
—Henry David Thoreau

"You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you."
—Ray Bradbury

"The job of the writer is to win the battle against loneliness."
—Barry Hannah

“The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”
—Flannery O’Connor

“Perhaps there is another kind of writing, I only know this one: in the night, when fear does not let me sleep.”
—Franz Kafka

"Imaginative work is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground; it is like a spider web attached ever so lightly, but attached to all four corners of the earth."
—Virginia Woolf

“This morning I took out a comma, and this afternoon I put it back again.”
— Oscar Wilde

"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting."
—Robert Frost

"Poetry is my love, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face."
—Anne Sexton

A random assortment

Five Things You Didn't Know About the Romantics

1. At age 22 Shelley insisted on a diet of bread, butter and "a sort of spurious lemonade" until a friend, Thomas Love Peacock, convinced him to start eating meat again. Shelley's complexion improved.

2. The writer John William Polidori developed a serious crush on 18-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft and "jumped from a wall in an effort to impress her, spraining his ankle badly in the process." A few days later she told him that she thought of him mostly as a little brother.

3. Lord Byron enjoyed singing Albanian songs consisting of "strange, wild howls" while boating with Shelley in order to exacerbate their "contest with the elements."

4. Upon his release from Surrey Gaol for libel charges, Leigh Hunt, a critic and writer, created for himself a new study "which bore a startling resemblance to his prison bower." His books, busts, flowers and piano were all carefully transported from his prison cell. "His new room was lily- rather than rose-themed, but in all other respects it was similar to his prison accommodation."

5. Leigh Hunt gave John Keats the nickname of "Junkets", which Keats hated. "What has become of Junkets," Hunt wondered to Charles Cowden Clarke in the summer of 1817. "I suppose Queen Mab has eaten him."

(The last one is my favorite. Dear me, what has become of Junkets?)

********

Oh honey, don't let me walk away from this. If I'm trying to fuck up my own life, then until I figure out why, I think it's best you keep your distance lest I fall in love.

********

No one is with me, going fearlessly--that’s the way I live in the dream I saw. I must put my loneliness away, and protect myself, and I’ll learn to be strong. Country road, it’ll take me back to my home. I can feel it now, if I just keep to this far-off country road. It won’t matter how lonely the times get; you’ll never see me cry, I’ll keep my tears at bay. I know I must take heart, and that hurrying is all I can do. Only that way can I forget.

********

Ate oscypek (raw sheep cheese handmade in the Tatra mountains) with breakfast this morning. Yesterday evening, we walked around the Old Town, where the buildings still have bullet holes. This afternoon I went to my grandfather's apartment to eat pierogi and borscht and my ninety-five year old uncle told us a story about jumping from a train to flee Communists.

PERFECTION

the end

*

Hell

The second-hardest thing I have to do is not be longing’s slave.

Hell is that. Hell is that, others, having a job, and not having a job. Hell is thinking continually of those who were truly great.

Hell is the moment you realize that you were ignorant of the fact, when it was true, that you were not yet ruined by desire.

The kind of music I want to continue hearing after I am dead is the kind that makes me think I will be capable of hearing it then.

There is music in Hell. Wind of desolation! It blows past the egg-eyed statues. The canopic jars are full of secrets.

The wind blows through me. I open my mouth to speak.

I recite the list of people I have copulated with. It does not take long. I say the names of my imaginary children. I call out four-syllable words beginning with B. This is how I stay alive.

Beelzebub. Brachiosaur. Bubble-headed. I don’t know how I stay alive. What I do know is that there is a light, far above us, that goes out when we die,

and that in Hell there is a gray tulip that grows without any sun. It reminds me of everything I failed at,

and I water it carefully. It is all I have to remind me of you.

--Sarah Manguso

*

Sigh, a million times. That poem is it. That poem is how I feel.