The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total darkness sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

W.H Auden

This Morning

This morning was something. A little snow

lay on the ground. The sun floated in a clear

blue sky. The sea was blue, and blue-green,

as far as the eye could see.

Scarcely a ripple. Calm. I dressed and went

for a walk — determined not to return

until I took in what Nature had to offer.

I passed close to some old, bent-over trees.

Crossed a field strewn with rocks

where snow had drifted. Kept going

until I reached the bluff.

Where I gazed at the sea, and the sky, and

the gulls wheeling over the white beach

far below. All lovely. All bathed in a pure

cold light. But, as usual, my thoughts

began to wander. I had to will

myself to see what I was seeing

and nothing else. I had to tell myself this is what

mattered, not the other. (And I did see it,

for a minute or two!) For a minute or two

it crowded out the usual musings on

what was right, and what was wrong — duty,

tender memories, thoughts of death, how I should treat

with my former wife. All the things

I hoped would go away this morning.

The stuff I live with every day. What

I’ve trampled on in order to stay alive.

But for a minute or two I did forget

myself and everything else. I know I did.

For when I turned back i didn’t know

where I was. Until some birds rose up

from the gnarled trees. And flew

in the direction I needed to be going.

Raymond Carver

"You haven't a clue who I am"

#killingeve

This show reminds me of le femme nikita
I am loving it :)

"Her eyes are sort of catlike. Wide, but alert. Her lips are full, she has a long neck, high cheekbones. Skin is smooth and bright. She had a lost look in her eye that was both direct and also chilling. She's totally focused yet almost entirely inaccessible."

"Sometimes it takes a long time to learn how to play like yourself." -Miles Davis 

"I could imagine the kind of love in which I was fully seen, known, and cherished."

Antidotes to Fear of Death

Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.

Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.

Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:

No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.

And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:

To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.

Rebecca Elson

Brene Brown and Glennon Doyle on Untamed

The Poet with His Face in His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need anymore of that sound.

So if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

like crazy, and there is a cave behind all that
jubilation and water fun and you can
stand there, under it, and roar all you

want and nothing will be disturbed; you can
drip with despair all afternoon and still,
on a green branch, its wings just lightly touched

by the passing foil of the water, the thrush,
puffing out its spotted breast, will sing
of the perfect, stone-hard beauty of everything.

Mary Oliver

Two Countries

Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step,
swept away by someone who never saw
it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,
slept by itself, knew how to raise a
see-you-later hand. But skin felt
it was never seen, never known as
a land on the map, nose like a city,
hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque
and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.

Skin had hope, that’s what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries.
And skin remembers–silk, spiny grass,
deep in the pocket that is skin’s secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.

Naomi Shihab Nye

Waiting For My Life

I waited for my life to start
for years, standing at bus stops
looking into the curved distance
thinking each bus was the wrong bus;
or lost in books where I would travel
without luggage from one page
to another; where the only breeze
was the rustle of pages turning,
and lives rose and set
in the violent colors of suns.

Sometimes my life coughed and coughed:
a stalled car about to catch,
and I would hold someone in my arms,
though it was always someone else I wanted.
Or I would board any bus, jostled
by thighs and elbows that knew
where they were going; collecting scraps
of talk, setting them down like bird song
in my notebook, where someday I would go
prospecting for my life.

Linda Pastan

First Memory

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived

to revenge myself

against my father, not

for what he was—

for what I was: from the beginning of time,

in childhood, I thought

that pain meant

I was not loved.

It meant I loved.

Louise Glück