GRATITUDE: AUGUST 31, 2023- Reprieve

frigates that take us lands away

After Emily Dickinson’s “There is no Frigate like a Book”

the small begin of i
in to look 
up
all the way
up 
the wall of 
books that break 
the heart of a 
child open to love  
who does not yet
know desire except 
when she desires 
cathedrals of words that gather 
dust
await the eye 
—to see was to love—
hungered on hunger 
sweeping across a paginated world
perfected 
in misery in
love in words spent with 
books and time
algorithms of the
ever in spirit 
the extended minute 
stretched to 
goodbye to 
leaved portals
to
the worlds 
of other to

forever. 

M. NourbeSe Philip

Jimmy Cliff - Many Rivers To Cross

!!!!!!!

It's 6pm on Friday, and I'm writing to a few thousand friends I have not met yet.

I am writing to ask them to change our plans and meet a little while later.

Here's the thing.

I have a dog Janet, and she's been ill for almost two years now, as a tumor has been idling in her chest, growing ever so slowly. She's almost 14 years old now.I got her when she was 4 months old. I was 21 then ,an adult officially – and she was my child.

She is a pitbull, and was found in Echo Park, with a rope around her neck, and bites all over her ears and face.

She was the one the dogfighters use to puff up the confidence of the contenders.

She's almost 14 and I've never seen her start a fight ,or bite, or even growl, so I can understand why they chose her for that awful role. She's a pacifist.

Janet has been the most consistent relationship of my adult life, and that is just a fact.

We've lived in numerous houses, and jumped a few make shift families, but it's always really been the two of us.

She slept in bed with me, her head on the pillow, and she accepted my hysterical, tearful face into her chest, with her paws around me, every time I was heartbroken, or spirit-broken, or just lost, and as years went by, she let me take the role of her child, as I fell asleep, with her chin resting above my head.

She was under the piano when I wrote songs, barked any time I tried to record anything, and she was in the studio with me all the time we recorded the last album.

The last time I came back from tour, she was spry as ever, and she's used to me being gone for a few weeks every 6 or 7 years.

She has Addison's Disease, which makes it dangerous for her to travel since she needs regular injections of Cortisol, because she reacts to stress and to excitement without the physiological tools which keep most of us from literally panicking to death.

Despite all of this, she's effortlessly joyful and playful, and only stopped acting like a puppy about 3 years ago.

She's my best friend and my mother and my daughter, my benefactor, and she's the one who taught me what love is.

I can't come to South America. Not now.

When I got back from the last leg of the US tour, there was a big, big difference.

She doesn't even want to go for walks anymore.

I know that she's not sad about aging or dying. Animals have a survival instinct, but a sense of mortality and vanity, they do not. That's why they are so much more present than people.

But I know that she is coming close to point where she will stop being a dog, and instead, be part of everything. She'll be in the wind, and in the soil, and the snow, and in me, wherever I go.

I just can't leave her now, please understand.

If I go away again, I'm afraid she'll die and I won't have the honor of singing her to sleep, of escorting her out.

Sometimes it takes me 20 minutes to pick which socks to wear to bed.

But this decision is instant.

These are the choices we make, which define us.

I will not be the woman who puts her career ahead of love and friendship.

I am the woman who stays home and bakes Tilapia for my dearest, oldest friend.

And helps her be comfortable, and comforted, and safe, and important.

Many of us these days, we dread the death of a loved one. It is the ugly truth of Life, that keeps us feeling terrified and alone.

I wish we could also appreciate the time that lies right beside the end of time.

I know that I will feel the most overwhelming knowledge of her, and of her life and of my love for her, in the last moments.

I need to do my damnedest to be there for that.

Because it will be the most beautiful, the most intense, the most enriching experience of life I've ever known.

When she dies.

So I am staying home, and I am listening to her snore and wheeze, and reveling in the swampiest, most awful breath that ever emanated from an angel.

And I am asking for your blessing.I'll be seeing you.

Love, Fiona

Gratitude: August 16, 2023

Real Estate

I have emotions
that are like newspapers that
read themselves.

I go for days at a time
trapped in the want ads.

I feel as if I am an ad
for the sale of a haunted house:

18 rooms
$37,000
I’m yours
ghosts and all.

Richard Brautigan

*

I Feel Horrible. She Doesn’t

I feel horrible. She doesn’t
love me and I wander around
the house like a sewing machine
that’s just finished sewing
a turd to a garbage can lid.

Richard Brautigan

*

Boo, Forever

Spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a 
top,
I'm haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
you.

Richard Brautigan

Gratitude: August 15, 2023

Impossible Friendships

For example, with someone who no longer is,
who exists only in yellowed letters.

Or long walks beside a stream,
whose depths hold hidden

porcelain cups—and the talks about philosophy
with a timid student or the postman.

A passerby with proud eyes
whom you'll never know.

Friendship with this world, ever more perfect
(if not for the salty smell of blood).

The old man sipping coffee
in St.-Lazare, who reminds you of someone.

Faces flashing by
in local trains—

the happy faces of travelers headed perhaps
for a splendid ball, or a beheading.

And friendship with yourself
—since after all you don't know who you are.

ADAM ZAGAJEWSKI
TRANSLATED BY CLARE CAVANAGH

*

Things We Were Told About the Moon

We were told the moon was the Earth’s only satellite.

We were told it was cratered, pocked and pitted from the impact 
of asteroids and comets.

We were told it was luminous against the dark.

We were sometimes told it was made of chalk and sometimes told 
it was made of cheese.

We were told the moon was a folded note trying to send itself to the sun.

We were told that if we read the note it would say I’m cold. It’s lonely up here. 

We were told not to mind this kind of talk, that the moon was lying, it had no feelings. In this way, they said, it was akin to insects and fish.

We were told that fish kiss the water as they move through the waves.

We were told they are always drowning and they enjoy this act. But how can they enjoy drowning? we asked, and the answer was always the same: Each enjoys whatever life offers. 

We began to ask each other, Are you a moon or a fish? Meaning, Are you drowning or are you lonely? I chose moon because I was orbiting the school in progressively wider arcs.

How far will I go? I wondered. My classmates reached for me; I tried to catch their fingers but they could not hold me; I was floating away.

Years later, I would recall their eyes gazing at me, how they looked, not like children’s eyes, but like moons drifting into darkness, drifting into space, trying to relate a message to the sun that, we all discovered, we would never be able to deliver.

Dara Yen Elerath
 

Gratitude: August 11, 2023

Day 4

A Ritual to Read to Each Other 

If you don't know the kind of person I am

and I don't know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,

a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break

sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood

storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,

but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider—

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

William Stafford

Gratitude: August 6, 2023

Roadside Flowers

These are the kind you are supposed

to stop to look at, as I do this morning,

but just long enough 

so as not to carry my non-stopping

around with me all day,

a big medicine ball of neglect and disregard.

But now I seem to be carrying

my not-stopping-long-enough ball

as I walk around

the circumference of myself

and up and down the angles of the day.

Roadside flowers,

when I get back to my room

I will make it all up to you.

I will lie on my stomach and write

in a notebook how lighthearted you were,

pink and white among the weeds,

wild phlox perhaps,

or at least of cousin of that family,

a pretty one who comes to visit

every summer for two weeks without her parents,

she who unpacks her things upstairs

while I am out on the lawn

throwing the ball as high as I can,

catching it almost

every time in my two outstretched hands.

Billy Collins

                                   
                                               

Gratitude:: Summer

 

The temple bell stops
But the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers

Matsuo Bashō

Gratitude: August 3, 2022

 Ode to Joy 

We shall have everything we want and there’ll be no more dying
on the pretty plains or in the supper clubs
for our symbol we’ll acknowledge vulgar materialistic laughter
over an insatiable sexual appetite
and the streets will be filled with racing forms
and the photographs of murderers and narcissists and movie stars
will swell from the walls and books alive in steaming rooms
to press against our burning flesh not once but interminably
as water flows down hill into the full-lipped basin
and the adder dives for the ultimate ostrich egg
and the feather cushion preens beneath a reclining monolith
that’s sweating with post-exertion visibility and sweetness
near the grave of love
No more dying

—

We shall see the grave of love as a lovely sight and temporary
near the elm that spells the lovers’ names in roots
and there’ll be no more music but the ears in lips and no more wit
but tongues in ears and no more drums but ears to thighs
as evening signals nudities unknown to ancestors’ imaginations
and the imagination itself will stagger like a tired paramour of ivory
under the sculptural necessities of lust that never falters
like a six-mile runner from Sweden or Liberia covered with gold
as lava flows up and over the far-down somnolent city’s abdication
and the hermit always wanting to be lone is lone at last
and the weight of external heat crushes the heat-hating Puritan
whose self-defeating vice becomes a proper sepulcher at last
that love may live

—

Buildings will go up into the dizzy air as love itself goes in
and up the reeling life that it has chosen for once or all
while in the sky a feeling of intemperate fondness will excite the birds
to swoop and veer like flies crawling across absorbed limbs
that weep a pearly perspiration on the sheets of brief attention
and the hairs dry out that summon anxious declaration of the organs
as they rise like buildings to the needs of temporary neighbors
pouring hunger through the heart to feed desire in intravenous ways
like the ways of gods with humans in the innocent combination of light
and flesh or as the legends ride their heroes through the dark to found
great cities where all life is possible to maintain as long as time
which wants us to remain for cocktails in a bar and after dinner
lets us live with it
No more dying

Frank O’Hara