omm:

"I went out in the world and tried to find places of my own to live. I was always anxious about it. In some ways, this anxiety was a terrific motivator. Fear made me resourceful. And I had some extraordinary adventures as a result.. I will cherish the memories of these escapades forever. In other ways tho, I became more codependent than ever. On the surface, I appeared to be a confident young go getter, but my inner life was, as it had always been, a tremulous fearscape. I was neither mature, or emotionally secure, and hidden beneath my apparent ingenuity was a terrified child, constantly asking, Who’s got me? Who will keep me safe. Where do I belong? And thus began my lifelong quest to make other people into my home. 

...

That relationship blew up because all my relationships blow up. Like a thief in the night, I left that good man behind, running off to California with someone who did not belong to me. And for sure someone should have been worried about me because that relationship swiftly blew up too, I remember making desperate phone calls in San Francisco, looking for places to stay, back to New York City I came, and I slept on my friends sofa on 14th street for 6 weeks, sobbing in silence and shame, night after night, and then I ran into the next relationship and the next living situation, and the next, and the next, and then the next, I once estimated that between the ages of 20 and 48 I lived in approximately 28 different homes, and that is not everywhere I stayed, that number would be incalculable, its merely everywhere I lived, everywhere that had my actual my name on the lease or the mortgage and I never lived alone, I couldn’t bear to be alone, I couldn’t bear being alone with the open wound that was my own mind. But also I couldn’t bear the chafe and strain of intimacy. I couldn’t last anywhere and I couldn’t last with anyone. So I came and went. Colliding and separating, Roaming the planet, constantly looking for places to land and people to merge with. I sometimes used to call this behavior being a free spirit, but my wild instability was quite the opposite of freedom because I had no agency in the matter, only urgency. Also, if I was so free, why did I always end up feeling trapped? It’s because my moves were motivated by desperate situations in which I was running either towards somebody, or away from somebody else. I constantly found myself in stories that started out with passion but ended up with shame. So much shame in fact, that during those years, there were entire geographical regions I had to flee at top speed because my behavior had created dramas that made it impossible for me to remain there for another day."

 

Imagine browsing through this book on a random Tuesday evening at the MCA and discovering you're in it...

An Adventure By Louise Gluck

1.

It came to me one night as I was falling asleep 
that I had finished with those amorous adventures 
to which I had long been a slave. Finished with love? 
my heart murmured. To which I responded that many profound discoveries 
awaited us, hoping, at the same time, I would not be asked 
to name them. For I could not name them. But the belief that they existed— 
surely this counted for something? 
2.

The next night brought the same thought, 
this time concerning poetry, and in the nights that followed 
various other passions and sensations were, in the same way, 
set aside forever, and each night my heart 
protested its future, like a small child being deprived of a favorite toy. 
But these farewells, I said, are the way of things. 
And once more I alluded to the vast territory 
opening to us with each valediction. And with that phrase I became 
a glorious knight riding into the setting sun, and my heart 
became the steed underneath me.
3.

I was, you will understand, entering the kingdom of death, 
though why this landscape was so conventional 
I could not say. Here, too, the days were very long 
while the years were very short. The sun sank over the far mountain. 
The stars shone, the moon waxed and waned. Soon 
faces from the past appeared to me: 
my mother and father, my infant sister; they had not, it seemed, 
finished what they had to say, though now 
I could hear them because my heart was still.
4.

At this point, I attained the precipice 
but the trail did not, I saw, descend on the other side; 
rather, having flattened out, it continued at this altitude 
as far as the eye could see, though gradually 
the mountain that supported it completely dissolved 
so that I found myself riding steadily through the air—
All around, the dead were cheering me on, the joy of finding them 
obliterated by the task of responding to them—
5.

As we had all been flesh together, 
now we were mist. 
As we had been before objects with shadows, 
now we were substance without form, like evaporated chemicals. 
Neigh, neigh, said my heart, 
or perhaps nay, nay—it was hard to know.
6.

Here the vision ended. I was in my bed, the morning sun 
contentedly rising, the feather comforter 
mounded in white drifts over my lower body. 
You had been with me— 
there was a dent in the second pillowcase. 
We had escaped from death— 
or was this the view from the precipice?

 

It had occurred to me that all human beings are divided
into those who wish to move forward
and those who wish to go back.
Or you could say, those who wish to keep moving
and those who want to be stopped in their tracks
as by the blazing sword...

The Trees by Philip Larkin

 

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too.
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

아빠 힘덜어

One Art 

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

so many things seem filled with the intent

to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

places, and names, and where it was you meant

to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. 

Elizabeth Bishop

Pagan Virtues by Stephen Dunn

 

If you have them, your day will overflow

with options; you can reexamine

everything that smells of dogma

or the forbidden, tip your hat

to the great poem that is the body,

maybe even uphold the beautiful

by renouncing the pretty.

Prepare to be in trouble on holidays,

which are holy days for others, but for you

are days off, a chance to exercise

your pleasures, perhaps speculate why prayer

never seems to reach its destination.

Tell your churchgoing friends

that you're more like a justice of the peace

than a witch or a warlock, someone trying-

with the help of the best that's been written 

and said, and without aid from the cloudy above-

to divine what's evil, investigate what's good,

attempt to live in a world a person from

another world might want to muck around in,

raise children, guide them to discover

for themselves what it means to be a citizen.

Stephen Dunn