SONNET LXXXI

And now you're mine. Rest with your dream in my dream.
Love and pain and work should all sleep, now.
The night turns on its invisible wheels,
and you are pure beside me as a sleeping amber.

No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go,
we will go together, over the waters of time.
No one else will travel through the shadows with me,
only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon.

Your hands have already opened their delicate fists
and let their soft drifting signs drop away; your eyes closed like two gray
wings, and I move

after, following the folding water you carry, that carries
me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny.
Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all. 


Pablo Neruda

The broken heart is a remarkable thing:

it holds on to what it shouldn't, pines after what is gone, long gone; from what is there, chooses what is no longer there and, therefore, can no longer be had; languishes where gloom and anguish are; talks in its sleep and yet, is mute when asked to speak the pain out; slams the door on sunlight and insists on turning all the lights off because they are "too bright", and then complains of seeing darkness everywhere, trembling, like a sick heart, because the dark illuminates what should be obliterated, cloaks what should be suffered.

A Large Number (by Wislawa Szymborska)

Four billion people on this earth,

but my imagination is the way it's always been:

bad with large numbers.

It is still moved by particularity.

It flits about the darkness like a flashlight beam,

disclosing only random faces,

while the rest go blindly by,

unthought of, unpitied.

Not even a Dante could have stopped that.

So what do you do when you're not,

even with all the muses on your side?

Non omnis moriar—a premature worry.

Yet am I fully alive, and is that enough?

It never has been, and even less so now.

I select by rejecting, for there's no other way,

but what I reject, is more numerous,

more dense, more intrusive than ever.

At the cost of untold losses—a poem, a sigh.

I reply with a whisper to a thunderous calling.

How much I am silent about I can't say.

A mouse at the foot of mother mountain.

Life lasts as long as a few lines of claws in the sand.

My dreams—even they are not as populous as they should be.

There is more solitude in them than crowds or clamor.

Sometimes someone long dead will drop by for a bit.

A single hand turns a knob.

Annexes of echo overgrow the empty house.

I run from the threshold down into the quiet

valley seemingly no one's—an anachronism by now.

Where does all this space still in me come from—

that I don't know.

Translated by Joanna Trzeciak

Bends in my road

The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
-Wislawa Szymborska, "Nothing Twice"


At times, I fancy my feet planting themselves on palpable ground. The air pauses in its billowing, the heart trembles, sighing, for a little while, hopeful, wondering: is this where the hapless, aimless chase ends, where things are found and held, where I am to be found, and held, at last?


Somewhere,  a clearing.  Nearby, a promise. From the soul, a hunger, inchoate. The longing to stay. 
Oh, to stay. 


And then, the breeze turns, unannounced, a host of forebodings descend, whirring with the wind, and the time for trembling, sighing, closes in, like all days do. 


But it was so still in that last second, so still!


Still, the feet, reluctant, spring into a run. Gently, at first, then swiftly, as always. Only this time, questions weigh the mind, the heart down, will the eyes to turn toward directions other than forward.

A "Thank You" Note

by Wislawa Szymborska


There is much I owe
to those I do not love.


The relief in accepting
they are closer to another.


Joy that I am not
the wolf to their sheep.


My peace be with them
for with them I am free,
and this, love can neither give,
nor know how to take.


I don't wait for them
from window to door.
Almost as patient
as a sun dial,
I understand
what love does not understand.
I forgive
what love would never have forgiven.


Between rendezvous and letter
no eternity passes,
only a few days or weeks.


My trips with them always turn out well.
Concerts are heard.
Cathedrals are toured.
Landscapes are distinct.


And when seven rivers and mountains
come between us,
they are rivers and mountains
well known from any map.


It is thanks to them
that I live in three dimensions,
in a non-lyrical and non-rhetorical space,
with a shifting, thus real, horizon.


They don't even know
how much they carry in their empty hands.

"I don't owe them anything",
love would have said
on this open topic.

Ellie Goulding : The Writer

Ellie Goulding 'Your Song'

Happy Birthday, Dear Blog!

4 years. Hmm. It's been a while.
Glad to still have you in my life.
=)

This greeting is 11 days late.
Haha

David Foster Wallace, in the house:

"There are no choices without personal freedom, Buckeroo. It's not us who are dead inside. These things you find so weak and contemptible in us---these are just the hazards of being free." 
— from Infinite Jest

"Logical validity is not a guarantee of truth." 
— from Infinite Jest

"Mario, what do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic and a dyslexic?" 

I give." 

You get someone who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there's a dog." 


— from Infinite Jest

"Both destiny's kisses and its dope-slaps illustrate an individual person's basic personal powerlessness over the really meaningful events in his life: i.e. almost nothing important that ever happens to you happens because you engineer it. Destiny has no beeper; destiny always leans trenchcoated out of an alley with some sort of Psst that you usually can't even hear because you're in such a rush to or from something important you've tried to engineer." 


"Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still." 
— from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

"...morning is the soul's night." 
—  from Infinite Jest

"Mediocrity is contextual." 
—  from Infinite Jest

"But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision?" 
— from Consider the Lobster: and other Essays


"Words and a book and a belief that the world is words..." 
— from The Broom of the System


"No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home." 
— from Consider the Lobster: and other Essays


"To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type if death, the death of childhood's limitless possibility, of the flattery of choice without duress-this will happen, mark me. Childhood's end." 
— from The Pale King


"life's endless war against the self you cannot live without." 
— from Infinite Jest


"I'll say God seems to have a kind of laid-back management style I'm not crazy about. "
— from Infinite Jest

Loveliness

Last night the apple trees shook and gave each lettuce a heart
- from "In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden" by Matthea Harvey

No in-betweens

There can be method to the madness, but a choice has to be made.

Neither mid-way nor half-way is a good place to be. Something either is, or is not. I will not stand for half-baked, or halfhearted. A half-life will not sit well with me. Neither will half-tones, because there is no pleasant shade between black and white.

Half is not a good word. I have yet to come to terms with halves.

Corinne Bailey Rae - Closer

Don't make me responsible/ for something that you can't find./
I don't mind us to build tension/ but we've got to move in the same direction./
Lay down what's impeding you/ 'Cause I want to get closer to you./

Autumn

BY AMY LOWELL

All day I have watched the purple vine leaves

Fall into the water.

And now in the moonlight they still fall,

But each leaf is fringed with silver.

"To raise the veil. 
To see what you're saying goodbye to." 
— Louise Glück

Town Hall Fun

And how predictable was it that I should go to our Town Hall as Daphne? My purple sheath dress, wide, brown belt, nude Anthologys (good as bare feet), and the garland of purple (the Daphne flower is purple, incidentally)

and white flowers on my hair certainly got lost in the grandiose costumes--people actually came dressed as Greek gods and goddesses, Red Riding Hood, the Mad Hatter, Green Lantern, Paris Hilton, Spiderman, mafia lords, gladiators, drag queens, etc.--but I couldn't think of a better role to fit into than Daphne. Well, it was really a choice between her and Holly Golightly, but my procrastination at buying a pair of black gloves and a tiara finally left me with no other option. Though a colleague had offered to do my hair in an Audrey Hepburn bun (giggle).

This month, everyone is agog with dancing, and, my love for the art and the penchant for movement and rhythm that I got from my folks come into play as I take on the role of choreographer for my team. We are dancing the hustle, to the music of "Kung-Fu Fighting". And some colleagues and I will be opening the show with a Pitbull song.

Whew. Haha.

I wonder what's coming up next.

But first, here.

‎"At first I saw you everywhere. 
Now only in certain things, 
at longer intervals." 
— Louise Glück

For no matter how much clarity we tried to outline the expectations with, the beginning still brought us here.

Here.

Where your walls are down, and where my guards lounge with ease, too much ease. And where the course of friendship goes on, undisturbed, except now and then, with questions of what will come next, and where.

But first, here, where speech is low but devoid of sadness, where secrets spill out with the smiles that could not be suppressed, where rain could just as well be sunlight, the way it rolls with so little weight, where rainbows and stars are not strangers to each other, where frowns and facades are read, and construed with kindness and patience, where one takes, and then gives back, where childhoods brighten and dim, and commingle, brightening together, where one life touches the other and leaves little chance of either one staying ever the same again.

Yes, first, here.

Areas, Gray (by Mookie Katigbak)

Now that I have your mind by heart,
Silence becomes this space
Between us, singular as breath.

Now that you have my heart by mind,
You say, "Silence has a way so terribly exact
Even when it means neither no or yes—"

So all the meanings we unsay, we let
Close in on us in gray ambivalence.
If it weren't so precise—

You do not want my heart.
I do not want your mind.

Rainy Days and Mondays no longer bring me down

"Each moment is a place you've never been." 
— Mark Strand

It's been a while. The days have gone by, one after the other, in a seemingly perpetual stream of hours and people and places.

But let me start with my dad, and the cherished hours the two of us, once upon a sunny morning, whiled away in music, and talks about melody and lyrics, and performing on stage, and the Beatles and Crystal Gayle and books and writers, and family, and life. Priceless, that's the word that comes to mind. I am lucky to have a father who understands me and whom I understand and with whom I can talk to about things in languages that are familiar to us both.

And, from there, comes everything else that's keeping me on a high these days:

the job I have that's become more than just a job, recently, something more than a reason to get out of bed at a certain hour and drag oneself to start and complain about and finish because one has to, but something that has finally, finally turned into a place where I know I can be (extremely) productive and useful and, yes, happy, at the same time;

the weekend getaways that are proof of the importance of work-life balance, the bouts of conversations and laughter--be it in holes-in-the-wall, or bowling joints, or a cinema where "Transformers" is proof that robots can also wear shawls with flair (hello, Megatron!) or loud music-infested joints, or quiet cafes--that are best shared with well-trusted buddies, or peers with whom one can be comfortable, or new-found friends that one is getting to know better;

and, not least of all, the moments I spend with myself, those few, precious hours that keep my sanity intact and my sense of the world and my reason for being in it, in place, where my only companions could only be either of these: a good book, or a good song. And where the only constant is coffee, with sugar and lots of cream.

Found:

Quiver

by Mookie Katigbak-Lacuesta

Speed of neither wind nor ripple,

neither hawk nor dove; she darted

quick across the woods through blister’s

roots, and hyacinths, the river’s blue

narcissus—

gleamed like a pair of scissors

clipping silk. And with what haste

did I proceed, imploring limb and bone

to make the light as we sped trackless

through the night, and I flagged behind.

Gave her the lead by small leagues,

and watched her quicken when the miles

between us vanished by degrees.

Now the light within me slows, quivers

somewhere into color. I know her

like a heft in the blood, like an arrow

that arrives with a sudden red notion.

And wherever you go, I am to follow.