Weekly Edition #15
XIII (Dedications) by by Adrienne Rich
(from An Atlas of the Difficult World)
I know you are reading this poem
late, before leaving your office
of the one intense yellow lamp-spot and the darkening window
in the lassitude of a building faded to quiet
long after rush-hour. I know you are reading this poem
standing up in a bookstore far from the ocean
on a grey day of early spring, faint flakes driven
across the plains’ enormous spaces around you.
I know you are reading this poem
in a room where too much has happened for you to bear
where the bedclothes lie in stagnant coils on the bed
and the open valise speaks of flight
but you cannot leave yet. I know you are reading this poem
as the underground train loses momentum and before running
up the stairs
toward a new kind of love
your life has never allowed.
I know you are reading this poem by the light
of the television screen where soundless images jerk and slide
while you wait for the newscast from the intifada.
I know you are reading this poem in a waiting-room
of eyes met and unmeeting, of identity with strangers.
I know you are reading this poem by fluorescent light
in the boredom and fatigue of the young who are counted out,
count themselves out, at too early an age. I know
you are reading this poem through your failing sight, the thick
lens enlarging these letters beyond all meaning yet you read on
because even the alphabet is precious.
I know you are reading this poem as you pace beside the stove
warming milk, a crying child on your shoulder, a book in your
hand
because life is short and you too are thirsty.
I know you are reading this poem which is not in your language
guessing at some words while others keep you reading
and I want to know which words they are.
I know you are reading this poem listening for something, torn
between bitterness and hope
turning back once again to the task you cannot refuse.
I know you are reading this poem because there is nothing else
left to read
there where you have landed, stripped as you are.
Art by Alisher Kushakov
Other poems I read this week: (click links to read the full poem)
"This page I type and retype
This table I dust till the scarred wood shines
This bundle of clothes I wash and hang and wash again
like flags we share, a country so close
no one needs to name it
The days are nouns: touch them
The hands are churches that worship the world"
"If anybody made a movie out of my life
I wouldn't like it, but I'd watch it twice
If they halfway tried to do it right
There'd be forty screen writers workin' day and nite."
-Don't Make a Movie About Me by Johnny Cash
"Every year
everything
I have ever learned
in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go." -In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver
"I fell in love with my husband,
not when he told me
what the word “apercus” means,
but when I looked it up,
and he was right." -Vocabulary by Jason Schneiderman
"Think of the storm roaming the sky uneasily
like a dog looking for a place to sleep in,
listen to it growling."
-Little Exercise by Elizabeth Bishop
Recommended Music:
I'm on Fire - Bruce Springsteen
April Come She Will - Simon & Garfunkel
The Carnival is Over - Anohni, Shirin Neshat & Cate Blanchett Dead Boys - Sam Fender
The Wild Honey Pie / Summer EP - Nighttime
Links of the Week:
Inemuri, The Japanese Art of Sleeping at Work Why You Need a Reading Plan Jenny Holzer’s Inflammatory Essays Hybridizer (create your own animated animal hybrid based on Merian’s engravings for Jonston’s Historiae naturalis) Read Old Magazines