anjellynajolie reblogged
Oh, must we dream our dreams and have them, too?
Elizabeth Bishop, Questions of Travel (via likearegularbookworm)
anjellynajolie reblogged
The still explosions on the rocks,
the lichens, grow
by spreading, gray, concentric shocks.
They have arranged
to meet the rings around the moon, although
within our memories they have not changed.
And since the heavens will attend
as long on us,
you’ve been, dear friend,
precipitate and pragmatical;
and look what happens. For Time is
nothing if not amenable.
The shooting stars in your black hair
in bright formation
are flocking where,
so straight, so soon?
– Come, let me wash it in this big tin basin,
battered and shiny like the moon.
Elizabeth Bishop, “The Shampoo” (via lifeinpoetry)
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.
“One Art”, Elizabeth Bishop
the poet & the architect
i.
she cuts (with the tip of her pen and her tongue) out
lines dictating proportions, her
eyes stripping oaks down to their weight in gold,
furnace-hands rearranging space displacing parts you’d thought would stick -
that are now tucked behind cabinets forgotten
as slowly you are not yourself but a renovation, vignettes of brittle things that have been improved from you,
painted over to hide the brick.
the dimension of her lust is a cruel price
she’s paid with her lifeblood and yours to fall
head-first into the ocean of a world-worth living where finally
the scale of the tallest peak is as calculated as all her dreams.
ii.
she observes, puts into verses.
leaning on a man she asks to be described as the loneliest person to have ever lived.
using heavier pens and bleeding from deeper cuts, but
before the indulgence of feeling she has already sold these wounds for replication.
collar upturned for fear of losing more words -
things she knows will never live to taste again
because now they read what she writes in schools, and she cannot reconcile
herself and the woman who lives in her pages,
reflecting the street lamps and tainting her lips with the taste of dusk and ash
like words looking for a tune,
graffiti wanting for paragraphs within plot-lines, and land-mines
where she will trip, hoping to fall into concave arms measured singularly to the way she loved,
and they lost.
(rld)