Cribbed from the Un
I often feel like giving up. I don’t know why I don’t except that I have family I love and students to whom I feel accountable. I have hope that, in the end, it will all make sense—the overabundance, the scarcity, the apparent meaninglessness, the incredible urge to harm, the terror of others. And the envy—worst of all the emotions, and most hidden. I often think I can’t take another day… I don’t know what else to say, except hang in there, we are all suffering, all of us, even though it might not seem so from the surface, even if from the surface it all looks easier in some other life—
Jorie Graham
For Love
Yesterday I wanted to
speak of it, that sense above
the others to me
important because all
that I know derives
from what it teaches me.
Today, what is it that
is finally so helpless,
different, despairs of its own
statement, wants to
turn away, endlessly
to turn away.
If the moon did not …
no, if you did not
I wouldn’t either, but
what would I not
do, what prevention, what
thing so quickly stopped.
That is love yesterday
or tomorrow, not
now. Can I eat
what you give me. I
have not earned it. Must
I think of everything
as earned. Now love also
becomes a reward so
remote from me I have
only made it with my mind.
Here is tedium,
despair, a painful
sense of isolation and
whimsical if pompous
self-regard. But that image
is only of the mind’s
vague structure, vague to me
because it is my own.
Love, what do I think
to say. I cannot say it.
What have you become to ask,
what have I made you into,
companion, good company,
crossed legs with skirt, or
soft body under
the bones of the bed.
Nothing says anything
but that which it wishes
would come true, fears
what else might happen in
some other place, some
other time not this one.
A voice in my place, an
echo of that only in yours.
Let me stumble into
not the confession but
the obsession I begin with
now. For you
also (also)
some time beyond place, or
place beyond time, no
mind left to
say anything at all,
that face gone, now.
Into the company of love
it all returns
Robert Creeley
From “Crush”
…For starters, it was all
an accident, you cut
the right branch
and a sort of light
woke up underneath,
and the inedible fruit
grew dark and needy.
Think crucial hanging.
Think crayon orange.
There is one low, leaning
heart-shaped globe left
and dearest, can you
tell, I am trying
to love you less.
Ada Limon
It’s O.K. to keep hearing your worries, so long as you
stop talking to them. Shun them like a double-crossed Quaker.
Imagine how quiet it would be, like shutting off the droning ocean.
That’s how our parasites must feel about our hearts.
What a racket, all that pumping. Shut up shut up.
Jennifer Michael Hecht
No doubt left. Enough deceiving.
Now I know you do not love.
Now you know I do not love.
Now we know we do not love.
No more doubt. No more deceiving.
Yet there is pity in us for each other
And better times are almost fresh as true.
The dog returns. And the man to his mother.
And tides. And you to me. And I to you.
James Dickey
In the great volume of the universe, as she read it,
her ego was like a word which she had succeeded, perhaps,
in erasing, but it was still underlined .
Gustave Thibon, on Simone Weil
