The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.Derek Walcott, 1976.
(via round robin editrice)
Love After Love
•July 22, 2009 • Leave a CommentThe night
•April 27, 2009 • Leave a Comment
Nice kind of night feeling, by pixel
The night
1
The night, its feelers twitching in the distance
the night locked into a box swallowed by the night in the dresser in the nook
while my eyes and especially that space between my eyes and nostrils stretches out like a two-story gutter
startled and unnerved, I’m suddenly aware—there’s a tubular cocoon, spun from eye to eye, through which I see only the night, fractured and phantasmagoric
thanks to a force from who knows where the space of my dream has been split by a wall
on this side sleep is not possible and on the other it’s perfectly possible but nevertheless thoroughly impossible
the wall, in fact, is not a wall but a living force that writhes and throbs and this wall is me
with an inconceivable transparency that allows me to see the night’s other side
and places you might sleep in an overcoat of aches and interminable sighs and grief-belching terrors which home in on your bones
the other side of night is a night without night, without earth, without shelter, without rooms, without furniture, unpeopled
there is absolutely nothing on the other side of night
it’s a world utterly without world, and to possess it, you must never arrive there
—it’s the dock at the very side of your body
and, at the same time, it’s inconceivably remote.
Excerpt from The night, by Jaime Saenz, translated from the Spanish by Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson
Morning has broken
•April 27, 2009 • Leave a Comment
Morning has broken, like the first morning
Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning
Praise for them springing fresh from the worldSweet the rain’s new fall, sunlit from heaven
Like the first dewfall, on the first grass
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden
Sprung in completeness where his feet passMine is the sunlight, mine is the morning
Born of the one light, eden saw play
Praise with elation, praise every morning
God’s recreation of the new day







