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exceptindreams
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June 24 2011, 23:46

08

1214: The Promise | Sharon Olds
"The Promise"
Sharon Olds

With the second drink, at the restaurant,
holding hands on the bare table,
we are at it again, renewing our promise
to kill each other. You are drinking gin,
night-blue juniper berry
dissolving in your body, I am drinking Fume,
chewing its fragrant dirt and smoke, we are
taking on earth, we are part soil already,
and wherever we are, we are also in our
bed, fitted, naked, closely
along each other, half passed out
after love, drifting back
and forth across the border of consciousness,
our bodies buoyant, clasped. Your hand
tightens on the table. You're a little afraid
I'll chicken out. What you do not want
is to lie in a hospital bed for a year
after a stroke, without being able
to think or die, you do not want
to be tied to a chair like a prim grandmother,
cursing. The room is dim around us,
ivory globes, pink curtains,
bound at the waist - and outside,
a weightless, luminous, lifted-up
summer twilight. I tell you you do not
know me if you think I will not
kill you. Think how we have floated together
eye to eye, nipple to nipple,
sex to sex, the halves of a creature
drifting up to the lip of matter
and over it - you know me from the bright, blood-
flecked delivery room, if a lion
had you in its jaws I would attack it, if the ropes
binding your soul are your own wrists, I will cut them.

Yesterday, I asked what your poetry "life lines", your rosary words, your mantras were. Thank you to everyone who has already replied. If you haven't responded yet, please do.

As for mine, I have several, more than I can remember right now.

I have linked to the poems from which the excerpts are taken so you can read the whole poem. I love these poems. They're probably the ones that have touched me the most out of the over 1000 I've posted here.

"Antilamentation"
Dorianne Laux

Regret nothing./
...Not the nights you called god names

This might just be the best advice I've ever received.

"Hunger"
Gamaliel Bradford

I've been a hopeless sinner, but I understand a saint, /...
I'm a haunter of the devil, but I hunger after God.

So another one relating to God. This was the first poem I read that I really liked and identified with, and it was one of the first I ever posted here.

"Trust"
Thomas R. Smith

And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life
is delivered, even though you can't read the address.

This.

"Untitled"
Jalaluddin Rumi
translated by Coleman Barks and John Moyne

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I'll meet you there.

Someone commented with this poem on yesterday's entry, and I completely agree. Sometimes I imagine going there when I can't sleep.

"Failing and Falling"
Jack Gilbert

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.

Someone else commented with this poem on yesterday's entry as well. I love this line -- it has so much truth, and yes, good poetry always is truth (truth in its Sunday clothes, as Joseph Roux said), but this one especially.

"Gratitude"
Leigh Stein

And when it is too hard to be thankful for anything
other than the fact that at least the two of you aren't dead yet,
you call, despite the time zone difference and impossible hour,
to say, Walk west so that I can hear your footsteps better.

"Late Night"
Margaret Atwood

Screw poetry, it's you I want,
your taste, rain
on you, mouth on your skin.

Whenever I find myself missing M, these are the lines that come to mind and bring me comfort in knowing that someone else has felt what I feel.
08

Read also
Gravy | Raymond Carver
We Lived Happily During the War | Ilya Kaminsky
Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars) | Muriel Rukeyser
I look at the world | Langston Hughes
The Failure of Navigation in the Valley | Kazim Ali
Twenty-One Love Poems [Poem II] | Adrienne Rich
8 comments
POST A NEW COMMENT
icy_latte
November 6 2012, 04:39:11 UTC

I know this post was over a year back, but I came across it and wanted to contribute the only poem I have memorized:

"Delphiniums in a Window Box"
By Dean Young

Every sunrise, even strangers’ eyes.
Not necessarily swans, even crows,
even the evening fusillade of bats.
That place where the creek goes underground,
how many weeks before I see you again?
Stacks of books, every page, characters’
rages and poets’ strange contraptions
of syntax and song, every song
even when there isn’t one.
Every thistle, splinter, butterfly
over the drainage ditches. Every stray.
Did you see the meteor shower?
Did it feel like something swallowed?
Every question, conversation
even with almost nothing, cricket, cloud,
because of you I’m talking to crickets, clouds,
confiding in a cat. Everyone says,
Come to your senses, and I do, of you.
Every touch electric, every taste you,
every smell, even burning sugar, every
cry and laugh. Toothpicked samples
at the farmers’ market, every melon,
plum, I come undone, undone.
exceptindreams
November 16 2012, 01:40:24 UTC

This is gorgeous. Thank you.
anotherhand
July 4 2011, 14:30:27 UTC

Yes yes yes to that amazing Jack Gilbert poem, and to the Atwood, too. Yes.
jaded_hopeless
June 25 2011, 16:19:13 UTC

"Safe upon the solid rocks the ugly houses stand
come and see my shining palace built upon the sand."
~Edna St Vincent Milay

I use this to remind myself that doing what you want and loving the unusual, the different, the "fun" if you will is ok.

"Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry."
~Auden "In Memory of WB Yates"

I use this to remind myself that something you love can force you to do bigger things, even if it is motivated by pain.

"But Kurt...
Didn't the thought that you would never write another song
Another feverish line or riff
Make you think twice?
That's what I don't understand
Because it's kept me alive, above any wounds"
~Jim Carrol 8 Fragments for Kurt Cobain

this one reminds me never to give up

"He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;"
~Auden

this one i always kept in my head because i hoped to someday find someone who made me feel like this- someone who was literally the guiding force in my life.

I could go on, but this comment is long enough.
kyreii
June 25 2011, 14:28:58 UTC

the lesson of the moth

By Don Marquis

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires

why do you fellows
pull this stunt i asked him
because it is the conventional
thing for moths or why
if that had been an uncovered
candle instead of an electric
light bulb you would
now be a small unsightly cinder
have you no sense

plenty of it he answered
but at times we get tired
of using it
we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy
for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while
so we wad all our life up
into one little roll
and then we shoot the roll
that is what life is for
it is better to be a part of beauty
for one instant and then cease to
exist than to exist forever
and never be a part of beauty
our attitude toward life
is come easy go easy
we are like human beings
used to be before they became
too civilized to enjoy themselves

and before i could argue him
out of his philosophy
he went and immolated himself
on a patent cigar lighter
i do not agree with him
myself i would rather have
half the happiness and twice
the longevity

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

archy

-------------------------------

I read this poem once and though I've never committed it to memory, it remains my favorite poem and something I go back to when I'm having a hard time.
athiran
June 25 2011, 13:32:04 UTC
When yet I had not walk'd above
A mile or two from my first love;
-- Henry Vaughan, The Retreat
Thus let me live, unseen, unknown;
Thus unlamented let me die;
Steal from the world, and not a stone
Tell where I lie.
-- Alexander Pope, Solitude.
I am sinner,I am saint.
I am the beloved and the Betrayed.
I have no joys that are not yours,
no aches which are not yours.
I too call myself I.
-- Kamala Das, An Introduction.
"I look for uncomplicated hymns
but love has none."
-- Anne Sexton, March 1965, 'a little uncomplicated hymn'

If a god must shatter me
upon the wine-dark sea,
so be it.
-- Homer, The Odyssey.

Then mercy returns to me
To the fretboard
And the problems of the song
-- Leonard Cohen, Mercy Returns To Me.

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