Bury your heart in some deep green hollow
Or hide it up in a kind old tree
Better still, give it the swallow
When she goes over the sea.
— Charlotte Mew
Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.
“I begin to feel the wish to be singled out; to be summoned, to be called away by one person who comes to find me, who is attracted towards me, who cannot keep himself from me, but comes to where I sit on my gilt chair, with my frock billowing round me like a flower. And withdrawing into an alcove, sitting alone on a balcony we talk together.”— Virginia Woolf, The Waves
September 22.
Nothing.
Nothing.
— Franz Kafka - from The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1910-1923
“I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and ankle. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too. And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin to know each other?”— Mary Oliver, from “The Whistler” in Winter Hours
“Where is the scent of cloves coming from?? her hair? armpit? or her dress thrown on the Tunisian rug? From the third step in the house? Layla makes everything smell of cloves. Layla is the orchard when it’s wet. She is what the orchard breathes when it’s watered at night Layla knows now that I am drunk with the scent of cloves […] My fingers are numb, over the dunes she knows my pulse is hers, my water is hers. Layla leaves me sleeping, rocking between clouds and cloves.”— Saadi Youssef, from ‘Cloves’, Nostalgia, My Enemy: Poems (trans. Sinan Antoon & Peter Money)
“Love and fury can coexist” is one of the rawest fucking statements regarding human rights activism that I’ve ever heard
And I saw it didn’t matter
who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone.
The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty
of the Iranian attendant, the thickening
clouds–nothing was mine. And I understood
finally, after a semester of philosophy,
a thousand books of poetry, after death
and childbirth and the startled cries of men
who called out my name as they entered me,
I finally believed I was alone, felt it
in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo
like a thin bell. And the sounds
came back, the slish of tires
and footsteps, all the delicate cargo
they carried saying thank you
and yes. So I paid and climbed into my car
as if nothing had happened–
as if everything mattered–What else could I do?
who had loved me or who I loved. I was alone.
The black oily asphalt, the slick beauty
of the Iranian attendant, the thickening
clouds–nothing was mine. And I understood
finally, after a semester of philosophy,
a thousand books of poetry, after death
and childbirth and the startled cries of men
who called out my name as they entered me,
I finally believed I was alone, felt it
in my actual, visceral heart, heard it echo
like a thin bell. And the sounds
came back, the slish of tires
and footsteps, all the delicate cargo
they carried saying thank you
and yes. So I paid and climbed into my car
as if nothing had happened–
as if everything mattered–What else could I do?
— Dorianne Laux, from ‘After Twelve Days of Rain’, What We Carry: Poems
Cy Twombly, Studies for Treatise on the Veil, 1970
Crayon, colored pencil, ink, paper, and tape on paper
