home

Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Memorial Day

Only the dead have seen the end of war.

attributed to Plato

Knife

Something
just now
moved through my heart
like the thinnest of blades
as that red-tail pumped
once with its great wings
and flew above the gray, cracked
rock wall.
It wasn't
about the bird, it was
something about the way
stone stays
mute and put, whatever
goes flashing by.
Sometimes,when I sit like this, quiet,
all the dreams of my blood
and all outrageous divisions of time
seem ready to leave,
to slide out of me.
Then, I imagine, I would never move.
By now
the hawk has flown five miles
at least,
dazzling whoever else has happened
to look up.
I was dazzled. But that
wasn't the knife.
It was the sheer, dense wall
of blind stone
without a pinch of hope
or a single unfulfilled desire.

Knife
Mary Oliver

Beguiling

She is so beguiling
That when she beckons
I can run a mile
In twenty seconds.

Beguiling
Roger McGough

forever in my garden.

If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden.

Attributed to and borrowed from:
Claudia Ghandi

The Gift

This morning there's snow everywhere. We remark on it.
You tell me you didn't sleep well. I say
I didn't either. You had a terrible night. "Me too."
We're extraordinarily calm and tender with each other
as if sensing the other's rickety state of mind.
As if we knew what the other was feeling. We don't,
of course. We never do. No matter.
It's the tenderness I care about. That's the gift
this morning that moves me and holds me.
Same as every morning.


The Gift [excerpt]
Raymond Carver

one book

Are we not like two volumes of one book?

Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

St. Ives

As I was going to St Ives
I met a man with seven wives
Said he, 'I think it's much more fun
Than getting stuck with only one.'

St. Ives
Roald Dahl

Love Sick

I'm sick of love; I wish I'd never met you
I'm sick of love; I'm trying to forget you

Just don't know what to do
I'd give anything to
Be with you

Love Sick [excerpt]
Bob Dylan

Bluebird

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pour whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

Bluebird
Charles Bukowski

For Mom(s)

Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. ~Elizabeth Stone

You don't really understand human nature unless you know why a child on a merry-go-round will wave at his parents every time around - and why his parents will always wave back. ~William D. Tammeus

My mom is a neverending song in my heart of comfort, happiness, and being. I may sometimes forget the words but I always remember the tune. ~Graycie Harmon

A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie. ~Tenneva Jordan

like their mothers.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That's his.

The Importance of Being Earnest
Oscar Wilde

what I am feeling

I never know what I am feeling until it’s too late.

Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides

the joy of your approach

There is something
something urgent
I have to say to you
and you alone
but it must wait
while I drink in
the joy of your approach,
perhaps for the last time.

Asphodel, That Greeny Flower, Book I [excerpt]
William Carlos Williams

Borrowed from "the Book of Dreams"...

I dream of when I met my wife, fifty years ago, and it’s exactly as it happened. I dream of our marriage, and I can even see my father’s tears of pride. It’s all there, just as it was. But then I dream of my own death, which I have heard is impossible to do, but you must believe me. I dream of my wife telling me on my deathbed that she loves me, and even though she thinks I can’t hear her, I can, and she says she wouldn’t have changed anything. It feels like a moment I’ve lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake.

Everything Is Illuminated
Jonathan Safran Foer

Sex Without Love

How do they do it, the ones who make love
without love? Beautiful as dancers,
gliding over each other like ice-skaters
over the ice, fingers hooked
inside each other's bodies, faces
red as steak, wine, wet as the
children at birth whose mothers are going to
give them away. How do they come to the
come to the come to the God come to the
still waters, and not love
the one who came there with them, light
rising slowly as steam off their joined
skin? These are the true religious,
the purists, the pros, the ones who will not
accept a false Messiah, love the
priest instead of the God. They do not
mistake the lover for their own pleasure,
they are like great runners: they know they are alone
with the road surface, the cold, the wind,
the fit of their shoes, their over-all cardio-
vascular health--just factors, like the partner
in the bed, and not the truth, which is the
single body alone in the universe
against its own best time.

Sex Without Love
Sharon Olds

I Am Not Yours

I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

I Am Not Yours [excerpt]
Sarah Teasdale

Cake

i wanted one life
you wanted another
we couldn't have our cake
so we ate eachother.

Cake
Roger McGough

Pettiness is the first casualty...

Hospitals strip a lot from you - your independence, your confidence, sometimes your will to live. But pettiness too. Pettiness is the first casualty of the ICU waiting room. No one has the energy for it.

Would you like this magazine? I'm done with it.
Oh, let me remove my coat. Take the seat. Take the seat, take it.
I'm going to get a soda. Would you like one?
Is this okay, or should I keep flipping?

Even the employees in the gift shop and the cafeteria and the food court and at the coffee carts, are to a person, respectful and courteous. Never solicitous, but kind. Because they don't know if your son just died, your wife just received chemo, you've been told you won't see June.

There is a basic human concern in hospitals.

ICU [excerpt from Coronado]
Dennis Lehane