Love

Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being in love which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.But sometimes the petals fall away and the roots have not entwined. Imagine giving up your home and your people, only to discover after six months, a year, three years, that the trees have no roots and have fallen over. Imagine the desolation. Imagine the imprisonment.


-Captain Corelli's Mandolin

Sonnet XLIII

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain 
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

i do not love thee

I do not love thee!—no! I do not love thee!
And yet when thou art absent I am sad;
And envy even the bright blue sky above thee,
Whose quiet stars may see thee and be glad.

I do not love thee!—yet, I know not why,
Whate’er thou dost seems still well done, to me:
  And often in my solitude I sigh
That those I do love are not more like thee!

I do not love thee!—yet, when thou art gone,
I hate the sound (though those who speak be dear)
  Which breaks the lingering echo of the tone
Thy voice of music leaves upon my ear.

I do not love thee!—yet thy speaking eyes,
With their deep, bright, and most expressive blue,
  Between me and the midnight heaven arise,
Oftener than any eyes I ever knew.

I know I do not love thee! yet, alas!
Others will scarcely trust my candid heart;
  And oft I catch them smiling as they pass,
Because they see me gazing where thou art.

Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton

all the heart

Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that's lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.

W. B. Yeats

dreams

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

Langston Huges

psalm of life

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
   "Life is but an empty dream!"
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
   And things are not what they seem.

Life is real! Life is earnest!
   And the grave is not its goal;
"Dust thou art, to dust returnest,"
   Was not spoken of the soul.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

spring and fall (to a young child)

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

be drunk!

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

Charles Baudelaire
Translated by Louis Simpson

Nothing Twice

Nothing can ever happen twice.
In consequence, the sorry fact is
that we arrive here improvised
and leave without the chance to practice.

Even if there is no one dumber,
if you're the planet's biggest dunce,
you can't repeat the class in summer:
this course is only offered once.

No day copies yesterday,
no two nights will teach what bliss is
in precisely the same way,
with precisely the same kisses.

One day, perhaps some idle tongue
mentions your name by accident:
I feel as if a rose were flung
into the room, all hue and scent.

The next day, though you're here with me,
I can't help looking at the clock:
A rose? A rose? What could that be?
Is ita flower or a rock?

Why do we treat the fleeting day
with so much needless fear and sorrow?
It's in its nature not to say
Today is always gone tomorrow

With smiles and kisses, we prefer
to seek accord beneath our star,
although we're different (we concur)
just as two drops of water are.

Wislawa Szymborska

Free

"We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it."
William Faulkner

very pissed off

"I see in fight club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see squandering. Goddamn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

Tyler, Fight Club

sabbath poem

Sabbath poem II, 1995

The best reward in going to the woods
Is being lost to other people, and
Lost sometimes to myself. I'm at the end
Of no bespeaking wire to spoil my goods;

I send no letter back I do not bring.
Whoever wants me now must hunt me down
Like something wild, and wild is anything
Beyond the reach of purpose not its own.

Wild is anything that's not at home
In something else's place. This good white oak
Is not an orchard tree, is unbespoke,
And it can live here by its will alone,

Lost to all other wills but Heaven's--wild.
So where I most am found I'm lost to you,
Presuming friend, and only can be called
Or answered by a certain one, or two.

Wendell Berry

the guest

Washed into the doorway
by the wake of the traffic,
he wears humanity
like a third-hand shirt
--blackened with enough
of Manhatten's dirt to sprout
a tree, or poison one.
His empty hand has led him
where he has come to.
Our differences claim us.
He holds out his hand,
in need of all that's mine.

And so we're joined, as deep
as son and father. His life
is offered me to choose.

Shall I begin servitude
to him? Let this cup pass.
Who am I? But charity must
suppose, knowing no better,
that this is a man fallen
among theives, or come
to this strait by no fault
-- that our difference
is not a judgement,
though I can afford to eat
and am made his judge.

I am, I nearly believe
the Samaritan who fell
into the ambush of his heart
on the way to another place.
My stranger waits, his hand
held out like something to read,
as though its emptiness
is an accomplishment.
I give him a smoke and the price
of a meal, no more

-- not sufficient kindness
or believable sham.
I paid him to remain strange
to my threshold and table,
to permit me to forget him --
knowning I won't. He's the guest
of my knowing, though not asked.

Wendell Berry

the fire and the rose

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling...

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flames are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

T.S. Eliot, The Four Quartets

Does he love us?

“Does Mister God love us truly?”

“Sure thing,” I said. “Mister God loves everything.”

“Oh,” she said. “Well then, why does he let things get hurt and dead?” Her voice sounded as if she felt she had betrayed a sacred trust, but the question has been thought and it had to be spoken.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “There’s a great many things about Mister God that we don’t know about.”

“Well then,” she continued, “if we don’t know many things about Mister God, how do we know he loves us?”

I could see that this was going to be one of those times, but thank goodness she didn’t expect an answer to her question, for she hurried on: “Them pollywogs, I could love them till I burst, but they wouldn’t know, would they? I’m million times bigger than they are and Mister God is million times bigger than me, so how do I know what Mister God does?”

She was silent for a little while. Later I thought that at this moment she was taking her last look at babyhood. Then she went on.

“Fynn, Mister God doesn’t love us.” She hesitated. “He doesn’t really, you know, only people can love. I love Bossy, but Bossy don’t love me. I love you, Fynn, and you love me, don’t you?”

I tightened my arm about her.

“You love me because you are people. I love Mister God truly, but he don’t love me.”

It sounded like a death knell. “Damn and blast,” I thought. “Why does this have to happen to people? Now she’s lost everything.” But I was wrong. She had got both feet planted firmly on the next stepping-stone.

“No,” she went on, “no, he don’t love me, not like you do, it’s different, it’s millions of times bigger.”

I must have made some movement or noise, for she levered herself upright and sat on her haunches and giggled. Then she launched herself at me and undid my little pang of hurt, cut out the useless spark of jealousy with the delicateness of a surgeon.

“Fynn, you can love better than any people that ever was, and so can I, can’t I? But Mister God is different. You see, Fynn, people can only love outside and can only kiss outside, but Mister God can love you right inside, and Mister God can kiss you right inside, so it’s different. Mister God ain’t like us; we are a little bit like Mister God, but not much yet.”

It seemed to me to reduce itself to the fact that we were like God because of some similarities, but God was not like us because of our differences. Her inner fires had refined her ideas, and like some alchemist she had turned lead into gold. Gone were all the human definitions of God, like Goodness, Mercy, Love, and Justice, for these were merely props to describe the indescribable.

“You see, Fynn, Mister God is different from us because he can finish things and we can’t. I can’t finish loving you because I shall be dead millions of years before I can finish, but Mister God can finish loving ou, and so it’s not the same kind of love, is it? Even Mister Jether’s love is not the same as Mister God’s because he only came here to make us remember.”

Mister God, This is Anna

Anna's idea of God

After the evening meal was finished and all the bits and pieces put away, Anna and I would settle down to some activity, generally of her choosing. Fairy stories were dismissed as mere pretend stories; living was real and living was interesting, and by and large, fun. Reading the Bible wasn’t a great success. She tended to regard it was a primer, strictly for the infants. The message of the Bible was simple and any half-wit could grasp it in thirty minutes flat! Religion was for doing things, not for reading about doing things. Once you had got the message there wasn’t much point in going over and over the same old ground. Our local parson was taken aback when he asked her about God. The conversation went as follows:

“Do you believe in God?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know what God is?”

“Yes.”

“What is God then?”

“He’s God!”

“Do you go to church?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I know it all!”

“What do you know?”

“I know to love Mister God and to love people and cats and dogs and spiders and flowers and trees” – and the catalog went on – “with all of me.”

Carol grinned at me, Stan made a face, and I hurriedly put a cigarette in my mouth and indulged in a bout of coughing. There’s nothing much you can do in the face of that kind of accusation, for that’s what it amounted to. (“Out of the mouths of babes…”) Anna had bypassed all the nonessentials and distilled centuries of learning into one sentence: “And God said love me, love them, and love it, and don’t forget to love yourself.”

The whole business of adults going to church filled Anna with suspicion. The idea of collective worship went against her sense of private conversations with Mister God. As for going to church to meet Mister God, that was preposterous. After all, if Mister God wasn’t everywhere, he wasn’t anywhere. For her, churchgoing and “Mister God” talks had no necessary connection. For her, the whole thing was transparently simple. You went to church to get the message when you were very little. Once you had got it, you went out and did something about it. Keeping on going to church was because you hadn’t got the message or didn’t understand it or it was “just for swank.”

Mister God, This is Anna

monsters in trashcans

I'm off for a walk, braving the cold and the monsters in the trashcans. But they don't frighten me anymore, because last time they came out and put their arm around me and asked why I was crying, and then gave me tea and hot biscuits. I asked them what it was like to be monsters and live in trashcans, and they said it wasn't easy being green but that God had a plan for them too, and that day it was to come out and comfort me. And they said they couldn't help me with all of my problems, but promised that it wasn't all meaningless and random and that I should just keep doing the best that I could. I told them I was afraid that I was being destructive in the things that were most important to me, and if that was the case I'd rather God just kill me before I screwed anything up more. So then they said that I had to try to be wise, but that really God only asked me to pray a lot and act out of love as much as I could. And I was relieved, and it was like Narnia and Sesame Street had combined and materialized in Lullwater Park one very cold day.

Sarah Eliza Langley

Veronika decides to die

"Save your criticisms for later."
"I'll try to, although all I have is the present, and a very brief one too, it seems."
"That's all anyone has, and it's always very brief, although, of course, some people believe they have a past where they can accumulate things and a future where they will accumulate still more."

This young woman's case, though, was dramatic because she was so young and because she now wanted to live again - something they all knew to be impossible. Some people asked themselves, What if that happened to me? I do have a chance to live. Am I making good use of it?

"I'm going to allow myself to do a few foolish things, just so that people can say: 'She's just been released from Villete.' But I know that my soul is complete, because my life has meaning. I'll be able to look at a sunset and believe God is behind it. When someone irritates me, I'll tell them what I think of them, and I won't worry what they think of me, because everyone will say: 'She's just been released from Villete.'"

Paulo Coelho

home

III. House upon the Rock

On some soon afternoon I'll fly back home,
Well-weighted down with everything I own.
To sweet iced tea and Southern drawls I go,
Along the driveway, through our bright red door
To follow puppy nose, proud gaze, soft hands
Upstairs to my own bed in my own room.

But far off from that bed and from that room
Is this bedroom that has lately marked my home,
And far off from that nose, that gaze, those hands
Are these corners I have lately made my own,
And far off from that driveway and that door,
This gate that screeches grudges when I go.

I'm learning how to take root on the go.
Each year a different bed, another room:
Relearn the twist of wrist to lock the door.
Each year I have nine months to make a home,
Of furniture you'd never want to own
That's made to hide the prints of strangers' hands.

When I was three my mother took my hands
In plaster held them still, then let me go
To play at building stories on my own.
Queen mother of a kingdom in my room,
I had no need for sad-sweet words like home,
The whole known world was behind our front door.

My world now pivots far beyond that door;
Those prints now pantomime my adult hands,
Which clench in silence when I miss my home
To stifle sadness, help me bravely go
Again to this year's bed and this year's room
Where I (for real) am building on my own.

I often find it difficult to own
All that I do beyond that red front door
Sometimes it seems that I don't have the room
To hold life's pebbles in my two small hands:
Each chip of stone from each new place I go,
Each piece of what will someday be my home.

Though hands of time again transform my own,
I still will rally going out the door
To look for bits of home beyond my room.

Devin Yagel
(friend of mine)

making death

"Mortification - literally, 'making death' - is what life is all about, a slow discovery of the mortality of all that is created so that we can appreciate its beauty without clinging to it as if it were a lasting possession. Our lives can indeed be seen as a process of becoming familiar with death, as a school in the art of dying. I do not mean this in a morbid way. On the contrary, when we see life constantly relativized by death, we can enjoy it for what it is: a free gift. The pictures, letters, and books of the past reveal life to us as a constant saying of farewell to beautiful places, good people, and wonderful experience...All these times have passed by like friendly visitors, leaving [us] with dear memories but also with the sad recognition of the shortness of life. In every arrival there is a leavetaking; in each one's growing up there is a growing old; in every smile there is a tear; and in every success there is a loss. All living is dying and all celebration is mortification too."
--Henri Nouwen, A Letter of Consolation
(from Lament for a Son)

How to use this body

Remove clothes and put to one side.
Body will look awkward, which is normal.
Arrange body on sheets, adjust temperature,
and turn out lights.

At this point,
any number of things can go wrong:
phone can ring, vase or book can fall
from shelf, memory can quicken, love can beat
its wings against the window, and so on.
In that case read to body, give body

hot drink or bath, return body to bed,
and repeat steps two through four (above).
After several hours, remove body from bed
and wash.

Put body into clothes again.
Feed and love body. Do not cut, shoot,
hang, poison, or throw body from window.
Keep body from drafts and solitude.
Write us if you are happy with body, and
could we use your name in our next poem?

David Kirby

uncertainty

"'Believe also in Me,' said Jesus, not 'Believe certain things about Me.'"

"Naturally, we are inclined to be so mathematical and calculating that we look upon uncertainty as a bad thing. We imagine that we have to reach some end, but that is not the nature of spiritual life. The nature of spiritual life is that we are certain in our uncertainty."
Oswald Chambers

your own laws

Each of us has to find out for ourselves what is permitted and what is forbidden--forbidden for him. It's possible for one never to transgress a single law and still be a bastard. And vice versa. Actually, it's only a question of convenience. Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judges obey the rules. Others sense their own laws within them; things are forbidden in them that every honorable man will do in any day of the year, and other things are allowed to them that are generally despised. Each person must stand on his own feet.

Demian, by Hermann Hesse

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years -
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre duex guerres
Trying to learn to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength or submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after,
But a lifetime burning in every moment
And not the lifetime of one man only
But of old stones that cannot be deciphered.
There is a time for the evening under starlight,
A time for the evening under lamplight
(The evening with the photograph album).
Love is most nearly itself
When here and now cease to matter.
Old men ought to be explorers
Here and here does not matter
We must be still and still moving
Into another intensity
For a further union, a deeper communion
Through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

T.S. Eliot