who only by moving can balance

How did we get to be old ladies--
my grandmother's job--when we
were the long-leggèd girls?
--Hilma Wolitzer

Instead of marrying the day after graduation,
in spite of freezing on my father's arm as
here comes the bride struck up,
saying, I'm not sure I want to do this,

I should have taken that fellowship
to the University of Grenoble to examine
the original manuscript
of Stendhal's unfinished Lucien Leuwen,

I, who had never been west of the Mississippi,
should have crossed the ocean
in third class on the Cunard White Star,
the war just over, the Second World War

when Kilroy was here, that innocent graffito,
two eyes and a nose draped over
a fence line. How could I go?
Passion had locked us together.

Sixty years my lover,
he says he would have waited.
He says he would have sat
where the steamship docked

till the last of the pursers
decamped, and I rushed back
littering the runway with carbon paper...
Why didn't I go? It was fated.

Marriage dizzied us. Hand over hand,
flesh against flesh for the final haul,
we tugged our lifeline through limestone and sand,
lover and long-leggèd girl.

Dark corsage I can't
unpin, I'm stuck with it,
drawing wry comment
for days, however I hide
this stamp that approves
the boundary, proves that you
stop short of blood, all jokes
aside. But note
how readily my veins
leap up: a little harder and
the whole heart would follow,
I'd turn inside out, bleak pocket
for your rummaging,
magician's hat. And yet
I don't; I let you pass
like this small stormcloud on
my white, impassive throat.

Tracy Ryan

Huh, apparently I haven't actually recced A Litany for Survival here, at least not any place I can find it readily? So let's start with that.

( A Litany for Survival )

from Walking Our Boundaries

The sun is watery warm
our voices
seem too loud for this small yard
too tentative for women
so in love
the siding has come loose in spots
our footsteps hold this place
together
as our place
our joint decisions make the possible
whole.
I do not know when
we shall laugh again
but next week
we will spade up another plot
for this spring's seeding.

( from Eulogy for Alvin Frost )

Note that synecdochic has set up smellsgood for those of us that way inclined ;)

( Huitieme Art - ciel d'airain )


( Serge Lutens - femininite du bois )



Still to go I've got Tauer Orange Star & Lonestar Memories, and Knize Ten, but I'm not particularly feeling in the mood for any of those today (LM turns into WD40 on me - it's hilarious but I'd like to write it up properly) so you get the theoretically femme scents today. ;)

A day
drunk with the nectar of
nowness
weaves its way between
the years
to find itself at the flophouse
of night
to sleep and be seen
no more.

Will I be less
dead because I wrote this
poem or you more because
you read it
long years hence.

-- Maya Angelou

( The Summer Day )

A snippet:

... to live in this world

you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

And another:

... You must not ever stop being whimsical.
And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.

( The Journey )

All by Mary Oliver.

1. My strategy for dealing with my insomnia last night (leave main light on, read book until can't any more, pretend is afternoon nap) was good for 4 hours' sleep, which I think is more than I'd have managed otherwise. Hurrah for coping strategies.

2. I have now finished the first Mary Oliver collection I borrowed from the Saison Poetry Library, and it's amazing and I love her (You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.).

3. I need to be in work this afternoon (and building steam has been turned back on, which means that the clean lab isn't at ambient outdoor temperature, hurrah). I was starting from Oxfordshire, via Paddington. I had my wheelchair with me. Paddington is conveniently just north of Hyde Park, which is just north of work. I had an absolutely fantastic explore along the Serpentine - ridiculous waterfowl, several types of snowdrop, narcissi, silver-fern bramble (one of my favourites), a whole pile of beautiful gradated dogwoods interspersed with salix, gorse in flower, birches with pink bark peeling, a tree with astonishing pink catkins, hellebores and mahonias and...

4. ... and yesterday afternoon I visited the Oxford Botanics with That One Lady. They are tiny and adorable and have a whole series of beds organised by which medical discipline the plants were or are used in. Also, lots of my absolute favourite iris (they're predominantly a sort of pale sky blue in person).

5. The 1am bugfuck nuts appears to have been followed by starting a bleed. Thanks, body, for your utter predictability; on the plus side, in the middle of going "EVERYTHING IS SPIDERS" I did at least manage to spot that that was likely what was happening.

6. Actually, one of the other ways I dealt with the insomnia was putting together a tentative setlist for the 10-minute poetry reading I'm doing as part of a General Evening, in late May. I'm going to have to think a bit carefully, because I've selected 9 poems and put them in a coherent order, so that + patter is clearly going to be too long... e-mail to the organisers time, I think.

7. In fact, the General Evening is a monthly event I performed at with Lashings last night. I remain absolutely astonished by my ability to make a room burst out laughing via the medium of improvisation on an approximate theme of my lines; perhaps I shouldn't be, because after all I've been managing that for nearly five years now, but hey.

8. The Situation with the Partner continues to Make Progress. We've managed another several good & useful conversations; things aren't fixed but we are stubborn enough that we're pretty sure we're going to manage, at this point, and we've got a stopgap in place.

9. It's nearly 5pm and the sun hasn't finished setting, yet; currently it is painting the sky gold, and it is glorious.

10. Thank you to, like, half the Internet for taking care of me during meltdown last night - so, so grateful that you will make the time for me. <3 Special shout-out to flippac, who handled the brunt of it solo with no warning. ♥

Here you go; and of those my favourites are Grief, On the Death of Beth Meacham's Father, On the Death of Spider, Yarnell Fire, and On the Impending Death of Iain Banks. Via poetree.

Content notes: death, horror, and the unbearable.

( Read more... )