Rilke on Love and and Other Difficulties

If only we arrange our life according
to that principle which counsels us
that we must always hold to the difficult,
then that which now still seems to us
the most alien become what we
most trust and find most faithful.

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Spaces are Necessary.

It only takes one
hesitant step.
A simple movement.

I've decided.
I am "me." 

Beyond this point,
"We" no longer exist.

And I am alone.
And you aren't following. 

How does it feel to
dissolve into absence,
After years of re-membering
our ways to fit the gaps?

Memory is devoured by time.
And momentary edges remind us of what we've lost.

Music endures.
Sometime we tell stories.
For the past holds fondness for ignorance:
(I miss you, terribly.)
"It was always better then."
"This is our song!"
  
Although stretched taught,
Strings do not break away.
For it is in returning,
That leaving meant something.

A lone guitar wails for a moment,
have I already lost you?
Caressed by callused fingers,
We are used to playing this game of departure and return:
Hush, I am here.
Strings merge and separate
into a melody, a duet breaks a century of silence.

[There is constant space between us.
There has always been space between us.]

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This is Where We Live by Pablo Neruda

I am grateful to the earth

for having waited

for me

when the sky and sea came together

like two lips touching;

for that's no small thing, no?--

to have lived

through one solitude to arrive at another,

to feel oneself many things and recover wholeness.

I love all the things there are,

and of all fires

love is the only inexhaustible one;

and that's why I go from life to life,

from guitar to guitar,

and I have no fear

of light or of shade,

and almost being earth myself,

I spoon away at infinity.

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φῶς (phos) "light" and γραφή (graphê)

Drawing with Light

This is our fate:
to see things that aren't there.
The next movement is an anticipated
syncopation,
breaking into gesture.
A sigh, a head lays on a shoulder.

This is our fate:
To forget what we saw,
For color cannot be remembered.
Light falls differently on every eye absorbing a moment.

This is our fate:
To know the difference.
For to compose, composite, de-compose,
is to choose a story.
(They will never know.)
They should know,
that reality does not satisfy the dreamer.

This is our fate:
To blink, to lose an instant to time.
For clicking opens the shutter long enough,
only to close as quickly.
Eyes water and to dream is a forgivable luxury.

This is our fate:
to step away from ourselves.
For distance allows us to focus, unfocus,
until the decisive moment.

This is our fate:
To record history with silence.
For every print trades its lightness for gravity.
A mimicry of stories unfold in front of the viewers gaze.

(to be continued within the course of the year. probably. hopefully!)
This just might evolve into one of my pet projects. I'm thinking of taking photos to match each stanza and perhaps put together a small book.

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Washing

Sorrow seeps through cupped hands
like water taken against it's will.
It cannot be contained.
Tears
brim over the edges,
like bleeding watercolor on white paper.
The world is a gasp of shapes,
lacking in dimension.
I blink to give way to gravity's course.

It's best not to fight it,
in exchange for clarity.

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A void

I think I lost a friend today.
My condolences.
No, not to death. But similar to it, I suppose.
To what then?

To silence.
To space.
To a void. (Avoid.)

Lost words float on a wave with no sound.
Memories dip, falter, and are taken in, in an instant swell of emotion.
Wave after wave after wave,
I send a flying kiss to find you in the depths.
I promise not to wait on the shore
or to bother with prayers.
It is enough,
somehow enough,
to survive such tragedies.



You told me you wanted to eat up my sadness
Well jump on, enjoy, you can gorge away
You told me you wanted to eat up my sadness
Jump right
Baby, you've got to be more discerning
I've never known what's good for me
Baby, you've got to be more demanding
Jump left

This modern love breaks me
This modern love wastes me

Do you wanna come over and kill some time?
Tell me facts, tell me facts, tell me facts
Tell me facts
Throw your arms around me.

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If only we could collapse inward--
crushing this loneliness
under a debris
of bones.
Maybe we can forget
such a structure existed
and discover ourselves whole
once more--
contained in a heartbeat.

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Winter is coming.

It will take some getting used to, the cold. Especially this kind that seeps into bones. Stealthily it creeps and surrounds the deepest of marrows like a tongue sucking out the life in me.

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Solitude

for S.

Ultimately we die alone.
It is an experience reserved
for us since birth.
A payment for living?
No matter.
We still force ourselves
To love, perhaps to
Forget the finality
Of our bodies' divisions.

We welcome nothingness,
as we dissolve into each other,
Allowing ourselves to feel
Bliss, or something like it.
Eyes closed,
We do not like to see
ourselves die
in another's arms,
Just to be born again,
Alone.

For the end will come.
It always does,
Come.

In despair, we curl into a fetal position,
Allowing ourselves to remember
How naturally we are
enveloped by darkness and solitude.
We try to remember what it was like
To be held by night--
Held together
and contained within ourselves.

But light filters through closed eyelids,
and it glares at us,
as we are released from this quiet embrace;
Nakedness is no exception to its severity.
We cannot forget
Our divisions then.

But how can you turn away?
When you can see you are not alone?

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Disaggregation

It was a strange condition of cracking from the core.
Pieces fall away, for no apparent reason.
Muss es sein? Es muss sein!
The sculptor cries in his grave--
His art has no lasting impression on time.

Restorers find noses
Crumbled into dust,
Resigned to unremembered scents.
Like the telltale sweat of someone struggling to survive.
But stone reveals itself as only stone,
Coolly collected,
As strange hands attempt to replace
broken parts.

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Struggling to defend..love.

It is exhausting to defend..love. Struggling all the time--to explain it, to believe in it, and to find it, is truly a chore. Deceptive love..how will people know that it's real if our hearts are capable of "loving" again. and again. Repairing itself to accommodate someone else, regardless of doubt, pain, or misery. As if our hearts can take that much loss! But it IS real! How do I explain it? It is strange to meet these agnostic lovers.

And what of our love? A battling of individuals trying to remember and forget the most. A love independent of ideal qualities, ever changing, strangely beautiful? It is a terrifying thing, this love of ours, precisely because it seems rare. We bounce back and forth between i-don't-want-to-lose-you and I-have-already-lost-you-because-you-love-me. Am I just idealizing things between us? I should stop playing witness to the world. It shouldn't matter to me--what they think, I mean. KNOWING should be enough for me, right? I have to admit that sometimes it isn't.

It's must be this distance...this innate longing to be together...it highlights just how far apart we are right now.

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The Way of It

This is the way of it, wide world over,
One is beloved, and one is the lover,
One gives and the other receives.
One lavishes all in a wild emotion,
One offers a smile for a life's devotion,
One hopes and the other believes,
One lies awake in the night to weep,
And the other drifts off in a sweet sound sleep.

One soul is aflame with a godlike passion,
One plays with love in an idler's fashion,
One speaks and the other hears.
One sobs, 'I love you,'and wet eyes show it,
And one laughs lightly, and says, 'I know it,'
With smiles for the other's tears.
One lives for the other and nothing beside,
And the other remembers the world is wide.

This is the way of it, sad earth over,
The heart that breaks is the heart of the lover,
And the other learns to forget.
For what is the use of endless sorrow?
Though the sun goes down, it will rise tomorrow;
And life is not over yet.
Oh! I know this truth, if no other,
That Passionate Love is Pain's own mother.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1850-1919)

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A Moment

The clouds had made a crimson crown
Above the mountains high.
The stormy sun was going down
In a story sky.

Why did you let your eyes so rest on me,
And hold your breath between,
In all the ages this can never be
As if it had never been.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861-1907)

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Those Who Love

Those who love the most,
Do not talk of their love,
Francesca, Guinevere,
Dierdre, Iseult, Heloise
In the fragrant gardens of heaven
Are silent, or speak of at all
Of fragile inconsequent things.

And a woman I used to know
Who loved one man from her youth,
Against the strength of the fates
Fighting in somber pride
Never spoke of this thing,
But hearing his name by chance,
A light would pass over her face.

Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

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LDF

If only I could stop breathing,
squeeze this ache and
clasp the vertigo inside me
in my fists...

If only I could run
to close this space
that reminds me that we're apart,

If only I could make you truly see--
see me,
how I am without you,

Then there would be no need for these quiet tears, shouting in ALL CAPS, and emoticons.

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Bird in Flight

Fingers melt into sable wings.
I, a fluttering form
unable to escape these walls.
Nature dictates
its well-worn path--
This is north,
That is south.

I must go my own way.
But I cannot help
but be defined by you,
pulled by an instinct
born before me.

Ah, nature.
Or cruel fate?

I think we both yearn to break
away from this bond
and discover
our own shapes,
removed from these hands--
this glaring light,
that only illuminates our
incapacity to see beyond ourselves.

So why do we hold on
to this painful mimicry,
of me trying to be what you are,
a life void of color,
unable to let you go.

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No Titles

In between waking and dreaming
Of drunken stars and white silences,
Their gazes articulated what they felt
With words that would never be born.

for W.

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