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intaceternity · 6 years ago

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Forgiveness

x Rebecca Brown

When I said I'd give my right arm for you, I didn't think you'd ask me for it, but you did. You said, Give it to me. And I said OK. There were lots of reasons I gave it to you. First of all, I didn't want to be made a liar of. (I had never lied to you.) So when you reminded me that I'd said it and asked me if I really meant it, I didn't want to seem like I was copping out by saying that I'd only spoken figuratively. (It is an old saying, after all.) Also, I had the feeling you didn't think I would really do it, that you were testing me to see if I would, and I wanted you to know I would. Also, I believed you wouldn't have asked me for it unless you really wanted it, and needed it. But then, when you got it, you bronzed it and put it on the mantel over the fireplace in the den. The night you took it, I dreamt of arms. I slept on the couch in the den because I was still bleeding, even through the bandages, and I knew I'd stir during the night and need to put on more bandages and we didn't want me to wake you up. So I stayed on the couch and when I slept, I dreamt of arms: red arms, blue arms, golden arms. And arms made of jade. Arms with tattoos, arms with stripes. Arms waving, sleeping, holding. Arms that rested up against my ribs. We kept my arm in the bathtub, bleeding like a fish. When I went to bed, the water was the color of rose water, with thick red lines like strings. And when I woke up the first time to change my bandages, it was colored like salmon. Then it was carnation red, and then maroon, then burgundy, then purple, thick, and almost black by morning. In the morning, you took it out. I watched you pat it dry with my favorite big fat terry cloth tower and wrap it in saran wrap and take it out to get it bronzed. I learned to do things differently. To button my shirts, to screw and unscrew the toothpaste cap, to tie my shoes. We didn't think of this. Together, we were valiant, brave and stoic. Though I couldn't quite keep up with you at tennis anymore. In a way, it was fun. Things I once took for granted became significant. Cutting a steak with a knife and fork, or buttoning my fly, untying a knot around a bag, adding milk while stirring. After a while, I developed a scab and you let me come back to bed. But sometimes in the night, I'd shift or have a nightmare, jolt, and suddenly, I'd open up again, and bleed all over uncontrollably. The first this happened neither of us could go back to sleep. But after a while, you got used to it and you'd be back asleep in a minute. It didn't seem to bother you at all. But I guess after a while it started bothering you, because one day when I was washing out the sheets I'd bloodied the night before, you said, You sleep too restless. I don't like it when your bleeding wakes me up. I think you're sick. I think it's sick to cut off your own arm. I looked at you, your sweet brown eyes, innocent as a puppy. But you cut it off, I said. You did it. You didn't blink. You asked me for it, so I said OK. Don't try to make me feel guilty, you said, your pretty brown eyes looking at me. It was your arm. You didn't blink. I closed my eyes. That night I bled again. I woke up and the bed was red, all full of blood and wet. I reached over to touch you and to wake you up and tell you I was sorry, but you were not there. I learned more. To cook and clean, to eat a quarter pounder with one fist, to balance my groceries on my knee while my hand fumbled with the front door key. My arm got strong. My left sleeve on my shirts got tight and pinched. My right shirt sleeve was lithe and open, carefree, like a pretty girl. But then the novelty wore off. I had to convince myself. I read about those valiant cases, one-legged heroes who run across the continent to raise money for causes, and paraplegic mothers of four, one-eyed pool sharks. I wanted these stories to inspire me, but they didn't. I didn't want to be like one of those people. I didn't want to be cheery and valiant. I didn't want to have to rise above my situation. What I wanted was my arm. Because I missed it. I missed everything about it. I missed the long solid weight of it in my sleeve. I missed clapping and waving and putting my hand in my pocket. I miss waking up at night with it twisted behind my head, asleep and heavy and tingling. And then I realized that I had missed these things all along, the whole time my arm had been over the mantel, but that I'd never said anything or even let myself feel anything bad because I didn't want to dwell on those feelings because I didn't want to make you feel bad and I didn't want you to think I wanted you to feel bad. I decided to look for it. Maybe you'd sold it. You were always good with things like that. I hit the pawnshops. I walked into them and they'd ask me could they help me and I'd say, I'm looking for an arm. And they'd stare at me, my empty sleeve pinned to my shirt, or flapping in the air. I never have liked acting like things aren't the way they are. When I searched all the local pawnshops, I started going to ones further away. I saw a lot of the country. It was nice. And I got good at it. The more I did, the more I learned to do. The braver ones would look at me directly in the eye. They'd give me the names and addresses of outlets selling artificial limbs, or reconstructive surgeons. But I didn't want another one, I wanted mine. And then, the more I looked for it, the more I wondered if I wasn't looking more for something else besides me severed arm. I wondered was I really searching for you? It all came clear to me. Like something hacked away from me; you'd done this to me as a test. To show me things. To show me what things meant to me, how much my arm was part of me, but how I could learn to live without it. How, if I was forced to, I could learn to get by with only part of me, with next to nothing. You'd done this to me to teach me something. And then I thought how, if you were testing me, you must be watching me, to see if I was passing. So I started acting out my life for you. And then I felt you watching all my actions. I whistled with bravado, jaunted, rather than walked. I had a confident swagger. I slapped friendly pawnshop keepers on their shoulders and told them jokes. I was fun, an inspiration they'd remember after I'd passed through. I acted like I couldn't care less about my old arm. Like I liked the breezes in my sleeve. I began to think in perfect sentences, as if you were listening to me. I thought clear sentences inside myself, in trying to convince you, that I had never had an arm I'd lost. Soon I didn't think the word inside me any more. I didn't think about the right hand gloves buried in my bottom drawer. I made myself not miss it. I tested myself. I sat in the den and started at the empty space above the mantel. I spent the night on the couch. I went into the bathroom and looked in the tub. I felt nothing. I went to be. I thought my trips to pawnshops, my wanderlust, were only things I did to pass the time. I thought of nothing almost happily. I looked at my shoulder. The tissue was smooth. I ran my fingers over it. Round and slightly puffed, pink and shiny and slick. As soft as pimento, as cool as a spoon, the tenderest flesh of my body. My beautiful empty sleeve and I were friends, like intimates. So everything was fine. For a while. Then you came back. Then everything did. But I was careful. It had been a long time. I had learned how to live. Why, hadn't I just forgotten what used to fill my empty sleeve entirely? I was very careful. I acted like nothing had ever been different, that you never ripped it out of me, then bronzed it, put it on the mantel, left with it. I wanted things to stay forgot. And besides, it was so easy, so familiar having you around. It was nice. I determined to hold on to what I'd learned. About the strength of having only one. Maybe I should have told you then. Maybe I should have told you then. But then I told myself, if you knew to leave it alone, then good. And if you didn't know, we needed to find that out. So we were sitting in the den. You looked at me with your big sweet pretty brown eyes and you said, you whispered it softly like a little girl, you said, Oh, I'm so sorry. You started crying softly, your lips quivering. Can you ever forgive me? You said it slow and sweet like a foreign language. I watched you, knowing you knew the way I was watching you. You leaned into my and pulled my arm around you and ran your pretty fingers down the solid muscle in my sleeve. Just hold me, darling, you said. Just hold me again. I ran my wet palm, shaking, on your gorgeous back. Your hair smelled sweet. I looked at your beautiful tear-lined face and tried to pretend that I had never seen you before in my life. Why did you do it? I whispered. You looked at me, your eyes all moist and sweet like you could melt anything in the world. You didn't answer. What did you do with it? You shrugged your shoulders, shook your head and smiled at me sweeter than an angel. Say something, I whispered into your pretty hair. Say something, goddammit. You looked up at me and your sweet brown eyes welled up with tears again. You put your head against my breast and sobbed. You made me rock you and I did and then you cried yourself to sleep as innocent as a baby. When you were asleep I walked you to the bedroom and put you in to bed. You slept. I watched you all night. You remembered nothing in the morning. In the morning we had coffee. You chatted to me about your adventures. You cocked your head at just the right places, the way I remembered you did. You told me you'd worked hard in the time you'd been away. You told me you had grown. You told me how much you had learned about the world, about yourself, about honor, faith and trust, etc. You looked deep into my eyes and said, I've changed. You said how good and strong and true and truly different you were. How you had learned that it is not our acts, but our intents, that make us who we are.

I watched your perfect teeth. I felt your sweet familiar hands run up my body, over the empty sleeve that rumpled on the exposed side of me. I closed my eyes and couldn't open them. My mouth was closed. I couldn't tell you anything. I couldn't tell you that you can't re-do a thing that's been undone. I couldn't tell you anything that you would understand. I couldn't tell you that it wasn't just the fact that you had ripped it out of me and taken it and mounted it, then left with it then lost it, how it wasn't only that, but it was more. How it was that when you asked me, I believed you and I told you yes. How, though I had tried a long time to replace what you had hacked away from me, I never could undo the action of your doing so, that I had, and only ever would have, more belief in your faulty memory, your stupid sloppy foresight, than in your claims of change. How I believed, yes, I believed with all my heart, that given time, you'd do something else again. And then I thought, but this was only half a thought, that even if you had changed, no really really changed, truly and at last, and even if you knew me better than I know myself, and even if I'm better off than I've ever been, and even if this was the only way we could have gotten to this special place where we are now, and even if there's a reason, darling, something bigger than both of us, and even if all these even if's are true, that I would never believe you again, never forget what I know of you, never forget what you've done to me, what you will do, I'll never believe the myth of forgiveness between us.

#rebecca brown #forgiveness #favourites #short story #short form fiction #the terrible girls #lgbt #symbolism #love #loss

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intaceternity · 6 years ago

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Conversation at Tea

My love had been splendid

For brilliant eyes,

Dancing bodies, star-wheels

Through the night, for flights

Of morning birds, symphonic skies

At noon, all forms of sensual delight,

All willing worlds at once. But the heart mad,

Their tinsel tore. And I declared

My war on every grain God made.

War, I would judge, is tragic,

But the difference between

A tragic action on the stage

And off is — one is only mimic.

If you are so insane

As to wish — how do you say? — soul-purge,

By all means go to the theatre

But never fight a war.

Come, take two seats at Cyrano

Or better, Evans doing Hamlet

(But what a shame it’s cut!)

Or best, the Old Vic

Is bringing Lear here next week.

But then, the theatre, it’s just too —

Too something — for a man like you.

Why don’t you use instead my study

And lose yourself in Chaucer.

Though my classics are a trifle dusty

For you a book is still a book I’m sure.

Who is it I am searching for tonight?

What disembodied voice can I surround

With flesh? Like calls of Puck there float

Into my troubled memory the sounds

Of all those voices mingling from the past—

Who is it I am seeking in this waste?

I have mourned with Troilus — not quite in jest

Known the moping madness to declare

His love; and betrayed, called the world a waste

And vanity with heart too deadly sober;

With Sampson too, and Adam, for a love misplaced —

I have motions with Troilus and the rest.

And swaggering with Cyrano and travelling

To the moon, and sweeping win a plume

The threshold of the stars, my restless craving

Took bravado for its meat — O spume

Of glory, your vapoured kind can only go

With dreams, or swagger there with Cyrano.

And in the heath shall I continue seeking?

Has the storm that lashed us then subsided

Yet, that struggled with the bitter breaking

Of a mind and heart, has it faded

For me yet, or only now begun?

And shall I through the heath continue on?

Who spoke those self-tormentings, were they yours,

Or mine, or Hamlet’s own? Whose voice

Is no difference, what head invented

Doesn’t matter — the Prince of all of us

Opened the pain of solitude and cursed

The tyrant stars. Do not ask who said them first.

I have been all these hearts, and more,

Heroes, criminals, frauds, and tortured fools,

I have merged my spirit with the fair

And with souls as dark as blood or bowels,

And yet I know more of providence or fate

That who my heart is searching for tonight.

Yesterday I saw you

And you did not speak,

You walked

as if — allow

Me to be trite —

You walked in a daze.

Do you concentrate

On things so bleak

You cannot see, for thought, your friends?

I know you saw my face

And yet as if our hands

Had never touched, you

Did not know me,

Or even seem to know

Yourself. This struck me strangely,

Your silence, since

Here we are sipping tea

talking in present tense.

Let’s agree, now we are together,

Friendship is forever

I have struck gems in several friends,

Perhaps in more than most, certainly

In more than you, whose delicate tea

Tends more to water. But this is surely

Because the stars rule our destiny

Or God plots out our ends.

My drink is crude and bitter

But at least I made the stuff myself.

You might concede that nature made me better

At hunting diamond mines than you, yet if

You doubt, let me recount the story of

Two friendships now a-tatter.

Chris was one, whose fine fierce spirit spent

Its up-pent fury arguing with me

Who wandered worlds with him. One day he penned

His testament and died. If he could see

Me now, against my heart’s depravity,

He could not lift, for teats, his hand.

Another friend was glib, who did not die,

But wished to

Change the world, and found

It would not change. His heart fell utterly

To dust, though sometimes still he smiles around

The corners of his mouth. I saw him ruined,

He cannot therefore speak to me.

These friends were fast, for life-long working,

But as you see, a friend is not eternal.

Sometimes walking on the streets, or talking

Over tea, I drowse, conversing with an angel

Of all those days when friends went well,

And see no half-friends lurking.

You know, you sometimes have

A sour look — I mean

You can be affable — but I have seen

Often in your face a look of —

Not exactly pain —

But more as if

Your dream had lain

In puddles, stained

By themselves, like cigaret butts in the rain.

You look as if you came

From some other time

And idle in this calm

Remember storms you could not take,

And feel at twenty years quite old

— But then, our tea is getting cold

What storms have blown me, and from where,

What dreams have drowned, or half-dead, here

Surround me, or whether I am old or young,

I cannot find an answer on my tongue.

Yet if you ask me to describe that dark, wild

Winter of the eyes, then I

Can speak, answer endlessly

For that look was not on me as a child.

Each year I lived I watched the fissure

Between what was and what I wished for

Widen, until there was nothing left

But the gulf of emptiness.

Most men have not seen the world divide,

Or seen, it did not open wide

Or wide, they clung to the safer side.

But I have felt the sundering like a blade.

I am old

But quite perceptive —

I could have told

You many goals you strive

To reach

Are reachless, yet in some strange way

I feel there is nothing I can teach

Or do or say, but wheel my crippled age

Away, and let you wage

Your war.

I have been crouching here too long, sipping

Tea, while the souls I love, wan Troilus, old King Lear fool-guided through the world, the noble

Prince, countless more, to tell

Too endless, Gib, Chris, and all, hold hell’s

Hot breath back and summon me to battle.

Now I must nurse my courage in a sling,

I dream the ancient skies are ripening,

That golden fruit shall form like summer clouds

Demanding poet-men to sing like lords

Of giant gods who pace

The mountain-tops. Then I will write my peace.

#galway kinnell #poem #long post #poetry #early works #conversation at tea

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intaceternity · 6 years ago

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1 = 1

by Anne Carson

Illustration by Jon Gray / GRAY318

She visits others. Before they’re up, dawn, she walks to the lake, listening to Bach, the first clavichord exercise, which she plans to have played at her funeral someday, has had this plan since she first heard the music and, thinking of it, she weeps lightly. The lake is whipped by wind and tides (big lake) doing what tides do, she never knows in or out. There is a man standing on shore and a big dog swimming back to him with stick in mouth. This repeats. The dog does not tire. She peels a swim cap onto her head, goggles, enters the water, which is cold but not shocking. Swims. High waves in one direction. The dog is gone.

Now she is alone. There is a pressure to swim well and to use this water correctly. People think swimming is carefree and effortless. A bath! In fact, it is full of anxieties. Every water has its own rules and offering. Misuse is hard to explain. Perhaps involved is that commonplace struggle to know beauty, to know beauty exactly, to put oneself right in its path, to be in the perfect place to hear the nightingale sing, see the groom kiss the bride, clock the comet. Every water has a right place to be, but that place is in motion. You have to keep finding it, keep having it find you. Your movement sinks into and out of it with each stroke. You can fail it with each stroke. What does that mean, fail it.

After a while, she climbs out over stones, puts on small flippers, reënters the water. The difference is like the difference between glimpsing a beautiful thing and staring at it. Now she can stream into the way of the water and stay there. She stays. She is one of the most selfish people she has ever known, she thinks about this while swimming and after, on the beach, in her towel, shivering. It is an aspect of personality, hard to change. Generous gestures, when she attempts them, seem to swipe through the lives of others like a random bear paw, often making matters worse. And she finds no momentum in sharing, in benevolence, in charity, no interaction with another person ever brought her a bolt of pure aliveness like entering the water on a still morning with the world empty in every direction to the sky. That first entry. Crossing the border of consciousness into, into what?

And then the (she searches for the right word) instruction of balancing along in the water, the ten thousand adjustments of vivid action, the staining together of mind and time so that she is no longer miles and miles apart from her life, watching it differently unfold, but in it, as it, it. Not at all like meditation—an analogy often thoughtlessly adduced—but, rather, almost forensic, as an application of attention, while at the same time, to some degree, autonomic. These modes do not exclude each other, so swimming instructs. There is a stoniness. Water is as different from air as from stones, and you must find your way through its structures, its ancientness, the history of an entity without response to you and yet complicit in your obstinate intrusion. You have no personhood there, and water is uninterested in itself, stones don’t care if you tell their story nicely. Your bowels, your miraculously lucky life, your love of your mother, your well-crafted similes, all are lost in the slide from depth to depth, pure, impure, compassionless. There is no renunciation in this (cf. meditation), no striving to detach, all these things, all the things you can name, being simply gone. Meaning, gone.

Her visit ends. Back at home, the newspapers, front-page photos of a train car in Europe jammed floor to door with escaped victims of a war zone farther south, people denied transit. Filthy families and souls in despair pressed flat against one another in the grip to survive, uncountable arms and legs, torn-open eyes, locked in the train all night waiting for dawn, a scene so much the antithesis of her own morning she cannot enter it. What sense it makes for these two mornings to exist side by side in the world where we live, should this be framed as a question, would not be answerable by philosophy or poetry or finance or by the shallows or the deeps of her own mind, she fears. Words like “rationale” become, well, laughable. Rationales have to do with composite things—migrants, swimmers, the selfish, the damned, the plural—but existence and sense belong to singularity. You can make sentences about a composite thing, you can’t ask it to look back at you. Sentences are strategic. They let you off.

She goes downstairs and out to the stoop, hoping it’s cooler there. Traffic crashes past. Chandler on the sidewalk making a chalk drawing. Comrade Chandler, she says. He doesn’t look up. What’s the drawing? He goes on chalking. His gaze is ahead and within. He lives in the back of the house somewhere, speaks not much, draws a lot. She calls him Comrade because she’d been reading Russian books the summer she met him and she thought him secretive. This was an error. Secrecy implies a concern for one’s own personality. You hardly ever see Chandler enter a room, he’s just there, or leave a room, he seeps away, small tide of person, noticed as a retraction.

She stands nearer. The drawing is a pear tree. She can see the pears all over it, small, perfect green chalk globes with yellow-cream-white highlights. She wants to lean down and bite them. You’ve hit the nail on the head here, Comrade, she says. He doesn’t answer. Once they had a conversation, extending over many months, in broken bits, about mushrooms. He’d said the thing he hated about being in prison was the mushrooms. For several days, she wondered if he meant the food, but it didn’t make sense they served mushrooms in prison often enough to be a problem, or if he had a damp cell with fungus sprouting in the corners, but this, too, seemed extreme, and gradually she understood him to mean he had been able to see a patch of mushrooms, boletus, from his window and he used to go hunting for those in the woods with his mother when he was a kid and it made him sad. Not a mushroom fancier herself, she didn’t have anything subjective to say at the time, so she told him John Cage was a mushroom hunter, too, and wrote a book about it, a sort of mushroom guide, that she could lend him. Chandler didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure he read books or knew who John Cage was. Conversation is precarious. Now, as she looks at the very round, chalky pale pears, mushrooms come to mind again, and she says, One day, as I remember it, John Cage was out mushrooming with his mother, after an hour or so she turns to him and says, We can always go to the store and buy some real ones.

Silence from Chandler. He is adding touches of red to the pear array, here and there. Then suddenly all his five teeth laugh. The laugh slams out of him and is gone. He returns to chalking. Quickenough quickenough, muttering to himself, and something she can’t quite hear, had a kidscad buttended, it sounds like. She returns to the stoop and stands on the bottom step. Evening now. Still hot. Long day, Chandler, she says to the back of his head. He’s moving down the sidewalk to mark out a new drawing, red chalk in hand. It will be a fox. He likes a fox at the end of the day.

Upstairs, she finds herself thinking again about the failure to swim. It can be quantitative as well as qualitative. Imagine how many pools, ponds, lakes, bays, streams, stretches of swimmable shore there are in the world right now, probably half of them empty of swimmers, by reason of night or negligence. Empty, still, perfect. What a waste, what an extravagance—why not make oneself accountable to that? Why not swim in all of them? One by one or all at once, geographically or conceptually, putting aside gleaming Burt Lancaster, someone should be using all that water. Across the level ocean of her mind come floating certain refugees in a makeshift plastic boat so crowded with passengers they are stacked in layers and dropping over the sides. She has seen this picture. She has read that larger ships might sail very near, that they might stop to consider the woe and the odds, then keep going. Sometimes bottles of water or biscuits were tossed from the larger ships before they started their engines again. What could she put against the desolation of that moment, watching the ship start its engines again. What is the price of desolation, and who pays. Some questions don’t warrant a question mark.

Passengers. To pass. To pass muster. To pass over. To be passed over. To pass the buck. To pass the butter. To pass out. To pass to one’s reward. She is eating yogurt when the doorbell rings. Didn’t know that bell worked, she says, wiping her mouth with her sleeve, as she gets to the door. Comrade Chandler doesn’t answer. He gestures with his head toward the street. They descend. Yogurt on your eyebrow, he says over his shoulder as they go down. Oh, she says, thanks. The finished fox drawing is under a streetlamp. It glows. He has used some sort of phosphorescent chalk, and the fox, swimming in a lucent blue-green jelly, has a look on its face of escaping all possible explanations. She stares at the blue-green. It has clearness, wetness, coolness, the deep-lit self-immersedness of water. You made a lake, she says, turning to him, but he is gone, now it is night, off to wherever he goes when he is absolved. She stands awhile, watching the fox swim, looking back on the day, its images too strong, and yet the soul—how does it ever get peace in its mouth, close its mouth on peace while alive. To be alive is just this pouring in and out. Find, lose, demand, obsess, move head slightly closer. Try to swim without thinking how strong it looks. Try to do what you do without mockery of our heartbroken little era. To mock is easy. She feels a breeze on her forehead, night wind. The fox is stroking splashlessly forward. The fox does not fail.

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intaceternity · 7 years ago

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Replaceable until You’re Not

x Brenda Shaughnessy

Throw your love until it sticks, and know you’ll only know it stuck

if it ends up sticking. In case it does in the end, in the beginning

just say “This is the one.” Whether or not that’s true, trick yourself

into it being true, so you’re someone who says truths.

The problem might be regret. It is so beautiful to cry and remember,

if beauty is a knife wound. Memory, that disco light, makes for some unforgettable songs,

until morning. Will I have you? It’s impossible to know, or impossible to have a person.

Why do we think we can? I can’t yet forget the quiet music you gave me,

the lyrics I imagined in your voice. Music’s ruthless that way: “Here are the words

and here’s the tune to how you feel. Doesn’t matter you didn’t originate your own feelings.

We know you! Enjoy!” I may be a chump, but at some point aren’t I irreplaceable?

And if I am, mustn’t I have always been, or have I so improved?

When does being enough occur? When will I say you and no other, you as long

as I can see, as long as I want, and I want infinitely. Not indefinitely, which seems arbitrary,

but wanting precisely more, always, of the same kind of thing.

When, because next year never happens, the wedding plans sketched on scraps of paper

thrown out next misunderstanding. Fres pages replace them. Fresh scraps.

Eventually the heart I have to offer is as hard and small and uni-purpose as a tack

We only make this love work because we work for it, like a wage, an art.

We are only each other’s because the day is long.

The feeling, the opening wide, the blue glee, laughing, ravenous together

And at some point the question comes up, of whether we could continue

and the answer is not quite yes, which isn’t quite no, but then, what is it?

Well, we both deserve something more than nothing, neither of which this thing we’re doing ends up being.

So let’s split, let’s know, and make ourselves an old song of it: “If I’m not it then it’s not me and you neither.”

Moving on, is what they call it. As if one moves, instead of revises, reneges, replenishes.

When you get new shoes, do you throw out the old? Do you buy the same style?

Not another one, you think, impossible. Not again.

I can’t do it differently, I can’t do it the same. I can’t.

You do. Opening. Being careful. Being stupid.

Same beast of hope, beast of shame, same terror, same space, different world.

Old world. Scary moment. Amazement that breaks you.

You are not broken. You break again and again because

that’s what breaking means. To be whole.

Maybe when we’re in the same nursing home, neighbors again after decades apart,

surprised at our homing instinct. Or maybe just next year, happy with others,

having learned not to chuck the safe before cracking it. At a friend’s book party,

you’ll notice how I’ve changed. In line at the Apple Store, weary in the cab,

startled in the saladmarket, weeping at the doctor’s, I’ll never change

I’ll always be the same woman you loved, this woman I no longer am,

I’ll be her and re-be her because I can’t replace myself.

Hers it the body you loved, she was yours, this future corpse;

no matter how many lovers she, her body, and I have, only you know the curvature that stops your heart,

that’s the truth of it, only you could hear the mess of breaths and cries I made splitting open,

my voice cracking in your arms even when this corpse is a corpse.

Because it all happened to me, the real actual me. I am yours. I am still I.

You must be still part-me, but who wasn’t parting ways. You could always replace me,

go ahead, find another to fill the me-shaped hole. I would do the same.

Find a new person I’d also call you, another I’d hold with my cold, dead hands.

#brenda shaughnessy #replaceable until you're not #poem #poetry #relationships #bitterness #hope #female poet #human dark with sugar

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intaceternity · 7 years ago

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Do I know any better who I am? Or only Feigning just to arm myself against Time's accusations; after all I have promised to keep: move out Of my anxious joke and forgive all My peripheral wrongs—wrongs for my years. I'll tell the truth for once, leave enough Unsaid and tear up all warrants. I thought eventually nothing will be left At the edges of the light and I'll be transparent in Dark labyrinths. There'll be neither Wrong nor right, nor dissenting noises. Now all these bear revisions, for I found An unretrieved claim in a well of Bitter tears: A new warrant. I don't remember anything I confessed. Yes, I don't know any better who I am. I came To design innocence—a longing In vain. All seems to be lost on me; even The despair is no longer my own

T Byram Karasu - Disappropriation

#poem #t byram karasu #aging #time #melancholy #poetry #poet #disappropriation #rags of my soul

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intaceternity · 7 years ago

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Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy

For some reason

when the rains fall

relentlessly they fall

into swimming pools, these otherwise

bright and scary

arachnids. They can swim

a little, but not for long

And they can’t climb the ladder out.

They usually drown - but

if you want their favor,

if you believe there is justice,

a reward for not loving

the death of ugly

and even dangerous (the eel, hog snake,

rats) creatures, if

you believe these things, then

you would leave a lifebuoy

or two in your swimming pool at night.

And in the morning

you would haul ashore

the huddled, hairy survivors

and escort them

back to the bush, and know,

be assured that at least these saved,

as individuals, would not turn up

again someday

in your hat, drawer,

or the tangled underworld

of your socks, and that even -

when your belief in justice

merges with your belief in dreams -

they may tell the others

in a sign language

four times as subtle

and complicated as man’s

that you are good,

that you love them,

that you would save them again.

- Thomas Lux

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intaceternity · 7 years ago

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Love Poem

Annie Oakley’s Girl x Rebecca Brown

It’s like art, making and unmaking. You’re attracted to misshapen blocks. You like to chisel and form them into something beautiful and show yourself that you can do it. And you can do it. You do it beautifully. Why, look at all the things you’ve made beautiful. You’ve had shows in internationally renowned galleries. Everyone loves your work. Everyone says what a miracle worker you are, and you are. Here are some of your works: Lazarus, The Woman Who Died, Spring in December, A Sunny Day in Chicago in November, Piña Colada in Salt Lake City, Love Among the Ruins, Blood From Stone, A Fine Shoot of Green in the Arctic, Love Among the Ruins II, Love Among the Ruins III. You’re acclaimed. Everyone clamors about you. Everyone loves you.

But they don’t know your secret. One night after the opening at the Tate last September - the Queen came, the Prime Minister came, David Bowie came. John Lennon came, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore came - one night after your opening, someone broke into the gallery and tore apart all your beautiful canvases. Someone soldered down all your beautiful metal sculpture. They broke your marbles. They smashed your glass. They burnt your wood. (You work in many mediums.) The next day, the papers were full of it and the Times and the Guardian interviewed you. There were correspondents from New York, Washington, L.A., Chicago. They interviewed you about the destruction of your beautiful work and took pictures of you crying over the destruction of your beautiful work. But you wouldn’t let them take many pictures or ask many questions because, as you and your agent told them repeatedly. you were much too distraught about the destruction of your beautiful work. How could anyone want to, you asked. Everyone asked: how could anyone want to? Everyone shook their heads. Such beautiful work - irreplaceable. Your picture on the front page of the Times was poignant and moving. I could barely see your face (your head was turned from the camera), but I could see your tears. I saw your tears and they looked real even to me. They streaked down your face gorgeously, like one of your drip paintings after Helen Frankenthaler. Yes, you were very beautiful.

I had the paper sent up to my room where I was staying at the Y near Russell Square. I’d paid the paper boy the day before because I knew you’d be in the paper. I knew because you and I had done it. We’d done it for old times’ sake. We’d had a few quick ones at the Prince of Wales, and then we’d done it. We did it to finish off something we’d left undone. I did it because I wanted to. You did it because you wanted to, too, because I told you I was the only person who knew you wanted to, and because I was the only person who would tell you that, and because I was the only person who would help you do it. You also did it for the insurance. We let ourselves into the Tate with your master key, which had been entrusted to you by the Tate Gallery Trustees. I took chains and knives and razors and a whip and a machine gun and a sword and a cat-o’-nine-tails and three hand grenades and a liter of sulphuric acid and a power drill with four big drill bits. You didn’t take anything because you wanted to do it with your own bare hands. The only thing you carried was a flashlight. We went in and didn’t turn on any of the lights. We did that for old times’ sake too. We went through your exhibition and destroyed everything. I slashed and shot and blow-torched and cut and soldered and blasted and whipped and drilled. You hit and kicked and tore and bit and clawed. Some pieces we did separately and some pieces we did under the soft grey glow of your flashlight. We worked almost the whole night and made rubble of everything. But then I asked you if we could turn the lights on, please, because suddenly my old fear of the dark was on me again, and I was afraid. But you said we couldn’t because you couldn’t see anything because you had to look surprised when the sympathetic police and curators brought you here tomorrow to see what horrid vandalism had occurred the night before. I said I understood, and I closed my eyes to pretend it was only dark because I had my eyes closed and that it was really light. And then I asked you to tell me it was light and you said, but it wasn’t, and I said, did you think I was a fool, of course I knew it was dark, but I just wanted to be told it wasn’t, and you didn’t understand, but I said, Lie to me, dammit, lie to me, so you did. You took me in your arms and said, It’s light, it’s light, it’s light, it’s light, it’s light, and you held me and told me it was light through the rest of the night until just before morning, and then we had to leave before the gallery opened. You led me to the exit door by my hand (my eyes were still closed), and outside where it was beginning to be light, and you told me to open my eyes, that it was beginning to get light. I did and then we shook hands on the steps of the gallery and patted each other on the shoulders like comrades and vowed secrecy. Then we each went home, you took a cab to Grosvenor Square and I hurried to the Russell Square Station Y. I went to bed for a few minutes and dreamt. This is what I dreamt:

I dreamt that I became an artist too, and what I did was make and destroy things just like you. But no matter what I did, either in making or destroying it, no one cared. They didn’t consider me an artist or a criminal. They didn’t say what a shame. They never gave me coverage. They never noticed me and I didn’t know why, because, after all, I was just doing exactly what you had done and, not only that, what I had taught you to do and what you and I had done together.

I woke up when the paper boy brought me the paper with your picture and the articles about your show. I thought how I was the only person in the world who knew the real story. I knew that you knew it too, but I also knew that you would never think about it, that you would forget it. I will not forget it. I will tell it to myself again and again and again.

#rebecca brown #love poem #short story #fiction #annie oakley's girl #short form fiction #literature #favourites #symbolism #art

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