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Aubade

From the last stars to sunrise the world is dark and enduring

and emptiness has its place.

Then, to wake each day to the world’s unwavering

limits, you have to think about passion differently, again.

Don’t we forgive everything of a lover

if we are the motive,

if love promises to take us to many places, to even larger themes?

Faithlessness is a heart glancing down

a plumed avenue

in which one is serenaded by myriad, scattering birds.

Thunder in the air begins opening appetites;

everyone is being true to themselves, they think—

And then it is having your right arm sheared off,

and the whole world gets to touch you, chime your losses.

I turn to my imagination, but its eyes are still

green, as if from

too much looking on at equatorial gardens.

Still, if I were you I would linger here,

deepen in the rottenness,

learn something about the world, about the desire for safety.

Then, I’d make an instrument from the ruins,

something awfully beautiful.

I would sit down to eat as if I were reading a poem.

I would observe how the night went into the day with a special grandeur.

It could be like swallowing a sword and growing surprised

by how good it is, how it opens.

And then maybe to sing out with a throat like that—

saying look, look how the world has touched me.

Sandra Lim

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What’s Broken

The slate black sky. The middle step of the back porch. And long ago

my mother’s necklace, the beads rolling north and south. Broken

the rose stem, water into drops, glass knobs on the bedroom door. Last summer’s

pot of parsley and mint, white roots shooting like streamers through the cracks.

Years ago the cat’s tail, the bird bath, the car hood’s rusted latch. Broken

little finger on my right hand at birth— I was pulled out too fast. What hasn’t

been rent, divided, split? Broken the days into nights, the night sky

into stars, the stars into patterns I make up as I trace them

with a broken-off blade of grass. Possible, unthinkable,

the cricket’s tiny back as I lie on the lawn in the dark, my heart

a blue cup fallen from someone’s hands.

Dorianne Laux

[jxnna]

Advice to Myself

Leave the dishes.

Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator

and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.

Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.

Throw the cracked bowl out and don’t patch the cup.

Don’t patch anything. Don’t mend. Buy safety pins.

Don’t even sew on a button.

Let the wind have its way, then the earth

that invades as dust and then the dead

foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.

Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.

Don’t keep all the pieces of the puzzles

or the doll’s tiny shoes in pairs, don’t worry

who uses whose toothbrush or if anything

matches, at all.

Except one word to another. Or a thought.

Pursue the authentic-decide first

what is authentic,

then go after it with all your heart.

Your heart, that place

you don’t even think of cleaning out.

That closet stuffed with savage mementos.

Don’t sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth

or worry if we’re all eating cereal for dinner

again. Don’t answer the telephone, ever,

or weep over anything at all that breaks.

Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons

in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life

and talk to the dead

who drift in through the screened windows, who collect

patiently on the tops of food jars and books.

Recycle the mail, don’t read it, don’t read anything

except what destroys

the insulation between yourself and your experience

or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters

this ruse you call necessity.

Louise Erdrich

[jxnna]

You Know, I Think More and More Often

You know, I think more and more often that I should go back. Maybe I’ll meet you. And happiness? Happiness is being sad together. So I look through the moonlit window and listen. Nothing. A breeze stirs somewhere. Alone among the leaves - the moon. Like a golden wheel it rolls above the windblown leaves. Such moons, only paler, shone over the Wisla. Even the Big Dipper on its course stops in a tree at midnight, just like at home. But why here? Truly, I don’t know. What’s here? Longing and sleepless nights, unknown streets and somebody’s verse. I live here as a nobody: a Displaced Person. I think of you. I know I must leave. Perhaps we can return to our past, but I know neither what youth will be like nor where you are. But I’m yours or no one’s forever. Listen, listen, read this poem

Tadeusz Borowski

Thank you, properlylost

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from weheartit

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Vintage Travel Poster showing Pelican birds in Sengal, Africa.

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