March 2012
In Those Years | Adrienne Rich
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and, yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through rages of fog
where we stood, saying I
Word of the Month: Thread →
gone-postal.tumblr.com
This is how it starts. I’m worrying about where to get it next. A friend. A friend of a friend. I remember the clumsiness of the first night, the troubling thrill inside the taxi as I waited until we reached the corner with the familiar glowing sign: open. A welcome, a warning. Friends, that’s what we all looked like. Half-handshake, half-hug to hide the transaction and the trembling. In the bathroom, I held the tiny packets against the light, and I left with footsteps that argued: fear or excitement, you coward.
The first few times made me sick, but in a hospital, “They’d know.” So I threw the packets away only to come rummaging in the bathroom bin two days later.
This is how it starts: two lines a day like I was writing a love poem, inhaling with the tenderness of a tremor crawling up the spine, the heart being fed with false love. Grief was easier to deal with when divided into small parts.
I opened a drawer and pulled out a mirror from underneath a box (everything had to be hidden, the mirror most of all), but its lid toppled over and a spool of thread fell to the floor, its string unravelling faster than my fingers. How does it feel to come loose after being wound around so tightly like that? I wanted to find out.
From 'Crush'
“Tell me about the dream where we pull the bodies out of the lake
and dress them in warm clothes again.
How it was late, and no one could sleep, the horses running
until they forget that they are horses.
It’s not like a tree where the roots have to end somewhere,
it’s more like a song on a policeman’s radio,
how we rolled up the carpet so we could dance, and the days
were bright red, and every time we kissed there was another apple
to slice into pieces.
Look at the light through the windowpane. That means it’s noon, that means
we’re inconsolable.
Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.
These, our bodies, possessed by light.
Tell me we’ll never get used to it.”
—Richard Siken
