poetic_confetti
ovenbird Share your fluttering bits of verse. The pieces that drift and careen in the wind and then stick in your hair. I'll go first.

"What if we joined our sorrows, I'm saying. I'm saying: What if that is joy?"
-Ross Gay from "Joy Is Such a Human Madness" in The Book of Delights
250330
...
raze from laurie blauner's "i was one of my memories", which i'm in the thick of right now:

"i try to pay attention to the signs around me, darkness arriving late, a whistle in the distance, a hummingbird curiously reading my face. our bodies contain our sentiments, our ideas. i know i can only be the beast of myself."
250330
...
ovenbird From Louise Gluck's poem "Lamium". It's from her collection The Wild Iris, all of which is stunning.

Living things don't all require
light in the same degree. Some of us
make our own light: a silver leaf
like a path no one can use, a shallow
lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.
250331
...
ovenbird Gregory Orr "Of Course, A Book About Living" from the collection Concerning The Book that is the Body of the Beloved:

Of course, a book about living
Has to be filled with dying.
And a book of joy
Will be full of sorrow.
Why else winter?
Why else the bones
Of trees against the gray sky?

But could you stay in winter?
Could you brace your shoulder
Against the great wheel
And halt its slow roll?
Could you stop a single bush
From sending out its new
leaves, from flowering?
250401
...
ovenbird Virginia Woolf from To the Lighthouse:

"For now she need not think of anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of--to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others... and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures."
250402
...
ovenbird From the poem "How it Might Continue" by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer:

Wherever we go, the chance for joy,
whole orchards of amazement--

one more reason to always travel
with our pockets full of exclamation
marks,

so we might scatter them for others
like apple seeds.
250403
...
epitome of incomprehensibility The first entry reminds me of the title Joy is So Exhausting, a book by Susan Holbrook. Maybe it's cheating to have the title as a line that sticks in my mind, but it's just so good. 250403
...
raze from "dad_says_he_saw_you_at_the_mall" by ken sparling:

"at night, when she was in bed, she fell into caverns. these were not dreams she was having. she was falling into her own history, now and then resurfacing long enough to catch her breath."
250404
...
ovenbird More from Danusha Lameris' poem "Goldfinches" (I left the first stanza on the goldfinch blathe).

In her poem she writes that goldfinches eat thistles:

and so are said
to eat the thorns
of Christ's crown,
to lift some small measure
of his suffering.

Whatever your grief,
however long you've carried it--
may something
come to you,
quick and unexpected,
whisk away
the bristled edge
in its sharp
and tender beak.
250404
...
ovenbird Copper Canyon Press uses the Chinese character for "poetry" as their pressmark. They note that this character is made up of two parts "word" and "temple." And so the character for "poetry" IS poetry and I really can't get over that. 250405
...
ovenbird From "In Blackwater Woods" by Mary Oliver

Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
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.
250407
...
raze beautiful_song_lyrics, from david sylvian's "orpheus". the whole thing deserves quoting, but this specific verse is a sliver embedded in my skin:

"sleepers sleep
as we row the boat
just you, the weather,
and i gave up hope.
but all of the hurdles
that fell in our laps
were fuel for the fire
and straw for our backs.

still the voices
have stories to tell
of the power struggles
in heaven and hell.
but we feel secure
against such mighty dreams,
as orpheus sings of the promise
tomorrow may bring."
250408
...
ovenbird The "orpheus" lyrics made me think of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, which lead me to this poem:

Quiet friend who has come so far,

feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.

In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.

And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.

-Rainer Maria Rilke Sonnets to Orpheus II, 29
250408
...
ovenbird From Ocean Vuong's poem "The Smallest Measure" (I won't try to reproduce the line spacing, which sprawls over the page)

Heavy with summer, I
am the doe whose one hoof cocks
like a question ready to open

roots. & like any god
-forsaken thing, I want nothing more
than my breaths. To lift

this snout, carved
from centuries of hunger, towards the next
low peach bruising

in the season's clutch.
250409
...
ovenbird Dallas Hunt from "Notes on Grief"

grief is a gathering
that no one wanted to attend yet obligations
are the heaviest millstones to sink with
250411
...
raze from "life's work", the soul-shattering memoir by david_milch:

"all energy moves in waves and particles, but the ocean wave is the only wave the naked human eye can see. if time is the lesson willing to be learned, the wave is time's expression. it comes again and again. it keeps saying, 'will you know me now?'"
250412
...
raze from p.f. thomése's "shadowchild":

"when you've lost enough, the past finally becomes what the future used to be: a distance to dream away in, a horizon behind which there's always a second chance and where, despite the pastness of it all, inexplicable hope lives on."
250415
...
raze here's rick_bass, from his novella "the sky, the stars, the wilderness":

"you can rot or you can burn but either way, if you're lucky, a place will shape and cut and bend you, will strengthen you and weaken you. you trade your life for the privilege of this experiencethe joy of a place, the joy of blood family; the joy of knowledge gotten by listening and observing."
250417
...
raze from chloe n. clark's "collective gravities":

"imagine death as a door. we're in one room for our entire lives, and there is this door on the wall. we're not allowed to peek behind it, so we think about it constantly. but it's really just a door. it opens. it closes. it takes us to another room."
250419
...
ovenbird The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
250420
...
e_o_i "Spring Training" by Devon Gallant, lines 5-14:

These words reject context.
They exist outside of his story, or her story,
past or future.

They exist only in the sunglight
and in the sound of children playing
and the recurrence of Spring.

Today is the dawning of a new Age.
There is no context
beyond the melting of snow
or the playing of children.
250421
...
e_o_i edits of course I meant "sunlight" - "sunglight" sounds cool, but doesn't really fit this poem 250421
...
ovenbird Yelizaveta P. Renfro from Xylotheque

You don't want to forget or be forgotten. You want to live forever and for there to be meaning, everywhere, all the time. And you don't want the meaning to be in blue jeans or hamburgers. You realize that you want the meaning to be in the sky and the earth and the trees, in what preceded us, in what we recognize as home, more elemental than the name of a nation or a political system, in what we share in common-or should share in common-if we weren't surrounded by and distracted by and dazzled by stuff.
250423
...
ovenbird I have come back to this so many times that I'm giving it a place here:

i think the wilder few are those rare human animals who are still untamed. the ones who feel everything with so much intensity a raindrop is a torrential downpour. who love with every cell in their bodies no matter how badly they've been broken. they hear the call of the world outside because they recognize the worth of what's still wild in them.

i think it's us. we're the wilder few.

--raze in band_names
250427
...
ovenbird --raze in band_name
No "s"
250427
...
ovenbird From "every time I said I want to die" by Andrea Gibson

The world needs those who can find
a tunnel with no light at the end
of it and hold it up like a telescope
to show that the darkness contains
many truths that can bring the light
to its knees. Grief astronomer,

adjust the lens, look close. Tell us
what you see.
250429
...
e_o_i (ooh, that's a good one)

On a sillier note, Ogden Nash in "Cat Naps Are Too Good for Cats":

I would not sell my daily swoon
For all the rubies in Rangoon.
What? Sell my swoon? My lovely swoon?
Oh, many and many's the afternoon
I've scoured the woods with Daniel Boone,
And sipped a julep with Lorna Doone
And Former Governor Ruby Laffoon.
I'll sell my soul before my swoon,
It's not for sale, my swoon's immune.
250429
...
raze words from leonard_cohen that never fail to resonate:

"ring the bells that still can ring
forget your perfect offering
there is a crack in everything
that's how the light gets in"

(from "anthem")
250501
...
ovenbird From "late summer" by Anna Kamienska

Why can't I be reconciled
to green rustling life
and sleep among mortal dreams

Leaf
teach me to fall
on the indifferent earth
250503
...
raze a two-year-old comment at the very bottom of roger ebert's review of agnes varda's film "vagabond":

"do you feel like there are movies that are just for you, and you can't really show them to other people in your life, because they are not for them? and in a way these are the movies you most want to show to others, because to show them is to show yourself, but really it wouldn't work, so the movie provides both a relief in that it finds you but also a cutting edge in that it highlights your aloneness?"

this from user "glazed ham", whose avatar iswait for ita picture of a glazed ham.

(i have a movie like that, too. in my case, it's "paris, texas".)
250506
...
ovenbird This line caught me unawares and I laughed out loud in surprised delight:

From "visiting hours" by Shane Koyczan

She could laugh--
she had a laugh like a welcome mat
wore the same kind of smile
Curious George would wear
if he finally came out of the closet
to be with the man in the big yellow hat.
250516
...
ovenbird Almost immediately after posting numinous I ran into a poem by Ada Limon that seemed to speak directly to it:

From "what it looks like to us and the words we use"

You don't believe in God? And I said, No. I believe in this connection we all have to nature, to each other, to the universe.

And she said, Yeah, God. And how we stood there, low beasts among the white oaks, Spanish moss, and spider webs, obsidian shards stuck in our pockets, woodpecker flurry, and I refused to call it so. So instead, we looked up at the unruly sky, its clouds in simple animal shapes we could name though we knew they were really just clouds-disorderly, and marvelous, and ours.
250517
...
ovenbird Simple
Raymond Carver

A break in the clouds. The blue
outline of the mountains.
Dark yellow of the fields.
Black river. What am I doing here,
lonely and filled with remorse?

I go on casually eating from the bowl
of raspberries. If I were dead,
I remind myself, I wouldn’t
be eating them. It’s not so simple.
It is that simple.
250605
...
raze from nicole stellon o'donnell's "you are no longer in trouble":

"i tried to tell you about your handwriting, one of the good things you gave me. how so long ago i watched you and practiced, tongue sticking out in concentration at the dining room table. i taught my daughters to make the letter 'a' look like typeface and put serifs on the ends like you did when you were writing a card. crying, unable to speak, you turned away. i stopped trying. i never tried to tell you anything else."
250606
...
raze from the same laurie blauner book quoted near the beginning of this blathe, which is starting to seem like the last book i'll ever read (i can't finish anything anymore):

"outside moonlight highlights tree branches and parts of buildings and wind steals shadows, returning them as objects. puddles ache for birds and feel no pain when they arrive. woods cough up leaves. people i trust return again and again like former pets materializing refurbished."
250607
...
ovenbird from "we are listening" by Diane Ackerman

With our scurrying minds
and our lidless will
and our lank, floppy bodies
and our galloping yens
and our deep, cosmic loneliness
and our starboard hearts
where love careens,
we are listening,
the small bipeds
with the giant dreams.
250608
...
ovenbird How About Now
Kate Baer

We are born dying, which is one way to look at it. Another is to wake up knowing we are made of impossible things: crystal caves, singing dunes, dark matter held in mortal hope.

It's true, time has a way of making lists and ledgers.

You say you want a garden, beds of lavender and daffodils. You say we have a lifetime. Love, we're in our lifetime.

How about now?
250612
...
raze "tell me a story", by robert penn warren:

[ a ]

long ago, in kentucky, i, a boy, stood
by a dirt road, in first dark, and heard
the great geese hoot northward.

i could not see them, there being no moon
and the stars sparse. i heard them.

i did not know what was happening in my heart.

it was the season before the elderberry blooms,
therefore they were going north.

the sound was passing northward.

[ b ]

tell me a story.

in this century, and moment, of mania,
tell me a story.

make it a story of great distances, and starlight.

the name of the story will be time,
but you must not pronounce its name.

tell me a story of deep delight.
250627
...
raze marilyn_monroe, from "fragments":

"men are climbing to the moon but they don't seem interested in the beating human heart."
250708
...
raze from "what's_wrong?", a story by kathy fish:

"these_days people are *encouraged* to embrace thoughtlessness. pondering internal states (hunger, desire) is okay. that only makes heads bow, creating an odd crook in the neck. (chiropractors are doing a brisk business.) but go deeper and there will be consequences, my friend. the weight of one's head becomes commensurate with the weight of one's thoughts. some heads don't fit in the overhead bins and must be checked at the gate. the proud heads of honors students have been repurposed as medicine balls. i know a poet who pushes hers around in a baby carriage. certain politician's heads, however, have simply floated away like so many helium balloons."
250709
...
ovenbird Rachel McKibbens
From "To my daughters I need to say"

Go with the one who loves you biblically. The one whose love lifts its head to you

despite its broken neck. Whose body bursts sixteen arms electric

to carry you, gentle the way old grief is gentle.

Love the love that is messy in all its too much.
250710
...
raze a single sentence from victoria redel's "where the road bottoms out" that captures everything i love about what words can be made to do:

"'all aboard!' said the father, and they were off, past towns and towns and once towns, past raked leaves, burning leaves, past awnings, past diners and quick stands where men tank coffee, talk news, and waiter boys lean on counters for years, reading comic books with heroes who shuttle out past stars, past planets, rocketing mapless, past deneb, polaris, skirting the pleiades, spacemen out riding the dusty tails of comets, out and out and out, to a place where a boy, hearing no echo of a distant earth, could pilot himself to a glorious end."
250711
...
raze there's enough truth in this paragraph from the marvel that was lucia_berlin to almost cleave the book it calls its home in two:

"time stops when someone dies. of course it stops for them, maybe, but for the mourners time runs amok. death comes too soon. it forgets the tides, the days growing longer and shorter, the moon. it rips up the calendar. you aren't at your desk or on the subway or fixing dinner for the children. you're reading people in a surgery waiting room, or shivering outside on a balcony smoking all night long. you stare into space, sitting in your childhood bedroom with the globe on the desk. persia, the belgian congo. the bad part is that when you return to your ordinary life all the routines, the marks of the day, seem like senseless lies. all is suspect, a trick to lull us in, roll us back into the placid relentlessness of time."
250716
...
ovenbird Equinox
Tamiko Beyer

Dear child of the near future,
here is what I know—hawks

soar on the updraft and sparrows always
return to the seed source until they spot

the circling hawk. Then they disappear
for days and return, a full flock,

ready. I think we all have the power
to do what we must to survive.

One day, I hope to set a table, invite you
to draw up a chair. Greens steaming garlic.

Slices of bread, still warm. Honey flecked with wax,
and a pitcher of clear water. Sustenance for acts

of survival, for incantations
stirring across our tongues. Can we climb

out of this greedy mouth,
disappear, and then return in force?

My stars are tucked in my pocket,
ready for battle. If we flood

the streets with salt water, we can
flood the sky with wings.
250719
...
raze from "that don't get him back again", john jeremiah sullivan's brilliant 2003 meditation on the music of chris bell (which was once just about the only piece of writing you could find about chris online):

"great songwriters learn as much from listening to bad music as they do from listening to what they love. they memorize pitfalls, dead-ends; the how, as opposed to the what, of poor taste and cliché. it's a strange, hair-splitting science, since, let's face it, when you're thinking in shostakovich terms, the distance between a brian_wilson objet d'art and a breakfast cereal jingle is about three atoms wide. for a pop songwriter, each new composition presents countless temptations and traps, moments when the song wants to become 'stupid', wants to go to the obvious chord or rhyme, wants to sound too close, as opposed to just close enough, to what we've heard before. the game is to thread your way through these traps without sounding as if you're trying to be unpredictable —melodically, lyrically, in whatever way. and success comes when you've taken all the crap the genre gives you to work withlimited instrumentation, limited melodic possibilities, limited timeand made beauty of it, then disguised the beauty as more of the good ol' crap we like to hear when we turn on the radio. isn't that precisely what makes those classics, like 'baby, it's you', so moving, so overwhelming, what makes you have to pull your car to the side of the road when they come on? the beauty in them is subversive. it doesn't belong. it's been smuggled in under the radar of suburban teenage taste and purchasing power. that's why pop music is the art for our time: it's an art of crap. and not in a self-conscious sense, not like a sculpture made of garbage and shown at the whitney, which is only a way of saying that 'low' materials can be made to serve the demands of 'high' art. no, pop music really is crap. it's about transcending through crap. it's about standing there with your stupid guitar, and your stupid words, and your stupid band, and not being stupid."
250720
...
ovenbird From Andrea Gibson
Published posthumously

But my calling, I now know, has always been
this: to parent my own departure.
To never punish the child for being who she is.

To keep a roof over the head of the truth.
To raise what will end me, with love.
250726
...
ovenbird Excerpts fromOctober Fullness” by Pablo Neruda

In the end, everyone is aware of this:
nobody keeps any of what he has,
and life is only a borrowing of bones

but my business was
the fullness of the spirit:
a cry of pleasure choking you,
a sigh from an uprooted plant,
the sum of all action.

It pleased me to grow with the morning,
to bathe in the sun, in the great joy
of sun, salt, sea-light and wave,
and in that unwinding of the foam
my heart began to move,
growing in that essential spasm,
and dying away as it seeped into the sand.
250731
what's it to you?
who go
blather
from