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 experience — the 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 is — wait for it — a picture of a glazed ham. (i have a movie like that, too. in my case, it's "paris, texas".) 250506 what's it to you? who go blather from