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 ... 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 with — limited instrumentation, limited melodic possibilities, limited time — and 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 from “October 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 ... ovenbird More Pablo_Neruda from sonnet LXV I watched the void without you that is like a house, nothing left but tragic windows. Out of sheer taciturnity the ceiling listens to the fall of the ancient leafless rain, to feathers, to whatever the night imprisioned; so I wait for you like a lonely house till you will see me again and live in me. Till then my windows ache. 250805 ... raze from tina ontiveros' staggering memoir "rough house": "i think we tell ourselves children are resilient because it relieves us of worry about the trauma they endure. but there is no trauma that doesn't wound and i don't know that injury can fully heal. nothing that's broken can ever be whole like it was before breaking. maybe our focus on resilience teaches children the wrong lesson. maybe instead of fooling ourselves that our children will heal, that they'll be restored or cleaned of their traumas, we should teach them to find beauty in their scars." 250806 ... ovenbird Allie Michelle: The heart doesn't measure love in time, but in resonance. You can sleepwalk through twenty-five years with someone-yet a few short hours with the right person can alter everything. That terrifyingly wonderful feeling of being stripped bare by one who can level us with a single look. The heart recognizes when it's found the answer to a riddle you didn't know you were trying to solve. Resonance thrums on the strings of shock and familiarity. Maybe it lasts a minute. Maybe it lasts a lifetime. But a snapshot in resonance can carry more gravity than a stretch of weightless years. 250807 ... raze an excerpt from jack spicer's "second letter to federico garcia lorca": "we want to transfer the immediate object, the immediate emotion to the poem — and yet the immediate always has hundreds of its own words clinging to it, short_lived and tenacious as barnacles. and it is wrong to scrape them off and substitute others. a poet is a time mechanic, not an embalmer. the words around the immediate shrivel and decay like flesh around the body. no mummy sheet of tradition can be used to stop the process. objects, words must be led across time, not preserved against it. i yell 'shit' down a cliff at the ocean. even in my lifetime the immediacy of that word will fade. it will be dead as 'alas'. but if i put the real cliff and the real ocean into the poem, the word 'shit' will ride along with them, travel the time machine until cliffs and oceans disappear. most of my friends like words too well. they set them under the blinding light of the poem and try to extract every possible connotation from each of them, every temporary pun, every direct or indirect connection — as if a word could become an object by mere addition of consequences. others pick up words from the streets, from their bars, from their offices and display them proudly in their poems as if they were shouting, 'see what i have collected from the american language. look at my butterflies, my stamps, my old shoes!' what does one do with all this crap? words are what stick to the real. we use them to push the real, to drag the real into the poem. they are what we hold on with, nothing else. they are as valuable in themselves as rope with nothing to be tied to." 250810 ... ovenbird Radio by Mark Kirschen Deep in the body A radio Tells us stories to withstand The cold- A fine net of signals That shock to the touch Lie down by the fire Now the ice will form The trees turn to stone And soon enough You will feel lightly For the warmth over your heart 250811 ... raze melissa cundieff, from an interview with four way review: "i think of language as the holiest muscle, because it enacts and performs transformation — private, political, creative. that no one is necessarily listening, though, is an important reality. it's important to remember that i'm sometimes my only company. and i don't mean to sound severe, but i suspect this is so important because when something needs to change, when it's truly time, the words to start that change must be heard. they should be as plain as still objects on a table." 250812 ... raze from fábio moon and gabriel bá's "daytripper": "the young open the paper to forget about life by reading the funny strips. the old do it to forget about death by reading other people's obits. my advice: don't open the paper, and go on with your life." 250822 what's it to you? who go blather from