Showing posts with label unfeeling. Show all posts
Showing posts with label unfeeling. Show all posts

3/18/20

EXAGGERATION - Scarriet Editors

You must know I’m not usually excitable,
But how long must I be calm and pleasantly glad?
I have read about love. It was sad.
The man paced outside the window. The woman
Covered her arms in folds of crimson and myrtle.
The tradition arrived every night this year.
Every woman attended. This is no exaggeration;
They crowded, they pushed ahead—even the dearest woman.
I affected learning. I thought this decision up in my own mind.
The poetry readings, seminars; failures in oak,
Scratches, graffiti, partly undressed tables, inside and outside the mind.
I affected poetry. It did no good. I was too calm;
I went on in hushed tones about my childhood;
Stood near her by the window, even laughed.
It wouldn’t do to repeat it now, even if I could.
There is a need to exaggerate, even without drama or poems,
To not flag, to make oneself happy; to pretend a woman’s figure
Will make one happy, and this is all a man needs.
Life is dull. We exaggerate. And so it proceeds.

12/11/15

Lamium - Louise Glück

This is how you live when you have a cold heart.
As I do: in shadows, trailing over cool rock,
under the great maple trees.

The sun hardly touches me.
Sometimes I see it in early spring, rising very far away.
Then leaves grow over it, completely hiding it. I feel it
glinting through the leaves, erratic,
like someone hitting the side of a glass with a metal spoon.

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.

But you know this already.
You and the others who think
you live for truth and, by extension, love
all that is cold.