Showing posts with label self-deception. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self-deception. Show all posts

2/6/19

Lines for Winter - Mark Strand

                                                                            for Ros Krauss
Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

9/28/18

Popular Romance - Paul Guest

To hum in a smoke-dank alley a song by Elvis
was not the height of my love for you. To turn
my arm from its socket like a hateful thing

was not devotion only. To speak your name
like a spell to my imagined foes was not
peace, no, not ever. Rather, you were a stone

I licked and pretended to eat. You were
ever a dream of falling. An odor of smoke.
You were the design of my worst

crimes. What I stole for love added up.
It added up to nothing. To the air perfumed
by an absent woman. To a box

filled with crushed chalk. God save me
from the stars, once and for all—
I have had enough. Let me love anything

but that: let me go free and dream
of green oceans and the surf
that batters some other world to sleeplessness.

O. It is enough to whisper only
this. To speak to the flame in your breast
and hear nothing else. Once

I believed I could possess
what touched you: the worn sweater,
or the song on the radio

that meant nothing and all in that instant.
Against your door I pressed
my ear, and heard nothing, the whisper

of water, maybe, a breath of cool air—
the gossip of your absence—
and nothing in me could knock or wait,

and all around me the night
spread like water through a rag,
and I let my hands drop whatever they held.

7/31/16

Brinkwomanship - Leontia Flynn

When they come for you no bigger than a piece of fruit,
weighing no more and no less than a water biscuit,
this will be my excuse:
that I hoped you were just testing yourself
as I might subtly and irresistibly
poke at a sensitive tooth. That is, not morbidly,
but out of a curiosity
to locate the exact, minute, sensory transition -- between
merely knowing the definition
of pain, and knowing the meaning.