Não se pode dar uma prova da existência do que é mais verdadeiro, o jeito é acreditar. Acreditar chorando.
Esta história acontece em estado de emergência e da calamidade pública. Trata-se de livro inacabado porque lhe falta a resposta. Resposta esta que espero que alguém no mundo ma dê. Vós?
One cannot prove the existence of what is most real but the essential thing is to believe. To weep and believe.
This story unfolds in a state of emergency and public calamity. It is an unfinished book because it offers no answer. An answer I hope someone somewhere in the world may be able to provide. You perhaps?
Clarice Lispector, introduction to The Hour of the Star (1977)
My friend at the sad ambient guitar show did not share my feelings about the sad ambient guitarist. “Too professional to be sexy.” But I thought, what’s sexier than a competent professional? More awkward when it’s such a small show there’s no ceremony of separation and you’re watching them set up their own gear. It would have been a social gathering if not for the six inches of stage elevation, a symbolic barrier, like the screen I used to imagine was cutting me off from the world.
Last night a poetry reading which really was a social gathering. I liked everything the poets read and told them so; then the afterparty music came on, a feeling of adjacency took over and I slipped away. It would be nice to be able to write a poem about Minneapolis. I can’t do it.
I wanted to resist the Geese record and I’m still not sure I’m convinced by “Trinidad,” but let’s be fair, a whole lot of it is done right. “Cobra” and “Husbands” have the good guitars, and “Au Pays du Cocaine” (that’s Breugel’s Cockaigne, I guess) knows what nerve it’s hitting.
you can change and still choose me
you can be free and still come home
you can stay with me and just pretend I’m not there
“the male plot of ambition and the female plot of endurance”
Overnight on leave, half sleeping, the hemispheres take turns on watch. The hum of a strange furnace, a hymn. Breathing island, keep your arm around me; I know you’re in a dream but I’ll go under without you.
i would molt a raincoat straight from my lungs for you and wouldn't forget for the world..
[folded hands emoji]
I finished Al filo del agua and enjoyed it so much! Jalisco dust, Latin mass. It ends with Halley’s Comet and the revolution.
When I was seven they told me, if you live to eighty-two you’ll see it a second time. But all I could make out through the eyepiece was gray fuzz. It must be at aphelion right about now.
N. is out of the hospital and strangely already herself, texting in paragraphs. She’s happy.
R. opens my door without knocking, sits on the tatami with an expectant air and has no idea what she’s expecting. She wants the world to be more than it is.
Tao Te Ching: “nothing is lacking.” If you really meant that it would leave nothing standing.
Supposing I built a Moorish garden out back, what would come bathe.
A whisper on the walk home: you don’t have to keep trying to do the impossible. Meaning what, though?
The sun came back and the shadows got darker. Void splayed sideways. Tree-shaped by courtesy. Put on your dark glasses, there’s no bottom to it.
One thing you don’t get in Zen is the figure of God as absent lover. For me that might be a safety feature.
Dirt, cold gust, hawk. The elements.
A few months ago I hiked up to this stand of eucalyptus and it frightened me. I thought there was something pagan in the glade. Today it’s still strange, the giant stems split almost down to the root, but the guardrails seem to be back in place. I haven’t had a drink in twelve days and the effect so far is that I sometimes forget why one does anything.
Waiting for the text that they’ve sewn N. into her new shape at the hospital. I saw her dozen packets of post-op medication and exclaimed, God, I’m never going to get bottom surgery, and C. said, as long as you’re prepared for your mind to change.
I brought Miguel Hernández up the hill.
Yo no quiero más luz que tu sombra dorada
donde brotan anillos de una hierba sombría.
En mi sangre, fielmente por tu cuerpo abrasada,
para siempre es de noche: para siempre es de día.
I don’t have a peninsular accent in my head and read abrasada as abrazada without thinking. No, it’s more so.
Hello again. I’ve been doing a stint at the Oakland Review of Books (uh huh, we made one), so my bit for the day is over here. Back here tomorrow? Perhaps?
(Previously I went to the opera, saw a gay movie and attended the spicy release party. In the future I hope to read a book.)
I was first interested... in the letters to and from the old lovers, significant and less so, the charcoal portraits, the photographs, and the diary entries detailing every fluctuation of those courtships. I pored over them so carefully that I couldn’t even glance at the mirror as I brushed my teeth at night, so gross the trespass. I justified my behavior by believing that a woman is the most interesting version of herself when she’s enraptured, but that’s not true. Romance is a closed circuit. Nothing makes a person less comprehensible to others than being in love.
—Catherine Lacey, Biography of X
Crying in the car is a kind of sex. You’re present for it, there’s release, you feel complete when it’s over. How it compares to release of other kinds, and which are the more valid, is a problem of many bodies. Solve it by approximation, smart girl.
Tired, often.
When I drove home there was lightning on the hills.
