Keep everything
under your tongue and don’t
come home. Go far and farther still.
We’ll meet in dreams as we do now.
I’ll be waiting for you on the windowsill
we already knew we knew.
- griswold
houston, tx
We are not one with this world. We are not
the complexity our body is, nor the summer air
idling in the big maple without purpose.
We are a shape the wind makes in these leaves
as it passes through. We are not the wood
any more than the fire, but the heat which is a marriage
between the two. We are certainly not the lake
nor the fish in it, but the something that is
pleased by them. We are the stillness when
a mighty Mediterranean noon subtracts even the voices of
insects by the broken farmhouse. We are evident
when the orchestra plays, and yet are not part
of the strings or brass. Like the song that exists
only in the singing, and is not the singer.
God does not live among the church bells
but is briefly resident there. We are occasional
like that. A lifetime of easy happiness mixed
with pain and loss, trying always to name and hold
on to the enterprise under way in our chest.
Reality is not what we marry as a feeling. It is what
walks up the dirt path, through the excessive heat
and giant sky, the sea stretching away.
He continues past the nunnery to the old villa
where he will sit on the terrace with her, their sides
touching. In the quiet that is the music of that place,
which is the difference between silence and windlessness.
- “Music Is in the Piano Only When It Is Played”, by the great Jack Gilbert
addie against green with lips red, colors like winter holiday, yet on a day beset by summer sunlight.
houston, tx
reposted from Traci:
Three mouths; two open to what’s above them.
July 2012
film
in/on my house
*
(photo of me covered in milk by Rose Kuo; photo of Rose by me)
via thebodyasconduit
it seemed normal, even likely at the time. this hope.
(petals falling though it wasn’t windy,
sunny though it wasn’t warm,
pollen though i couldn’t smell it,
sky though we couldn’t reach it,
light though it wasn’t blinding,
tree though it was more flower,
powerlines though barely showing,
spring, though this hope was not really of any season)
new york city
by rose kuo
new york city, new york
Faith is a series of calculations
made by an idiot savant.
I’m in love.
I’m alone
in this city of painted boxes
stacked like alphabet blocks
spelling nothing.
- from “Gravity”, Maura O’Connor
“Suddenly this defeat.
This rain.
The blues gone gray
And the browns gone gray
And yellow
A terrible amber.
In the cold streets
Your warm body.
In whatever room
Your warm body.
Among all the people
Your absence
The people who are always
Not you.
I have been easy with trees
Too long.
Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
Suddenly
This rain.”
― Jack Gilbert
(Source: Flickr / rosekuo)
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.
Pablo Neruda
traci and a. photographing the seagulls at the back of the ferry. galveston, tx
admittedly.. this is the one i actually wanted to post.
it got buried among my other photos.
instead, according to flickr, this became the most “popular” photo i have ever posted.
It’s funny when you try to bury something that refuses to be buried.
(like love, or heartache, or the feeling of being compelled to write about something)
more often than not, the images of the things i try to bury come out in my dreams
and in my sleep i revisit the details,
tracing my fingers along the soft edges of the things i remember,
or the sharp ones of the things i think i remember, but really just imagined.
more often than not, the feelings i associate with those things are magnified in these meetings during sleep
and i wonder… if i dig them out from their graves and face them,
what will they become instead?
i still can’t get over the detail in the wings, and
how the smaller creatures seem overwhelm the larger ones,
and the formation against the seemingly blank sky
which makes it seem either ominous, or peaceful, or horrific
depending on how you look at it.
so this is me digging it out. and i’m looking.
“You don’t need a war.
You don’t need to go anywhere.
It’s a myth: if you hurl
yourself at chaos
chaos will catch you.”
- E.G.
