Your Blood Clotting / Neurons Firing / Heart Always Beating And Beating. Your Own Hands Falling Out To

“Your blood clotting / neurons firing / heart always beating and beating. Your own hands falling out to catch you before you hit the ground. All the ways you save yourself even when you don’t want to.”

— Darshana Suresh, “Love is,” from Howling at the Moon

“The Italians have a word for the store of poems you have in your head: a gazofilacio […] in its original language it actually means a treasure chamber of the mind. The poems I remember are the milestones marking the journey of my life. And unlike paintings, sculptures or passages of great music, they do not outstrip the scope of memory, but are the actual thing, incarnate.”

— Clive James, ‘The poems I remember are the milestones marking the journey of my life,’ The Guardian (26 September 2020)

“You, who opened suns in my heart,”

— Alfonsina Storni, tr. by David Masse, from Mask & Clover: Poems; “The Siren, (via violentwavesofemotion)

buffleheadcabin:

“It was one of those moments that in retrospect have come to seem prophetic … Sometimes it has seemed to me that life is a series of punishments for such moments of unawareness, that one forges one’s own destiny by what one doesn’t notice or feel compassion for; that what you don’t know and don’t make the effort to understand will become the very thing you are forced into knowledge of.”

— Rachel Cusk, from Outline (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2015)

University Hospital, Boston

The trees on the hospital lawn are lush and thriving. They too are getting the best of care, like you, and the anonymous many, in the clean rooms high above this city, where day and night the doctors keep arriving, where intricate machines chart with cool devotion the murmur of the blood, the slow patching-up of bone, the despair of the mind.

When I come to visit and we walk out into the light of a summer day, we sit under the trees — buckeyes, a sycamore and one black walnut brooding high over a hedge of lilacs as old as the red-brick building behind them, the original hospital built before the Civil War. We sit on the lawn together, holding hands while you tell me: you are better.  

How many young men, I wonder, came here, wheeled on cots off the slow trains from the red and hideous battlefields to lie all summer in the small and stuffy chambers while doctors did what they could, longing for tools still unimagined, medicines still unfound, wisdoms still unguessed at, and how many died staring at the leaves of the trees, blind to the terrible effort around them to keep them alive? I look into your eyes

which are sometimes green and sometimes gray, and sometimes full of humor, but often not, and tell myself, you are better, because my life without you would be a place of parched and broken trees. Later, walking the corridors down to the street, I turn and step inside an empty room. Yesterday someone was here with a gasping face. Now the bed is made all new, the machines have been rolled away. The silence continues, deep and neutral, as I stand there, loving you.