Wild Geese

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body       love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting — over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

“‘Love’, this English word: like other English words it has tense. ‘Loved’ or ‘will love’ or ‘have loved’. All these tenses mean love is time-limited thing. Not infinite. It only exist in particular period of time. In Chinese, love is '爱’ (ai). It has no tense. No past and future. Love in Chinese means a being, a situation, a circumstance. Love is existence, holding past and future.”

—

edwordsmyth:

However satisfying writing is—that mix of discipline and miracle, which leaves you in control, even when what appears on the page has emerged from regions beyond your control—it is a very poor substitute indeed for the joy and agony of loving. Of there being someone who loves and desires you, and he glories in his love and desire, and you glory in this ever-strange being, which comes up against you, and disappears, again and again, surprising you with difficulties and with bounty. To lose this is the greatest loss, a loss for which there is no consolation.

— Gillian Rose, from Love’s Work (NYRB Classics, 2011)

“so the beach was less a paradise, more hurricane backwash. so the afternoon sped straight on into the pitch-black night spent together, but apart. so you drank the witch hazel and shattered the screens but their face was still there, burning, burning, burning. throw in the towel. burn the poems. there’s no love so good that you can’t grind it out like an old cigarette. you chose ‘now’ and maybe it should have been ‘never’. who cares. start again. drink out of bottles, not people. shatter the cup. use the pieces to cut your brake lines. set the whole car on fire, if you have to. you’re not in the desert anymore. lick the wounds. fuck the earthquake. howl at the moon. run for cover. you don’t have to be a poet in order to say, save yourself. we are still young and still foolish and still writing about our hearts, but they were never meant to be eaten.”

— THE POET RETRACTS HER EARLIER STATEMENT WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE, by jones howell (via joneshowell)

“Art, however, has another way of remembering, because its aims are different to those of an archive-type memory. Art actively transforms facts into past; it produces the very experience of their passing by and consequently interrupts their immutability. Thus, by means of art and yet within its boundaries, the past appears ungraspable and mutable, it appears as what the present will never be able to store and keep to itself. Nonetheless, and precisely for this reason, the past—in its ungraspable form—proffers new possibilities of comprehension. Therefore, art neither resolves nor leaves what has happened behind; it does, however, clear a different pathway for remembrance by revisiting the past, by accompanying its loss, and by mourning it.”

María del Rosario Acosta Lópe, from “Memory and Fragility: Art’s Resistance to Oblivion,” The New Centennial Review (vol. 14, no. 1, Spring 2014)

“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)