yowza!

You're The Dictionary!

by Merriam-Webster

You're one of those know-it-all types, with an amazing amount of
knowledge at your command. People really enjoy spending time with you in very short
spurts, but hanging out with you for a long time tends to bore them. When folks
really need an authority to refer to, however, you're the one they seek. You're an
exceptional speller and very well organized.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

something borrowed by subs

A poem sent to me through email. And as for your query, yes, there is nothing wrong with borrowing words as long as they are amply cited and as long as the phrases are as beautiful as these. Thank you.


Please Come Late
Hugo Williams

Please come late,
so that I have almost given you up
and have started glancing round the room,
thinking everyone is you.
Please don't come
until I have started missing you,
thinking I will never see you again,
praying you are lost.
Come too late for me not to notice.
Make me suffer,
wondering what you are doing
on the other side of town,
still in your dressing gown.
Make me beg for mercy
when you pick up a magazine.

Are you looking in your mirror,
suddenly remembering me?
I'm on my second coffee by now,
eating the little bits of sugar in my cup.
Haven't you set out yet?
I decide I don't want to see you after all.
I don't really like you.
I'd rather be on my own.
I know it is all over between us;

but I go on sitting here,
reading a newspaper,
not understanding a word.
If you came in now, I wouldn't recognize you.
Don't come anywhere near me
until I have gone slightly mad for love of you.

because i am in a cycle

"it's time that we began to laugh and cry and cry and laugh over it all again. "- Leonard Cohen

Deciphering fire

“And I made my own way, deciphering fire.”- Pablo Neruda

The first thing that you will notice would be
the absence of the strange coldness that you have been
familiar with since you were five and everyone else knew all the
dance steps to a certain country song except for you. During the
right time, the sudden warmth will lick your shoulders,
your tired hands, your mourning eyes, pulling out its
yardstick to take your measurements. It will need to know
how it would best fit you and during what occasions it would be most appropriate
to display so that you don’t go and nurture the notion that you are anyone
other than yourself. It decides how you will grow and by how many
inches each season. But it knows better than to make you hurry,
to make you want more from it than what is required.
Some say, yellow flowers are composed of this;
water when you are especially thirsty.
It holds the timidity of first love and the grains of sweat
coursing down the backs of rice farmers.
It is the sound you hear when the wind howls and the
echoing loneliness in seashells. But mostly, it is fire, burning down
your mindless rage, renewing the true magnificence
of your own beliefs. But when it becomes too hot and mistakenly stifles you,
it eases its grip slowly but doesn’t dare let you go. It will keep its finger lightly
on one of your shoulders, or will maintain its hold on a particular hair strand.
You are, at times, jealous because you know it doesn’t belong only to you but in these circumstances, insecurity would be as inappropriate as
tulips in May. Only those who do not know,
who do not have the certainty that they are knowledgeable,
are aware that the journey may last long, may lead them astray,
may be perilous, but it will always be as unique
as an unpremeditated gift, as precious as love before dying.
For whatever reason it may have, you are lucky enough that it chose you.
It can never be the other way around.

So be silent and let it lead you. Let it take you home.

Poem sharing!

susanna's death

when her body was all that they had left of her,
he passed the time counting faces that showed
disapproval, disappointment, sometimes relief.
He put their reactions in labeled boxes, to keep the situation more organized.
some of them said she was probably tired and wanted out,
others thought she was wasteful,
jumping in front of that
train like a wounded bird. They are weary and illiterate gods,
strangers to romance. He sees her body outlined in the sky,
like a holy fixture or an ornament that smells of the sun
and of faraway cities.He feels odd,
like he has swallowed torrents of ill will.
There are seconds when he travels outside himself and sees the both of them,
sitting on the bedraggled couch, watching movies where heroes were always
the only ones lucky enough to die. She says she will sing for him
when he keels over. It was always her, surviving,
flourishing in the arms of southern winds. Maybe because she always
seemed younger then. but he has never heard her speak
of her own mortality, which is something about her that he
has not noticed before. He looks in the mirror
more frequently now and hopes that he'll see her
looking through him. They say the dead visit the disbelieving,
the ill-equipped, the needy.
He waits for her prayers.
He does not hear them.

Spider webs

Privilege of Being
Robert Hass

Many are making love. Up above, the angels
in the unshaken ether and crystal of human longing
are braiding one another's hair, which is strawberry blond
and the texture of cold rivers. They glance
down from time to time at the awkward ecstasy--
it must look to them like featherless birds
splashing in the spring puddle of a bed--
and then one woman, she is about to come,
peels back the man's shut eyelids and says,
look at me, and he does. Or is it the man
tugging the curtain rope in that dark theater?
Anyway, they do, they look at each other;
two beings with evolved eyes, rapacious,
startled, connected at the belly in an unbelievably sweet
lubricious glue, stare at each other,
and the angels are desolate. They hate it. They shudder pathetically
like lithographs of Victorian beggars
with perfect features and alabaster skin hawking rags
in the lewd alleys of the novel.
All of creation in offended by this distress.
It is like the keening sound the moon makes sometimes,
rising. The lovers especially cannot bear it,
it fills them with unspeakable sadness, so that
they close their eyes again and hold each other, each
feeling the mortal singularity of the body
they have enchanted out of death for an hour or so,
and one day, running at sunset, the woman says to the man,
I woke up feeling so sad this morning because I realized
that you could not, as much as I love you,
dear heart, cure my loneliness,
wherewith she touched his cheek to reassure him
that she did not mean to hurt him with this truth.
And the man is not hurt exactly,
he understands that life has limits, that people
die young, fail at love,
fail of their ambitions. He runs beside her, he thinks
of the sadness they have gasped and crooned their way out of
coming, clutching each other with old, invented
forms of grace and clumsy gratitude, ready
to be alone again, or dissatisfied, or merely
companionable like the couples on the summer beach
reading magazine articles about intimacy between the sexes
to themselves, and to each other,
and to the immense, illiterate, consoling angels.


Androgyne
Stephen Dunn, Different Hours

My lost love, back when Zeus split us in two --
our intelligence and completeness
a threat to the gods -- this ache
began, this perpetual wandering.

I've seen you in the teeming, concupiscent
streets, I married you, at dusk I followed you
into bars; every time I found you
I recognized you as someone seen before.
I could not choose not to respond to desire.
Only you understand.

Old now, I admit to you
I've been content watching deer
play out their nimble, nervous lives.
I've considered flowers and without sadness
watched them drop their yellow leaves.

In dreams you still whisper to me
and in dreams I whisper back.
But we make fewer plans.

I will tell you, Androgyne, what I learned today
about the sublime. It's that moment
when a compound changes
from one state to another. It's chemistry.
All lovers know it's chemistry,
not physics, that makes the world go round.

And maybe when we meet again
after one of our long journeys towards the other,
you will find me wishing
to do little more than brush back
a lock of hair that's fallen
across your face, too close to an eye.

We'll be sitting side by side,
noontime, in a park.
We'll not be able to see the sun
due to the excess of light.
I'll raise my hand to your face
and you'll tilt your cheek my way,
and I'll move that lock of hair, now gray,
to where I've always liked it to be.