Could I love you, if I had no memory of breathing skin, of weight, or time, or matter? (Close to counting creases in the sheet that covers way too much of you) Perfect as the instinct and the courage of the painter’s first and lasting stroke; (Wide awake now, caught by morning lust and light, [...]
Our cells are dying faster than we breathe. It takes less than a decade to replace each bit of then with bits of some time later. We are impermanence personified and yet we love stability. We feel the moments we are in to be the moulds that keep the past and hold the future. We [...]
A horse is a horse the moment it’s born. So are tulips, microbes, stones. Only humans are not born to what we may become; we are not manifest or destined. Each of us must run a private, evolutionary course, before we stop to be mere animated matter – and some of us will never learn. [...]
“We open our eyes and stare at the coiling darkness, And enter our dreams again.” . (Conrad Aiken) The wooden handrail on the stairs, first used by your great-grandparents, shines like a mirror that accepts but won’t reflect the lives of those who went before and those who’ll be here after we are gone. The [...]
“Supper on a tray in the drawing-room and nothing said.” . (Selima Hill) Another failed evening, a dinner gone cold over stale conversation and on my way home now, safe in the belly of city and metro, I think of the short time we thought we could be love’s fierce ambassadors – and how we [...]
“The skeletons of a thousand butterflies sleep in my enclosure.” . (Federico García Lorca) Fire thinks that Shadow dances like a supplicant. Fire doesn’t know that when its flames have gone to sleep, Shadow fills a sky, draped with burning diamonds.
“You know, the moon is just a violin that longs to be repaired.” . (Rachel Manley) I close my eyes and I see lightning running down my veins and hear the drums of thunder gather in my wrists. The outside world is as small as the hand that caresses your hair and notes the soft [...]
“I lift my hands to you. I kneel toward my heart. I have no other home.” . (Leonard Cohen) In Reims, I stood within the silence of the gathering dusk, inside the Notre Dame cathedral: A speck of dust, forever caught in fading bruises of soft light that fell from Chagall’s stained glass [...]
“And quietly the trees casting their crowns Into the pools.” . (Ted Hughes) Down by the river, where we stopped to greet the sleeping swans, bats twinkle darkly, on and off, between the trees, like hesitant and twisted twins of stately blinking, distant stars. (I look at you. You smile – and all that I [...]
“Leave to dogs and the angels the music that lies beyond hearing.” . (Jane Hirshfield) ‘Stella by Starlight’ Chet Baker live in Tokyo. So strange to listen here, alone, to something once recorded live, so long ago and far away, while I write to you, and while I wait for the kettle to boil, and [...]