Sunday, December 16, 2012

Cold Poem


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Cold now.
Close to the edge. Almost
unbearable. Clouds
bunch up and boil down
from the north of the white bear.
This tree-splitting morning
I dream of his fat tracks,
the lifesaving suet.

I think of summer with its luminous fruit,
blossoms rounding to berries, leaves,
handfuls of grain.

Maybe what cold is, is the time
we measure the love we have always had, secretly,
for our own bones, the hard knife-edged love
for the warm river of the I, beyond all else; maybe

that is what it means the beauty
of the blue shark cruising toward the tumbling seals.

In the season of snow,
in the immeasurable cold,
we grow cruel but honest; we keep
ourselves alive,
if we can, taking one after another
the necessary bodies of others, the many
crushed red flowers.


—Mary Oliver 
from American Primitive




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 via growing orbits 
image via deja vu



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Thursday, December 6, 2012





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Do not mourn the dead: they know what they are doing.


—Clarice Lispector
The Hour of The Star 
trans. Benjamin Moser





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