.

via largerloves

.

how it works

 

.

 

Be melting snow.

Wash yourself of yourself.


–Rumi

.

things my son should know after I've died

 .
 

I was young once. I dug holes

near a canal and almost drowned.

I filled notebooks with words

as carefully as a hunter loads his shotgun.

I had a father also, and I came second to an addiction.

I spent a summer swallowing seeds

and nothing ever grew in my stomach.

Every woman I kissed,

I kissed as if I loved her.

My left and right hands were rivals.

After I hit puberty, I was kicked out of my parents’ house

at least twice a year. No matter when you receive this

there was music playing now.

Your grandfather isn’t

my father. I chose to do something with my life

that I knew I could fail at.

I spent my whole life walking

and hid such colorful wings.

–Brian Trimboli
from Rattle #29

 .

Reading Aloud to My Father, excerpt

.

I chose the book haphazard
from the shelf, but with Nabokov’s first
sentence I knew it wasn’t the thing
to read to a dying man:
The cradle rocks above the abyss, it began,
and common sense tells us that our existence
is but a brief crack of light
between two eternities of darkness

The words disturbed both of us immediately,
and I stopped. With music it was the same—
Chopin’s piano concerto—he asked me
to turn it off …

But to return to the cradle rocking. I think
Nabokov had it wrong. This is the abyss.
That’s why babies howl at birth,
and why the dying so often reach
for something only they can apprehend."

 
–Jane Kenyon
Poetry

 

.


via wait - what?

 

.