gosh

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If it’s darkness we’re having, let it be extravagant.

–Jane Kenyon

taking down the tree

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thegreatwideworld

largerloves

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Reading Aloud to My Father, excerpt

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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

 

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via wait - what?

 

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otherwise

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I got out of bed

on two strong legs.

It might have been

otherwise. I ate

cereal, sweet

milk, ripe, flawless

peach. It might

have been otherwise.

I took the dog uphill

to the birch wood.

All morning I did

the work I love.

At noon I lay down

with my mate. It might

have been otherwise.

We ate dinner together

at a table with silver

candlesticks. It might

have been otherwise.

I slept in a bed

in a room with paintings

on the walls, and

planned another day

just like this day.

But one day, I know,

it will be otherwise.

–Jane Kenyon 

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What Came to Me

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I took the last
dusty piece of china
out of the barrel.

It was your gravy boat,
with a hard, brown
drop of gravy still
on the porcelain lip.

I grieved for you then
as I never had before.


–Jane Kenyon


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