Urgent Telegram to Jean-Michel Basquiat
by Kevin Young
HAVENT HEARD FROM YOU IN AGES STOP LOVE YOUR
LATEST SHOW STOP THIS NO PHONE STUFF IS FOR BIRDS
LIKE YOU STOP ONCE SHOUTED UP FROM STREET ONLY
RAIN AND YOUR ASSISTANT ANSWERED STOP DO YOU
STILL SLEEP LATE STOP DOES YOUR PAINT STILL COVER
DOORS STOP FOUND A SAMO TAG COPYRIGHT HIGH
ABOVE A STAIR STOP NOT SURE HOW YOU REACHED STOP
YOU ALWAYS WERE A CLIMBER STOP COME DOWN SOME
DAY AND SEE US AGAIN END
Human love is grossly flawed, and even when it isn’t, people routinely misunderstand it, reject it, use it or manipulate it. It is hard to protect a person you love from pain because people often choose pain; I am a person who often chooses pain. An animal will never choose pain; an animal can receive love far more easily than even a very young human.
— Mary Gaitskill, from one of my favorite personal essays
In this month’s issue, Philip Roth responds to the claim that he had a “crack-up” in his mid-50s. He faxed his response to us.
(via teamsweeting)
From ‘Kew Gardens’
by Virginia Woolf
‘Tell me, Eleanor. Do you ever think of the past?’
‘Why do you ask, Simon?’
‘Because I’ve been thinking of the past. I’ve been thinking of Lily, the woman I might have married…Well, why are you silent? Do you mind my thinking of the past?’
‘Why should I mind, Simon? Doesn’t one always think of the past, in a garden with men and women lying under the trees. Aren’t they one’s past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees,…one’s happiness, one’s reality?’
‘For me, a square silver shoe buckle and a dragonfly—-’
‘For me, a kiss. Imagine six little girls sitting before their easels twenty years ago, down by the side of a lake, painting the water-lilies, the first red water-lilies I’d ever seen. And suddenly a kiss, there on the back of my neck. And my hand shook all the afternoon so that I couldn’t paint. I took out my watch and marked the hour when I would allow myself to think of the kiss for five minutes only—-it was so precious—-the kiss of an old grey-haired woman with a wart on her nose, the mother of all the kisses all my life. Come, Caroline, come, Hubert.’
What Do I Care
What do I care, in the dreams and the languor of spring,
That my songs do not show me at all?
For they are a fragrance, and I am a flint and a fire,
I am an answer, they are only a call.But what do I care, for love will be over so soon,
Let my heart have its say and my mind stand idly by,
For my mind is proud and strong enough to be silent,
It is my heart that makes my songs, not I.By Sara Teasdale
(via sharksdonthavescales)
Event
By Sylvia Plath
How the elements solidify!—
The moonlight, that chalk cliff
In whose rift we lie
Back to back. I hear an owl cry
From its cold indigo.
Intolerable vowels enter my heart.
The child in the white crib revolves and sighs,
Opens its mouth now, demanding.
His little face is carved in painted, red wood.
Then there are the stars—ineradicable, hard.
One touch: it burns and sickens.
I cannot see your eyes.
Where apple bloom ices the night
I walk in a ring,
A groove of old faults, deep and bitter.
Love cannot come here.
A black gap discloses itself.
On the opposite lip
A small white soul is waving, a small white maggot.
My limbs, also, have left me.
Who was dismembered us?
The dark is melting. We touch like cripples.
The Babies
by Sabrina Orah Mark
Some thought it was because of all the babies I suddenly seemed to be having. Others, that I should pay for the damages. Fact is, I wasn’t getting any older, so I bought a small aquarium, and skipped town. Took up with a toy store owner until he left me for a more beautiful robot. Took up with a reader of instructional booklets. Never mind. I was lost. By the time I arrived at Mrs. Greenaway’s, it was clear I was nowhere at all. In exchange for room and board, I’d rearrange her furniture, her birthmarks, her quiet animals, until they took on more satisfying shapes. Sometimes the shapes were simple, like a mustache or a pipe. Sometimes they were more complicated arrangements, like the one of dead Mr. Greenaway’s closed barbershop. Over the years, as Mrs. Greenaway and I became more and more vague, the shapes did too. For identification purposes, we’d give them names like She Wasn’t Fooling Anyone, She Was Hurt and She Was Hurt Bad or The Insides of Doctors. One night when I was working on a piece I thought I’d call Symphony, Symphony, the shapes began to slip out of my hands. At first, as Mrs. Greenaway remembers, the sound of broken glass. Then the trumpets. Then the terrible music of all those babies I once seemed to be suddenly having, marching, like soldiers, in rows. Then their round wet bellies coming towards me. Mrs. Greenaway still talks about how expertly they gathered me into their tiny arms. And how they took me away not like a prisoner. But like a mother. Into a past I still swear I never had.
II
I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,
you’ve been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:
our friend the poet comes into my room
where I’ve been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake. You’ve kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone…
and I laugh and fall dreaming again
of the desire to show you to everyone I love,
to move openly together
in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,
which carries the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.
—-Adrienne Rich
Invective Against Swans
—-Wallace Stevens
The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks
And far beyond the discords of the wind.
A bronze rain from the sun descending marks
The death of summer, which that time endures
Like one who scrawls a listless testament
Of golden quirks and Paphian caricatures,
Bequeathing your white feathers to the moon
And giving your bland motions to the air.
Behold, already on the long parades
The crows anoint the statues with their dirt.
And the soul, O ganders, being lonely, flies
Beyond your chilly chariots, to the skies.
Metaphor for Something
By Hilary Vaughn Dobel
We didn’t have any bears and so drew straws
to dress up in the bear-suit and stand, vinyl-fanged
jaws agape in the hotel lobby. In August
of the drought-year, there was yellow grass, the daily
ritual of asking it to do violence to our feet, we lay
holepunched looking up at the electrical wires
crisscrossing the yard. From room to room, it
smelled of apples and bacon, or of comic books
and old dolls, and sometimes cinnamon potpourri
after the maids went through. And now it is real
summer again, a hot pink watermelon gulf
of unconditioned outside crawling with ants long
and fat as finger-joints, nymphs aloft in air viscous
with unspent rain. The creek-beds are tired.
The bear-suit is heavy. When Tom wore it, he ran
around shrieking at the tourist-children, a most
un-bear-like sound but effective nonetheless. Sasha tried
to hibernate, but that was less ferocious and the hotel
staff dragged her sleeping across the polished floor.
Now it’s my turn, and all I can feel is the sticky weight
of it, the bear-smells of Tom and Sasha, of the children
we frightened. It’s dark inside, and warm. I can’t stand
here long without becoming a metaphor for something.
But I’m just a girl in a bear suit. When the others sneak off
then I am a secret agent or I drive the van too fast
and forget to check the back of my skirt before leaving.
We never locked the door behind us, there was nothing
there worth stealing except the bear suit, but no one
can steal it, not with a whole entire person inside.
one of my favorite of my dad’s paintings, this one hangs outside my bedroom in georgia
