Galway Kinnell

1

You scream, waking from a nightmare.

When I sleepwalk

into your room, and pick you up,

and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me

hard,

as if clinging could save us. I think

you think

I will never die, I think I exude

to you the permanence of smoke or stars,

even as

my broken arms heal themselves around you.

2

I have heard you tell

the sun, don't go down, I have stood by

as you told the flower, don't grow old,

don't die.

I would blow the flame out of your silver cup,

I would suck the rot from your fingernail,

I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light,

I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones,

I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body,

I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood,

I would let nothing of you go, ever,

3

Yes,

you cling because

I, like you, only sooner

than you, will go down

the path of vanished alphabets,

the roadlessness

to the other side of the darkness,

your arms

like the shoes left behind,

like the adjectives in the halting speech

of old men,

which once could call up the lost nouns.

learn,

as you stand

at this end of the bridge which arcs,

from love, you think, into enduring love,

learn to reach deeper

into the sorrows

to come – to touch

the almost imaginary bones

under the face, to hear under the laughter

the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss

the mouth

which tells you, here,

here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

6

In the light the moon

sends back, I can see in your eyes

the hand that waved once

in my father's eyes, a tiny kite

wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:

and the angel

of all mortal things lets go the string.

Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,

when I come back

we will go out together,

we will walk out together among

the ten thousand things,

each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages

of dying is love.

(edited)

The Sartorialist, January

"Bringing up Baby", my baby and me.

"M"

In watching the German film, "M", the first of Fritz Lang's "talkies", you are transported from an hour and half of consequential and obviously important boredom, to the last 20 minutes of one of the most affecting and emotionally riveting scenes I have ever scene portrayed in film. Peter Lorre is astounding. It is worth the wait, believe me.

Gilda

Gilda: I've got some news for you, Johnny. I'm going to do exactly what I please, when I please. I was true to one man once, hmmm...
[looking despiseful at Johnny]
Gilda: ...and look what happened.

Rita Hayworth is a goddess.

It's never the changes we want that change everything.

"But if these years have taught me anything it is this: you can never run away. Not ever. The only way out is in."

-J.D.

Whitman

"I am large, I contain multitudes, I am the poet of the body."

James Murray in "The Crowd"

“We do not know how big the crowd is, and what opposition it is…until we get out of step with it.”

The best quote I've read in a while. Thank you, Kia.

"Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe."

-Franz Kafka, in a letter to Oskar Pollak dated January 27, 1904

Ingrid Bergman

in "Journey to Italy"

Without Love

Katharine Hepburn on the MGM lot during the filming of Without Love (1945)

Calvin Klein: Your style, did it come from you? Or was it someone else that influenced you?

KH: No, no one influenced me. I think that I must have been very self-conscious about my appearance, that I wanted to present something that looked as though it had just come out of the woods or something, and everyone thought, ‘I’ve never seen anything like that before.’

I liked to look as if I didn’t give a damn. I think you should pretend you don’t care … but it’s the most outrageous pretense. I said to Garbo once, ‘I bet it takes us longer to look as if we hadn’t made any effort than it does someone else to come in beautifully dressed.’

CK: Were you influenced by any of the men you knew at that time?

KH: No! I never dressed up for any man. If I thought he cared how I looked, I would have thought he was a fool. I really would have.

The men dressed for me, you know. Nobody ever made a pass at me unless I fully expected them to and welcomed the notion.

CK: Good for you.

KH: I’m rather a forbidding character.

-excerpted from Washington Post Magazine interview

White Zinfandel and 3D glasses said:

Audrey pouts

Stand

Lee

"Tonight, someone, unable

to see in one darkness,

has shut his eyes

to see into another.

Among the sleepers, he is one

who doesn't sleep.

Know him by his noise

Hear the nervous

scratching of his pencil,

sound of a rasping

file, a small

restless percussion, a soul's

minute chewing,

the old poem

birthing itself

into the new

and murderous century."

Cancelling itself

"Someone tell the Lord to leave me alone

I've had enough of his love

that feels like burning and flight and running away."

-Li-Young Lee

Li-Young Lee

I'm through with memory.

Can't you still smell the smoke on my body?

Giselle

"Goodbye, last thing."

Robert Hass, The Seventh Night

Novemberween, finally

My costume was essentially how I dress all the time, I just wore leg warmers and headscarf.

"Who are you?"

"I'm Margot Fonteyn. You know, the greatest English classical ballet dancer of all time."

"You mean the most obscure costume of all time?"

"Yeah. Her."

We got Sham-wowed.

"Marilyn", by Norman Mailer

I gave it 3 stars for the photographs. It seemed Mr. Mailer was more interested in her fragility and sex appeal than her actual well being. His insight is captivating, yes, but sells her short in many ways. This book gives the reader a strong perception of a woman that is to be pitied more than emulated.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/131787.Marilyn

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins."

The film, "Etoiles: Dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet" is both beautiful and educational. Any aficionado of dance is urged to watch this film posthaste

Camelot

Read it aloud.

"Now goth sonne under wode--

Me reweth, Marie, thi faire rode.

Now goth sonne under tre--

Me reweth, Marie, thi sonne and thee."

-Annonymous, 12th. century

Perilous

‎"But perhaps you could call her perilous, because she's so strong in herself. You, you could dash yourself to pieces on her, like a ship on a rock." -Tolkien

Biutiful

Poor girl

Playwrights will get you every time.

Jackie

B.B.

"On the last floor

are the remnants of a library, all fire,

my love, has fled from these verses;

what burned strangely are

neat little piles of ash.

An anthology in the empty garden."

Rebel Song (edited)

"Give me a pen

so I may sing

life is not in vain

give me that love

which never rots between fingers

give me a love

as I want to give you one

my dove

grant me a heart

that will pulsate will beat

throb stronger than the white beating

heart of a frightened dove in the dark

knock louder than butter bullets

give me two lips

and bright ink for tongue

to write the earth

one big letter

filled with the milk of mercy."

-Breyton Breytonbach