a blog of found things: words, art, photography, disappointment & hope
You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.
But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.
– From, Be Drunk by Charles Baudelaire
Now for the other life. The one
without mistakes.
– Lou Lipsitz
I woke up with a spot of blood
over my eye. A scratch
halfway across my forehead.
But I’m sleeping alone these days.
Why on earth would a man raise his hand
against himself, even in sleep?
It’s this and similar questions
I’m trying to answer this morning.
As I study my face in the window.
– Raymond Carver
These fish have no eyes
these silver fish that come to me in dreams,
scattering their roe and milt
in the pockets of my brain.
But there’s one that comes–
heavy, scarred, silent like the rest,
that simply holds against the current,
closing its dark mouth against
the current, closing and opening
as it holds to the current.
– Raymond Carver
You are falling in love again. This time
it is a South American general’s daughter.
You want to be stretched on the rack again.
You want to hear awful things said to you
and to admit these things are true.
You want to have unspeakable acts
committed against your person, things
nice people don’t talk about in classrooms.
You want to tell everything you know
on Simon Bolivar, on Jorge Luis Borges,
on yourself most of all.
You want to implicate everyone in this!
Even when it’s four o’clock in the morning
and the lights are burning still –
those lights that have been burning night and day
in your eyes and brain for two weeks –
and you are dying for a smoke and a lemonade,
but she won’t turn off the lights that woman
with the green eyes and little ways about her,
even when you want to be her gaucho.
Dance with me, you imagine hearing her say
as you reach for the empty beaker of water.
Dance with me, she says again and no mistake.
She picks this minute to ask you, hombre,
to get up and dance with her in the nude.
No, you don’t have the strength of a fallen leaf,
not the strength of a little reed basket
battered by waves on Lake Titicaca.
But you bound out of bed
just the same, amigo, you dance
across wide open spaces.
– Raymond Carver
Between now and now,
between I am and you are,
the word bridge.
Entering it
you enter yourself:
the world connects
and closes like a ring.
From one bank to another,
there is always
a body stretched:
a rainbow.
I’ll sleep beneath its arches.
– Octavio Paz
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