Where you are tender, you speak your plural.
– Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, trans. Richard Howard
Everything
So Far
What I have loved so far, I have loved in order to be able to love you.
– Paul Celan, from a letter to his wife Gisèle in 1952
Your Voice
And the poem, I think, is only your voice speaking.
– Virginia Woolf, The Waves
Lake Natron
There is a lake in Tanzania
That turns everything it touches into stone—
Petrified animals washing up on shore.
I’ve known people like that:
Who drag loved ones into their waters
And send out dead things with the tide.
People who walk into your life
With poison fingers and Midas touches
That leave hearts hardened and calcified.
People who spit back love covered in salt.
.
I have walked back alleys and lost loves
That looked red and cracked like the water.
I have seen people
Who are calm and flat like the lake.
I have watched Beauty
Break Trust over her knee
And lay her, gentle, on the shoreline.
I have been among the bodies
Left crumbling in the waves.
Because sometimes, no amount of knowing
Is enough to keep you from the water.
Sometimes, the desire to drink
Is stronger than anything else.
– Ashe Vernon
From Blossoms
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background, from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
– Li-Young Lee
Creation
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